I have written about converting Microsoft Word files into text or html using OpenOffice before. However, the wizards I described in that article were crashing when the number of files crossed into several hundreds. I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, I now found a tool that does the same job better and with more flexibility. DocConverter by Danny Brewer and Dan Horwood allows to convert a whole directory of files at a time from any to any OpenOffice-understood format.

No, I am not complaining about food. I love food. And I love it different and - sometimes even - adventurous. Which is where Sour Grapes come in. We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some not-quite-recognizable ones. Our strategy with the later is usually to buy it and then google for its name/recipe. Usually it works quite well.

They say at BarCamp that if you don’t like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not. That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the second day of BarCampNYC3. So, after waiting for 10 minutes past the start time, I decided to step in and moderate.

I have gone (and will go back tomorrow) to the BarCampNYC3. The requirement for every person to speak was not enforced, but I figured I have something to contribute anyway. I brought and talked about the Chumby. I entitled my talk “Chumby - Open, Cool, Cute”. My session must have only had 6 people in it, but I think all those people were interested and asked good questions. I certainly got some queries after the talk and even later in the evening, when I put Chumby on display again.

Atlassian has just released Crowd 1.3 that now has the Delegated Authentication option - two-faced directory with an external LDAP facing part for authentication and an internal Crowd part for authorisation. This double-faced functionality causes some non-obvious interface issues. The most important issue to understand is that external part is accessed only when user is authenticated with full username/password. In any other context, users and groups are those that are copied/imported into the internal Crowd side of the directory.