November 2006

Pretty simple task: I want to forward some emails because my exchange semester here in Sweden is coming to an end and I want to keep some mails. ‘Forward’ seems to describe my planned task best. Clicking ‘Forward’ brings me to a simple screen, original email is attached to the new one and I enter my email address. And nothing happens, for some hours. I check back the next day and in my Inbox (the one from my soon-to-be-removed account) I find the following email:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: [my_email] This message has been rejected because it has a potentially executable attachment “Result ISBUS.eml” This form of attachment has been used by recent viruses or other malware. If you meant to send this file then please package it up as a zip file and resend it.

Hm, I just want to forward an email? I actually didn’t even want to forward it as a file but Novell’s Netmail gives me no other joice. Wait, I could send the email to my current account, so I get the original one as an attachement, download the attachement, zip it, upload it again and send it to my other account.

Come on, is that really all you have to offer?

Addendum: An empty mail body gives me the following error message:

Unable to create new message (5)

5, of course, thanks for telling me that it’s not 3 or even 4 (oh my god, I hate 4s).

Remember, I told you about The Daily WTF a few days ago…

Sometime ago - nearly two years in a few weeks time - I wrote about Ikea modding, back then still in German. Well, as a fellow reader of my blog you know that I love browsing Flickr for photos tagged with ‘loft’. Today I stumbled over some pretty cool loft-workplace pictures and visited the guy’s blog (don’t ask me for the url, I really can’t remember) and suddenly I found myself on ikea hacker. Great blog, some really good ideas and I can’t wait to go to the Ikea store in Vienna after I come back.

Intype really looks like the solution to all Windows users who want to code in Ruby/PHP/Perl/whatever and had an eye on buying a Mac, because of Textmate (well, I won’t talk about the Mac-WinXP thing here, that’s a whole different story).

Intype will come with support for a wide-range of different languages, support for JavaScript scripting, support for Textmate Bundles and all other fancy stuff. I’m really looking forward to some screenshots or screencasts.

Only problem is that there are no valid download links for the current (and final) release, just for RC2. Additionally there are no Vista builds, but well, I don’t care about that. Seems that Microsoft’s new technology is not that ready for release or something’s wrong with the communication inside of MS!?

Nevertheless, PS looks really good, hope it gets online these days.

[Windows PowerShell Blog]

Warning: Might be only interesting for German speaking people.

I never liked Java. Not because I don’t like the language, simply because it took the JVM ages to start (and it consumes heaps of memory). It never really bothered me that much, since time critical processes (such as playing music) were outsourced to other devices (a CD-player, for example). But since I’m here in Sweden and I do not want to use the earphones of my iPod the whole day (health issues, you know), iTunes and Winamp are my friends and the are running a good 99% of the time I’m working on my computer. Bad thing is that they always hang when I wanted to use Java or start “high-load” applications (starting Firefox, Thunderbird,…).

The last days I figured out that my McAfee VirusScan is the root of all evil: CPU usage climbed up to 100% and stayed there for several seconds when I started a Java applet or something similiar (I actually thought that I fixed that problem weeks ago by excluding my disks from On-Read scans. Well, at least that was my intention).

And that’s were the suboptimal translation capabilities of some companies come into play. There are, for example, not so many differences between the two German words “Löschen” und “Entfernen” (”delete” and “erase”). However, I’m quite sure that in the actual application there was a difference because there is still is a difference in the button procedure: one deletes just the selected element and the other one deletes all elements. Same caption, different action - great!

Another thing which is a bit annoying is missing of some little words, like “auch” (which means “too”). When you place it in one form then you should also use it in the other one, just to make sure that your users can be sure that you mean the same thing. In my concrete example there’s a difference between “Unterordner ausschließen” und “Unterordner auch ausschließen” (”Exclude subfolders” and “Exclude subfolders too”).

No offence, it just took my 1 1/2 hours today to make sure my virus scanner doesn’t block my cpu anymore.

And it was at that very moment that Rob realized that the sun was not so bright, the sky was not so blue, and there was really no reason for him to get up in the morning ever again.