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MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find

On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.

Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.

C.

MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find

On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.

Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.

C.

MSDN is not really a realistic resource for useful data for interoperability with windows. There are a few nuggets spread thinly about the site but it is awesomely hard work to track them down, links are forever moving around and the search engine sucks. Formats are usually described in terms of their windows api interfaces and MS always invents new terms for existing standards and mechanisms. Concise and complete descriptions are hard to find

On the other hand people are very quick to assume that a format is secret or not documented, this is not always true so it is a very good idea to check msdn before simply lying back and saying "ack its proprietry, we can never support it". There are a lot of MS formats which could be supported right now from working with the available documentation. Simple examples which I did some fiddling with include the wmf format, emf format, pe and ne executable formats. In addition windows and dos programmers have often made source available to parse some of the undocumented formats already and just need some massaging to make that source crossplatform. And note that theres ole2 stream support for linux as well, so thats no barrier.

Wander over to wotsit.org and take an unsupported windows format and write a linux converter today.

C.

Why can't the KDE/qt people and the Gnome/gtk+ people link up and stop wasting time on two competing API's for a market that is two small to support 2?

By the way, I think the email program to be released with KDE 2.0 is Magellan, which looks much more slick than Evolution (which is for Gnome).

Magellan: http://zamolxe.csis.ul.ie/Magellan/in dex.html


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btw...kde's Magellan looks to be very similar as well (for KDE2 tho)

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If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...

Right now, gnumeric can import excel, and could do with more help

abiword uses wv to import word documents, kword also uses wv though they have seen fit to branch off their own version to do so. It too could do with more help

These specifications are also available on the July 1998 MSDN Microsoft Developer CD. They are stored on this CD in the proprietry .ivt format, but nonetheless I've even implemented an .ivt to .html converter for you to read those files under linux.

Get ivt2html and convert that office.ivt on disk 3

Alternatively wotsit.org has versions of many of them as well, including the word 6 file format which wv can handle as well

Now if someone wanted to do something constructive but wants to start small, then rather than sitting around on their arse blathering uselessly they could take a look at the public specs for mathtype and put together a linux equation edit file format to mathml converter which both abi and kword might use as an importer for equations.

Or they could help enhance libwmf to convert wmf files into svg format.

Its not just the office formats that are the problem, its the fact that they all embed or are based upon, or otherwise require the ability to convert all the secondary windows formats as well, so theres loads to see and do

C.

Right now, gnumeric can import excel, and could do with more help

abiword uses wv to import word documents, kword also uses wv though they have seen fit to branch off their own version to do so. It too could do with more help

These specifications are also available on the July 1998 MSDN Microsoft Developer CD. They are stored on this CD in the proprietry .ivt format, but nonetheless I've even implemented an .ivt to .html converter for you to read those files under linux.

Get ivt2html and convert that office.ivt on disk 3

Alternatively wotsit.org has versions of many of them as well, including the word 6 file format which wv can handle as well

Now if someone wanted to do something constructive but wants to start small, then rather than sitting around on their arse blathering uselessly they could take a look at the public specs for mathtype and put together a linux equation edit file format to mathml converter which both abi and kword might use as an importer for equations.

Or they could help enhance libwmf to convert wmf files into svg format.

Its not just the office formats that are the problem, its the fact that they all embed or are based upon, or otherwise require the ability to convert all the secondary windows formats as well, so theres loads to see and do

C.

While I don't think WordPerfect Office does e-mail, Magellan does most of the things you describe. It's still in development, but it's going to be very cool :)

The KDE 2.0 release schedule drowned out the fact that the KDE 2.0-based Lotus Notes++ clone Magellan was made available by rsync today. The combination of Magellan, KOffice, KDevelop and KDE2 will meet most of MY requirements, atleast. :)

Does anyone have any advice on hooking up xmms to netscape so that it acts as a plugin instead of just as a standalone app?

Check out XSwallow. According to its web page: X Swallow is a plugin i've cobbled together to allow any X program to be used as an inline viewer for any appropiate mime type. So a mime type like vrml for which there does not exist, as of the moment, a plugin for linux netscape can be viewed inline to netscape with ordinary vrml viewers such as vrweb/liquid reality.

I've used it with xanim for quicktimes, wavplay for wavs and the like. Its really pretty cool.

I really liked the part about people using studies like these because they feel out of control. I look around and see people who are scared of computers and the 'net all the time. Folks seem to be grasping hard at the illusion of control these days. I was reminded recently of this theme in my favorite book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (you can read it online here .) Every time I read this book I get something new. Now, I get things about programming and computers. Anyway, here's a good quote:
That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it's for you don't know, and why it's there, there's no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn't belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn't want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, ``Get out.'' You know there's an explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that's ultimately what's involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don't want to get into it.
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i rather hope you aren't implying my alma mater should be a diploma mill. certainly Phaedrus would not approve.

You know, every hacker should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Quality -- you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others -- but what's the ``betterness''? -- So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?

...

``Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and formswe give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn't we'd be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.''

The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don't have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.

This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students' ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.

In a sense, he said, it's the student's choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just speculation.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Interestingly I have received practically no code from anyone except from some wonderful work by a few in the areas of ole2 stream reading, and some great work by two or three in the area of word decryption

So my angle on this is that Stardivision will probably get next to no useful input into their import filters from the community, the office formats are nasty and arcane and don't hold much interest for most programmers. Either that or my code smells so bad that noone wants to associate themselves with it :-), which is a distinct possibility

Anyhow, if you don't want to wait around for someone else to write a word import filter you can help make wv better, development versions at this location. C.

Interestingly I have received practically no code from anyone except from some wonderful work by a few in the areas of ole2 stream reading, and some great work by two or three in the area of word decryption

So my angle on this is that Stardivision will probably get next to no useful input into their import filters from the community, the office formats are nasty and arcane and don't hold much interest for most programmers. Either that or my code smells so bad that noone wants to associate themselves with it :-), which is a distinct possibility

Anyhow, if you don't want to wait around for someone else to write a word import filter you can help make wv better, development versions at this location. C.

I imagine that a useful alternative might be to pull out the gif code and insert png code instead. That would be the most viable alternative, looking at the code, all that would really be required would be to modify/replace gdImageGif which converts gd to gif with something line gdImagePng and re-release the software as lib to create png's instead. I imagine that you'd have to drop support for importing gif's ala gdImageCreateFromGif, but i suppose we can live with that.

The gd library is a simple but truly handy library, I imagine that the author is incredibly annoyed about this, as he only announced the latest version (1.5) a few days ago.

The problems about the gif patent have cropped up again and again since unisys tried to hold the web to ransom on the matter, it really is time for apps that use gif to use png instead. png does appear to be such a nicer format as well.

C.

eEye.com is hardly "Un*x community". A netcraft query says www.eeye.com is running IIS4 on NT or Windows 98. Their scanner is only for Windows too.

Also, this "patch" you speak of simply is to remove the .htr DLL from IIS. From their advisory, I count 13 mouse clicks but I could be wrong. Unlike last week's Linux 2.2.x bug, this doesn't even need a kernel compile... Just kidding of course, because that is impossible on NT anyway... hehe

Back to your comments.. The whole purpose of full disclosure is to PREVENT what your are describing: an "elite" few from controlling the information. Several years ago, vendors would sit on reports of vulnerabilities in their products for months or even years before releasing patches. Information about security was only released to "professionals" who needed to know the information. This strategy was supposed to keep the exploits from the hackers which obviously didn't work.

It seems so many people are "Linux sucks because xxx...", "NT sucks because yyyy...", "FreeBSD sucks..." etc... In real life, someone may use more than a single OS. Look at cdrom.com and you will see there is absolutly no way a Microsoft OS can support something like that (except for clustering lots of servers together). However, on the same note, there isn't anything out there for Linux/FreeBSD/etc.. which allows easy management of 1000's of users like a NT/Win9x solution does. I'm sure there will be someday but right now, companies can't afford to pay to maintain Linux PCs for their enterprise.

Each OS has advantages and disadvantages (although I will admit NT is a little heavy on the latter side). The best idea of course is to utilize the strengths of all OS's to get the most effective solution. Strategies like this are responsible for the development of things like pam_smb which combines NT and Linux (even FreeBSD now) in a great e-mail solution.

I guess I've been off-topic enough for now.

I was in Outlook 97 hell for 1.5 years, and that's why I am moving. I managed to find some shareware that worked with Outlook to save the messages as they arrived to text with mildly bogus headers that had to be converted on Unix.

Here's an oddball suggestion that might work for you if you can work out the details. Trick your MS mail program into remailing the messages to a Unix mail spool, where you can do what you please. Of course, the "detail" is how to preserve the sender.

If you can post somewhere examples of the database, it might be crackable, a true public service to all in MS mail hell. All their mail programs and servers are like that.

For examples of how complex their formats are, look at the MSWORDView project Home Page http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/

When possible, I have tried to use mail clients and sendmail to do all the conversion for me rather than write scripts to do so. ( lazy sysadmin syndrome )

XSwallow is a nifty little plugin that can be registered to handle all mimetypes and spawn off a helper app to handle the type, which netscape won't do for embedded mimetypes. The nifty bit is that xswallow can relocate the spawned off X program into the space that netscape provides in its window, so you get a nicely faked plugin especially for vrml and animations.

With xswallow you have two choices, when netscape finds an embedded realvideo type do you want the realplayer app to appear embedded in the webpage, or whether you want it to appear external to the webpage, which might be a better option as the actual app has menubars etc that wouldn't exist in a real plugin.

I used it quite happily for the previous rvplayer with a xswallow config line of
audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin; rpm; rvplayer %s; ;Real Player

C.

As you pointed out, while strings will give you some juicy tidbits, you can't extract the full macro contents that way (does MS tokenize their VB text?). Neither word2x nor mswordview do anything with macros. LAOLA includes a tool called ELSER which dumps out embedded macros, but it doesn't work with Word97 documents (which Melissa is). The mswordview site even linked to a DOS program called List Word Macros which I tried, and it doesn't support Word97 either.

I'd really like to see a dump of this virus, because I'm curious to see exactly what kind of insecurities a macro language would need to have in order to let the author both scan an address book and send email, without doing anything too suspicious in the UI. Does anyone have any better tools for looking at this file?

Ole decoding tools for linux are available, information of getting the formats, and the ole tools, and a work in progress converter for converting msword 8 format documents into html can all be found at my mswordview page, or its mirror on gnu.org

Lend a hand, less talk more code

C.