I was recently setting up a new account for a new Pay-Per-Click client in Microsoft AdCenter. We’ve been fairly busy lately, and this is work that I can do from anywhere, so I decided to do it one evening from home. I have a Macintosh at home (and at the office). I do not have a spare Windows computer, nor do I have VMware on my home computer. Essentially, from home, I have no access to a Windows computer. No big deal, right? I mean, after all, AdCenter is just a web site, so as long as I have a web browser, I’m in good shape, right? Wrong. Let’s explore what happened…
 

I got almost all of the way through the sign-up process and ran into this error:
 

Basically, it says that I must accept the sign up charge. Hmm..I didn’t see that anywhere. Let’s scroll down and find the problem.
 

Oh, look, there’s the problem. But…there’s no checkbox. Or text. The little exclamation point is where there SHOULD be a checkbox for me to accept the charges, but it’s not there. So, I figure, well, this is Firefox on a Mac, I’ll give Safari a shot. Surely it will work in there.

I fired up Safari and went to the main AdCenter page, clicked on Sign up today, which then brought up this page:
 

So, naturally, I clicked ‘Sign Up Now’. Guess what? In Safari, you can’t even click the button. Clicking on it just does nothing.
 

I was completely dumbfounded by this, so I tried it the next day at work, again on my Mac. Same issues. Unbelievable.
 

This is an excellent example of why usability and testing are so important. The Macintosh market is growing every month, and here we have one of the largest companies in the technology industry that has built a product that only works on Windows.
 

And Microsoft wonders why Google is completely obliterating them in this market…

I had a need today to convert a Word Document to a PDF using Java. This needed to be an automated process. A quick Google search was turning up a little empty handed. I kept finding people talking about ‘just open it in OpenOffice and export as a PDF’. Obviously, that doesn’t fit the automated requirement.
 

Apache has a Java API, called POI, that allows you to access Microsoft formats from within Java. It looks handy, but I found some people complaining about the complexity of it. Some further searching turned up mention of something called JODConverter. This is a fantastic project.
 

JODConverter is essentially a Java library that utilizes OpenOffice’s conversion engine to convert to and from any format that OpenOffice supports. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, Plain Text, etc.
 

I decided to see how easy it was going to be to use this library. Let’s face it, a lot of these open source projects claim to do all kinds of great things, but do not provide the greatest results. So, I created a small test project and wrote a simple class. Here’s what it looks like:
 

public class convertFile {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      File inputFile = new File("resume-2.doc");

      File outputFile = new File("resume-2.pdf");

     OpenOfficeConnection connection = new SocketOpenOfficeConnection(8100);

     try {

        connection.connect();

     } catch(Exception e) {

     }

     DocumentConverter converter = new OpenOfficeDocumentConverter(connection);

     converter.convert(inputFile, outputFile);

     connection.disconnect();

   }

}

 

Obviously, there’s error-checking that is lacking. For example, the convert() method should be wrapped to ensure that a failed conversion doesn’t blow up your application, and something should be done if an exception is caught on the connection. However, this is the basic skeleton. Pretty cool.
 

Basically, all this does is open a connection to OpenOffice, create a converter, and pass in the files to convert. JODConverter and OpenOffice handle everything else.
 

The only caveat to this is that OpenOffice must be installed on the server and must be running as a headless app (the JODConverter README file explains how to do this). While that may not be ideal, it’s probably worth it for the amazing results this library provides.
 

Great tool, highly recommended.
 

Joe Koenig

Creative Anvil

Search Engine Optimization & Web Application Development