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.
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 🙂
I wrote a bunch of command-line apps a while ago that let me control my Outlook task list. As a big GTD devotee, everything that I do revolves around my task list. And as someone who spends a lot of time at the command prompt, these apps mean being able to add something to my task list when I think of it – without interrupting what I am doing. It means not needing to Alt-Tab to Microsoft Outlook, waiting for it to wake up, opening a new Form… all of which takes me away from what I was doing when I thought of whatever task needed capturing on my list.
But recently, Outlook started throwing up security warnings when I use them… which means I have to Alt-Tab to Outlook anyway to tick the box telling it it’s not under attack. 🙁
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.
Whether to protect against unforseen setbacks, or to be able to take advantage of unexpected change and opportunity, there is a need to set aside some money as a reserve. Sounds kinda obvious, but this evening has involved finding out that there is slightly more to it.
This one is probably obvious to people more used to blogging, but I still thought this was pretty cool 🙂
windbg is a debugger for Windows. It can step through programs while they run, or be used to examine the dumps produced when Windows crashes or hangs (including when you get the infamous blue-screen-of-death).
And with a couple of simple commands, it can get you a long way towards figuring out the cause of the problem.
I’ve been having a bit of a play with Java 5 to see what is new, and I’m impressed. There’s lots of neat little things to give developers less to worry about. One of these is the introduction of in-built support for thread pooling.