For some reason, despite the fact that work is going like hell at the moment, with all kinds of crazy stuff happening, my out of work projects are thriving.

Take SquirrelMail for example. Cor Bosman from XS4ALL released SquirrelMail 1.4.5 to their user base after extensive testing, and internal enhancements. This has generated a whole bunch of feedback and allowed us to get a bunch of bug fixing done. In the last 3 days, I think I’ve made over 30 cvs commits.

I also fixed a long standing bug in the GPG plugin for SquirrelMail today. It was a minor documentation issue, and code misstake. A simple case of assuming strrpos did the same as strpos. In general, it does, except strrpos only accepts one character for the needle. This resulted in a case of matching nearly every attachment to verify with gpg. To fix, it was a case of changing this (line 211 in plugins/gpg/setup.php):

if ((strrpos($filename,".asc") == (strlen($filename)-4)) 
or (strrpos($filename,".pgp") == (strlen($filename)-4))) {

To this:

if ((strpos($filename,".asc") == (strlen($filename)-4)) 
or (strpos($filename,".pgp") == (strlen($filename)-4))) {

Code still works as expected, and no more issue of gpg checking all attachments to see if they are encrypted.

So, it’s been very productive for me this week, lets hope it continues. I’m planning on pushing SquirrelMail 1.4.6 out by Christmas.

I think you realize that your week is going to be bad when on Sunday you spend more time with a server than you do with your son.

Pretty much everybody knows Microsoft Outlook. It’s in the news quite a bit, or at least was, for security issues, plus it’s packaged with all versions of the Office suite, and used in quite a few office places. It’s also not too uncommon to hear a coined name “Lookout” either. It’s a simple play on words, but works quite well I feel.

A small company of developers produced a plugin for Outlook funnily named “Lookout”. It’s an extended search feature that allows an enhanced search of the outlook message base. Microsoft brought the company (as they do with anybody that has a good idea), and have now merged it into their toolbar, and offer it as a free download on their site.

Interestingly enough, it looks like it’s in direct competition with Google Toolbar and Google Desktop. Those with their ears close to the industry, or anywhere close, would know that is not really a shock. Both Microsoft, and Google, are working on indexing books as part of their search engines, Microsoft enhanced their search engine shortly after Google introduced a Microsoft specific search feature…

All in all, I guess this is good for us, better searching, better email, better software.

It has come to my attention, well not recently really, that people are generally incredibly lazy. They don’t like doing things that will either:

• Make life generally a little better for everybody
• Will involve a small amount of work

This little rant has been building up for a long while… today it popped.

Online gaming is great stuff, I dare say many millions of people would tend to agree, but has it gone too far?

At the beginning of June, a Chinese gamer was given a suspended death sentence after he murdered a fellow gamer (and friend) after his virtual sword was sold by his friend for a meer $850.

Bill brought to my attention a rather amusing site by Doug Savage called Savage Chickens, where browsing through the archives got to this one about Quitting Time, and I couldn’t agree more…

I had a rant about this before, I’m trying to recover the DB and put it on here so it’s more complete, and not so empty, but here we go again.

I have to deal with software that I know nothing about, and have little use for. Our DB Admin uses it, and I occasionally peek at it, watching just enough to get me information I need to problem solve if DB issues occur. Unfortunately the latest version appears to have a bug in it. When attempting to install an agent on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, it has a minimum requirements of SQL 2000 SP3. That’s all well and good, and I can live with minimum requirements, nearly everything has them. However, when you are running two SQL servers, one with SP3, and one with SP4 and they both return the error message “Your version of SQL server is outdated”, you tend to scratch your head a bit.

Have you ever heard that everybody has a twin, even if they don’t know it? I’ve always thought that everybody had a twin somewhere in the world. I used to walk around my home town and see a man that looked exactly the same as my dad, and I have approached him several times only to realize it wasn’t him. Today I think I found mine.

eBay is evil. I really don’t have much to say on it, except it is evil. I can hear it calling my name and tempting me to buy goodies. In particular camera stuff. I recently got myself a new camera from there, and then a second lense for it as well. I’ve been looking at the digital equivalent of my camera as well, the Nikon D70. It uses the same lenses as my film SLR so that is one bonus, unfortunately it would appear that the body alone for the Nikon D70 starts around $800 new, and about $400-$500 on ebay… That’s something I think Stephanie might get a little upset over.

I’m happy. My new camera arrived today… Have been reading the manual as it has more buttons than my laptop I think… I was going to take it for a test drive this weekend, but we have been given warning it might be a little wet as Hurricane Rita prepares to hit the coast of Texas/Louisiana tonight. Looking at the predicted path, we might just get a bit of rain, I don’t expect much else.