The Debian Exim 4 package uses a quite uncommon, but elegant, method of configuration where the “real” Exim configuration file is assembled from a tree of snippets by a script invoked just before the daemon is started.

Stuff like that makes me sick. Why on Earth can't they do it as everybody does? Screw elegance, I want it easy. Not only does it Debian differently, they also chose to document it poorly. Eventually, you'll find everything in /usr/share/doc/exim4/README.Debian.gz, but this file is a disorganized pile of I-don't-know-what. I wasted 4 hours with this crap.

All I wanted was having emails delivered.

But: I prefer the XML based Office 12 formats to the old DOC/XLS/PPT formats. Even if they are still proprietary. Here is why:

• Microsoft specifies the new formats and puts the specification under a royalty free license (whatever that means). I think this is a huge improvement over the old formats, which weren't specified at all. There has to be a reason it took the OpenOffice.org developers years in order to implement decent import/export filters for DOC. (BTW, isn't it ironic that the XML Formats Guide is only available as DOC file?)
• The new format is processable by everyone. ZIP tools and XML parsers are available for almost every programming language on almost any operating system. For the first time, everybody can work with Office documents without having to depend on third-party tools.
• Considering the points above, it will be much easier to integrate with Office. At my company, we develop a Java-based business application. Export to Office applications is a much requested feature. We can only go so far with the current CSV based export to Microsoft Excel.

That said, I still prefer OpenDocument, but I also have to consider the market realities.

One would think that [the new format] would spawn an explosion of new products designed to please Office users but that's not what's happening. A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft's (with a monopolistic dominant installed base).

Unfortunately, Dave got the facts wrong. According to Wikipedia, the standardization of OpenDocument at OASIS started in 2002. It was decided to build on an earlier version of the OpenOffice.org format, which was already in XML and had been in use since 2000.

At this time, nobody at Microsoft talked about the XMLification of the DOC format. So one could argue that OpenOffice.org's file format together with the standardization process at OASIS actually forced Microsoft to develop the XML-based file format we'll see in Office 12.

Who knows, maybe that's OpenDocument's only success. In any case, it is not a waste of time or money.

I decided to dump IBM/Hitachi -- the new drive is the MK8032GAX from Toshiba. My only hope is that it lasts longer than the old one.

Via Slashdot.

All joking aside, the Creative Zen Touch is a great unit. It looks good, sounds good and is easy to use. As with every portable audio player the enclosed headphones aren't much good. I own a pair of AKG's K26P which are much better. Together with the Zen Touch they make a killer combination.

What's not to like: the accompanying  windows software is awful. Not only is it ugly, it's also hard to use . Without consulting the help file you don't have a chance. The MP3 encoder is a joke. On top of that, the autosync component crashes sometimes. It's not that the software is completely unusable, it's just no joy to use. I think about getting Notmad. I'm not interested in the MP3 encoder as I've been completely satisfied with Audiograbber.

The big question is: Why didn't I get an iPod? First, I don't want to be part of a movement. You know, as a punk by heart I like to do things differently. Second, I don't want to pay Apple's premium prices. The 20GB Zen Touch simply is cheaper. Third, I've neither used iTunes nor the iTunes Music Store. In fact, I don't care for music downloads. I'm one of those old fashioned I-need-the-real-thing-guys. CDs are sort of a compromise.

So anyway, I like the Zen Touch and recommend it. But don't listen only to me. Frank, the GadgetGuy, has a nice series of articles about the Creative Zen Micro. Don't forget to read the last article where he explains why he returned the Micro and bought an iPod.

Apparently, the ONElist file is inspired by theAutoDesk file, which should be a required reading for any IT entrepreneur.

Imagine you wanted to learn French, and there were no books, courses etc available to teach you. You might decide to learn by flying to France and sitting in a French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you. You take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what food arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for "bread", "coffee" etc.

We use the same technique to learn about protocol additions that Microsoft makes. We use a network sniffer to listen in on conversations between Microsoft clients and servers and over time we learn the "words" for "file size", "datestamp" as we observe what is sent for each query.

The article describes a couple of more advanced techniques. By employing those for more than 12 years, Samba was written.

spam section. It contains more informations.

I sympathize with that. But from a UI standpoint I have to object. If I received only one of three emails I'd suspect two got lost. That's not the impression an email program should give. I think it is better to deliver every email and mark the duplicates as read.

Another thing: suppose you regularly sent emails to yourself. You'd never get them.

I understand where Dion comes from. But given the sorry state of email with it's misconfigured servers and mailing lists or it's crude handling of encodings, I don't think email programs have a chance. They'd never get it right.

• mailinator.com,
• dodgeit.com, and
• spamgourmet.com

Great for handing out email addresses to unknown people or web sites.

Update:

Cedric reviewed these services. He concludes that dodgeit.com is the best: it allows you to bookmark your mailbox and provides an RSS feed. Cedric's readers mention other services in the comments.

After a bit of research, I found a couple of products that support multi-lingual spell checking in almost every windows application. Two of them, Spell Check Anywhere and Spell Catcher Plus, I put to test.

Spell Check Anywhere

The spell checker in Spell Check Anywhere is based on the technology by Wintertree Software. Interestingly, this is the same engine that's behind CityDesk's spell checker.

The download comes with an dictionary for American English. There's no mention of the number of words it contains. On the Web site, dictionaries for more than 10 languages are available. Among them is one for German. It contains 295000 words, which is reasonable.

The basic linguistic features work flawlessly. The problem is stability. Sometimes the application works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually, right after reboot everything is fine. More than once, it stopped working for me during the day. When it works, it works with CityDesk, Notepad, my e-mail  program and every other application I tried.

Spell Check Anywhere is activated via a hot key. Options and customizations are configured with the help of a tray menu. This menu is pretty overloaded. Instead of clearing it out, the developer chose to prefix the important items with a bullet.

The user interface of the spell checker's dialog is OK. It's not beautiful but has everything I expect from a spell checker. It displays suggestions for unknown words; unknown words can be ignored, changed or added to the user dictionary.

After spell checking is invoked, one can't change the language in the dialog. This is unfortunate, because even in my limited testing the current language almost never matched the language of the text. The only way is to cancel spell checking and change the language via the application's tray menu.

During my test, I had no problem crashing the application: when hitting the hot key while a modal dialog window was displayed, Spell Check Anywhere simply disappeared. In order to restart Spell Check Anywhere, I had to logoff and logon again. I couldn't find a way to start it by hand. For an application that's supposed to increase productivity, this is inacceptable.

The web site makes it hard to find the price for a single license -- it is hidden on the page for bulk discounts. I found no way to buy the software directly from the web site. There is a link in the tray menu, though, that links to an order page on a different web site.

All in all, because of the similarity to CityDesk's own spell checker, I really wanted to like the software. But given it's stability problems, I can't recommend it.

Spell Check Anywhere is available on Windows. It costs 30 USD.

Spell Catcher Plus

Spell Catcher Plus just works. Right now, even though I've only been using it for a couple of hours, I already replaced the spell checker of CityDesk and my e-mail program with Spell Catcher. It is that good. It's check-as-you-type feature really rocks. When Spell Catcher finds an error it displays a small non-intrusive popup window showing the suggestions. Of course, you don't have to use check-as-you-type. Spell Catcher can also check selected text. So an alternative is to finish typing first and check the text later. This can be invoked via hot key.

With 170,000 words, the English dictionary is reasonably large. The German one, though, is massive -- it contains more than 650,000 words. Dictionaries for 10 more languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, ...) are available for download.

In addition to spell checking, Spell Catcher integrates a thesaurus. That's another plus compared to Spell Check Anywhere.

The software is customizable in all regards. I especially like possibility to assign hot keys for language switching.

Another important feature is per-application configuration. Whenever you use an application that Spell Catcher doesn't know yet, it asks if it should monitor it. The keys, the sound to be played when it finds a typo or the format to use when spell-checking the contents of the clipboard -- Spell Catcher can be specifically tuned for every application.

The Web site is well structured. Links that point to the downloads, support forum and store are visible and easy to find.

Spell Catcher Plus costs 40 USD --  not cheap, but affordable. I haven't registered it yet as I have 14 days left for testing. So far, Spell Catcher has performed really well. I'm certain, it'll make it into my collection ofobscure and daily used tools.

A version for Mac OS X-- Spell Catcher X --  is available too.

Experience has shown that with every version Adobe Reader got worse. After looking at the feature summary, I suspect this one to be the most important new feature:

Download the free Yahoo! Toolbar with Pop-Up Blocker

Glad to see that Adobe is still on track, concentrating on what users want.

In contrast, I can't agree with this:

For instance, in software development, we like to have people unit-test their code. However, a good, experienced developer is about 100 times less likely to write bugs that will be uncovered during unit tests than a beginner. It is therefore practically useless for the former to write these... but most methodologies would enforce that he has to, or else you don't pass some phase.

Maybe it's because I'm only a Wannabe Rockstar. But I find unit tests helpful; they are a my first line of defense. First, unit tests shield me from myself. It's hard to admit, but sometimes even The Wannabe Java Rockstar makes stupid mistakes. Second, they also protect against well-intentioned yet still wrong-doing coworkers.

In an ideal world, I'd work only with Rockstars. In reality I don't. That's why I value unit tests. Plus, they serve other purposes too. As Greg Luck says:

A suite of automatic regression tests, with high coverage, support safe refactoring of the code base. This benefit is less about testing in the sense of producing a high quality output, than in enabling developers to make changes without fear. In this sense tools like JUnit are very valuable.

Isn't that something even a True Rockstar can relate to?

A nice side effect was the coverage by other news sources; heise online, Spiegel online and several news papers had reports on campaign. So while one can argue that the ad is boring -- which I don't think it is -- it had a much bigger impact than I expected.

Standblog has a translation of the ad for English readers. Further informations available at MozillaZine.

Update: Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service, has a nice article in English on their website.

ControlCenter

Being raised on Unix, I depend on virtual desktops. Stardock's ControlCenter is a virtual desktop manager for Windows. I tried a lot of them and ControlCenter is the best. Besides virtual desktop, it provides resource monitoring, start menu integration and program launching. My only gripe: you can't change desktops via keyboard shortcuts. Homepage

IrCOMM2k

IrCOMM2k is a driver for Windows 2000 and XP. It emulates a serial port which can be used to exchange data with mobile devices. It's the only way to hotsync my Palm via the infrared port. Homepage

NetSwitcher

Do you need to access different networks? Did you've ever have to change your network settings every time you sit down at a client's site or fumble with your IP address configuration every time you plug into your home network? If so, NetSwitcher is the tool for you. It is not the most beautiful application, but really useful. Homepage

I'd like to get to know your favorite -- but relatively unknown -- applications. Leave a comment or post on your blog and tell me.

Again, via Slashdot.

¹ Bonus points for anyone who knows where the quote came from.

Via Slashdot.

Scoble has a theory why: link blogs want people to go somewhere else. Craig's List, Gizmodo, Engadget -- they all tell people to get lost. The philosophy of  those sites is to take us to the coolest stuff on the Internet. And by doing that, they have become the coolest places on the Internet.

Case in point, the posts where I pointed to somebody else had more readers than some of my original content.

Does this mean, I should turn this blog into a link blog? No, I like my little niche. I already got job offers via the blog. That's more than I had imagined when I started this thing. Plus, there can only be one Erik, Scott or Scoble, although I actually planned to do something similar to Scott's blog. He beat me by a couple of days.

Filehand sports a rich client interface, which I like. It is a pure desktop search engine lacking web integration. That leaves room for enhancements. The indexer understands  PDF, DOC, RTF, XLS, WPD, PPT, MP3, HTML and TXT documents, but is quite slow.

Compared to Windows' built-in search facility, Filehand is an improvement. Is it better or worse than GDS? That depends on your needs. If  you need integrated web search, GDS is the way to go. If not, Filehand is an interesting choice. Both need to support more file formats, though.

Filehand needs Windows 2000 or later and .NET 1.1.

Via heise online.

I just googled forme and could not find anything embarrassing. So yes, I would.

Ok, who wants to work there?

Via Joel's forum.

Download it from my Software page.

Update: Download works now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Wired - Darl Mc Bride - (Wannabe) Linux Killer

Via Adam, Web-based color tools

Im Editor hilft eine aus Textverarbeitungen bekannte Rechtschreib- und Grammatikprüfung, syntaktisch und semantisch einwandfreien Code zu produzieren - noch bevor es ans Debuggen geht.

Aber hallo! Zum einen erfordert es doch einiges Können syntaktisch inkorrekten Code zu kompilieren und debuggen. Daß die "Rechtschreib- und Grammatikprüfung" die semantische Korrektheit sicherstellen kann, ist zudem eine faustdicke Überraschung. Diese Pfundskerle aus Redmond haben doch mal so nebenbei das Halteproblem gelöst. Chapeau!

Aber im Ernst: Wer redigiert bei der c't die Artikel?

• Computer management, such SNMP or remote desktop and assistance applications
• TCP/IP servers, such as HTTP servers
• File and printer sharing, print services for UNIX
• Peer-to-peer applications, such as Limewire

I have to deploy a application on Windows that exposes a management interface via HTTP. As such this application is impaired by the new firewall. Fortunately, Microsoft documents several methods to define excepted traffic. First, you can configure the firewall manually. This will obviously work. But in my experience, users - sometimes even administrators - in a small office/home office setting, which is the target market, have trouble when it comes to network configuration. That's why the new "firewall" context of the netsh command is great. Among the commands exposed by this context are:

• add allowedprogram and remove allowedprogram to add and remove excepted traffic by specifying the program's filename.
  
  Example:add allowedprogram C:\MyApp\MyApp.exe MyApp ENABLE
• add portopening and remove portopening to add and remove excepted traffic by specifying a TCP or UDP port.
  
  Example: add portopening TCP 80 MyWebPort

Everything that could be done to the firewall can be configured using netsh. That makes it easy to carry out adjustments during installation.

I also like the possibility to configure the firewall with an API. In SP2, the firewall exposes a couple of COM interfaces with which an application can communicate directly with the firewall. Using the API, an application could open a port only when it's running. For a JAVA application, this is too much though.

For deploying firewall settings in a corporate environment, Microsoft recommends the use of Active Directory and the new Windows Firewall settings in Computer Configuration Group Policy. This method requires the use of Active Directory with either Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 domain controllers.

For more information about SP2 I recommend to check Microsoft's official resources.