Dreaded winmail.dat

There's long been a problem with Outlook, which rather than using standard attachment syntax, uses something called winmail.dat. It's another example of Microsoft intentionally not playing well with others. In the past, if a student has sent me a winmail.dat attachment, I've simply told the student to try again with something not Microsoft-proprietary.

I got a winmail.dat this morning from a co-worker, and rather than just say "try again," I decided to spend a few minutes on the problem (or pointy-haired opportunity). There's a site that seems to do a good job of extracting files from winmail.dat files: http://tud.at/php/tndef/index.php

There are privacy issues here. Should one send personal, or work-related, or student-generated contact to a third-party web site?

Shawano News and Liquor

As near as I can tell, Shawano News and Liquor no longer exists. 4 or so decades ago, it was the only bookstore in Shawano, WI. They sold other stuff, too. I remember browsing the shelves as a kid and the woman who managed the store (who I think was a Moede, and related to my great grandmother) told me that part of the store was for adults. I told her I could read pretty well, but she still shooed me out of there. Now I think she wasn't concerned about the reading level per se.

Blocking Referer Page

By default, browsers tell servers what page they're coming from, i.e., the page on which the link to the page was clicked. The justification for this is hazy--I can't imagine why I would want to give this information to any server.

I used to use RefControl to block referring information (note the HTTP spelling is referer[sic]). Unfortunately, the current version of RefControl doesn't work with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.14, so I went in search of something that would work. I tried No-Referer and Refspoof, neither of which appear to work at all.

A little Googling led to the Web Developer Toolbar, which does successfully block the referring page. It's a bit heavier weight than I wanted, but it works, and it does have other features I may use over time.

Check to see if your referer information is shared.

Airline Passenger Bill of Rights

Another group of passengers got stranded on the ground in a plane for 6 hours, were forced to pay for food and water while stranded, and still the plane was out of food and water by the time the passengers were allowed to depart. Being out of water can be dangerous for people with certain medical conditions. While not as extreme as the flight that was kept prisoner on a plane over night, this points out the need for a passengers' bill of rights. Between the airlines' lack of respect for their customers and the government's security theatre, flying has become very unpleasant in this country.

Amtrak works well, though.

Humor, Brasero Style

I was burning a backup DVD this morning on Ubuntu 8.04LTS using Brasero 0.7.1, and, as I added files to my project, got the oft seen 3.10GB follows 3.9GB error. I always thought something closer to 4 than 3.10 would follow 3.9, but whatever. Then I burned the backup disk. The drive slid open after burning, as usual, and so I closed it for the verification. Except, instead of verifying, an alert popped up saying that Brasero was unable to eject the disk, and so it then didn't attempt the verification.

Did I miss something? When the the tray slides out, isn't that ejecting the disk?

This was a backup, and so verification is critical. Fortunately there's diff. It's the old tools that work, though wc has been messed up because somebody decided it should adapt to character sets rather than just count bytes, which I guess is the right choice, but breaks it on some installations. I wrote my own wc in response, and it actually runs without warning and error messages.

Other Brasero glitches are that, for data disk projects, it defaults to burning a DVD, but it also defaults to a drive that doesn't burn DVDs. Dumb. This could be Windows software.

LaTeX to XML

There's a LaTeX to XML converter called Tralics which is used by the folks at Inria. Expect a posting on experiences with Tralics real soon now.

Speaking of False Positives, Sales, Catching Terrorists

Go Figure

BBC has a columnist, Michael Blastland, with an excellent (based on a small sample) column entitled Go Figure: Different ways of seeing stats. A few pieces in particular that I'll recommend are

• The problem with junk stats? It's you which discusses the problem with self-report in survey data.
  


• A scanner to detect terrorists which discusses the problem of false positives in the context of detecting terrorists. A number of people have pointed this problem in a number of contexts, but policy makers and reporters, in particular, just don't get it. Companies selling face recognition systems and data mining software for detecting terrorists probably do get it, but sell the government junk nonetheless.
  


• Just what is poor? explains how the poverty line is set.
  

Good reading. It appears to be published every two weeks, and there's an RSS feed.

Yahoo Video

A friend suggested I check out a web tool called pipes (they're not going to trademark that name are they? That'd be like trademarking word, or office, or windows, or some other common day-to-day term.

Anyhow, I watched a video showing how to use the tool. The video was boring and not very informative. Or maybe it was informative. Hard to tell. The video site, video.yahoo.com, is very distracting. There's this video playing, but there's also text scrolling around in two places competing for attention. So whenever another part of the screen changes, the eye is drawn to the other place. What's happening in the video I was watching. Don't know--I got distracted. Should I go back and watch the video again? Well, if they really cared they would have hosted it at a more competent video site.

Or maybe not, since the pipes site itself is hosted at yahoo: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

Chrome: Darn the Luck

It looks like my favorite feature of the Linux version of Chrome, the lack of Flash support, is going the way of the dodo: http://h3g3m0n.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/linux-chrome-flash-ext/

It's nice to have a browser that doesn't support Flash simply because so many web sites use it for advertising content. Perhaps advertising is the predominant use of Flash.

Fixing a Broken Link

In November I posted about my last mile, and the entry included the Xohm logo. But I linked to it rather than grabbing my own. And the link rotted. So, I've just grabbed my own and will update the broken link in the old post.

gFTP Much Nicer than Nautilus for sftp

Gnome ships with GUI sftp support built into nautilus, but it's not ideal. I was living with it, and do prefer it over the command line version (I'm getting lazy in my old age) but recently have been evaluating xfce as an environment. This is a whole different story, but I'd like to find a less bloated, less buggy environment than Gnome. Xfce doesn't seem to ship with a GUI sftp client, which is totally fine--why ship software that many users won't use?

Looking around, I found gFTP. So far, it seems gFTP is as good as nautilus in every respect. A major difference, however, is that when transferring files to and fro, gFTP maintains modification times. This way, if I have two copies of the same file in two (or more) places, they all have the same modification time. Seems pretty basic and pretty obvious--and very important--but nautilus gets it wrong.

Is my preference for a GUI sftp client really a sign of laziness? I don't think so. In many cases command line tools are quicker and easier, but when maintaining web directory trees it's nice to be able to quickly glance at two direcoties and see if their contents match. gFTP does have one quirk that's inconvenient in this regard, however, in that it sorts files and directories differently. IMHO, this is another sign of Linux developers not understanding Unix: a directory is, like a file, a link in a directory, darn it, so sort it like other links.