Recently, as part of the many antitrust/anti-competition legal actions they’re suffering under, Microsoft released specifications for the old Office binary file formats. As expected, they’re big and complex. Joel Spolsky (a former member of the Excel team) had some thoughts on their size and complexity:

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.

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Source: The Licquia Blog

Today, we released the first beta of LSB 3.2. If all goes well, this will hopefully be the only beta.

We’ve been working on 3.2 for a while, and we’re really excited about it. We’ve added quite a few interfaces, based on feedback from application vendors and others. There are whole new sections: printing support, Perl and Python, FreeType, Qt 4, and trial use support (our new name for “optional”) for Xrender, Xft, and the ALSA API.

A while back, I posted a set of instructions on how to test a Linux distribution for LSB compliance. With the 3.1 update, testing has gotten a lot easier.

The most notable enhancement in the update is the LSB Distribution Test Kit Manager, or “DTK Manager” for short. This is a framework which controls the execution of the entire test suite and collecting the results.

So, it’s time to update the instructions.