I just noticed that Lotus Notes R7.0.1 supports 'certain' Linux distros as a platform. This is a good thing if your corporate email is Lotus Domino and your desktop client is the fat Lotus Notes client. Now you have flexilibity in your platforms without having to (wait to) migrate directly to IBM's Workplace 'based-on-the-Eclipse-framework' client.

If your a UNIX admin at a large corporation, it's awesome. No more having to use Xming or and Exceed license to get remote shells or access GUI-only X11 tools.

That reminds me: sometimes a business relation will ask you, "what is Linux?" Sending them to the IBM linux homepage is an awesome start for a suit. After all, nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft^H^H^H^H IBM, did they?

My Grandmother died yesterday. I fear that I will be quite sad for some time.

Since I was living with her as part of the death watch, I will be looking for a new place to live. Hopefully I will not be looking for some time.

A lot of my family is affected by this. I wish that they could stay together for some time.

Some time.

That is all we have. Some time it doesn't seem like enough.

In my weblog I have recorded a 'fairly' biased review of my experiences with the University of Oklahoma's Information Technology (IT) Symposium from April 13 of this year.

Feel free to enjoy it.

I know my web server won't.

Since I posted about being able to script-manipulate Outlook files, a request to put up or shut up about those scripts has gone out. In all fairness I only pointed people at my meta-site and not my user site (with all the goodies that I've time to properly format for the web.) FYI, with the following YMMV.

Note: if your outlook folders are compressed, SOL dude. Try
Something nice to ease your pain of having to use Outlook until you export all your data to un-compressed PST format. Additionally, the *encrypted* PST files are just bit substitutions (caeser ciphers, blech.) Uncover the substitution table and it's a (relatively) simple tr to unencrypt.

Still with me? Good.

1. Put all your stuff in PST format - OST files are not a Good Thing with which to deal.
2. Goto SourceForge and download ol2mbox.
3. Build it on your Linux box. (Hopefully you have one, as your asking to move stuff from Outlook to Linux, but hey - anything goes :-) For the really brave, try building it under cygwin. Ick.
4. Get access to your PST files from above.
5. Run the tool on those files to generate all your email in Mbox format. Yes, this is a flat file format where each of your directories in Outlook will map to directories below your home dir.
6. Move these files/dirs to wherever you need/want them.

I don't like messing with PST file formats, so I use someone else's tool to do so. End of story.

For those of you with Outlook Express, try running this on your mbx file:

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
# Project: M$ E-mail parser
# File: parsembx.pl
# Description: get the emails out of
# Outlook Express mbx files and put them
# into EML text format
# Author: Jeremiah Powell
# Created: 02-AUG-2002 JPOWELL
# License: GPL 2.0
{
#read in whole files at once
undef $/;
$min_size_of_valid_email = 10; #C Programmer's Disease!!!
 
foreach(@ARGV) {
    # open the src file
    $srcFile = $_;
    open(SRCFILE,"<".$srcFile) ||
        die "Give me a mail index file to process!!!\n";
    $i = 0;
    mkdir("${srcFile}-mail");
 
    @mails = split /[^a-zA-z0-9~!@#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)_\|\{\[\]\}\-+=-`'":;,\.\/\?><\t\\\n\r\s]+/,<SRCFILE>;
    # for each Return-path in the file, get everything until the next
    # set of ugly control-characters
    foreach(@mails) {
            open(MAILDEST,">","${srcFile}-mail\\${i}.eml") ||
            die "Unable to open ${srcFile}-mail\\${i}.eml";
        #send it to the output file
        if (length($_) > $min_size_of_valid_email) {
            print MAILDEST $_;
            $i++
        } #end if
        close(MAILDEST);
    }; #end foreach
    close SRCFILE;
}; #end foreach
}

Concatenating the EML files into a coherent Mbox file is left as an exercise for the reader.

Sysadmining.

Kids, don't do this at home. As a matter of fact, just don't do this.

When did weekends become work holidays? As I sit here in my cheap office chair, drinking my cheap filtered office water I wonder - oh so casually - what happened to me. "Soo much fun," they said. "Soo many toys," they said. 'They' obviously never sat for 3 hours while a hacked up backup script brings the secretary's box (the current sacrificial victim of system rebuild time) back to life.

Fun indeed.

Today is a nice day, though. If you aren't babysitting tar scripts and samba shares, you may even enjoy it.

Ugh. Shopping. Not that I won't die without more milk or fat free cheese, it's just that shopping in my region of Texas means one thing: shopping at Walmart. I'd rather get back to renaming my dated files in ISO 8601 format. After spending much of the day looking for reasons to not go (and an equal amount washing off the icky feeling afterward) I went to Wally land.

Soooo many vapid people filled the isles. Crushing piles of carts. People who stop to fiddle with the smallest of thing spread, like sheild volcanoes, their carts and kids and junk blocking the way as if lava flows cutting through civilization. Blech. I choose to not associate with these people for a reason: stupidity. Blind, ignorant, self-serving and head-up-$ORIFICE stupidity.

An example will illustrate the cause of my ire. An express checkout lane breaks down. A clever person converts an unused regular checkout lane into a temporary express lane. Copious signs are posted: express lane - 20 items or less. A call is sent out on the intercomm. I had given up my previous position in another line to make a last search for glue (mainly hoping that the supply isle was finally free of the family that appeared to be setting up long-term housing there.) Upon returning the hellish wait to be drained of money for items I probably could justify not purchasing for 1 or 2 more days, I took up a position in the new exprees lane. My 11 items were sparsely scattered in the cheap and poorly treated Walmart cart.

A large man with a overflowing cart enters the line behind me. His glazed examination of the 'express - 20 items or less' sign warns me this evening was about to get ugly. I got as far in the process of checkout as most of the way through purchasing, before he prepared to load his ark onto the convery belt. In ensuing conversaion he pleaded ignorance, inability to understand how to map signs with lane numbers to the lanes that they discussed and how this 'little' [1] incident should be let to slide.

Never before have I ever felt sympathy or joy at dealing with an empolyee of Sam Walton's attempt to crap-o-tize [2] retailing. Her stern adherance to following the rules AND ethics in rebuking him was the highlight of my day. The look alone on the neanderthal's [3] face as he sought out one of the (actually very short) normal lines was delightful to my eyes. While walking out, I preemted the welcome specialist with "Thank you, have a good nite."

1. Irregardless of the fact that he had easily 5 times the number items of combined count of the rest of the line.
2. The low, low, low margins and area-suffocating nature [4] of a [Super] Walmart can not be benificial to either local employment or traffic patterns.
3. Stupid People
4. Combined with the focus on 'only the top 10% of sellers' (read low, low, low quality at high, high volume) implies that the contientious customer will usually buy at a lot more at slightly more expensive, but independent stores with a Good Selection, leaving the 'average' people to walk the isles.

Road Warriors: Deams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway

466 pg.

Daniel Burstein, David Kline

1995 Penguin Books

ISBN 0-525-93726-9

Summary:

The living story behind the "Information Highway" and the highwaymen and women who build it.

Contents

Introduction: The Utopia Paradox

Part 1: Where the Roads Connect

1. The Fog of War
2. Accidental Genesis
3. The Rabbit in the Hat

Part 2: A Kingdom of Riches

1. The Internet Reconsidered
2. Monster Experiment
3. Read Out and Crush Someone
4. The Games People Play
5. Smart TV or a PC in Drag?
6. An Interesting Place to Go

Part 3: Brave New World

1. Private Riches, Social Wealth
2. The Global Challenge
3. To Have and Have Not

Appendix A: The Interview Triptych

Appendix B: A Twenty-First Century

Good:
        Burstein and Kline have a very well researched set of quotes, competent sources and an almost textbook-like ate of Notes. The text reads well with a prose adapted striaght from the pages of Wired, possibly due to the influence of Kline who is a columnist for HotWired. The focus on people and relationships secures this encylopaedia of marketing and industry politik from the curse of technology focus. Two volumnous appendicies cover detailed accounts of current high-level digital dignitaries interviews and a look at the furture through an improvised thought experiement.
The Bad:
        For all the work that has gone into weaving a cohesive whole from the text, the book tends to read like quotes strung one after the other. Focus in the early chapters centers around telling the story of what is, but the bookshows to debating morality and justice in cyberspace as Kilne and Burstein try to divine the direction of the furture. Both the disturbing shift in topic and the low-cohesion of the quote-based writing combine to muddy the impact of constant urging for action.
The Ugly:
        Two words - Interactive Television - defines the major flaw of this large undertaking. By the 260th page, this concept has been raised to the highest places by the authors while throughouly trashed by direct quotes of the authorities used to flesh it out. Pushing for this awful metaphor for the future of computing severely undermines the reader's confidence in the material. Yet no real depth of discussion is reached about this conflict in paradigm.

        Were that this the only missed opportunity in the text, it would be passable. However the issues continue to build throughout the development of this "whole picture" of backrooms and boardrooms. Burstein and Kline quote Kenedy: "if men have the talent to invent new machines that put menout of work, they have the telkent to put those men back to work. Rather than call Kenedy on this poor homily - it is intent not talent these pundits should eveluate - he is used to back up a case for the unique early-U.S. Ford manufacuting ethos: "make customers out of your employees." The authors then descend into chapter after chapter of war mongering about the destructive potential in the "digital revolution" in which they hope to participate (the book was written during the end of the worst downturns in the history of the information sector.)

        The cerebral layout of the text is intemidating if the read is not familiar with college textbook fare. This is definitely a book written by and for the cyberspace intelligestia. Unfortunately, those intellegent enought to comprehend Road Warriors are those likely to be put off by the grasping moralism and petty preaching turn of direction that mars the last quarter of the text.

Having read this work both before and after the Dot-Com Bubble's rise and collapse, it amuses me that my initial

analaysis so many years ago still rings true: don't bother paying for this book. Unless you suffer from insomnia or are really lost as to how to market bad ideas when you

find it on your library shelf, just walk away.

Personal Rating: 2.5 out of 10

Well...after roaming through the new DejaNews and rsync.samba.org FAQ's I finally figured out that if you back things up off a Window$ Machine, don't send it to a Linux server first. Simply put, rsync -e ssh linux_server windows_client is okay, but due to permission mismatches and a known rsync bug (there is a patch, but it'd mean replacing my native win32 build of rsync with a cygwin version) never try rsync -e ssh windows_client linux_server without a good deal of patience and time on your hands.

Futhermore, I love watching my (RH 8.0+patches) webserver play DHCP musical-chairs with my WAP. Almost makes me pine for the days of static routing, but that would be a Bag Thing with the transient topology of my SOHO LAN.

Oh, yeah - my apartment is now short two more crickets[1]. Maybe I will go to sleep tonight after all.

Gotta remember to go to NTLUG meeting in Dallas tomorrow morning. Should be a fun drive. Can't cost too much more than the 500 count of custom stationary I ordered from Staples today.
I sleepy now...

[1] DEATH to the Unholy+3 Field Roaches of Noise!!!

Well..the ol' gamming box went tits up the weekend. When the fan died, the fan-detecting power supply quit. Since that little transformer box is pratically welded shut, I'm not getting in there without some major case-damage. Since there are no PC clone vendors in 50 miles of my apartment, I'm gonna be SOL for a while.

On the plus side I am now using Linux (RedHat 8.0, 166 Pentium, 64 MB RAM, 1.2Gb HD, Matrix Mystique video) pretty much full time now. I didn't want to put much on my 'home development' server, but ol' AutobotMatrix seems to be holding her own. Too bad I can't use my USB keyboard with this old AT motherboard. My old 108-key has a bad spacebar (try doing cli with no spaces!)

While the X11 and gnome fonts look like crap on my monitor, it has made web development a lot easier.

--http://24.219.85.9 out

Ugh. Trudging though anouther oddly paced, huge (+950pg) overly-general database system textbook. Maybe once I finish reading Silberschatz, Korth and Subarshan 4th ed. I can get back to reading Klir and Yuan's Intro to Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Sets. Yummy fuzzy formal automata. They give me that warm feeling between the ears. Prolly end up a stroke vicitm: "Yep officer, see there's the evidence - rows and rows of textbooks right by his exploded head."

Great. I just spent the last four hours moving my collective trash to my apartment from the old Frat house in which it was stored. Now I've got a dozen or so boxes, tops opened and tipped on their sides, stack in the form of little cardboard shelves. I can't wait until one of them gives way and spills Math and CS textbooks all over the room. At least I can get at my boxed set of Monkey island and Leasure Suite Larry games.

I need to study for my Data Networks final (not really, unless the prof. really loads down the test with ugly problems - then I'll need sleep a lot more) and I'm already starting to see the funny little spots and hear the happy little people living in my coffie mug. Caffine addiction sucks.