SwitchBL8’s gebazel

On MSDN there’s an announcement about the change in Outlook’s rendering engine for HTML mail. You can read it here.

Lately I noticed that most music I played showed up as being “mono” in WinAMP. Today I clicked on some music and it opened Mediaplayer (for some unknown reason, since it should have opened WinAMP, but hey, it’s Windows). The music was in stereo. I closed Mediaplayer (just don’t like it) and started WinAMP. The same file played in mono.
I opened the options dialog to look whether I accidently configured something in a way it shouldn’t but could not find any anomaly. So whilst downloading the latest version (5.32) of WinAMP I uninstalled the current (5.0x). I left the skins directory intact, but removed everything else the uninstaller could not remove (mainly the plugins directory).
After installing the new version, WinAMP plays stereo again. Very strange.

This week I received an e-mail from one of my colleagues, asking if there were people that would join him in his quest to get the SCJD certification. Some colleagues (before I got to work for the company, so unfortunately I was not one of them) did the same earlier for the SCJP certification.

Because one of my personal goals was to get SCJP certified this year, I could not resist and added some extra weight to that: get SCJP certified A.S.A.P. so that I can join the collective initiative to become SCJD certified. This year.

Fortunately I’m not the only one that still needs to get his SCJP first, so that enlarges the chance that I will have some more time to actually study for it and do an examination with positive outcome.

So if the software world would be so kind to come to a screeching halt, so I don’t get distracted and can maintain focus, thank you very much. After my certification you can all continue with what you were doing before that: producing too much interesting, distracting software that needs to be installed or tried once, or at least having the specs looked at.

Kathy’s book is over 800 pages. Gotta stop typing and start reading.

It happens to me very often that I’m at work to discover that I can’t read my e-mail because I forgot to close Outlook at my desktop PC at home before leaving for work. Since it polls every 5 minutes, the changes that I catch an email, are close to zero.

Because I’m playing with Unix a lot lately (I upgraded my server from Windows XP to Ubuntu Edgy Eft) I thought: what if I could send an email that could be scanned by the content-filter (like amavis in combination with antivirus/spam software does) and when it’s the correct message shutdown Outlook. The idea is simple, right?

Scanning a message for the right flags to be up (the right sender, the right subject, the right content, whatever) is not that hard, since Outlook has “rules”. Just create a rule that fires just after the message arrived and scan for whatever your think is secret enough so nobody else will guess it. Or make it come from an account that only you have access to. No big deal.

But how do you shutdown Outlook? I tried creating a macro with “Application.quit” in it, but I can’t seem to select that in a rule. But I saw that you could “start an application” from a rule. Now what’s the equivalent of “kill” under Windows XP? The resource kit (that I don’t have) does have the kill command. But what is standard? So I googled around, and found the command “taskkill”.
So…create a batch file somewhere, and call it somethink like “ShutdownOutlook.bat” and copy the following text in it:

@echo off
taskkill /im outlook.exe

The “/im” parameter tells taskkill to look for an “image” that is called outlook.exe. And then taskkill it, which basically means: shut it down gracefully.

Now go back to your newly created rule in Outlook, and tell it to “start an application” and point to ShutdownOutlook.bat.

Voila!

Modifying the batch file to close Thunderbird, Eudora (which will be Open-Sourced later this year), or some other more exotic e-mail client should be not too difficult, as long as it supports rules or macros that allow an external command to be executed.

I’m not the biggest Microsoft fan there is. People that know me, know that’s an understatement. But there is one thing worst than using Microsoft products and that’s: using LOCALIZED Microsoft products. My employer installs our laptops with a Dutch version of Microsoft Office. Probably to have a Dutch spellingchecker, I’m not sure. We all know that Excel excels in incompatibality between localized versions, since the formulas are translated as well. In Dutch “SUM” is “SOM”, “AVG” is “GEM” etcetera.
Now comes the good part. Microsoft Access comes with ODBC drivers for mindless programs that insist on slowing Access even further down by accessing it via ODBC. I tried to install an English trial version of PhotoShop Elements 5.0 today on my laptop, and it can not connect to it’s own database. Why? Because the program expects an English version of the driver. Come on people. This is 2007.
And why on earth did Adobe develop a program that accesses it own database via ODBC anyway? Are there people that hack PSE to use a MySQL database? Or Oracle? Tsssssk….stop pulling my leg.

Welcome to the modern world called Microsoft. I call it HELL.

I know, there is Picasa2. But have you looked at their tree-view? Since I don’t overwrite originals, I have lots of directories with a subdirectory called “edited”. Picasa2 just puts them all under eachother, so I don’t know which is which anymore… Why do people reinvent a treeview anyway? What is it with developers these days?