Heike tells a story

One of Heike's sisters lives in a remote area in southern Spain. They recently got a modem connection to their house. Heike was Skyping with her nephew, and typed, "I have to go now, time to walk the dog and meet people for dinner." The nephew replied, "Where will you go for your walk?" "In Görlitzer park," replied Heike, "... why don't you come with me?" Nephew (10 y.o.) said "I will! I will come with you on google earth!"

So sweet!

Integer Overflow Week, or When Things Get Bigger Than The Biggest Things

* Tuesday - riding to work, when suddenly some boofy german bloke in a big navy blue BMW slows down next to me. He's wound down the passenger side window and is shouting at me across the body of his tiny, weaselly-looking mate - "Hey You went through the red light! Red lights are for bicyclists, too, you know! Do you think you are special?"
OK, whatever, if I went through a red light at an intersection where there were no cars except for me and this guy, that's my business, right?. But I got /angry/. Really really angry. BMW roared off up the street, obviously proud to have done his civic duty. But I know the streets here, and I know that the light he was heading for is very slow. So I caught up with him there, and slammed the closed window with the flat of my hand. "Fuck you!", I yelled, and (the only german swearphrase I know coz it is written on the wall in the stairwell of my friend's house) "Fich dich, Opfer!". The lights changed to green, I got off my bike and strolled nonchalantly across the road to work, whilst BMW had to drive off, because of all the other cars waiting behind him at the lights.

* Tuesday, Part Two. I'm enjoying an afternoon coffee in the breakroom with Tobias from work. He's the 28-y.o., Go-playing, maths-PhD fella with the shiny head. He explains about a great bug that he's working on - there's a biggest integer down there in the engine of the software, and you're not supposed to get a value that's higher than it. But he found a situation where input from a MIDI keyboard wraps the value, and returns exactly the right value to give exactly the right behaviour - playing a note. We chuckled over this accidentality, and went back to work.

* Wednesday. I'm reading the latest xkcd cartoon - poor Mr. xkcd is trying to get to sleep, and is counting sheep. He counts and counts, when suddenly the number of the sheep goes into negative values. Integer overflow. http://www.xkcd.com/571/. Fitted nicely, coz I had terrible insomnia meself the night before. Might explain why I got so pissed at Mr. BMW.

* Wednesday, Part Two. Boss at work is working like a fiend - for him, that's typing up a storm, not talking to /anyone/, going into the machine room a lot, four or five terminal windows open at the same time on his monitors. At about four in the afternoon, he turns to me and explains that the job-tracker database needed to be upgraded live. He shows me some log files to do with the search component. "Search array out of range. Search daemon stopping." Apparently the new version fixes this, but it's completely undocumented. Well, the search engine is working now, but it was having a kind of integer overflow.

* Thursday. Riding home, going down a one-way street. Full of potholes, had to weave around a bit to avoid being chucked of the bike. It's a slow road anyway, running alongside a hotel with lots of waiting cabs, and tour buses. Suddenly massive horn-beeping from behind me. Without thinking, I yell, "Fuck /OFF/!". I've just about had it with these impatient, self-righteous cars. Surprise surprise (not) a big silvery BMW roars past me ... straight into the loving arms of another slow set of lights. Ha ha ha. Revenge is mine. I pull up next to Wanker Number Two and shout into the driver window - "What the fuck is the big hurry?" Mr. Big Arab yells back at me, "Fuck me?! Fuck you! I fuxk the Americans! I fuck the Israelis! I fuck your mother! I fuck the South Africans! I fuck the Brits!" Quite a large part of my brain is thinking, "How interesting. He's trying to figure out what kind of English-speaker I am." By now, the lights have changed, and we're both going round the corner together during this tirade. I yell back, "You must have a huge cock, then!" He and his mates all shout with laughter, and he roars off down the street.

* Friday. Today. I declare integer overflow week to be officially Over.

Dance Dance revolution

I went with StefanB and Amo adn StefanF and Anja last night to see a dress rehearsal of some dance thing. An older guy, thin with Levis and old brown men's shoes, and a pale blue electric detuned guitar. He sang softly into the mike - " When I came into the kitchen, you were crying / but it was only thaaaaat / you had been chopping onions ".
The dancer guy ran around, pointing this way and that. Jumped on a table and danced there too, until the front leg fell off. The audience said "eek!". It was a very lighthearted performance.
One great bit was social - I was in the foyer drinking my Club Mate coz I was a bit tired and wanted to be a bit more awake, then there was Saskia's friend Tania Rünow! Helloo Helloo and she gave me a big smile and hug like she was really pleased to see me. Nice change tell ya what. We chatted for a while, I think her good-looking maybe-dyke pals were a bit miffed, they wandered off to chat elsewhere.
Tania was the one who hosted me and Saskia, Richard and Robert and also a whole bunch of her other friends for New Year's Eve. Here in Tchermany when it's New Year Eve you say to everyone you meet on that day " Guten Rutsch!" which means "good slide" as in "have a good slide into the New Year". As all good aussies will do, me and Rich and Saskia who is now half-aussie pretty much ended up talking in Tania's kitchen, which like most apartments here is furnished with things from the street or the second-hand shop. Not a built-in cupboard in sight. Two of the chairs are from an aeroplane or a cinema I couldn't tell which. Rich was sitting on them and then suddenly they fell forward and he was under the table! We looked on in shock, and then I shouted "Guten Rutsch!" and we all screamed with laughter. Tops night!

Blokes on a roof

About four weeks ago, it had been pretty cold, with snow and everything. I was walking home, and heard a loud "clomp!" "crash!" sound. Over on the other side of the road, some people were looking out of their third floor window at the ground. There were some big bits of masonry lying there - I looked up, and could see that part of the architrave of the roof had fallen down.
By the time I'd gotten up to the apartment, the fire department had already arrived, and were carefully bashing away at the crumbling section, getting big chunks of plaster and concrete off the overhang.


Figure 1: Man on a mechanical stick

That was exciting - lots of people stopped in the street to watch the fun. The next step was to erect a scaffolding (Gerustbau) so workers could get up there to repair things. Scaffolders here are a tough bunch - and have romantic company names like Anarchie Gerustbau with a red and black anarchy symbol as the logo. The guys looking after our opposite neighbour didn't have a cool name, but the workers were straight out of a 13th century Frisian viking look-book. Note the awesome natural red-haired enormous handlebar moustache with beads. What you can't see is his down-to-the-middle-of-the-back thick plait of red-orange hair. Yes those are great big metal earrings, too. Hands like trucks, as my mate Cathy would say:

Figure 2: Leather trousers and plaited beards

The scaffolding was erected in about five hours. Time elapsed from initial avalanche: 29 hours. Things went quiet then for a long time. Some weeks passed, and it began to look like there was going to be no change for months. It's not unusual for houses here to have scaffolding for months or even years with nothing changing. Strange, since you have to pay monthly rental fees to both the scaffold company and the city, and they're not insignificant. Sometimes the scaffold is covered with thick plastic gauze which degrades over time, blowing in the wind like sails, giving the buildings the appearance of rotten, abandoned pirate ships which have come to rest between their land-locked cousins. Today, finally, some workmen came to work on the roof and architrave, hauling up sheets of tin and buckets of concrete and plaster to repair the leaks. Obviously, water had been working its way into architrave and mouldings, melting and re-freezing during winter, causing it to break apart. The workmen are a tough bunch, too, just walking about up on the roofline without a safety harness.

Figure 3: Bang bang tap tap.

Zotter

Not much of a post today, other than to recommend to you all any chocolate made by Zotter. It tastes of chocolate, not of sugar. Now that the big heat wave is over in Oz, I can send some to you.

Dreams - last night, I dreamt MMcK carried me to a pub on his shoulders. He was a huge man, and he had a tattoo on his right shoulder that he did not have before. JP said goodbye to us as we prepared to go, she was silently and good-naturedly laughing at MMcK's preparation. Little Scout ran around telling us things. We went over hill and dale, and came to the sprawling pub. I went to go and order Bundy and Cokes for us both (ugh?!), because MMcK was too large to fit through the door. Like a giant. At the bar, the barkeepers were women wearing a variation of neo-retro-seventies-countrygirl - that means, big straw hats, lace over the decolletage, and puffy sleeves but uncovered arms and disco skirts knee length. In sheer silks and modern rayons. After talking to an older retired business man in a gray woolen coat, I left to take the drinks to MMcK, but I had not enough hands, and had to put the chicory and cos lettuce in the pocket of my coat.

I think the narrative was breaking down at that stage.

Exim III

The solution to the problem with multiple recipients in an Exim filter, when you want delivery to go ahead to all but one, and you want the special one to go to different special place .... You have to wrangle the routers. Routers will let you pick out a mail for a particular recipient and do something special with just that particular delivery. I guess this is because routers come late in the delivery chain.

I thought that was cool, and told boss about it. But ... no point me going ahead and implementing one of these little gems, because apparently we're moving to PostFix Some Time Real Soon.

Note to Self: prepare all the the exim filters for PostFix ahead of time, so that boss is impressed.

E2K7SP1 MapiExceptionNotAuthorized

One of my users is replying to a message sent to a public folder that's hosted on Exchange 2007 SP1.
He's getting the following type of non-delivereable message:

Fehler bei der Zustellung der Nachricht an folgende Empfänger oder Verteilerlisten:

Jobs
Problem mit dem Postfach des Empfängers. Microsoft Exchange versucht nicht, diese Nachricht erneut für Sie zuzustellen. Versuchen Sie, diese Nachricht erneut zu senden, oder wenden Sie sich mit dem folgenden Diagnosetext an Ihren Systemadministrator.

------------------
Mit Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 gesendet


Diagnoseinformationen für Administratoren:

Generierender Server: x.y.z.com

jobs@z.com
#550 5.2.0 STOREDRV.Deliver: The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service reported an error. The following information should help identify the cause of this error: "MapiExceptionNotAuthorized:16.18969:DA0B0000, 17.27161:0000000062020000000000001F00000000000000, 255.23226:00000000, 255.27962:7A000000, 255.27962:0A000000
-------------------

(I coloured it blue because it's Microsoft)

Here's what it means:
MapiExceptionNotAuthorized means that Mapi does not allow the action to be taken, due to the action not being authorized. Usually this is because the Anonymous user doesn't have the ability/rights to write messages to the Public Folder.
However, in this case, this isn't true - people are succesfully sending in CVs everyday, and those messages are turning up in the Public Folder. So Anonymous does have rights to create items in that folder.

There are three ways to investigate and control permissions on a Public Folder in E2K7 -

1. using Powershell
2. you can use Msoft's free and excellent tool, PFDAVAdmin, with simple, workable GUI
3. you can do it all via Outlook if you have owner permission on the folder in the first place

Here's the p.shell you'll need:

To view permission on the PF, use the Get-PublicFolderClientPermission cmdlet.
For instance,
Get-PublicFolderClientPermission "\Jobs\03_Wrangling\28_PythonWrangler" -User Anonymous | format-list

To give Anonymous the ability to create items, use the Add-PublicFolderClientPermission cmdlet.
For instance,
Add-PublicFolderClientPermission "\Jobs\03_Wrangling\28_PythonWrangler" -AccessRights CreateItems -User Anonymous

This will also allow Anonymous to read items, something you don't want, in which case:
Remove-PublicFolderClientPermission "\Jobs\03_Wrangling\28_PythonWrangler"-AccessRights ReadItems -User Anonymous

PFDAVAdmin: - connect to your Public folder store, rightclick on the Folder, choose "Folder Permissions" and check what Anonymous can do. Correct it if needed, then click the handy Commit Changes button. I like this tool as much as I liked that small fluffy wriggly puppy that bounced up to me on Saturday and gave my knee a great big friendly lick.

Outlook: rightclick the folder, choose Properties, then the Permissions tab.

For more information on rights, please see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310789.aspx

Note! Applying all of the above did not solve the issue for my user. However, removing him entirely from the list of allowed users on the mail-enabled folder, then adding him again with Publishing Editor permission .. that did fix it.