How to open docx files??

First of all: I forgot my blog's "birthday" :D On the 9th february this blog here became 1 year old. My resumé of 1 year of blogging?? Well, mostly what's written already here. There would be so many interesting things to write about but I'm really occupied at the moment. Time is short, unfortunately :). But I'll for sure try to cover some of the topics I mentioned at the end of this post.

But now to the topic of this one. I just had to help my brother opening a .docx file and thought some of you may be interested in it. Docx is the new format produced by Microsoft Word 2007. More info's can be found here (I don't want to be redundand ;) ). So if you're using an MS Office product that is older than 2007, e.g. 2003 or 2002 you may be interested in installing the FileFormatConverter offered on the Microsoft Update site. Just download and install it and you will be able to open docx files with your old MS Word.

"Remember the milk"

Did you hear about it?? Rememberthemilk is an online task tracking tool with a lot of cool and nice features which make it worth to place a post here.
I first heared about it when I read a a showcase paper about the integration of Google Gears. Recently it seems to get more and more popular. In my eyes this is mainly due to the lot of different integrations they offer. People probably wouldn't want to go to the Remember-the-milk homepage for entering their tasks every time something comes them in mind. The integrations into email, calendar and even mobile phone is what makes it interesting. When I'm looking at my Calendar I can enter a task and I'll see it in my email account at the same time.













The "disadvantage"? It is havily based on Google services, so it uses integration into Google Calendar and Gmail, so it may be a disadvantage for those who don't use them. I personally can just recommend it.
From a technical point of view, RTM uses a lot of AJAX features. The integration into Gmail, which has to be installed as Firefox Plugin is really impressing. Just from the ways it integrates itself by making use of Gmail's function for showing messages to the user or the way it observs email labels for possibly integrating them directly as tasks.

Instant translation with Google Translate

Although living in Italy (South Tyrol), my native language is German and still I prefer to write my blog in English - as you see. First of all that's because I studied Computer Science at the University in English and it's therefore much more intuitive to use it for the mostly technical stuff on this blog here. Secondly it renders everything much more international which addresses a much bigger amount of people. And finally I can keep my English-knowledge a little up-to-date, now after the University.
Well, why am I telling you all these things? As you may have noticed, I placed a language gadget on the upper right corner of my blog. It allows to instantly translate it in a series of different languages for those who either don't understand English or just want to read everything in their native one. I tried it out for those languages I personally know (German and Italian) and it works quite well, although the construction of the sentences is not always correct. The overall result however is really good - meaning one understands also in the translated result what was the message of the post.
Just try it out, although I still suggest you to read my blog in its original language :) For more services around translation just check out Google Translate.