04/22/2009 08:06 posted by
StevenRunning Apache FOP Headless
At work I am looking into using Apache FOP to make my life much easier when it comes to generating reports for clients. Currently I have to programmatically build them using PDFLib, which is a royal pain. The actual development of code to generate the numbers is nothing compared to the time it takes to layout and flow the pages.
I downloaded FOP version 0.95 and I was having some issues running the fop script that comes with the binaries. I kept getting the gtk-warning regardless of what options I passed to the script. Adding in the awt.headless option recommended on other sites and the FOP FAQ did nothing either. I'm not a Java programmer, so this was all a bit frustrating.
It turns out I just needed a newer version of Java. I'm using CentOS 5.3 on my test machine, which unfortunately does not contain an RPM that works for me in the standard repositories. So the easiest way to solve my problem was to download the JRE RPM from the Sun website. Then I set the JAVA_HOME variable near the top of the fop script with the path of the JRE that I installed. Hope this helps out anyone who is having issues with that gtk-warning!
03/31/2009 13:42 posted by
StevenHeroes of Might & Magic 2 Palette
Terry Butler has written a program to extract the files from the large data file that Heroes of Might & Magic 2 uses. On Terry Butler's site you can see that he's made some progress figuring out the image format. I haven't been able to crack it myself, and I haven't been able to get a hold of him either. I figured I would at least make the palette available for anyone who wants it.
I'm providing it in two formats. First is a text-based file that can be loaded with Paint Shop Pro. Second is a 16x16 RGB image where each pixel represents a palette entry.
03/31/2009 13:30 posted by
StevenMore Site Changes
I finally got around to adding the ability for people to leave comments. I'm going to put any future images on my Facebook page. I will leave this for other stuff.
12/03/2008 15:54 posted by
StevenSome Info on ACT Files
I'm talking about the files that are used in the infamous Microsoft Bob, a shell replacement for early versions of Windows. Several years ago I found out you could put these files in a particular folder within the Office 97 directory and use the Microsoft Bob characters as Office Assistants. A handful of other people evidently had the same revelation, but other than that, I could find no information on the file format.
Well I did a bit of picking and here is some basic info for those 2 other people in the world that might be interested. First, the character graphics are stored in uncompressed WMF (Windows Meta File) files within the ACT file. You can extract these easily by looking for the hex sequence 0xD7CDC69A and grabbing everything until 0x300000000000. That's probably not the correct way to read them, but the file specification is long and boring. Unfortunately, the characters are animated with different body parts, so to make anything useful you will have to piece the images together. The WMF files can also be used as clip art in various versions of Microsoft Office.
The sound effects are just wave files and you can rip those with any file ripper. There is also some ASCII text at the rear end of the file that represents the different things the characters say.
Other than that information, I know nothing else. Theoretically, there are look-up tables and information for the animations, but I wasn't really that interested in the files. Also note that these ACT files are not used for the modern Office Assistants or Windows XP search screens.
