Sober sucks. I created a "backscatter" folder and have been building a collection of procmail rules to handle it. It's bad enough having to parse the body. Then some people think it's a good idea to base64 encode an HTML version of the notication. At least =5F is easy to handle with (_|=5F). I may be willing to have certain complex perl scripts parse and take action on my mail, but base64 decoding to check content is ridiculous. We'll see how bad those get. And then yahoo just truncates them... I wish people kept their networks under control. We've had 2 machines. It took about 10 seconds from first message for network services to be notified. If it wasn't for an upgrade that broke it and us not fixing it yet, they would have automatically been yanked off the network and notified within a few more seconds. Oh yea, and not even the first message actually makes it out. It's not that hard people...

It's been busy. Right now there is a server migration happening at work. Finally got sick of doing these manual migrations and working the weekends and scheduling outages. So each user's migration is now effectively atomic to them, verifying the account isn't in use beforehand and disabling for the duration, and notifying them afterwards. That means it's dump a bunch into the script, come back the next day and rerun the ones that were in use. Much better than the old way. It's also time for students to leave and after the last round of "I have important files I need before you delete my account", we decided to be proactive and sent a "get your crap off the servers" email. Well, not quite worded that way, but... I'm amazed it made it past most of ITS and the Alumni office on the first try. I think everyone must be just wanting to get the whole rush over. Unfortunately there's 2 more weeks and it doesn't look like the load is gonna get any lighter for quite a while.

Been doing a bit of groupware stuff a bit. Knowing both the unix and Windows side means I got stuck with the task of building the SJES connector setups and figuring a distribution. I'm not so impressed so far, but we'll see. SJS Messenger Express is just bad, the mail server doesn't seem so bad (and while the outlook integration isn't great, hopefully it'll be better than IMAP). I think it's gonna be a couple more versions down the road before Sun really gets the mail and calendaring apps integrated - it's still pretty obvious they weren't designed together. At least it's possible to make them run under the same LDAP structure even if they don't by default. Now if the pab LDAP structure just made more sense, and they put the right ACEs in by default so you could read your own... I think the outlook profile packager is the most stable part of it. Especially rolling it out through AD so it's just a click for people to install, and then enter their specific data. Why can't any of the big providers just use vCalendar? It'd save lots of hastle, and the format is simple. Plus there's tons of clients. I'm thinking OWA->vCalendar proxy...

Seen a few decent movies lately. Watched Man on Fire last weekend, which was good as expected. Also saw The Virgin Suicides. Definitely can tell its a Sofia Coppola film from the beginning. While the plot is different, the style reminds me so much of Lost in Translation... Cold Mountain wasn't really my favorite style, but it was still pretty decent. A few hours ago some people came over and we watched Catch Me If You Can. Seemed slower than last time I saw it, but still entertaining. Less fun after the first time though.

Then there's really good news. Half of you probably have no clue what that is, the other half have been pissed since you first heard about it. Suffice it to say, that headline is good news for consumers, producers with a decent business model (other than screwing the customers), and anyone who cares about being not tied to corporate whims (like being able to have stuff available even once the copyright expires if that ever happens). There's probably more but I should probably stop typing now if I want anyone to read this.