Conflicting standards

Got to love it when one standard says to either use a date format like CCYY-MM-DD or CCYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ and the other says only CCYY-MM-DD is allowed. In this case the outside XML container uses the verbose granularity whilst the encapsulated part only uses the small ISO 8601 variant, of which MM and DD are optional too.

OpenGL fully supported on Vista

In a SIGGraph 2006 presentation by NVIDIA it shows that Microsoft has revisited its stance on how they will support OpenGL within Windows Vista. You may recall when I first wrote about this last year that Microsoft's initial plan was to layer OpenGL through DirectX:

This time last year…

The plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista was to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in
order to obtain the Aeroglass experience

The situation today…

OpenGL accelerated ICD now fully supported under Windows Vista
OpenGL works fully with the Aeroglass compositing desktop
Performance and stability will rival Windows XP by driver release

So it seems some complaining still works given sufficient pressure.

Open format?

So, Microsoft intends to submit its Office 12 file formats to ECMA as a proposed standard..

I took a look at the files and they're in binary format. I thought that for most office applications, especially word processing, we were leaving behind the world of binary encoded formats and moving to XML?

Given the fact how the world is massing behind the Open Document initiative this move of Microsoft's seems to be nothing but PR and marketing. Especially given how the OASIS Open consortium and the Open Document community have now pushed this forward to become an ISO standard.

strmode() function declaration buglet fixed

Was converting files to proper ANSI C function declarations and a user tripped over the fact that old 4.4 BSD's function prototype of strmode() had int as a parameter, whereas it has been mode_t for a long, long time (read 1994 at least).

This broke buildworld of course.

Also asked Dima Dorfman to fix this for FreeBSD (broken in 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x).

NetBSD is fixed (as was to be expected to be honest).

And OpenBSD made the parameter int everywhere with a XXX comment in the strmode.c file that it should be mode_t actually. Weird.