Joel Spolsky answers the question thousands of computer users have been asking themselves for years: Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?¹

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.

[...]

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.

You’d be wrong on all four counts. With a little bit of digging, I’ll show you how those file formats got so unbelievably complicated, why it doesn’t reflect bad programming on Microsoft’s part, and what you can do to work around it.

Sadly, that last part amounts to two options: buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it to translate the files between formats, or use a non-Office format which Office can understand but which will fail to support at least 20% of the features you need. (The hell of it being that your 20% probably doesn't overlap with my 20%.)

It's a damn shame that Lotus and Borland and WordPerfect failed to keep up in the early-to-mid 1990s when Microsoft started pushing Office really hard; if there was still a competitive market in the general purpose office suite market then Microsoft wouldn't be able to get away with this nonsense.

1. More accurately, ordinary users don't wonder about the complexity of the file format as such; they just find themselves unable to rely on being able to use their Word and Excel documents in any product that isn't from Microsoft, not realising that this is largely because of how complicated the Microsoft file formats are. Same difference. ↩

A portrait of Homer Simpson in the style of Rembrandt.

[Via kottke.org]

Love in a Backward World.

Very nicely done.

[Via Very Short List]

Dan Hill's The street as platform paints a picture of a 'smart' street:

The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?

[...]

Three kids are playing an online game on their mobile phones, in which the physical street pattern around them is overlaid with renderings of the 19th century city. They scuttle down an alleyway behind a furniture showroom as the virtual presence of another player, actually situated in a town forty miles away and reincarnated as a Sherlock Holmes-ian detective, indicated on their map by an icon of a deerstalker and gently puffing pipe, stalks past the overlaid imagined space. The three play a trio of master criminals, intent on unleashing a poisonous miasma upon the unsuspecting and unreal caricatures generated by the game.

[...]

[An...] elderly lady stumbles over a pothole in the pavement. Helped back to her feet by a younger man, she decides to complain to the council about the pothole. The man suggests he can do that right now, from his iPod Touch and using the library’s open public wifi, by registering the presence of a pothole at this point on the local problems database, Fix My Street. The old woman stares at him quizzically as it takes him fifty seconds to close the website he had been looking it on his mobile (Google Maps directions for “hairdressers near SW4”, a phrase he’ll shortly have to type in again, having neglected to bookmark it) and access fixmystreet.com. He spends the next few minutes indicating the presence of a pothole outside the library on Fix My Street (unaware of the postcode, he has to select one from a few possible matches on street name), before he moves on, satisfied with his civic good deed for the day. The elderly lady had long since shuffled off, muttering to herself. Although Fix My Street smartly forwards on all issues to the corresponding council, a beleaguered under-trained temp in the also underfunded 'pavements team' is unaware of fixmystreet.com and unable to cope with the levels of complaint, and so the pothole claims five more victims over the next two weeks until someone rings up about it.

[...]

A prototype of a [...] monitoring system, but embedded in the bus-stop opposite the library, records the performance of the lights, travel information displays, large plasma-screen advertising display, and the chilled-beam cooling system newly installed for comfort. The travel information displays themselves receive updates in real-time via a slice of radio spectrum allocated to such data, indicating the proximity of the next five buses. This same system also conveys the latest information on the whereabouts of the no. 73 in particular, in the form of an SMS to a prospective passenger who has selected this as her ‘favourite bus’ via the transport company’s website. Around the corner, she breaks into a trot accordingly. [...]

I strongly recommend reading the entire post. The technology required to make all this happen is either already here or capable of being rolled out within a couple of years.

A few days late, but still worth reading: Love in the Laboratory.

It’s that time of year again, when pie-eyed romantics are wont to wax rhapsodic about the nature, the essence, and the mystery of love.

[...]

[I've...] put some of these sappy utopian fantasies to the test by applying our old friend, The Scientific Method. I’ve taken a closer look below at a few romantic old saws, and the results may surprise you. Especially if you’re a Hallmark fan.

HYPOTHESIS #1. “All we need is love.”

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: We chose an experimental male subject that had been engaged in a long-term, healthy, loving relationship for many years. The subject was removed from his native environment, stripped naked, and dropped onto a barren patch of Arctic tundra without food, protection from the elements, or means of communication. The subject was afforded only ‘love’, in the form of a parcel of romantic letters written by his sweetheart.

RESULTS: The subject spent considerable time with the letters, but in no manner that suggested ‘love’ was the primary objective. He managed to clothe himself, marginally, with several of the letters, and experimented with ingesting those printed on more pulpy paper. The subject spent very little time actually reading the correspondence, compared to other activities which included ’sobbing’, ’shivering uncontrollably’, and ‘cursing at the observation team’. [...]

[Via Seed Daily Zeitgeist]

Courtesy of The Magistrate's Blog:

It is reported that after the second time that a mobile phone had rung in the public gallery the Judge put down his pen, and glared across at the flustered-looking owner of the phone. "If that happens again" said His Honour, "you may discover why they are known as cell phones".

The Economist's blind spot is showing:

Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos, and at worst a transfer elsewhere. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created. That kind of thinking has led to the botched computerisation in Britain's National Health Service, where billions of pounds and millions of precious hours are spent on a system that at best will be substandard and at worst dangerously leaky with patients' private medical data.

Let's read that again:

Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created.

So, the contractors who are responsible for designing and building the IT systems in this world of contracting out IT services and public-private partnerships don't bear any responsibility for doing sub-standard work?

If I had to use a Windows PC at home, I'd be utterly paranoid after reading reports like this:

An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games – and its designers might have larger targets in mind.

"It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence," said Brian Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse.

The virus, which Computer Associates calls Mocmex, recognizes and blocks antivirus protection from more than 100 security vendors, as well as the security and firewall built into Microsoft Windows. It downloads files from remote locations and hides files, which it names randomly, on any PC it infects, making itself very difficult to remove. It spreads by hiding itself on photo frames and any other portable storage device that happens to be plugged into an infected PC.

The good news (unless you own shares in Microsoft) is that there are measures you can take to protect your computer:

Protecting against these new computer viruses, which so far are aimed at PCs running Windows, is hard – and sometimes impossible. [...] Deborah Hale at SANS suggested that PC users find friends with Macintosh or Linux machines and have them check for malware before plugging any device into a PC.

Mac users shouldn't be too smug about this; one day the bastards behind Mocmex will turn their attention to Mac OS X and there'll be carnage, not least because a lot of non-techie Mac users probably think there's no need for anti-virus software and a degree of care in how you deal with downloaded content because their computer is so "safe."

[Via Daring Fireball]

Channel 4 and E4 have just started showing The Big Bang Theory, a show pretty much designed to appeal to a geek like me. Writer/producer Chuck Lorre has a pretty good track record¹, and on the evidence of Thursday night's first episode his latest show has much to recommend it.

While I'm on the subject of this week's TV, I should note that Torchwood season 2 is getting better with every episode. This week's BBC2 episode was nicely creepy, and the BBC3 episode that followed immediately afterwards, whilst breezier in tone as Martha Jones was reunited with Captain Jack and bonded with the rest of the team, sneaked in a real punch to the gut at the end. It's still nowhere near as good as a Joss Whedon show or Farscape at delivering a combination of humour, melodrama and action in a single, deceptively compact package, but Torchwood is already a hell of a lot more convincing than the woefully inconsistent first season.

After a first episode that had me chortling gleefully from start to finish, the second episode of Ashes to Ashes got down to the business of having DI Alex Drake settle into her new role as part of Gene Hunt's team. There's much to like about the show, but fun as it is I'm still waiting for the show to reveal the reason we're exploring the ground Sam Tyler trod two years ago. Other than the fact that Alex Drake is aware of Sam Tyler's experience, what's really different this time round? We've got the officer trying to solve a mystery touching upon her parents' life, we've got Gene Hunt being a charismatic bastard with a well-hidden heart of gold, we've got tons of nostalgia-inducing period details ("Thanks, George."), and a really funny script that does a neat job of revealing how Gene and his crew have matured since we met them in 1970s Manchester². OK, midway through that sentence I talked myself round: even if the show does end up as a recycled Life on Mars there are enough virtues to make it a worthwhile addition to the schedules.

And finally, a show I had no expectations for that I'm liking almost despite myself. Given that the Blade films ended with such a letdown of a third film, I had no reason to think that a TV adaptation would be worth watching. And yet, despite the lack of Wesley Snipes and a distinct downgrading of the special effects budget, Blade: The Series is turning out to be quite a decent show. Goodness knows it's not exactly an original concept for a show about vampires to reveal that ancient vampire families lurk in the shadows, plotting against one another whilst living a decadent life and viewing humans as cattle, but Blade: The Series still manages to pull me in every week. The style of the show's storytelling isn't much like the films; the films' plots had to be introduced and wrapped up inside two hours, so there wasn't much room for backstory. The TV series allows the writers time to stretch a story like that of Krista, Blade's woman on the inside of the bad guys' gang, over several episodes.³

Another welcome improvement is that whilst the Blade of the films was damned near invincible except when he was up against the Big Bad of that particular story, in the TV series Blade has to exert himself a bit to fight his way through the tidal waves of vampire cannon fodder the bad guys throw at him.

Blade: The Series is certainly no classic, but it's doing a decent job of bringing the concept to television in an entertaining manner. It's the least impressive of the shows I'm talking about in this post, but it's good fun nonetheless.

¹ Except for Two and a Half Men. Everyone's allowed one catastrophic misjudgement, I suppose.

² e.g. Gene upending our expectations by taking a detour rather than risk scratching his shiny new car, Chris being "cautious, not nervous" last week.

³ In the films Krista would have gone from being turned to the climax of her story in a total of maybe ten minutes of screen time, squeezed between scenes of an implacable, unruffled Wesley Snipes kicking vampire ass without breaking into a sweat. Now I'll freely admit that Snipes was hugely charismatic and played the role well, but I can't imagine the film version of the character keeping my interest over a couple of dozen hours of TV.

Rejected ideas for Star Wars merchandise.

You know, I really like the idea of a Death Star Dartboard.

[Via Amygdala]

Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?

We can't deny the facts, people. All we will get by electing an African-American is Texas-size space particles crashing into the Earth's surface, mega-tsunamis that barrel into the Appalachian Mountains, and 6.6 billion dead people.

Something Positive on Alan Moore.

[Via Neil Gaiman]

I think it's fair to say that some commenters are unimpressed by the latest addition to the Guardian's stable of bloggers:

How is a nineteen year old, white, public school boy with a penchant for stubble going to get a head in life unless he has a weblog about his already-paid-for round-the-world trip?

I tell you, the comment thread is an order of magnitude more enjoyable than the blog post.

[Via Qwghlm]

Despite myself, the sight of the first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes me strangely hopeful that Messrs Spielberg and Ford might just still have it in them to show the likes of Michael Bay what a proper action/adventure movie looks like.

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Sam Leith on JG Ballard:

In the week before he left his public school to go up to Cambridge for his medical degree, J G Ballard reports:

My last act … took place in the basement kitchen in North B house, when I skinned and then boiled a rabbit. I was determined to expose the skeleton, wire it together and use it as a combined mascot and table ornament. I filled the entire building with steam and a disagreeably potent stench. The housemaster came down to stop me, but backed off when he saw that I was on an intense mission of my own. Why the rabbit skeleton was so important I can't remember.

There, compressed, is a quintessential chunk of Ballard. In tone, it is delivered as you might a cheerful reminiscence on the Parkinson show. There's a dance of humour about it, too: you probably can't really fill an entire building with steam by boiling a rabbit, and you'd expect the smell to be more or less agreeable, but the mad-scientist hyperbole is tickling. Then there's the conjunction of the macabre and the tweely suburban: he wants this horrible thing for a 'combined mascot and table ornament'. And, finally, the wondering payoff: what was he up to? The memory is strong – and his determination such that the master backed off – but his motivation is opaque. [...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

Found on the discussion boards at the IMDB:

by batmike22 (Tue Feb 5 2008 18:44:31)

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit for your consideration an idea for a comic book movie. I must first note this was not my idea. My friend Chris came up with what I think is an epiphany. Summer Glau is X23, directed by Joss Whedon. I can only hope one of them reads these boards and thinks this is a good idea.

You know, that's an even better idea than this.

See to it, Marvel…

Alex Cox has written Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, a sequel to Repo Man:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was the genesis of Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday?

ALEX COX: In '94-'95, I wrote it as a film script and gave it to Peter McCarthy, who was one of the original producers of Repo Man. And he showed it to Jonathan Wacks, who was the other original producer, and they said, "Let's take it to [ex-Monkee and Repo Man executive producer] Michael Nesmith and have him present it to Universal officially." We all came down for the meeting at Universal, and the executive that we had been delegated to meet was, like, 21 years old and had never seen the original Repo Man. [Laughs] And so it was an absurd meeting of these four old men and this sprightly individual who just didn't know what we were doing in his office. Nothing came of it.

Not having been able to get the film produced, he and artist Chris Bones have turned it into a comic which will be published next month.

From the same Alex Cox interview, here's his take on how the studio handled Walker:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Walker is an amazingly political film about a real-life American soldier, played by Ed Harris, who became the president of Nicaragua in the mid-19th Century. It not only attacks the philosophy of America-knows-best, but was also made in Nicaragua at a time when the U.S. was essentially at war with the country. How on earth did you get Universal to finance it in the first place?

ALEX COX: I had had a bad experience with Universal on Repo Man. And Rudy Wurlitzer [Walker's screenwriter] had a bad experience with Universal on Two-Lane Blacktop [a James Taylor-starring road movie from 1971]. Within Universal, like with any large company, there were people who sought to do good. And they said, "Listen, these guys have got this project — maybe it's worth spending $5.6 million on them." I would guess the psychology might have been that by hiring me and Rudy for a second time, they were demonstrating that they weren't just a bad, evil studio, but that they were sensitive to the artist. This was 20 years ago, when such things mattered.

And at what point with Walker did they start becoming just a bad, evil studio?

They weren't really that evil. They didn't mess with the content of the picture at all. The evil occurs when they re-edit it or they fire a director. That's very naughty. Universal didn't do anything like that. They were very respectful of the piece. They [just] didn't really put a lot of energy into distributing it to cinemas. I viewed it as a very broad comedy — with a lot of violence but also a lot of jokes and beautiful women. We thought we'd made popular entertainment. But, obviously, Universal didn't view it that way, so they tended to sideline it domestically in art houses.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

The BBC's NowPlaying prototype looks very promising:

The idea is to take the basic now-playing data from our music radio networks, throw it at the web, and see what we can get back. We could then use this, and other BBC API’s to create a pretty rich visualisation console pretty much automatically. We had a quick brainstorm and decided that we’d use the excellent Last.fm, the incredible MusicBrainz, and the usual suspects Flickr, YouTube, and LyricsFly.

Now, before we let you take a look, some caveatsɉ۬

• This is a functional data demo – there’s been no visual treatment at all. In fact, it looks pretty pants [...]
• There’s still some work to do to optimise the results (When we play ‘Oasis’ you can guess what kind of images we get back from Flickr…)

[Via cityofsound]

Newspaper front pages transformed:

A series of works which transcribe front pages of international daily newspapers into alchemical drawings. These works redeploy the languages and intentions of alchemy: the transformation of materials and essences and the revealed understanding of the world as a text, as a realm of powers and correspondences which, if properly understood, will allow man to take on transformative power.

Artist Suzanne Treister unaccountably failed to represent the front page of the Daily Express as a shrine to the People's Princess, but let that pass…

[Via MetaFilter]

Probably the best scene set at a bus stop in the history of film: Totoro waiting for the cat bus.

[Via VideoSift]