A Day in Paradise

I think we do about 75% of these

This is something that really bothers people in the business world when switching to Thunderbird from Outlook. In my opinion Thunderbird should make the dash-dash-space sigblock separator optional, or at least have a config option to turn it off.

The reason is that many people do not use a “signature” as a random block of information meant for the bottom of the page, but rather a real “signature”, something like.

Yours truly,

John Doe
CEO, ACME INC

This obviously looks very bad when it has — before it.

There are a couple plugins that allow you to drop arbitrary text into your document, but none that do this automatically when starting a new email message.

What you have to do is:

• Install TemplateLoader
• Follow the steps to create the template which includes your sigblock
• Choose that template as the default for your identity

And you are good to go. You will notice that there is a slight lag when starting a new email, but that is the price you pay

Some other links on the topic.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signatures_(Thunderbird)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=535118#535118
http://mailformat.dan.info/trailers/sigblocks.html

Here’s a Forum Post about IRC

Long before the days of the web and instant messaging as we knew it, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat, was created in the late 80s but gained notoriety during the invasion of Kuwait and subsequent gulf war. Through IRC people who were lucky enough to have access to the then rare internet, were able to engage in real-time chat with others around the world. While the technology itself was not new or revolutionary the rapid growth quickly grew IRC into the standard for internet based chatting.

IRC works exactly like the many different independent “chat rooms” which you will find scattered amongst various websites. The difference is the fact that in IRC all the channels (chat rooms) are connected on servers, and servers are connected using specific networks. This way I can log into a server in my country and have access to all the channels on all the other servers on the network.

So what does this have to do with the podcast pickle chatroom? Well, the podcast pickle chatroom is simply a web based client which connects to the “Afternet” IRC network, so if you want to get connected and wield the full power of IRC, just follow the following steps.

1. Get an IRC client
Using IRC without a good IRC client is like surfing the web without a good web browser. Following is a list of good IRC clients for various platforms

Windows
xchat – http://www.silverex.info/news/
mIRC – http://mirc.com/

Linux/Unix
xchat – http://www.xchat.org
plenty of others

Mac
Colloquy – http://colloquy.info/

2. Join a Channel and Network
Before you connect to your network is to come up with a “nick” which you will be identified as. Choose something that is unique, by default IRC does not “reserve” nicks you want something that someone else isn’t interested in. You also want to think of an alternative nick which the system will use if the nick you want is not available.

I use “awormus” for my nick and “awormus_” for my alternative nick.

Once you have installed your client fire it up. You will be prompted to choose a server and enter your nicks and “real name”. Some IRC clients allow you to choose the default channel, use the following information to connect to the “phpc” IRC channel.

Server: irc.freenode.org
Channel: #phpc

I’m in, now what?
IRC has a whole sub-culture which has been built around it. There are commands, bots, moderated/invite-only channels, ops, kicks, k-lines and much, much more. Thankfully these days the modern graphical clients, provide an easy learning curve for beginners.

This are some notes from a talk I attended at the International PHP Conference in 2005. I don’t think I have blogged it yet. (you find all kinds of interesting things when you try to “clean up” your hdd)

Case study
Survey center is an online survey generator written in PHP. Used to run multi-country panel portals, has interfaces to third-party applications.

Why migrate to Unicode. Before the switch non Western European languages were using html entities which caused a lot of trouble.

UTF-8 is simple to use, backwards compatible with ascii, variable bytelength. Slower than UTF-16, can waste some space on single byte characters.

PCRE supports UTF-8 with the /u modifier

Iconv and mbstring provides functionality missing in PHP. Mbstring offers the possibility to overload some of PHPs native string functions. Overloading functions, will break any binary handling. Slower but safer than iconv. MySQL has good UTF-8 database support in 4.1 and that warranted an upgrade.

The Migration: Grepped through the code and find what string functions were being used. Some functions worked with UTF-8 others had to be replaced with mb_* functions or other custom scripts.

1.Convert all files, Scripts, Templates to UTF-8
2.Enabled mbstring and iconv in PHP
3.Make sure all PCRE functions use the /u modifer. Get rid of the ereg regular expressions.
4.Change all the string functions.
5.Implemented on-the-fly character set conversions for IO, make sure that file uploads/downloads have the right character sets. Convert GET/POST to UTF-8
6.Send the HTTP Content-Type headers for the page. IE doesn’t bother reading the meta tags on SSL pages.
7.Update MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1, decide what the best collation is, discovered the most suitible is utf8_general_ci.
8.Update SQL queries which no longer worked
9.Converted all tables to UTF-8 (Set everything to Latin1 first)

Most of the third-party code wasn’t compatible. Serialized data in the database broke because the strings were no longer the same length, to fix this all data had to be unserialized converted and then serialized again.

Everything was much more complex than expected. Don’t do this because you think that UTF-8 is cool, it’s difficult, not well supported in PHP, and don’t do it without needing it. Don’t do this without a CVS.

Just to prove that you can bump into anything on the internet, here’s a nice tutorial on How to grow Marijuana. Pretty interesting production system this guy has.

Thankfully, the fact that I can’t even grow a radish probably keeps me out of trouble.

Now that I’m on the topic, everyone has got to see Saving Grace. It has one of the best tag lines in movie history “Grace’s doctor is worried about the state of her joints.”

That’s all for this weeks TGIF blog post… now back to work.

This is an email that I sent to someone who needed something to manage a small mailing list. I have used Worldcast in the past so I wrote up this simple how-to.

Worldcast is a free (for non-profit use) or cheap for business use mail sending program.

How to maintain a mailing list using WorldCast

1. Create New Project
To create a new Worldcast project, start Worldcast and go through the Configuration Wizard. To complete the configuration wizard, you’ll need your name, email address, the format of email you want to send out (HTML is recommended), transport protocol (SMTP recommended), and SMTP Server.

The final question is whether you want to send the emails or just validate the email addresses. You most probably will want to send only.

At the end of the wizard, once you have entered all the information you have the option to import contacts from a file or type them in yourself. You can import or add addresses at any time.

Worldcast imports files in the comma seperated value file, or another worldcast file.

Before you import your first batch of users, you should check your settings by manually adding your own email address and sending an email to yourself.

2. Sending an Update to your Mailing list
When you have your list prepared you can enter your subject and body message in the supplied area. If you chose to send an HTML message then you will be able to use HTML message formatting.

You can insert any of the feilds (Firstname, Lastname, Email) into your email by clicking on “Message->Insert Field” and selecting the data that you want to insert into the email.

Once you have sent your email, or created your project, save your project for future use.

3. Managing Unsubscriptions
If a user chooses to unsubscribe from your list, open your project click on the status column for the email address which you want to unsubscribe and change the status to Unsubscribed.

4. Merging Lists
When you are ready to send a new Mailing, export a new version of your contact list and import it into Worldcast by clicking on “File->Import Recipients”.

The users will be imported into your system and then the system will ask if you want to check for duplicates. It is important that you remove the duplicate email addresses, this will maintain your unsubscription lists.