3monkeys

A few days ago I submitted a story on digg, Linux: Introducing The Data Corruption Bug, from Kernal Trap. I took a few people by surprise that I would post an article critical of Linux, but as an self-respecting journalist would (like there are many self-respecting journalist), I bypassed my personal bias and submitted the article. One friend in particular, Roy Schestowitz, was particularly interested in letting me know that I had stumbled over to the Dark Side. If asked Roy if I could share his thoughts with my readers and he has graciously agreed.

I will have to admit that the comment along with associated links made for much more of an interesting read.

It all starts from the first comment on the story from DocWhoWho.

buggy linux crap

Then Roy makes one response — one long response. Note: The following has been formatted to be more visually appealing to the reader.

True. All software has some bugs. Except Vista. It’s perfect. Microsoft says so.

Vista Bug re-appears

Nice… minus one million, three hundred eight thousand, two hundred fifty nine bytes… how is that any where near or mathematically altered to 2.11 MB?

http://jadeallen.com/toms/index.asp?DoAction=ReadDay&ID=359

Windows Vista’s Hideous Wakeup Support

One thing we just can’t wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.’ Any time you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or “Deep Sleep” (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It’s either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound… the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to “power” the future! (No pun intended!) That’s with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs…

http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/299

TI won’t rush into Microsoft Vista readily

Corporate American, no, make that corporate everywhere is treating Vista like a dead animal found in the woods, they will poke it with a stick, but there is no way they will take it home. Take TI for instance, it is not going to touch the wonder OS for another two years or so.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36259

Installing A PS/2 Mouse Turns Off Firewall, Huh!

I plugged in the PS/2 mouse, rebooted the PC and on restart XP found the PS/2 mouse and suggested rebooting again, which I did. When it restarted the Microsoft Firewall had been switched off. How do I know, because it told me I had no firewall.

http://crunchysoftware.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/ps2-mouse-turns-off-firewall/

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 Sucks!

I know Microsoft’s release of IE 7.0 is in beta, but I still didn’t expect it to be such a big piece of crap and cause hours of misery.
[...]
What Microsoft hoped would help it win back Firefox “switchers” has done nothing but add one more to their growing ranks.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/02/microsoft-ie-70-sucks.html

Just One Question For Vista: Does It Simply Work — Like An Apple?

Jim Allchin responds over on his blog regarding a recent news report quoting him as saying that he would have bought a Mac if he weren’t working for Microsoft in an email to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

[...]

So the challenge for Microsoft, and in some ways to an even larger extent Allchin himself personally, is to ship Vista in a state that is as bug free as the Mac.
Vista is Allchin’s final legacy at Microsoft. After a long successful career this is his last hurah and in order to be successful it simply must be perfect.

http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingalpha/061213/22341_id.html?.v=1

Life with Vista – Is this dogfood really for the dogs?

I’m an absolute freak when it comes to .NET technologies. My blog is called the “.NET Addict”, so it should be pretty obvious that the day Vista’s RTM build came out, I downloaded it and installed it on every Vista-capable machine I had in my possession. I’ve been using Vista for several weeks now and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions that I think might startle and shock some of you.

http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/vista_dogfood.htm

Vista Breaks Applications

The big secret at Redmond is that existing applications and new products will not work with Vista.
Microsoft really doesn’t want you to know this, but many of your existing applications won’t work with Vista. In fact, some brand new products won’t work with Vista.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2062318,00.asp

Vista… Don’t Try to Copy and Paste

Vista gave me the following when trying to copy a file:
Error 0x800705AD.

Ohh, well of course… I should have known error 0x800705AD means the user tried to COPY AND PASTE. Are you shitting me?! Insufficient quota? WTF are you talking about Vista. First let’s check that I have enough disk space:

Ok, now by my calculations 413 MBs < 22.8 GBs. I can normally figure out almost any computer related problem.

http://buckwheats.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/vista%e2%80%a6-don%e2%80%99t-try-to-copy-and-paste-o/

Vista: Behind the scenes

Some of the glitches were already known. Many were things that have already been fixed, and a few were too new and need investigating. None appeared to be a show-stopper.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6133491.html

Analysts: Microsoft Changes Meaning Of ‘Release Candidate‘

Two industry watchers say Microsoft is corrupting the term, leading to major confusion among customers and others about whether the operating system is truly ready to evaluate.

Two analysts Thursday accused Microsoft Corp. of changing the meaning of “release candidate” by pushing out a version of Windows Vista that still needs major work.

[...]
Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch, said that Microsoft’s corrupted the term.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192700055&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Now folks, I don’t know if Roy was drinking a lot of coffee that morning, but this has to qualify for one of the longest replies in digg history.

Update:

I was asked to give a word and character count for the comment — 841 Words, 5364 characters.

Until next time.

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 20% [?]

This article is being archived here from its original publication in the 3Monkeyweb wiki.

This is the first in a series of articles detailing my experiences with directly manipulating .odt. I currently have a project to clean up and unify a 800 plus page document that has been converted among several formats over the years. It is distributed in .doc, .odt, .sxw and .pdf forms.

What am I working with

I’m starting out by creating several files that I can inspect for differences. The files can be found here. The files with their size and a brief description of each is below.

• oo_doc.odt (19175) was created by copying and pasting a 750 word section of a reference article in to OpenOffice Writer. I then added a character style and a list style. I applied these two styles and a third default style to the document as well as applying the “Heading 1″ style to all headers.
• ms_doc.doc (33280) was created in the same manner as oo_doc.odt, using MS Word 2003 instead of OpenOffice Writer.
• oo_doc.doc (21504), oo_doc.sxw (18787), oo_doc.rtf (19013), oo_doc_ms.xml (26148), and oo_doc_db.xml (5957) were all created by loading oo_doc.odt and saving it in the appropriate format. oo_doc_ms.xml is Microsoft Word 2003 XML and oo_doc_db.xm is DocBook? XML.
• ms_oo_doc.doc (22528) and ms_oo_doc.odt (19911) were created by loading ms_doc.doc with OpenOffice Writer and saving in the appropriate format.
• oo_ms_doc.doc (31744) was created by loading oo_doc.doc with Microsoft Word 2003 and simply re-saving.
• oo_ms_oo_doc.doc (22528) and oo_ms_oo_doc.odt (20653) were created by loading oo_ms_doc.doc with OpenOffice Writer and saving to the appropriate format.
• ms_doc.rtf (22940) and ms_doc_ms.xml (26011) were created by loading ms_doc.doc in Microsoft Word 2003 and saving to the appropriate format. ms_doc_ms.xml is Microsoft Word 2003 XML.
• ms_doc.zip (5465), oo_doc.zip (4608), and oo_odt.zip (18195) where all compressed with zip, not gzip, as this is the compression engine OpenOffice uses, from ms.doc.doc, oo_doc.doc and oo_doc.odt respectively.

I will probably add more files to the repository as my investigation continues, but for now these will do.

A few observations

First you will notice that the .odt files are generally smaller than the .doc files created from the same source from within OpenOffice Writer, oo_doc .odt 19175 vs .doc 21504 and oo_ms_oo_doc .odt 20653 vs .doc 22528. Although a small sample size, the trend is clear the .odt is more compact than .doc. The second thing you might notice is ms_doc.zip is highly compressible (84%) while oo_odt.zip is not (6%). I didn’t actually expect the .odt to compress as it is already a compressed format, so that is a little strange, and what is the real size?. What is even more interesting is the compression on ms_doc.doc. Apparently the .doc format is highly compressible. So why doesn’t Microsoft compress the file? Imagine the bandwidth saving on all of those .doc email attachments. Finally, when an .odt is saved as .doc, re-saved in Word, then converted back to .odt, bloat is introduced.

The first observation can be attributed to differences in the file formats, so I’m not too interested in that. The third observation, I will be covering in my next post. So, let us investigate the second observation, specifically what is the real size of the odt. When I unzip the .odt this is what I get.

> ls -al *
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 13437 2006-07-06 18:11 content.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 18 2006-07-06 18:11 layout-cache
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 1055 2006-07-06 18:11 meta.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 39 2006-07-06 18:11 mimetype
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 6608 2006-07-06 18:11 settings.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 13138 2006-07-06 18:11 styles.xml

Configurations2:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 48 2006-07-06 18:11 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 user users 336 2006-07-06 14:25 ..

META-INF:
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 80 2006-07-06 14:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 user users 336 2006-07-06 14:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 1173 2006-07-06 18:11 manifest.xml

Pictures:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 48 2006-07-06 18:11 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 user users 336 2006-07-06 14:25 ..

Thumbnails:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 user users 80 2006-07-06 14:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 user users 336 2006-07-06 14:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user users 10261 2006-07-06 18:11 thumbnail.png

Well a 10k .png will not help our cause. Configurations2, Pictures and Thumbnails are not required by the OpenDocument? specifications so let us remove them. We need to modify META-INF/manifest.xml as well by removing the referencing elements. After doing so and re-zipping, the resulting .odt is now 8232 bytes. Much closer to the compressed .doc. Realize that for significantly large documents, thumbnail.png becomes much less of a factor. Also realize that if you have embedded graphics or special configuration information, it might not be a good idea to remove those directories. If we open and re-save the document, all of what we removed will be replaced. But since this is an optimization effort, and all we really wanted to discover is how well .odt maps to .doc, and we are in the ballpark.

What have we learned

Natively, OpenOffice is providing smaller file sizes than Microsoft Word. In our test case this was on the order of a forty percent reduction. oo_doc.odt at 19175 bytes verses ms_doc.doc at 33280. A reduction of 14105 bytes or 42%. It was also noted that when we tried to compress ms_doc.doc, that we achieved a very substantial decrease in size. However, the practically of unzipping and re-zipping a .doc file each time we want to edit it was called into question. We were also able to determine that the majority of bloat in the .odt data was caused by the thumbnail feature of OpenOffice, and that for larger sized documents this should quickly become a non-factor.

Next time

Point three Saving in alternating sessions of OpenOffice and Word introduces bloat will be covered. We will take a look at the <office:font-face-decls> element and I will introduce a script that will maintain a clean set of font-face-decls.

Popularity: 12% [?]