OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now on general release

Finally, the long awaited OpenOffice.org 3.0 is on general release now. Strong demand of this state-of-art open source office application suite made them to temporary changed their website into a simple download page only to overcome the traffic.

Pre-compiled installation package is available for download for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Intel-based Mac OS X in various languages.

Right from the opening screen, OpenOffice.org 3 has a fresh new look, with a new start screen, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements.

The Writer word processor has a cool new slider control for zooming, allows multi-page display while editing, has powerful new multilingual support, and boasts improved notes capabilities. As well as conventional office documents, Writer can now edit wiki documents for the web.

The Calc spreadsheet has been given another increase in capacity - now up to 1024 columns per sheet. It also has a powerful new equation solver, and a great new collaboration feature for multiple users.

Draw can now cope with poster-size graphics (up to 3sq metres), and Impress supports multiple monitors for presentations. Chart now produces much more clean looking graphics by default, and has a range of additional features requested by power users.

The popular built-in PDF export facility has been further enhanced with PDF/A support and a range of new user-selectable options.

OpenOffice.org 3 is now also available for the first time as a full Mac OS X application, bringing the power of the world's leading open-source office suite to a whole new group of users. And it's even easier than ever to persuade MS-Office users to upgrade to OpenOffice.org, with new support for MS-Access 2007 'accdb' files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS-Office Open XML files (MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 documents)

OpenOffice.org's support for extensions is really coming of age with OpenOffice.org 3. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add great features such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, and a whole new way of supporting additional languages.

Click here to read their official press release.

The OAC Centennial PA Personal Accident Insurance

I believe most of us already insured with some kind of life insurance, which covers compensation on total permanent disablement (TPD). Have you ever think of what if the disablement is "non-total", for example, you just lost one single finger in an accident?

Life insurance won't cover for that, and in fact, you need to find such insurance under the general insurance category (note that not every life insurance agent is also agent for general insurance). I think you should have heard of the term before, it is called personal accident (PA) insurance.

If you are an employed employee, most probably you are already covered under the group PA policy that your company buy for you. You might also be insured with PA under some promotion of car loan, car club, credit card, bank account, etc. The question will be is the insured amount enough? What if you change company and the new one doesn't provide such employee benefit? What if you are retired?

After some consideration, I finally signed up with the Overseas Assurance Corporation (OAC) Centennial PA Personal Accident Insurance this year. What do you think of when you see the word "centennial" here? Yes, OAC is part of the Great Eastern group.

The premium of this policy is RM100 per year (less than RM9 per month) with the sum insured of:

• Accidental death: RM100,000
• Permanent disablement: RM100,000
• Medical expenses: RM5,000

There is a "no claim renewal bonus" with an increase of 10% on the above sum insured for renewal each year up to 100%. This mean if no claim is made, 10 years later, the sum insured will become:

• Accidental death: RM200,000
• Permanent disablement: RM200,000
• Medical expenses: RM10,000

If any claim is made, the sum insured will be reverted to the original amount.

Under this policy, the following are covered:

• Accidental death
• 26 items of permanent disablement
• Medical, surgical and hospital expenses for injury
• Bereavement allowance for death resulting from accident, dengue fever, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, scarlet fever or coxsackie
• Repatriation expenses if the accidental death happen outside Malaysia
• Rehabilitation allowance
• Disapperance for more than 1 year (while travelling)

I believe this policy will complement my life insurance policy as well as cover up any shortage in my company's group PA insurance scheme. It is very affordable too although the premium will be burnt off every year and does not carry cash value like most life insurance products. It is renewable up to 100 years old (and I believe when we get old, we are more risky in getting accident).

Editing the Sony Ericsson handphone theme with Themes Creator

I find that the themes (yes, more than one...) downloaded from the Sony Ericsson website for my P1i mobile phone have a logical bug with the listing checkbox. Once the theme is applied, the unchecked items will all shown as checked, and the checked items shown as unchecked.

After some troubleshooting and confirmed that the problem is with the theme, I found the way to fix it by editing the "checked" and "unchecked" icon to the order, and here is the way.

First of all, you need to download the theme file in .utz format into your computer. Make a copy of the file and change its extension to .zip. For example, download Shards.utz, make a copy named as Shards.zip.

Then, unzip the file Shards.zip with PeaZip or 7-Zip or any other file unarchiver tool.

Use a graphics editor to edit the file named as ListboxCheckbox.png in your unzip folder. Here is how it looks like before and after the editing.

Before:

After:
(you may right click to download this edited file)

You can now use the Sony Ericsson Themes Creator to open the file Shards.utz. To fix the problem, go to "List View" tab, and click on "Check boxes". Then, click on the Import button to import your edited ListboxCheckbox.png.




You can then see from the preview display that the checkbox is showing correctly by now.

Save the theme file Shards.utz and transfer it to your phone. You have to ensure that Shards is not in use as the current theme in your phone. Delete the existing Shards theme, and install this edited one. Woolah! You are done.