« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 27, 2007
Say What?
It's finally happened. URLs can contain domain names that I don't even know how to pronounce. Here's the first example I've found:
If that doesn't work for you, try this:
I'm not sure if the latter is an ASCII equivalent of the former or if it's an alias. It doesn't seem to be a redirect. While the second one is pronouncable as a string of characters, it certainly doesn't roll off the tongue. And what if one doesn't know what the ASCII equivalent of the Japanese name is?
Gee... I guess this may be the same complaint that non-English-speaking Japanese people may have had for many years.
Posted by lsloan at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)
Tolerating MS Exchange Calendar
In my organization, I am required to use Microsoft Exchange's Calendar system for accepting and creating meeting invitations. Ugh...
Fortunately, since the web access has been enabled for our Exchange server, I don't need to run Microsoft Entourage to access the calendar. At least, not most of the time. It turns out I do need to have it installed for a few rare occasions.
Since I won't use Exchange's email system (I will continue using my trusty IMAP account via Mozilla Thunderbird or Horde Imp), I want to make sure that my Exchange inbox contains only meeting invitations and not other email messages. The reason I get other messages there is that there are some people here that use Exchange for email. Whenever they compose a message and choose my name from the user directory or enter my email address as a recipient, the Exchange server sends the email to me in two places. It sends it to my Exchange inbox and it also sends it to my IMAP account. That is a system configuration, I guess. There isn't any forwarding option that is set in my own Exchange account. So I end up with extra messages in my Exchange inbox.
The IT support folks here anticipated that some users, like me, didn't want to use Exchange's email features. They prepared a file of Exchange rules that would put all messages that are not calendar invitations into the "deleted items" folder in Exchange, which is automatically emptied periodically. The problem is that this rules file (a .rwz file) can only be used by MS Outlook for Windoze. It will not work in MS Entourage, which is for Mac OS X. I was told this ahead of time, but I tried it myself just to be sure.
The solution is to go to somebody's computer that is running Windoze and has Outlook, set up my account there, load the rules, then delete my account settings from that computer. That didn't appeal to me. Given MS' record, how can I be sure that computer won't be able to access my Exchange account at a later date? (Yes, I'm probably acting paranoid.) I happen to have Entourage already installed on my Mac as pat of MS Office 2004. (Just in case OpenOffice or NeoOffice had trouble reading a document and I needed to use Wurd.) So I decided to use Entourage to create the necessary rule on my own.
I sent myself a meeting invitation from the Exchange web interface. I examined the invitation messages carefully (message source and full headers) within Entourage, Exchange web, and my IMAP client. I found that invitations always included an attachment with MIME type "text/calendar" named "meeting.ics". So I set up a rule in Entourage to move all messages that don't have an attachment with that name to my deleted items folder. When executed, the rule moved all messages, including the invitations, to the deleted items folder. Not good. So I moved all the messages back to my inbox and altered the rule to look for messages that don't have attachments. Again, when the rule ran in Outlook, it moved my invitations as well. Strangely enough, though other email clients recognize these invitations as containing attachments, MS Exchange clients do not. (I should expect MS software to be broken, shouldn't I?)
Looking at the message source and headers again, I found this header in the invitation messages:
Content-class: urn:content-classes:calendarmessage
So, I set up a new rule to move all messages that do not have a "Content-class" header that contains "calendarmessage" to the deleted items folder. I moved all my messages back to my inbox and tried the rule. This time, I had success. All invitations remained in my inbox, while all others went to the deleted items. Hopefully this rule will be robust enough to work properly for a very long time.
What's in the rule file that the IT support folks sent me, I don't know. It's a binary file that didn't include any text other than the name of the rule. That makes me think they used some criteria other than searching for a header string that contains a certain substring. Oh well. I could ask the IT folks what's in the rules file, but they will just ask me why I didn't give in and use it on somebody else's Windoze computer.
Posted by lsloan at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2007
Internet Radio Fights To Survive
I received an email message from Tim Westergren, founder of an innovative Internet radio service, Pandora. Mr. Westergren says that Pandora and many other Internet radio services are at risk of becoming extinct, driven into bankruptcy by insanely high royalty fee increases imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board.
See Mr. Westergren's message here:
Tim Westergren - Internet Radio At Risk
If you've never tried Pandora, you should. It lets you create a personalized radio station. You tell them the name of an artist or song that you like, and it will find other similar songs that you might like. As each new song plays, you are given the opportunity to say whether you like the songs or not, influencing which songs Pandora will play for you next. This makes Pandora unique among Internet radio services.
Pandora, like many Internet radio services, present a lot of music you will never hear anywhere else. It is a great way for independent artists to get their music heard.
Even if you don't listen to Internet radio often, if you think Internet radio is worth saving, please consider doing something about the unjust royalty increases. Go to the Savenetradio.org web site and fill in the form. Faxes will automaticaly be sent to your congressional representatives to let them know about what's going on and that you would like them to put a limit on these royalties.
Update: On April 21, 2007 I received an email message from Congressman John D. Dingell's office to acknowledge the receipt of my fax to them. The email said I would receive a response to my message as soon as possible.
Posted by lsloan at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2007
Guy's Got Many Cool Projects
Google Image Result for http://www.homebrewcpu.com/Pictures/dekadog.jpg
Posted by lsloan at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)
What Does It *Do*?
Posted by lsloan at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)
Olde Tyme Star Wars
Eric's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea: Steampunk Star Wars Desktops
Posted by lsloan at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
Box Rivets
My friend Jason Sonnenschein pointed out this web site that sells cool "box rivets". They are plastic fasteners that snap together. Good for holding boxes together.
Jason liked the castle. I think that's cool, but the spaceship is awesome. My sone would have fun with this. He loves boxes.
Posted by lsloan at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2007
Using FUSE To Access Remote Data
With the recent announcement on the local Mac SIG mailing list of MacFUSE (from Google?), my interest in FUSE has been rekindled.
The project at Google provides a core system and a sshfs helper application. (A helper for Apple's Spotlight also exists, but I never use Spotlight.)
Looking around for more information about FUSE, I found these web sites:
This dbtoyfs allows one to mount MySQL or PostgreSQL DBs as filesystems, representing schemas as directories and table information and data as XML files:
This system includes support for inserting user-defined XML into the documents. This can be used to load XSL to format the XML, for example, which is demonstrated on that web site.
Posted by lsloan at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)