Wednesday, July 15, 2009

SCJP Book Errata

I recently read the book A Programmer's Guide to Java SCJP
Certification: A Comprehensive Primer (Third Edition)
by Khalid Mughal and Rolf Rasmussen in order to prepare for the SCJP exam (which I took and passed last week). I sent the authors of list of mistakes that I found and some have made it into the book's online errata!



How cool is that! :-P

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

OpenOffice and DOC

Sorry, I need to rant a little. >:(

OpenOffice isn't as great as everyone says it is. Or at least as great as I though it was. I'm looking for a job and have been using the open source office suite to update my resume. Most recruiters want resumes in Microsoft Word's ".doc" format, but have no fear! OpenOffice supports that format...

...mostly...sorta kinda.

My resume is pretty basic in terms of features used. It uses two tables, a few bulleted lists, and three drawn lines, along with text of various sizes and fonts. But apparently that's too complex. It can never quite seem to get the bullets in the bulleted lists right:



One time, it used an icon of those things used in movies at the start of a take. Just completely random.

For throw-away documents, this is bearable. But for something important like a resume, you want your .doc to come out exactly right. And OpenOffice fails to do this.