Outlook and it's random line break removal

mtruesdell@stackoverflow.com very helpfully documented the odd behavior Outlook shows when dealing with line breaks in a most useful manner:

"Every message starts with continuation off.
Lines less than 40 characters long do not trigger continuation, but if continuation is on, they will have their line breaks removed.
Lines 40 characters or longer turn continuation on. It remains on until an event occurs to turn it off.
Lines that end with a period, question mark, exclamation point or colon turn continuation off. (Outlook assumes it's the end of a sentence?)
Lines that turn continuation off will start with a line break, but will turn continuation back on if they are longer than 40 characters.
Lines that start or end with a tab turn continuation off.
Lines that start with 2 or more spaces turn continuation off.
Lines that end with 3 or more spaces turn continuation off.

Please note that he tried all of this with Outlook 2007.
So if possible, you can end messages with a sentence-terminating punctuation mark, or even a tab."

Big yourself up mtruesdell this has been doing my head in the last 2 hours!

HP is the virus!

I have been seeing what I thought was a botnet virus on my network trying to talk to it's command and control server via constant UDP to everyone on port 34447! I had two laptop clients doing it and their owners where none the wiser. I reported this to HP's internal security teams to see if it was known to them and for them to get solving. One just stopped with no info from it's owner and the other was eventually rebuilt. Now I look at the users machine I note it runs a print server! A HP wireless print server! I smell the potential FAIL as most these products are made in India and Eastern Europe like their drivers, so I disable it. Bingo no more UDP broadcasts!

This is what the client running the print server sends:

438.407640 x.x.x.x -> 255.255.255.255 UDP Source port: 49906 Destination port: 34447

The source port moves but is sometimes reused the rest is static.

Apple Support Still Crap!!

So I expected in the 5 years since I last called apple support they may have improved some but nooo.

I have been trying to install XCode for about 2 hours now and finally hit success thanks to the community and some guess work.

Apple still seem to find it hard to make decent documentation and get carried away in the world of fluff and prettification. This becomes evident when you try to google out how to get and install Xcode the MacOSX development kit which I needed one small component from!

Their site on the user side just gives info on what this package does and that it comes with MacOSX with no download link so you'd think one might already have it. Perhaps it would be hiding in the Applications/Installers folder as has previously been the case but again noooo. A google external to apple shows that you can either grab a hefty download from ADC after sending Apple your life details and then some which didn't seem worth all the effort for the small component I needed. The other option is to install from DVD which I liked the sound of so I popped it in and rummaged around it for about 30 mins before I gave up.

Next step was to call support which is a tricky job as none of their support numbers appeared easy to find on the web or in the documentation supplied with my new macbook probably because they are overrun with stupid questions due to lack of decent documentation. I finally got there via calling my local apple store and having their phone system redirect me!

Once connected to Apple Care probably in some far flung sunny destination talking to a operator who has probably never even seen a macbook I proceeded to ask about XCode's whereabouts on the DVD or elsewhere and firstly was told "SCode?" in broken english to which I replied "XCode, X as in X-Ray" and was greeting with a confused noise and then silence, so again I asked "Is it on the DVD, I can't find it on the first disk" with which the operator replied "ILife on second CD" to which I replied "I don't think that's what I'm looking for" and was then put on hold and eventually disconnected probably to keep waiting times down.

I had another google I knew the answer was somewhere and didn't include a 2GB download(which is my monthly DL limit), nothing came back. I put in the second DVD before I gave up and took the dog for a walk before coming back and doing it the GNU way which IMO is far easier and should not be! Bingo!!!! the second DVD contains the xcode package!!

Now I wish out of all this apple would train their operators but I doubt they will! When I first got my Macbook most the scripts underneath the GUI where very badly written and checks reported the wrong issues since the checking was not done well at all! I expect this is probably still the case too :(

I advice anyone thinking of buying a support contract for their apple equipment and software to do it from a company other than apple that also offers business support as it will probably be cheaper and better, or you could just give me a call.

Thomas Nayler

Thomas Nayler is a London based jeweller specialising in custom graffiti style pieces . Quite resonably priced he has supplied commisions to the stars and been featured in many lifestyle magazines. I decided to get another piece of his work commissioned lately and here are the results.



The first piece I had made I haven't take off since I bought it and often gets commented on.



You can get your own and browse his work here Thomas Nayler

DreamBox DM600PVR

So after years of ignoring the compact pc I purchased to install MythTV on to use as a personal video recorded with added bonuses like network connectivity and ability to add modules to increase functionality I decided to leave it tasked as a email/web server and invest in a shiny new DreamBox. I have only seen dreamboxes in Egypt and most of those quite old models so I had a look to see what was on offer and found a number of interesting units. The daddy of them all the dm8000 has dual tuner internal hdd support and hd support but wasn't out yet so I turned my eyes to the dm800 its smaller brother who has the same features but with one tuner but sadly still a big price tag for someone like me who doesnt have a HD tv and isn't that interested in owning one in the near future. The next in the lineup to me seemed to be the new dm600pvr although often ignored due to lack of dual tuner like the 702x range it's small size and reasonable price made it very attractive to me.

The dreambox was simple to setup out of the box and occupied the same space under my tv that my sky digibox had done plus an extra cable to give an internet connection via my sky netgear router. Upon scanning for channels I realised I had an issue as by default it doesn't have any softcams which emulate provider encryption services so you can't use your sky card or someone else sky card id(not currently possible for NDS the system sky uses but possible for other providers) or share their sky card over the internet for example to decrypt the channels you usually get and some you don't usually get. I chose to go with the softcam CCcam but the Enigma image that comes on the dm600pvr is a little fiddly to add software and manage softcams with and turns it more into linux sysadmin work so to allow everyone in the house to have a play I replace it with the latest Gemini image which was 4.40.

Upgrading the image wasn't the simplest of process not having windows to hand or a working serial port and hearing tales of woe from people trying to use usb->serial cables I googled and found that if you fix your dreambox IP address on your DHCP server so it's now static then telnet to it and type the following:

mount /boot -o remount,rw
rm /boot/*
reboot

Once rebooted if you hit the web interface it gives you an option to re flash the unit with the image of your choice!

Now Its just a matter of using the blue menu / addons and download CCcam and a config file for it then select CCcam in the blue menu. Sky cards now work in the front slow and you have the ability to download the latest keys from satanddream ready for manual install in Gemini which is a user contributed source of keys for opening up more channels. There is much more you can install or addon but I recommend MultiView or MV for EPG which you can feed using xmltv project and their radio times script.

Man Page Bugs

Just noticed CentOS5 has a man page bug and may not be the only disto to have it as when I google for the same man page I get similar results.

Compare man mkfs.ext3 to http://man-wiki.net/index.php/8:mkfs.ext3

You will notice the following is missing:

-I inode-size

Specify the inode size. The default inode-size used by mke2fs is 128. inode-size can be 128, 256, 512 or

1024. This value generally shouldn't be changed!

It almost led me to recreate a filesystem with the wrong option as I did not believe GlusterFS docs would be more complete than my current distros.

RedHat Installer aka Anaconda

What an annoying inflexible tool! It reminds me of Windows in it's methodology e.g. abstract everything from the user so that he doesn't have to know anything, hide real problems from the user so he doesn't know whats broken and then won't worry, stop the user from being able to manually setup anything so he can never fix any problems that occur from the automated fashion the installer uses. What happened to the rescue shell that used to start back in the day giving you some flexibility? What happened to the option of loading another driver at install time from supplemental CD/DVD or the Internet? What happened to the ability to partition using fdisk or something seperate from the anaconda script?

IMHO all this type of thing breeds is a new type of Linux admin very similar to a Windows admin of late who can only follow others step by step work and heavily reliant on Wizards and management GUIs while pissing off the experience Open Source community members who are forced to use distributions like these because of their support structure and market share.