Hi,
a friend of mine runs a small restaurant and wants to professionalize his IT.
Our idea was to store everything in subversion (we use Debian with svn 1.3).
We had absolutely no problems with the 2D objects, converting recipes to ASCII
and storing them was peanuts. However the 3D objects are giving us a headache
- the forks and knifes are stuck in the keyboard, we even destroyed a floppy
drive trying to read an apple.
Any ideas how we can still use SVN to store everything?
Konrad Rosenbaum on the Subversion Users' mailing list
http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2006-04/0008.shtml
1 April 2006
-- Konrad Rosenbaum
-- Post to svn-users on 1 April 2006 ( http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2006-04/0008.shtml )
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These
formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format
is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that���s not all there is to it! This document
includes the following interesting comment:
Each Excel workbook is stored in a compound file.
You see, Excel 97-2003 files are OLE compound documents, which are,
essentially, file systems inside a single file. These are sufficiently
complicated that you have to read another 9 page spec to figure that out. And
these ���specs��� look more like C data structures than what we traditionally
think of as a spec. It's a whole hierarchical file system.
If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend
writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or
creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the
complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty
darn quickly. A normal programmer would conclude that Office���s binary file
formats:
* are deliberately obfuscated
* are the product of a demented Borg mind
* were created by insanely bad programmers
* and are impossible to read or create correctly.
-- Joel Spolsky
-- Blog entry for 19 February 2008 ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html )
Powered by UNIX fortune(6)