dale lane

I came across a new site – AnAppADay.com

I plan on writing an application everyday for 30 days straight. May the world benefit from the purposeful destruction of my personal life.

He’s been going for a while – I think he’s only got a week or so left now – so there’s a decent collection of apps there now. And some of them are clever ideas. A good example is the Mouse Heat Map.

Compared with most of the development that I do at work – where everything is carefully considered and designed and planned, there’s something appealing about this sort of approach. I wonder what sorta stuff we could come up with if we had 30 days to try as many ideas as we could.

(more…)

I tried Second Life for the first time today. It is mentioned fairly often at work (see here, there, or pretty much any post on eightbar).

It’s kinda amazing how much time you can spend without actually doing anything! 🙂 It’s been a while since I played games like Quake, so I spent quite a while on ‘Orientation Island’ and ‘Help Island’ to get the hang of the various controls, and customizing my avatar.

(more…)

I work in a technical service role – which normally involves customers emailing some error messages, trace or logs to us for analysis. Had a bit of problem with this today, as every file the customer sent – no matter what it was or how many they had included – ended up arriving in a single attachment called winmail.dat that we couldn’t seem to open.

Even using strings, the files still looked pretty mixed-up, but I could see that the one thing that they all had in common was that they all contained “IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note” fairly early on in the file. A Google for this showed that I’ve not been the first to come across this!

Turns out that Microsoft Outlook uses winmail.dat to preserve formatting information when sending HTML or Rich Text emails. We all use Lotus Notes at work (and that’s after a mail server script has had a go at incoming emails to scan attachments and file them somewhere safe). So, we couldn’t read attachments wrapped in the proprietary Outlook junk.

I found a bunch of different utilities claiming to extract attachments for you, but the one that seemed to do it quickest and easiest was WMDecode.

Good use of 5 minutes before I even got to look at the customer’s problem(!) Sadly, the problem described in the log files took slightly longer to figure out, but that’s another story 🙂

The Onyx Project sounds very cool…

The Onyx Project is the world’s first truly interactive, “hyperlinked” movie – the first fully browseable motion picture… It contains literally millions of possible viewer pathways – and therefore experiences, each one different from every other… an experiment in nonlinear storytelling for the digital age…

From the blurb, and some of the press coverage it has received, it sounds like it’s far more than your typical DVD alternate-endings offering. I definitely want to give this a try.