[plug] OpenOffice panic

[Leon Brooks]

On Friday 31 January 2003 09:34 am, Mark Saxon wrote:
>>> Any ideas at all would be helpfull at the moment.

>> You can unzip a few samples into their own directory and have a look at
>> the XML. Compare it with the last-known-good one.

> unzip ?   as in pkzip equivilent. Or do you mean unzip in some other
> another way.

> I tried zip instead but could not identify any XML component. In the
> double compressed file.

Ah, sorry. You have pre-OO StarOffice files, which are in magic binary 
StarOffice format. OOo files, and StarOffice from 6, are ZIPped XML plus 
images etc. They unpack into your current directory, so you need to make 
directory, change to that, and unzip ../name-of-oo-doc.sx?

> I did pick up the string
> "Hat Convention" in one file which I'm dead sure was or
> should not be  in the original.  Could be random chance I thought.

More likely to be garbage from something that was previously on a disk sector. 
Odds of getting that string randomly in any sequence of bytes that long are 
256^14 - a 34-digit number - against, and in a whole 700MB CD are a 25-digit 
number. The age of the universe in seconds is a 17-digit number.

> It did provide some light relief in what is becoming a likely fairly grim
> final outcome. :(

You've pointed `file' at the suspects etc in case they aren't stored as you 
think they are?

Cheers; Leon