Free office software

When people think of office software (Word Processor + Spreadsheet + more), they instantly think of Microsoft Office. However, Microsoft Office isn't the only office suite out there. There are a number of other office suites one can use.

A brief look at a few programs that are free downloads:

• Open Office. The largest most full-featured office suite out there. It's a big download, takes up about 300 megs of hard disk space, but it's the most well-known free office suite
• Lotus Symphony one well-known derivative of Open Office
• StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice
• AbiWord, not an office suite but a stand-alone word processor. Open-source; The software is quite buggy (its ability to change the document's language doesn't appear to work) and I don't care for it myself
• SoftMaker Office Word processor and Spreadsheet program; free to download and use.
• Jarte, which is essentially Wordpad with spell checking (but not inline spell checking without getting the $20 "plus" version)
• Easy Office, a free open-source office suite for Windows; very old and doesn't even support long file names. Strange user interface (you right-click to change text formatting). Not recommended.
• E-Press EasyOffice (not to be confused with the other EasyOffice) Fairly large package, but the license only allows this program to be used at home; it can not be freely used at work or for work-related activities.
• Atlantis Nova, another stand-alone word processor. Crippled freeware version; doesn't even have spellcheck.

Of all of these office suites, the one I like the most is SoftMaker.

SoftMaker is not perfect; its inline spell-checking (red lines under misspelled words) has to be explicitly enabled (other -> settings -> language).

To get Spanish-language spelling dictionaries for SoftMaker is somewhat of a pain in the butt. I went to the download page for the handheld version of the office suite, downloaded the additional dictionaries .exe file, and used 7zip to extract the Spanish language dictionaries from the .exe, which I put in the "SoftMaker Office 2006\spell" directory. Once I did this I had full Spanish-language support.

SoftMaker is a nice small office suite. I will use it for a while.

Alexa top 500 list

I have made a list of the Alexa top 500 websites; any "this site does not resolve with MaraDNS" bugs with hosts that aren't on this list will not be fixed. I am in the slow process of rewriting MaraDNS' recursive code; once this code is ready for testing, I will happily deal with "this site does not resolve with MaraDNS 2.0" bugs for any and all sites on the internet (provided the sites can resolve with BIND).

- Sam

Deadwood snapshot update

I have changed the sqa_bigpacket test to no longer need BIND; it now uses the code I worked on this weekend to do the test. This will allow me to run a version of the test that adds pauses to the TCP transmission, allowing me to test TCP buffering.

As an aside, the code I have been working on this weekend doesn't work when compiled with -O3; since this is a SQA test, I will not resolve this issue but simple compile the code without any optimization.

All SQA tests work, and the code can be looked at by going to maradns.org/deadwood/snap

New Deadwood snapshot

Some more work on the SQA tools for Deadwood:

Added new SQA tool, truncated, which always returns, over UDP, a "truncated" reply.

send_packet_stdin SQA tool should now be able to have pauses in the TCP packet it sends.

Starting tomorrow, I should have more time to dedicate to Deadwood development again and actually set up and run these DNS-over-TCP tests.

Deadwood snapshot update

show_packet_stdout now has support for sending the DNS packets in parts, so we can test TCP buffering.

Deadwood snapshot update

At this point, the DNS-over-TCP testing tools allow me to test DNS over TCP without using BIND; there is one tool that reads a DNS packet over TCP, outputs that packet to standard output, then reads a packet from standard input to give back to the client (changing the ID of the reply to
be the same as what the client sent us).

The other tools reads a DNS packet from standard input, sends that packet to a DNS-over-TCP server, and outputs the reply it receives on standard output.

The next step is to have it so these tools can have pauses in their TCP sending, so I can test Deadwood's ability to fully buffer DNS-over-TCP packets.

It can be looked at here

New Deadwood snapshot

Now that I have full DNS-over-TCP support in Deadwood (we can return a DNS packet from the cache for DNS-over-TCP queries; we only send TCP packets upstream if we get a truncated packet; we send TCP packets from upstream to the downstream DNS client), I want to fully test this code. I want to make sure that the buffering code I have in place works.

The problem with my current testing setup is that sending all packets over localhost doesn't need buffering, so the buffering isn't properly tested.

Since it's difficult to find DNS packets in the real internet large enough to require DNS-over-TCP, the way I am testing things is by writing a series of tools that will (hopefully) simulate DNS servers on the internet well enough to find and fix any problems with DNS-over-TCP buffering code. This code is currently incomplete.

Note that I have a number of personal commitments this weekend and may not be able to make another Deadwood snapshot update until late Tuesday; we'll see how things go.