The Geeks’ Agenda

Effective September 21, 2005 the Massachusetts has began requiring that all govermental documentation be provided in non propriaty formats with the lone exception being .PDF founded by Adobe. Amongs the defacto standards will be the XML, unformatted text documents and the Open Document format.

The OpenDocument format must be used for office documents such as text documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods), and presentations (.odp). The OpenDocument format is currently supported by a variety of office applications including OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace. OpenDocument v. 1.0 – Defines an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. The schema is suitable for office documents, including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings and presentations, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents.This file format is part of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 specification. This OASIS format is expected to become an industry standard for sharing documents. It is being adopted by the OpenOffice/StarOffice version 2 software suite but may appear in other products as well. The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is a standardized XML-based file format specification suitable for office applications. It covers the features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

The specification was recently approved by OASIS as an open standard. OASIS has also submitted the standard to ISO for consideration as an international standard for office document formats. OASIS, the international e-business standards consortium, announced that its members have approved the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. OpenDocument provides a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

“XML doesn’t always mean open. You can hide a lot in a file format. OpenDocument represents an opportunity to ensure truly open file formats for productivity applications, which is why it will receive the enthusiastic support of public sector steering organizations on a global basis,”

commented James Governor, principal analyst for RedMonk, a new analyst firm dedicated to understanding and building the narratives that define technology marketing and purchase. They cover enterprise software, providing objective research and analysis services to IT vendors, enterprise technology professionals, and corporate finance researchers.

“Office productivity applications and the documents they create are key to today’s knowledge economy. Information critical to the long term functioning of any organization is stored in the spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents its employees create,”

said Michael Brauer of Sun Microsystems, chair of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee. In closing Mr. Brauer said.

“Today, for the first time in the 25-year history of office applications, such documents can be stored in an open, standardized, and vendor-independent format.”

For more information you can review the following websites.

Massachusetts goverment Information Technology Division website

Organization for advancement of structured information standards OASIS website

For those with high speed interenet access it seems no matter what the speed is, it simply not fast enough. There are however settings are used to manipulate Windows NT and Windows 2000 in an effort to boost network throughput performance. Fortunately for us, due to a simliar core, these same system modifications work in Windows XP.

Now time for the disclaimer modifying the registry can cause serious problems that may lead to data loss or having to reinstall your operating system. Simply put modify your registry at your own peril. [ cue ominous music ]

Optional parameters that you can configure by using Registry Editor
Generally, these parameters do not exist in the registry. You can create them to modify the default behavior of the TCP/IP protocol driver.

1. Click start then Run
2. On the Run line type regedit and press ok.
3. Maneuver to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
4. In the window pane to the right right click on the blank space then left click on New and select DWORD Value.
5. Rename the New Value #1 created to ” TcpWindowSize ” and press enter.
6. Right click the TcpWindowSize and left click on modify
7. Change the base radial to decimal
8. Enter ” 64240 ” and into the Value data field and click ok

* When the key isn’t present the default TcpWindowSize for ethernet is reportedly only 8760.
* This number can be increased upto 1073741823 maximum.

Explaination: This parameter determines the maximum TCP receive window size offered. The receive window specifies the number of bytes that a sender can transmit without receiving an acknowledgment. In general, larger receive windows improve performance over high-delay, high-bandwidth networks

9. In the window pane to the right right click on the blank space then left click on New and select DWORD Value.
10. Rename the New Value #1 created to ” DefaultTTL ” and press enter.
11. Right click the DefaultTTL and left click on modify
12. Change the base radial to decimal
13. Enter ” 128 ” into the Value data field and click ok

* This number can be increased upto 255 maximum.

Explaination: Specifies the default time-to-live (TTL) value set in the header of outgoing IP packets. The TTL determines the maximum amount of time that an IP packet may live in the network without reaching its destination. It is effectively a limit on the number of routers that an IP packet is allowed to pass through before being discarded.

14. In the window pane to the right right click on the blank space then left click on New and select DWORD Value.
15. Rename the New Value #1 created to ” EnablePMTUBHDetect ” and press enter.
16. Right click the EnablePMTUBHDetect and left click on modify
17. Leave the base radial set to Hexadecimal
18. Enter ” 0 ” into the Value data field and click ok

Explaination: Setting this parameter to 1 (true) causes TCP to try to detect black hole routers while doing Path MTU Discovery. A black hole router does not return ICMP Destination Unreachable messages. Enabling black hole detection increases the maximum number of retransmissions that are performed for a given segment.

19. In the window pane to the right right click on the blank space then left click on New and select DWORD Value.
20. Rename the New Value #1 created to ” EnablePMTUDiscovery ” and press enter.
21. Right click the EnablePMTUDiscovery and left click on modify
22. Leave the base radial set to Hexadecimal
23. Enter ” 1 ” into the Value data field and click ok

Explaination: When this parameter is set to 1 (true) TCP attempts to discover the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU or largest packet size) over the path to a remote host. By discovering the Path MTU and limiting TCP segments to this size, TCP can eliminate fragmentation at routers along the path that connect networks with different MTUs. Fragmentation adversely affects TCP throughput and network congestion.

24. Once all of the registry editing is completed you will need to close the registry editor and reboot your computer before the changes will take place.

For more information on the settings and more please review the following:

Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP Implementation Details website

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP Implementation Details website

TCP/IP and NBT configuration parameters for Windows XP Article ID : 314053