February 2003 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

In Praise of Netscape 4.7 Mail

Netscape 4.7 was never praised for it’s browsing abilities, and the email client was (and still is) widely trounced and disparaged.
But, any time a mailbox goes wrong here at work I fire up Netscape mail to sort it out. Simply copy the offending mailbox into the nsmail of a local user and load up Netscape. It’ll handle mbox files too large for ipop3d (or Outlook) to handle. I just deleted 3 mails from one account that reduced the mbox from 1.5GB to 1.2MB!
It also handles the missing “F” from the word “From” when a procmail script bombs out (happens when Spam Assassin dies sometimes)
Then simply “cat” the file back into the spool directory. Make sure you use: “cat mbox >> /var/spool/USER” to append the data on at the end. You may want to stop Sendmail while you do that in case incoming mail overwrites your “cat” operation.
Netscape Mail gets my thumbs up for fixing things!

Tech spending slump ending – survey

Tech spending will increase this year? Unforunately, it’s only companies upgrading/maintaining their equipment.

Routine infrastructure upgrades will dominate projects, taking up almost half of all spending in 2003, IDC said.

Doing forms justice

Doing forms justice – great! (via Simon Willison)

Dilbert

This Dilbert comic made me laugh out loud.. *grin*

kermit!

What happened to kermit after all those years? *LOL*

More on data retention scheme

Dave expands on this problem a bit..

These guys don’t work for ISPs. It’s not unreasonable of them to think that an email is an email…

Your Rights Online: Secret Irish Data Repository Uncovered

After Karlin reported that there’s a secret data retention regime in place for almost a year it sparked a lively debate on /. and on the ILUG. What do I think? Mark Twomey says, “the moment anyone makes a call pays a bill, or whatever you create a digital paper trail which the supplier of the service or owner of the infrastructure you are using, be it a Bank or Telecom provider or such, is entitled to back up and/or analyse at their discretion. It’s their infrastructure, you’re just along for the ride.” Which is fair and reasonable.
Kevin Lyda thinks it could be more sinister, “i’m not completely sold that we as a society get anything from this expensive incursion into our privacy. just telling us it’s being done is *NOT* enough.”
I’m just worried about my next visit to the dentist and will the PRSI finally pay for the visit.