Outlook errors when retrieving mail from POP3 server
A problem I've been having more and more frequently is that I'll get a piece of spam in my POP3 account which Outlook is unable to process. This causes Outlook to keep downloading the same messages over and over from the server and it's unable to grab the latest messages.
Fortunately I found a nice little freeware utility years ago called Vallen POP3 Mail Checker that allows you to connect to a POP account and remove delete messages setting in your spool. This little utility works really great and doesn't require any installation—you can just unzip the exe into a folder and run the pop3.exe.
This little utility is also great for checking other miscellaneous POP3 accounts. I use it to occasionally connect to account that are set up for automation, so I can delete a message if it's causing problems with the server.
Anyway, since I just had to run this program again to delete some spam from my mail server, I thought I'd post about this great little tool.
Configuring Windows Authentication with Apache 2.2.x and Subversion
I've been working on our development server at work to try to help streamline some process. This included upgrade Subversion and Apache to the latest versions and installing Trac (so we can better track software issues.)
In order to really simplify being able to give developers and contractors access to the appropriate areas, I wanted to try and simplify the process by configuring Apache to use Windows Authentication. This allows us to control who has access to what, just by making them members of the appropriate groups.
Since I'm new to Apache, this whole process has taken longer than what I wanted—but I certainly learned a lot in the process.
Did you know?
I got this from my Grandma this morning in my inbox and thought it was interesting.
At 3 minutes and 4 seconds after 2 a.m. on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be:
02:03:04 05/06/07
This will never happen again.
It's one of those things that makes me go hmmmmmm...
jQuery Updates...
A couple of cool tidbits on the jQuery front.
Remy Sharp has written a nice, clear, concise entry on demystifying jQuery's this object. He does a really good job explaining the differences in what this means depending on the context of what you're doing. This, no pun intended, is one of the things that can be a little confusing when you're new to jQuery since the this keyword can either be a pointer to the current DOM element or a jQuery object—depending on the context of your code. Remy's write up should help to clear this up for any new jQuery users.
Ralf S. Engelschall has a released jQuery Plug-in for cross-site AJAX. His plug-in allows you to communicate to a 3rd party domain in a similar manor to the $.getScript() call. The new function he introduced is called $.getScriptXS(). He's even added support for callbacks, so you'll know when the script has loaded. Very nice!
USB Cable Slowing Down My PC...
Ok, this might be the weirdest PC performance issue I've ever seen. Starting sometime yesterday, my laptop starting running extremely slowly. Since it was nearly the end of the day, I just assumed some application (figured it was IE7) had just leaked some memory, and since I was shutting it off soon, didn't give it much thought.
However, this morning I was having the same issue. So I opened up Process Explorer to try and seeing what was eating all the CPU cycles. The only thing eating CPU was the Interrupts and DPCs. This really had me scratching my head. What the heck would be causing my PC to slow down so much?
A quick search on 'Net lead me to a forum post that indicated USB issues could cause DPC CPU spikes. So, I look over at my laptop and notice I still have a USB cable plugged in to my laptop, that is not plugged into anything.
Dina Programming Font...
Reading blogs the other day, I came across the Dina Programming Font. I've been testing it out for the past couple of days in Eclipse and so far I really like it.
Over the years I've tried a number of different fonts for my IDE, but I always end up back with Courier New—mainly because it's familiar. However, I've been able to use the Dina font at 8pt and it retains it's readability very well at 1028x768. Lowering the point size while not adding strain for my eyes, allows me to see more code on the page w/less scrolling. Since I have carpal tunnel, anything that reduces mouse movement is a welcome change.
Battle of the Album Art
This is a pretty cool video using album art from the past. It's amazing how many of these albums I own.
Picture: The Sunset From Mars...
This isn't a new picture, but I just came across it. This was taken from the Mars Rover "Spirit" on May 19th, 2005. It's pretty amazing when you realize you're looking at a sunset from a planet other than Earth.
I find the picture simply stunning.
Cloaking SVN Folders in Dreamweaver...
I just started using Dreamweaver for a site I'm working on. I'm keeping a repository of the files in Subversion, but found that trying to get Dreamweaver to ignore the SVN files when synchronizing is a bit of a pain.
Since I was in a quick solution, I ended up just setting Dreamweaver to show hidden files and then manually went to each .svn to cloak. Later on in the day, I did some searching to see if I could find an easier solution (because doing it manually really sucks.)
I found a blog entry by Josh Buhler in which he talks discusses cloaking/uncloaking SCM directories in Dreamweaver. He found a Dreamweaver extension called Cloak/Uncloak SCM Directories in Dreamweaver which appears to do the trick.
Chimpanzee Plays Ms. Pac-Man
I came across this video this morning and it's pretty interesting. The chimpanzee appears to have enough motorskills to get the basics down. His/her reaction seems a little slow, but it does appear that the chimp has the basic fundementals down. I found this fascinating at least.
Chimpanzee Plays Ms. Pac-Man
It's amazing what you can do w/some Coke & Menthos...
What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane. Watch the video
The future is here: Web 2.1
There's a new Web in town—Web v2.1! A new article over at Something Awful gives a humorous, yet insightful, look at the buzz phrase "Web 2.0".
Web 2.1 is the new standard for web sites and applications in the blogosphere collective information age. It is scaleable and easy to use, as well as being user friendly and designed with the end user in mind. In order to be Web 2.1 compliant, you must follow these guidelines:
- If it comes to a rest on the floor for less than five seconds, you can eat it
- No means no
- Don't expose it to bright lights, get it wet, or feed it after midnight
- Data is the next Intel Inside
- If the kick returner signals for a fair catch but drops the ball, the other team can attempt to recover it
Process Explorer saves me from IBM DLA hell
I've been having a lot of weird performance issues lately. For some reason today my CPU was just getting maxed out within minutes of booting. My first thought was a virus or spyware, but after some digging around with the excellent application Process Explorer, I was able to find a thread in the system process that was eating all my CPU cycles. It was a DLL named "ssrtln.sys".
Troubleshooting this was a real pain. This DLL was eating so many CPU cycles, that it was actually preventing many applications from even loading (including Internet Explorer, the Control Panel and Windows Explorer.) Turns out this DLL belongs to the Sonic Solutions, which was part of the IBM DLA drivers which were loaded on my IBM ThinkPad R50p.
Since the driver is not loaded in Safe Mode, I tried booting to Safe Mode to remove the driver. Turns out, you can't uninstall this particular piece of software in Safe Mode.
Disabling Windows' native Zip folder support
Tonight I finally got sick of Windows XP's native support for Zip files in Windows Explorer. It really slows down Explorer and I really have never even liked the fact that it treats Zip files as folders. I want compressed archives to be what they are—files. If I want to view the contents of compressed archives, I'll use an archive applications like WinRAR.
To prevent Windows XP from treating compressed Zip files as a folder,
go to "Start > Run" and type the following:
regsvr32 /u zipfldr
If you wish to restore native Zip support in Windows, just go
back to "Start > Run" and type the following:
regsvr32 zipfldr
Microsoft releases "official" WMF patch
A follow up from my blog post on Wednesday. Looks like peer pressure really got to Microsoft. An official patch to the WMF vulnerability was released late yesterday. If you don't have your PC set to automatically update, make sure to go visit the Windows Update site (make sure you're using Internet Explorer) and patch your system ASAP.
So much for Microsoft sticking to their patch release schedule. Personally, I'm glad they didn't wait. They should be releasing patches as they're available. If corporations want to wait and release things on a schedule, that's fine, but let us contractors and personal users fix our computers as quickly as possible.