news
Standards: Open Document Format (ODF), DER, miniDVD
-
Document Foundation ☛ Understanding ODF compliance and interoperability
The Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard format for office documents, which offers a vendor-independent, royalty-free way to encode text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
-
Alex Gaynor ☛ So you want to serialize some DER?
DER is a type-length-value (TLV) binary format. Which means serialized data is all of the form [type code][length][value], where value is always length bytes long. (Let’s Encrypt has a great introduction to DER if you’re interested.) The way length is encoded is itself variable length, if length is 8, its encoded as a single [0x08] byte. If length is 100, its encoded two bytes [0x81, 0x64]. If you’re serializing some data, and you’re just filling in your buffer from left to right, this gives you an interesting challenge: either you need to know how long each value is going to be when you start serializing, or you have to do some tricks.
-
Tyler Thorsted ☛ miniDVD – Obsolete Thor
Enter the miniDVD. It is a smaller version of the standard CD/DVD optical disc size. It was very popular as a recording medium for some digital video camera’s. Much like the Sony miniDVD handycam I own. You can pop a blank disc into the camera and it prepares it for you, which takes a couple minutes, then gives you 20 minutes of recording in high quality and up to 60 minutes with a lower quality. The discs can hold up to 1.4GB and will have the same structure as its big brother.