Torsten Curdt’s weblog

I have to say that I find the current concept of flickr sets quite useless. Other than having a more visual grouping I don’t see how a set really is much different than a tag. If you still want the grouping and do this by tags anyway smartsets is for you. This service is great! You can define rules and it will automatically update your sets accordingly. So when I tag picture with “apachecon” it will automatically appears in my “opensource” set. A very cool mashup.

Hmmm… it seems like Microsoft change the default settings for Outlook. At least I see the number of mails with those winmail.dat attachments increasing. “So what is it this winmail.dat thing? How come people telling me they cannot open my attachments?” Well, if you ask these questions you are probably a windows outlook user that is sending rich text mails to people that don’t use outlook. And you are probably not even aware of the crap that you are sending. Let me try to explain what is oing on.

Maybe lets take a step back on how email works. Email is an *old* standard in fact there was always just plain text getting transfered. Then people also wanted to send binary attachments. Hm – but we only have a plain text format? How do we do this without changing the standard? You have to encode the attachments. Simplified: you write a textual representation of byte instead of the byte itself into the mail. This is of course inherently more verbose. (This explains why you cannot send a 9MB mp3 file if your provider has a message size limit of 10MB. The encoded MP3 file will probably become more like 14MB when encoded in a mail) So something to remember: email is quite inefficient for file transfers.

Now we have another problem: how does the recipient distinguish between normal text and the encoded binary? You don’t want the recipient read that binary garbage but have him save the file. In the text mail there are markers that define the different parts of the mail. So a mail with an attachment actually looks like this

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------030009080508060306080006
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hey! Here is the image you wanted

--------------030009080508060306080006
Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="image.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="image.jpg"

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAlgCWAAD/2wBDAAYEBQYFBAYGBQYHBwYIChAKCgkJChQODwwQFxQY
GBcUFhYaHSUfGhsjHBYWICwgIyYnKSopGR8tMC0oMCUoKSj/2wBDAQcHBwoIChMKChMoGhYa
KCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCgoKCj/wAAR
...

It’s just the email program that is aware of this format an decodes it for you. So you only see the message with an image attached. Now this has served many people well over the years until someone had the (great?) idea to send around rich text/html emails. So people finally can annoy you with their “perfect layout” of emails. They send you two parts. The plain mail for people who cannot render html in their email client (yes, there are people like that!) and the html version. Both as “attachments”. OK. So we have been living with this for a while. It only gets messy when you send a html mail that also comes with an image. (Like those people sending their company’s logo in every mail!) …so we just attach that image too. But as you can imagine this can become quite ugly when there are many images in the mail. So the obvious choice was to group them in a container first. The problem though is that Microsoft used a proprietary format for this container. So instead of just having a htmlpage.zip attached they attach a winmail.dat that includes the rich text representation of the mail. Well, even that would be OK as we would still have the plain text version and could ignore the winmail.dat. Now the real problem is that they also attach the other attachments into this container. So if someone wants to send e.g. a PDF and Outlook is set to send rich text emails it will end up inside this winmail.dat archive! As it is proprietary other email clients cannot see the attachment easily.

For OSX there is a program that can open winmail.dat attachments or you can get the plugin for Mail.app. Unfortunately at least “TNEF`s Enough” cannot open every attachment. The other option is to educate the people and blame Microsoft for this stupid stupid move.

Further details can be found here.

• http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=138053
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Winmail.dat_attachments
• http://www.pchell.com/support/winmaildat.shtml

A weekend surely is not enough for Paris. But even the shortest trip is well worth it. Since last weekend I can tell.

We were lucky and the weather was beautiful that weekend. If so are you – don’t stay at the hotel for breakfast. There are plenty of cafes and it seems to be very natural to just sit outside in the sun to feel the real vibe of Paris. If you are late or just need something during the long day just go and find the next bakery. There is much more than just baguette in France. The bakeries are just fantastic. And in case you are exhausted from walking the sugar shock will help to get you though the rest of your day.

Montmatre is a nice suburb a little north of the center. It’s where many painters were/are living and trying sell their paintings. Unfortunately it’s a little touristy. Maybe that’s also because one of the well known sights is just next door. The church Sacre Coeur is on a top of a hill where you can get a pretty scenic view over Paris. In retrospective it might have been nice to see it rather after dawn. The church is nice – but I think as some stage I caught myself a permanent church fatigue. So I much more enjoyed just hanging out in a non-tourist cafe a little further down the hill. (Mmmmmhh …cheeeeeese)

Another recommended place for a late afternoon or even to watch the sunset is the riverside of the Seine. Especially between the Orsay Museum and St. Michel it is very nice to just sit and enjoy a good bottle of wine. Don’t expect to be the only that had this idea – but it still exhibits a very nice atmosphere. The wooden bridge just before the little island of St. Peter is where it can get a little crowded. Many young people hang out there at dawn.

Also one of the classics is to do a boat tour on the Seine. If you hate these guided tours as much as I do check out the much less touristy water taxi. You can hop-on/hop-off the whole day for 12EUR. Not as fast and cheap as the metro – but a nice alternative.

The Louvre! How can you visit Paris and not see the Louvre!? Nowadays especially fans of the Da Vinci Code can’t. As I do like art this was also on my “have to visit” list. And sure thing – just the size and the amount of treasures is more than just impressive. But if you don’t like the classic motives (that would probably be Jesus or some big woman) then it might well not be for you. Sure you can tell you have been to the Louvre, but I personally found the Orangerie (exhibiting impressionist like Monet) much more interesting than staring at the Mona Lisa. But as I am a child of the impressionism I might be biased. Probably also the reason why I wanted to visit Givernie. It is supposed to be really beautiful. Unfortunately it’s a little further out (30 minutes by train plus 20 minutes by bus) and we could not slot it in that weekend.

Next time!

(For more pictures see flickr)

I am looking for a good registrar where I can keep my domain and then just point to the dns servers of whatever hoster I am actually using. At the moment my domain moved with the hoster from provider to provider – which sucks. So far domainsite seems to be a good choice. Opinions or other recommendations?

I know some people have been really waiting for this. Finally I got the maven2 release build working and are happy to present the first release candidate of commons jci – a java compiler abstraction interface. More information and a comparison to jsr199 to come …but for now it would be great to just get 1.0 out of the door. Quoting from the web site:

JCI is a java compiler interface. It can be used to either compile java (or any other language that can be compiled to java classes like e.g. groovy or javascript) to java. It is well integrated with a FAM (FilesystemAlterationMonitor) that can be used with the JCI compiling/reloading classloader. All the currently supported compilers (even javac before java6) feature in-memory compilation.

Please let me know if there is something that needs to be fixed. Hope to get the release out soon. For now the RC1 is only available in the Apache snapshot repository.

• jci
• fam
• core
• eclipse compiler
• groovy compiler
• janino compiler
• javac compiler
• rhino compiler