a convenient truth

999 calls to Avon and Somerset Police:

Communications operator: “Hello police”

Caller: “My wife’s left me two salmon sandwiches which was left over from last night… and I’m a sat in the chair here and she’s out there decorating. She won’t put any food on or anything for anybody, I don’t know what….”

Communications operator: “I’m sorry but I really can’t take this. It’s not an emergency because your wife won’t give you anything to eat.”

HP have concluded, unsurprisingly (since it’s rather obvious when
you stop to think about it), that DRM doesn’t prevent unauthorised
duplication of copyright material (shiver me timbers, etc.):

“We conclude that given the current and foreseeable state
of technology the content protection features of DRM are not
effective at combating piracy.” — The Report [PDF]

We’re having our kitchen fitted. Obviously just a few cabinets
wasn’t enough for us. Oh no. We’re going the whole nine yards, and
getting new everything. And on top of that we knocked a wall down.

Well I say ‘we’, what I really mean is a Romanian bloke called Fatmir
and a whole bunch of huge Romanian geezers. I’ve got to say though,
they’re doing a fine job (as far as I can tell). Two weeks later, it’s
not looking like a building site any more, it’s looking more like a
room.

Almost all the walls are skimmed, the floor in the old scullery has
been raised and levelled, the first-fix electrics are done. All that’s
left is for them to finish the skimming, board the floor, put down the
undertile heating, put down the tiles, whack a new architrave where the
old back door was, put a mist coat on the plaster and we’re off.

Then there’s a couple of weeks of cabinet fitting. Here’s some
advice :- if you’re going to be without a kitchen for a month, go on
holiday. The worst bit is that the dust gets everywhere. I’d come
home in the evening, go upstairs and find the cats curled up together
with a thick coating of dust over them.

The cats are another thing I hadn’t considered. Obviously I’d
thought about them getting squished under huge Romanian boots, or lost
under the floor. But I hadn’t considered how on earth you clean their
bowls when you haven’t got a sink. We can eat pizza, and just chuck the
box away. They can’t. Poor blighters hate the whole building thing
more than us I think :(.

If I don’t get this off my chest, I’m going to explode.

I’ve spent all day trying to debug this really weird problem in some
code. I’m writing some code to generate HTML emails, for
spam^Wpermission marketing. I’m writing in python on Debian
GNU/Linux.

These emails have a bit of a funny format, where you need to provide
both a text part and an html part. You encode the message as a mime
multipart/alternative email, which tells the mail reader that
receives it that all the parts are equivalent, and to choose the one it
likes most - this means that people with text mail clients (like me) get
the text version automatically, and people with html mail clients (like
outlook) get the html one.

We build the text parts ourselves, since text formatting requires
some special decisions (like long url wrapping and things), so the code
takes seperate text and html parts, bundles them up and sends them.

Anyway, I was sending emails, and what arrived were two parts, text
& HTML, but with the same contents, except the html had been
mysteriously stripped from the html part, if it was used in the text
bit. It was only about 30 lines of code all-told, and I really couldn’t
see any mistakes in it.

So I’ve been laboriously debugging this code all day, probably for
about 5 hours, which is really frustrating. And I can’t find the
problem. I completely rewrite it from scratch using different email
libraries (email instead of MimeWriter for the python people). Still
the same effect. Then I notice that when I just tweak the MIME type of
the mail to multipart/mixed, suddenly my email is good.

It comes to me in a flash. There is a Microsoft Exchange 5.5 server
which acts as our office MTA. All email sent in the office is routed to
that, and then it sends it on. I’ve been reading my email on a remote
machine, so all Exchange has been doing is acting as an MTA. But IT
HAS BEEN REWRITING MY EMAILS. Not just a bit - “oh, i’ll just add a
Received: header”, but it’s been messing with the body of my email!
This is amazingly bad. In fact it’s shit. Even more shit than all the
other shit things about Microsoft software.

I’ve had enough. The Exchange server dies. Within a month we’ll be
running some nice, reliable IMAP server.