taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Antoin writes:

NSAI (the Irish national standards body) has posted an invitation for comments on its site regarding the proposed new Office Open XML standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). NSAI has established an ad hoc committee to consider the matter, and I am a member of that committee, together with a number of far more important and qualified people.

Anyway, we are anxious to hear from anyone who has a view on what way NSAI should vote on this standard when it reaches committee. If you can provide links to any relevant articles, that would also be very helpful. If you have time, please review the documents and leave your comments either here or send them to the committee.

So if you’ve been following the ongoing drama (to be honest, I haven’t), please feel free to make a submission; the deadline is 11 July.

Tags: file-formats, iso, nsai, office, ooxml, standards, word-processing, xml

Wow, I can’t believe I still have to do this in 2007 — Taiwan really needs to discover FreeDOS! Here’s how to run a DOS BIOS update on a PC without using Windows (in my case, it’s a Dell laptop).

• Grab the FreeDOS “ripcord” boot floppy image from the FreeDOS RipCord Bootdisk page — the 2.88MB version: FDSTD.288.gz (that link’s a local mirror).

• Grab the BIOS updater app from your PC vendor’s site. In my case, I used ME051A10.EXE, a BIOS update from Dell.

• Run:

  gunzip FDSTD.288.gz
  sudo mount -t msdos -o loop `pwd`/FDSTD.288 /tmp/bootiso

• ensure there’s enough space, and copy the app into the disk image:

  df /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cp ME051A10.EXE /tmp/bootiso

• Then make an ISO, using mkisofs’ “-b” option to ensure it’s bootable:

  mkdir /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -Rp /tmp/bootiso/* /tmp/floppycopy
  cp -p FDSTD.288 /tmp/floppycopy
  mkisofs -pad -b FDSTD.288 -R -o /tmp/cd.iso /tmp/floppycopy

• And burn it:

  sudo umount /tmp/bootiso
  sudo cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso

• Now, take the burned CDROM, and boot it.

Answer “N” to all questions when booting, otherwise you’re likely to see an error like “Cannot operate in Protected environment” when you run the BIOS update.

Thanks to the Motherboard Flash Boot CD from Linux Mini HOWTO; very helpful. I hope the next time I have to do this, they just issue a bootable ISO image instead…

Tags: bios, bootable, booting, cd, cdrom, dell, dos, floppy, freedos, hardware, iso, msdos

Perl: double-encoding is a frequent problem when dealing with UTF-8 text, where a UTF-8 string is treated as (typically) ISO Latin-1, and is re-encoded.

utf8lint is a quick hack script which uses perl’s Encode module to detect this. Feed it your data on STDIN, and it’ll flag lines that contain text which may be doubly-encoded UTF-8, in a lintish way.

Tags: encode, iso, latin, lint, perl, problem, script, string, text, utf