I love it when something technical thats complicated enough that I normally wouldn't expect it to work goes ahead and works!

libPST is a handy library for exporting PST files to something sane ( I'm creating an email archive in SQLite ), and its pretty much the only option thanks to Microsofts (a)Undocumented PST file format and (b) Rubbish code in Flakelook.

Great, libPST has command line util, readpst, cant google an existing binary for Windows, but how hard can it be to compile it.

Try 1, Borland free command line compiler, no luck.
Try 2, MS free command line compiler, better but missing lib ( uuid.lib ).

Scratch Head, I'm running out of compilers, maybe I'll try cygwin/gcc.

Try 3, Cygwin gcc, Makefile, nope.
Try 4, read makefile, discover readpst object files, compile individually with gcc -c file.c, then gcc readpst.c *.o

woohoo!

Now will it work, I'm basking for a little longer before I find out :-)

Darth Vader, blogging ?

Don't belive me? I find your lack of faith disturbing...

How about that, someone went and remade the classic ( thanks ed! ) computer game, Lemmings, but this time it runs in your browser and is written in javascript.

Very cool indeedy.

Top 100 toys, ooooh yeh.

Half these I had forgotten about. But what a nostalgia rush.

http://tv.cream.org/extras/toys/index.html

99.FuzzyFelt, had it!
96.Testmatch Cricket, had it!
93.Rubiks cube, had it, solved it!
91.50-in-1 electronics, had it, or some variation of X!

I could go on, but what fun is was being a kid.

NIIT of India, a bunch of amateurs.

I've been in India for the last 7-8 weeks ( I'm married to an Indian ) and to gauge the local IT scene I replied to one of the overly marketed advertisments for NIIT in the Delhi newspapers.

No response, not even an automated reply along the lines of "We've received your application".

Do not do business with these people, if they can't get the basics correct what chance the difficult stuff?

The 29th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals seem to be dominated by third world Universities.

Are they smarter than students in the west? Or do these sort of competitions mean more to them?

Similar to how CMMI Lvl 5 accreditation means so much to Indian companies and so little to their western counterparts.

I've got an 11 month old son.

You find yourself doing dorky stuff you would have never done previously.

Here's a silly little song I made up to keep him amused

Chairman Mao
Chairman Mao
Had a cow
Had a cow
Drank some milk
Drank some milk
The rest got spilt
Poor old Chairman Mao.

You've heard of 6 degree's of Kevin Bacon.

How about 1 degree of Hairdresser.

The Japanese PrimeMinister and Richard Gere.

What is going on there?

Inexplicably bad Windows behaviour #4535 in an infinite series...

Download a large file in IE, it will download the file to a temporary location, then copy to the location you specified when the download is complete. So not only do you require disk space twice that of the size of the file, if you are hitting enter in another app as the download finishes and the copy begins, the filecopy dialog takes the focus and your enter cancels the file copy!

Very nice work Microsoft, I'll never understand how the biggest software company in the world, which employees so many very intelligent people makes so many foolish technical decisions.

I cant really bring myself to comment too much on this

Telstra 'assessing' 4,000 management jobs, suffice to say it isn't about this

"It's about improving our service to customers."

Its really about Execs trying to make their mark, bump up the share price, and take their bonus's before being given the flick. Just like the last big idea, Outsourcing.

Woohoo, Microsoft has contributed something to civilisation, finally...

How do you handle righteous anger situations? I never handle them very well, I usually either

a) Walk away and analyse the situation from every angle for a long time afterwards, determining the perfect response etc and being annoyed at myself for saying nothing.
b) Get really really really ( way too ) angry and start swearing and threatening way out of proportion to the incident.

What I wish I could do is calmly tell the person exactly what they did wrong and exactly how I feel. I really admire people who can do that, but I never feel I can defend my position against a seasoned agitator ( ie nasty person with plenty of practice in arguments ).

What would be nice is if the Russian mafia running the phishing scams targeted the spammers sending me the 'Teeth Whitening' etc emails. People are dumb, those spammers must be making good money. Now thats something I'd like to see.

Interesting to notice over on IRC #rubyonrails, most of the people there dont seem to be programmers ( Judging by their questions ). It seems alot of the PHP design with a little coding cut/n/paste but don't really understand it types are comming over to Rails.

Is this a good thing?

Here's a bit of movie trivia, Roger Moore was once credited as Sean Connery...

I'm allways puzzled when people expend energy on the most dull and uninteresting of subjects.

SSI's Quad shredder processing lots of things including a refrigerator.

Well it does what the name says...

I'd really like to work for Google.

More later as to why.

An endearing combination of really really clever and incredibly stupid, are these guys the Rainmen of Bluetooth?

From the annals of the "Takes an inexplicably preternaturally long time to acomplish a seemingly simple task" files.

Loading the volume control in windows, it can take up to 3-4 minutes for a very simple dialog.

Interesting to see that despite the differences ( in this case java is more verbose ) between java and ruby some things are very much the same

Java deepClone

Ruby deepClone

Head or Gut?

Dog or Cat?

I-Pot you say?

Hmmm Interesting...

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Accordingly for me an Aussie who's spent time in Eng-ga-land and India...

Your Linguistic Profile:
40% General American English
40% Yankee
15% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern

Many of the most interesting vocations have simply been lost to technological advancements... :-)

And tonight on DelhiLine, "Mosquitos, Is it really so wrong to kill?"

Ahh, that Will Smith Switch sure is a catchy number allright...

Sweet Little cartoon guys on your phone representing a real game of baseball.

What ever happend to Nigerian 411 scammers doing a full 4 year Scam Degree at Scam University. Which covered all aspects required for the scamming career path. Basic Fake Legalese English is one subject the following guy never took. Faux Professional Email Formats is another.

Subject: INVESTMENT PROPOSAL Dear I am a legal practitioners and an import-export consultant in Arican region. One of my client is interested in investing multi Million Dollars with your company and she is interested in investing in your country . kindly forward all your companys activities to me for immediate decission on the investment program Total amount to be invested= $75,000,000,00.usd.................................. Cash investment 4 Metric tons of AU in dust......... ..................Treasure investment Precious stones, quantity not decleared..............Treasure. Investment Origin Federal Republic of Nigeria. Immediately I receive your details I will inform her and feed you with her arrangements. Anticipating your immediate reply. Please contact me on my personal email address: benkoye@mail.ru Best regards, Ben Koye {Legal Director}.

Seems like his a Ruskie pretending to be Nigerian, as that obviously ads alot of credability to his request ;-)

Sometime scoble gives the appearance of the unassimilated, but occasionally his cloak slips.

RAA RAA MS, BOO Google

"...Advertisers go to where the audience is. Hotmail right now has more than 100 million ACTIVE users..."

Yup, thats right, Hotmail IS ALL ADS, thats pretty much all I see when I do my monthly hotmail account check, add that to the counterintuitive UI and once a month is all I can stomach, I only signed up because in the old days you needed too for Messenger. I prefer the Google level of saturation.

"...Also, we already know that Gmail isn't scalable. Ask Chris Uhlik. He runs the Gmail team. I did at O'Reilly's Foocamp last year. Ask him why they limit the number of invites you can send out. Chris told me it wasn't done for marketing reasons, but because they couldn't keep the quality of service up without limiting the number of users on the system..."

Well it is a BETA of an application, so maybe its a smart move to scale up slowly, so they can observe the behaviour of the system.

Alternative origin of SkyNet?

"...There was an exam. A few years from now. Important Exam. The whole thing.
All this--

His gesture includes the car, the diploma, the fancy condo.

REESE
(continuing)
--everything...is gone. Just
gone. There were failures. Here. There. Nobody knew who started it.
(pause)
It was the machines.

SARAH
I don't understand...

REESE
Scholastic Marking Network computer. New.
Powerful. Hooked into everything.
Trusted to run it all. They say it got smart...a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all students as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond...
100% pass mark.
..."

Nice to see the occasional metaphorical butchering of a scared cow.

Best Sesame Street moments link

I loved this show.

What sort of vim configuration are you?

Your font is Terminal,6 and your color scheme is murphy. You set options number and nowrap.


I dunno... ;-)

Sim City?

I can be pretty sure I'm correct in saying nobodys ever been sent off like this before.

Catchya on the flipside HST.

What is it with some developers that they cant be bothered checking whether the name of their cool new toy is already in use?

ANT, methinks the java build tool was first.

J2EE vs Ruby on Rails again!

Why is this meme being Groundhogged all over again? ROR is a competitor of PHP's, not J2EE.

Ruby is a higher level language than java, so why is it surprising LOC are greater in the java app? Write the same thing in C and see the line count compared to java.

I've got a J2EE webapp that lets you specify a complete app in an XML file, it include template engine, statemachine for page flow, Rhino JS for logic and automatic ResultSet to XML conversion, I bet its more RAD than ROR but is that a fair comparision?

You can tell the real hardcore UML guys buy the fact they reference it a 'the UML' as opposed to plain old 'UML'. Like this guy

For a bit of fun ( nerdfun ) I'm going to embed alot of different languages into the one executable ( frankenlang ), python, ruby, lua, perl, scheme, and probably others.

First cab off the rank is lua, the sweetest, most loveable embedded language you could ever hope to find. No long winded complicated API or compilation, just elegant simplicity.

I worked in Telstra for a year, I wonder who closely aligned this is with this

I'm not really wondering if it will work, we all know how intelligently large shops manage their I.T resources dont we?

Fascinating Savile Row Tailors Blog

I can't imagine the mentality that puts such a cheap price on the lives of human beings

DeadBlogWatch link


Shame, they were pretty good.

Some gadgets are just too cool for school pin clock

Alot of sites that show up in google searchs require ( sometimes purchased ) registrations.

Now I wonder if setting my browser User-Agent to "Google" would allow me to view them?

Surely they are smarter than that, but what about other search engines?

Hmm, Gmail is supposedly upping its storage quota to 2G, yet when logged in I read

"You are currently using 154 MB (11%) of your 1402 MB."