Comments (0)

By Scott, February 27, 2006 8:31 AM

Whenever I have to resort to parsing SMTP protocol logs I am reminded of how inefficient MS made the logging.  There are no conversation/queue/message IDs logged for each line.  So if there are five connections happening at once there is no obvious distinction between each connection.  You have the commands and responses of all them intertwined with one another, forcing you to narrow down the exact time a message is sent/received and then look through each line deducing which ones are for the message you are interested in.  Ugh.

The UNIX guys here like to give me grief about it because their Postfix logs contain the conversation/message ID on each line.  So they just do a quick grep for it and get each line that applies only to the message in question.  Figures.

Comments (0)

By Scott, February 27, 2006 8:03 AM

I am in a DL that has explicit ownership permissions on all public folders in my org (all 22,881 of them).  And since Exchange sends public folder conflict messages to the owner(s) of a folder, I get quite a few of them.  At one time I thought I had a rule to move or delete them, but I couldn’t get it to work when I tried to set it up again.  Because the message class is different (IPM.Conflict.Folder) you don’t get to see the same fields as a regular message.  Rules to delete them based on words in the sender’s address, etc., had no effect, partly because the sender is the name of the folder that has the conflict, so it is a dynamic value.

Using MFCMapi to look at the properties of a conflict message, there are several properties that you’d think you could use, but when setting up a rule to use properties of the conflict message form, none of he properties are available.  And if you manually type in property name it gives you an error.

In the end, I tried setting the rule again to fire on subject contains "Conflict Message:" and it worked.  Huh.  So who knows what I was doing wrong before?  You can also have the rule fire if the message form is "Conflict Message."

Comments (0)

By Scott, February 9, 2006 10:20 AM

This was forwarded to me by a coworker. And since I can relate being old at the ripe age of 32, I found this to be quite funny.

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill BOTH ways..yadda, yadda, yadda.  And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in heck I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now…I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today. You’ve got it so easy!  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the darn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3′s or Napsters. You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the darn record store and shoplift it yourself.  Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

We didn’t have fancy crap like call waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal…that’s it.

And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!  It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know. You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600, with games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids," and the graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square. You actually had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever. And you could never win.  The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died…just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no was such thing as stadium seating.  All the seats were the same height!  If a tall guy or somebody with a big hat sat in front of you and you couldn’t see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no on-screen menu. You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on.  There was no Cartoon Network either. You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.  Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait all week for cartoons, you spoiled little rats!

And we didn’t have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or an oven.  If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled.
You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Comments (0)

By Scott, February 9, 2006 9:24 AM

As a youth of the 80s, New Wave music was all the rage (well, at least one of them). I distinctly remember this video from Information Society. Looking at it today shows how truly bad the video is; I think I can lip sync better. But it is still memorable to watch: