Try creating an X/Y chart in Calc showing two data series. Impossible. On the cool-but-too-much-work front, pgf looks really interesting for creating nice visuals in LaTeX. Have a look at the tutorials in the (huge) manual to get an idea of what it’s capable of. Too bad I have to finish the document I’m working on by Tuesday, or I’d try to establish a nice OOo free workflow.

Update: A simple pipeline from oocalc to text files to Gnuplot’s epslatex terminal to epstopdf to pdflatex to pdftops -eps produces something that doesn’t look like crap and can be imported into an oowriter document rather painlessly. make handles a lot of the trouble associated with juggling three source files per plot, but it still takes too long to create a new plot for my taste. At least this is on the transition path to a fully LaTeXized workflow.

Previously: Microsoft Sucks, OSS Sucks More.

Update: It’s apparently possible to get multiple series into a single OpenOffice diagram, but it’s not quite intuitive: You have to put all the X values into one column, then put each Y data series into its own column, leaving the cells that don’t have corresponding values empty, like in the screen shot. The conclusion still holds: Learn gnuplot, it makes much prettier charts!

While Broken Incentives are annoying when I try to save money, there’s definitely an up side to all the tax drudgery: When the choices change from “keep the money” vs “spend the money” to “pay back the state” vs “buy gadgets that qualify as a business expense”, a whole lot of stuff I wouldn’t otherwise allow myself to buy suddenly becomes a fully rational investment. Today, this brought the end of the CRT era on my desktop. My old Belinea 21″ CRT was replaced by two Philips 190P7ES LCD monitors, doubling the available resolution to a nice 2048×1280 (minus one dead pixel, which doesn’t stand out too much between its 2621439 working cousins).

There’s still some weirdness with ion3 and its xinerama support (I can’t seem to get Windows spanning both monitors when ion3 is in xinerama mode), but overall I expected more trouble setting things up than I actually had. Very nice.

First, Hans Reiser inflicted reiserfs on the world. Now he has apparently killed his wife. I bet he planned to eat the children.

Update: This fits nicely. And for the “he’s innocent” crowd, this.

Am I growing old? When Hunter S. Thompson died last year, it was the first time I actually cared for the news of a celebrity death. Now, it appears that Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, is about to die. Depressing times for the non-believer in an afterlife.