I had a hell of a time upgrading 15 users from 1.0.3 to 1.5.
I just didn't find a way to do it reliably and automatically, preserving the few installed extensions and plugins (Flash, QuickTime+ Real Alternative).
In the end, I had to physically go to each computer and check everything, making sure I also checked everybody's roaming profile.
I love Firefox for myself (it's my main browser since it was called Phoenix), but next time I deploy it in a company, it will need to have clear instructions on how to do that without a physical install/configuration/plugins and extensions install/etc.
I don't mind having to write a few Perl scripts to do it, if I can get clear instructions.
If the French military deployed it to 100000 people, maybe they have documented how they did it? Or maybe they just don't know about the upgrade hell yet?
After all, initial install was easy using FFdeploy. It's the upgrades that are a problem
The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method.
This must be very innovative technology. I wonder how they can divide one 24 Gbps signal into several 161.5 Gbps signals?
Even to divide into a single 161.5, they need to divide the 24 signal by 0.148606811145511.
And the real beauty, of course is in that second, which happens to be exactly
the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.
Too bad! I thought it was a PC program or had a PC version. I don't have a Mac, and while I would be happy to add an OSX Mac to my network, I definitely don't want to have to deal with any of [1-9].x series. Not even to please the children...
I cannot remember PhotoStyler, because I wasn't doing any graphics stuff at the time. But that and SuperPaint mentioned in this thread sound like they might be perfect tools/toys for my kids. MS Paint is too limited, and Photoshop / Paint Shop Pro / The Gimp are far too complex.
Would the last versions of these tools still run on current machines? Is it possible to find install disks somewhere? (Yes, I do still have a floppy drive (external USB)).
Re:Credit where credit is due
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 1
Gmail uses [Spamhaus project's] XBL to filter out spam
It obviously uses much more than that. I also use the Spamhaus XBL-SBL on my own server, but get much more spam on my self-hosted account than on my Gmail acount. Spamassassin labels most of it, but in the end there is still spam left in my Inbox, whereas on Gmail, there is much less.
So I wonder what they use to filter the messages which have passed through the SBL-XBL.
(Of course, they filter out.zip attachments too, which is definitely effective with current viruses, and annoying when you want to send compressed stuff to non-computer-savvy people.)
While all this sounds complicated to have in a little alarm clock, it's of course done in a couple of minutes on any Linux/*nix box.
I had that on my previous home server. Just a few crontab entries, which would play various sounds. I also set it up for a short while to play an Internet radio stream to wake up, but that bored me quickly.
The most useful were 2 different sounds for the 2 different times the 2 (small) children had to leave for school. That was incredibly effective. Instead of constantly having to try to convince them they should hurry up and go, we just watched them hear the sound and hurry up, without having to say anything.
The icing on the cake was a small text file keeping track of school holidays and one-time schedule changes, so the sounds would always and only go off at the right days and times.
If getting your children to leave for school drives you mad every morning, I highly recommend that solution.
Firefox is certainly a great home browser. It's the one I use, and I recommend it to everyone else.
But it is still far too dificult to deploy on a company network. I know, I have done it. I used FFdeploy to make it a bit easier.
Now that FF is on a solid path to conquer the personal desktops it deserves, I would really like to see some progress towards helping administators manage network installs.
How do I upgrade 25 client machines running 1.0.4 to 1.0.7 on a Samba network? Ideally, I would just put all files somewhere, and call xcopy from the logon script. Unfortunately, it is almost certain to break stuff (particularly with extensions).
Other than for products (or news aggregating websites) that were originally coded by smart people having fun, is there any reason to start a project today in a fun and powerful language instead of any of the more boring scripting languages? This is not a rhetorical question (or in Slashdot: I am not trolling). I would actually like to know why developers would choose having fun over alternatives today on a new project.:-)
Well, it seems that would be don't leave %USERPROFILE% without it, since it's only for Windows (and OS/2).
And if it's Windows, Total Commander seems to be much better. I wish Midnight Commander would be as good and feature rich as Total Commander. And I wish there was a Mac version.
A few users are instructed in editing their H:\vacation.msg file in a text editor and renaming their "H:\.forward.not" file to "H:\.forward". For others (who are scared by a text editor and not sure how to rename a file), I do it myself over SSH. I'm not using procmail, but this is equivalent.
Still, a nice web interface would be nice, which would take care of ensuring the sanity of the.forward and vacation.msg files.
1. You don't get important mail needing an urgent reply: the uselessness is obvious
2. You do get important mail needing an urgent reply: the autoresponder replies that you are away. Useless again.
Email is not a phone, where you get the answering machine *before* saying your message and can decide to call somewhere else instead.
Email is closer to a fax. Would you like your fax spitting out pages of "sorry we cannot read your fax right now. signed: friendly fax machine at recipient.com"?
In the case of 2., the obvious solutions are:
- you read your business mail while away and do something about those which seem to require a quick reply.
- someone else in the office reads your email and does what has to be done.... or 'evil'
evil was probably not the right word to use. But among the stupid/bad things autoresponders do:
- spam some poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a virus - spam another poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a spammer - burden your server's mail queue with mails to fake addresses - confirm your email to a spammer
and of course, in the worst case:
- reply to a mailing list (on which someone else also has an autoresponder). This actually still happens, even though the programs involved never seem to be the ones I use (Mailman and vacation).
Anyway, if people still want an autoreponder after having understood all this, then so be it.
his is the sort of anecdote which gives the open source push a bad name
They don't really know or care about OSS. If someone gets a bad name, it's not OSS, it's me. And I get bothered with setting up their autoresponders. At least I know it's configured properly and will not flood mailing lists. And I will find a way so they can all set it up themselves.
I agree that as mail admin, it's not my role to impose my views about the "correct" use of email. But I did try to explain them. Too bad I was unsuccessful, and probably a sign that I was right in not trying a career in politics...:-)
What mail client were your users using before the switch?
Outlook 2000
After?
Outlook 2003, alas!
The upgrade from Office 97 with Outlook 2000 to Office/Outlook 2003 was not easy. So during a few days, they used Thunderbird for email. Easy to set up, always works, leaves mails on the server (the way I set it up), no hassles. But most users wanted Outlook. Only 2 still use Thunderbird. Probably my fault: I didn't do any training for Thunderbird. So I suspect that apart from the mushy Fisher-Price TB icons, their problem with TB was mainly that they thought they couldn't do some things because they didn't look in the menus. Nobody was able to give me rational reasons why they preferred Outlook. Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore?
There is no shared calendar, but nobody was using that anyway. If they do want that some day, I don't know what I could use for that and it may be a problem.
There is no central Exchange address book, but that was not needed. They have their own database with all the business contacts, including emails. If needed later, I can set up an LDAP solution or whatever.
Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
- Free and excellent antivirus (ClamAV) - Free and excellent spam filtering (a couple of RBLs, header checks in Postfix, and Spamassassin to mark the remaining spam as such) - Remote administration through SSH. That is not only an admin benefit, but also a user benefit. With Exchange, if they had a problem/question/requirement, they had to wait for me to come by. Now, I can act immediately over SSH. (Of course, you can setup VNC to manage a GUI, but it is slow and clunky). There are also answers I can give them straight away by looking at the logs (X says he didn't get my email / Yes he did; mail.x.com accepted the mail at 12h32; he should ask his own mail admin. I didn't get the email from Y / True, it was rejected because it was 20 MB. etc.)
What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Nothing special. There is no particular need. There are no "prying eyes" inside the network, and they do regularly have their mail read by someone else to whom they give their password (it's not a bug, it's a feature).
There is no WiFi on the network. I try to explain to them they should use better passwords anyway, but most don't care.
As an admin, I can of course read everything if I want. But I don't want to, and more importantly, they have to fully trust their network admin. If they don't, they need to find another admin quickly anyway. In this regard, network admins are like bookkeepers and doctors. You cannot have one whom you don't trust.
I can give you the reasons why I moved away from Exchange. Others may have different reasons, and others may have good reasons to stay with Exchange. Anyway, this is my own example.
In a small (but growing) business of a dozen employees, an old NT server SBS edition with Exchange 5.5 needed to be replaced. I decided to go with a Linux server.
On the Exchange side, what I didn't like was:
1. all email is in a proprietary database, in a single (huge!) file. If something goes wrong with that file (as it once did), it's a nightmare to bring it back up, if it works at all. If you can't repair it, you loose anything that came in after the last backup.
2. speaking of backups, Exchange needs special Exchange-aware backup programs. You cannot just copy the files.
3. Lack of flexibility in handling of incoming mail, spam filtering, forwarding, etc.
4. No ssh access for quick and easy remote administration.
5. No simple text-file based configuration, meaning no grep or such to find some setting. You have to move around all the menus if you cannot remember where a setting was.
6. It is hard to move away from proprietary solutions like Exchange because you cannot just copy files and hand them over to another application. That's a good reason to do it rather sooner than later when it may become harder yet. It was not easy to move mailboxes from Exchange to IMAP.
So in the new setup, I used Postfix and Courier IMAP:
1. very easy and very flexible and powerful configuration
2. all configuration through simple text files which can be grep-ed, compared, backed-up, whatever.
3. simple backups through plain file copies or rsync
4. every mail is in it's own plain text file. Can be grep-ed, and if a file goes corrupt (didn't happen yet), it is only that single email.
5. easy administration. For example, I didn't implement quotas, but I'm considering setting up a little script that would check for the size of the maildirs and of single huge files, and send a little email to the users. Like "you are using up 1 GB for emails; please consider removing unnecessary stuff" or "Would you please check if you still need the 50 10 MB files in you mailbox". I can easily add a summary of the huge mails so the user knows which ones they are.
5. easy migration. If I ever decide I would like to replace Postfix or Courier with some other program, it's no problem. I'm not locked in the current programs. Not that I would want to move to other programs. I'm very happy with this setup. But I like to be sure I can if I ever wish to.
This has been running reliably for 6 months now, and I'm a very happy mail admin.
The users have only one complaint: they cannot set up an Out of Office auto-responder like they could on Exchange. I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success. They want it anyway. So I'm setting up vacation in their.forward files when needed, and looking for a good web interface so they can do it themselves. The Webmin interface I tried didn't work well, so I'm still looking, and may have to work on the Webmin module myself.
I'm surprised. Can't you just buy good maps in the US? In Europe, we're used to 1:25'000 maps being available in most book stores and newspaper shops. Maybe not in all countries, but in most. These maps are issued by the national topographic agency.
I'm sure such maps exist for the US. Originally, it's the military who have them made for them. Are they not available to the public in the US?
The solution would be simple if users weren't so addicted to Outlook.
I replaced Exchange with Postfix and Courier IMAP, and I'm a happy mail admin since.
For the client side, I always hated Outlook, so I installed Thunderbird on all machines.
Unfortunately, out of a dozen users, only one seems to prefer Thunderbird. The others insist on using Outlook 2003, despite all the problems they regularly have with it. For example, Outlook doesn't start, complaining that the server is not accessible or something. They call me, and to make sure the server actually is accessible to them, I have them start TB which works immediately. Rebooting/restarting Outlook several times usually fixes it. But they still prefer Outlook.
Anyway, the only user who has no trouble is the Thunderbird user, and all his mails are automatically backed up every night, and since they are in text format with one file per mail, he cannot loose everything if a single file gets corrupted.
I never could get a clear explanation on what it is they dislike in Thunderbird, or what it is in the email part of Outlook that is so great for them. Maybe they just dislike the TB icons? I do find they look childish, but I don't choose and email client solely on the esthetics of the icons...
Well, I suppose this doesn't help you at all with your specific problem if your tied to Exchange...
If he's a competent manager (and financial results suggest he may be), he most certainly uses, at least occasionally, Firefox, Opera, Macs, OpenOffice, Linux, etc.
And he certainly hires people to use the competition and report on it's strengths and weaknesses.
What we may never know, however, is which of the competing products he actually likes.
It's not a bug, it's a feature: it doesn't run on Windows. Works fine in Unix.
Links to the explanations are here, but it's not for novices.
Re:It works, and is much smarter than you think
on
Perl Best Practices
·
· Score: 1
to make things look difficult (or like in another post : it looks like perfectly normal code)
I don't think it does. I couldn't make sense out of it, even though I also cleaned it up first.
It doesn't run on Windows, and I've never used pipe in Unix, and very rarely used fork. So that's my excuse for not understanding it. But I suspect those who consider it as normal codedon't quite understand it either. Or those who do must be quite great Perl hackers. On par with the author: Mark-Jason Dominus.
Anyway, the explanation is well worth reading.
Perl hackers may prefer to try to guess how it works from as little hints as possible:
Slashdot Mirror
I had a hell of a time upgrading 15 users from 1.0.3 to 1.5.
I just didn't find a way to do it reliably and automatically, preserving the few installed extensions and plugins (Flash, QuickTime+ Real Alternative).
In the end, I had to physically go to each computer and check everything, making sure I also checked everybody's roaming profile.
I love Firefox for myself (it's my main browser since it was called Phoenix), but next time I deploy it in a company, it will need to have clear instructions on how to do that without a physical install/configuration/plugins and extensions install/etc.
I don't mind having to write a few Perl scripts to do it, if I can get clear instructions.
If the French military deployed it to 100000 people, maybe they have documented how they did it? Or maybe they just don't know about the upgrade hell yet?
After all, initial install was easy using FFdeploy. It's the upgrades that are a problem
The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method.
This must be very innovative technology. I wonder how they can divide one 24 Gbps signal into several 161.5 Gbps signals?
Even to divide into a single 161.5, they need to divide the 24 signal by 0.148606811145511.
This DWDM stuff sounds weird...
That could depend on whose foot it is.
But anyway, the definition is not arbitrary at all
And the real beauty, of course is in that second, which happens to be exactly
It's NOT arbitrary. It's poetry!
And there is a final draft too, of course.
Too bad! I thought it was a PC program or had a PC version. I don't have a Mac, and while I would be happy to add an OSX Mac to my network, I definitely don't want to have to deal with any of [1-9].x series. Not even to please the children...
But thank you anyway for the detailed reply.
I cannot remember PhotoStyler, because I wasn't doing any graphics stuff at the time. But that and SuperPaint mentioned in this thread sound like they might be perfect tools/toys for my kids. MS Paint is too limited, and Photoshop / Paint Shop Pro / The Gimp are far too complex.
Would the last versions of these tools still run on current machines? Is it possible to find install disks somewhere? (Yes, I do still have a floppy drive (external USB)).
Gmail uses [Spamhaus project's] XBL to filter out spam
.zip attachments too, which is definitely effective with current viruses, and annoying when you want to send compressed stuff to non-computer-savvy people.)
It obviously uses much more than that. I also use the Spamhaus XBL-SBL on my own server, but get much more spam on my self-hosted account than on my Gmail acount. Spamassassin labels most of it, but in the end there is still spam left in my Inbox, whereas on Gmail, there is much less.
So I wonder what they use to filter the messages which have passed through the SBL-XBL.
(Of course, they filter out
While all this sounds complicated to have in a little alarm clock, it's of course done in a couple of minutes on any Linux/*nix box.
I had that on my previous home server. Just a few crontab entries, which would play various sounds. I also set it up for a short while to play an Internet radio stream to wake up, but that bored me quickly.
The most useful were 2 different sounds for the 2 different times the 2 (small) children had to leave for school. That was incredibly effective. Instead of constantly having to try to convince them they should hurry up and go, we just watched them hear the sound and hurry up, without having to say anything.
The icing on the cake was a small text file keeping track of school holidays and one-time schedule changes, so the sounds would always and only go off at the right days and times.
If getting your children to leave for school drives you mad every morning, I highly recommend that solution.
Firefox is certainly a great home browser. It's the one I use, and I recommend it to everyone else.
But it is still far too dificult to deploy on a company network. I know, I have done it. I used FFdeploy to make it a bit easier.
Now that FF is on a solid path to conquer the personal desktops it deserves, I would really like to see some progress towards helping administators manage network installs.
How do I upgrade 25 client machines running 1.0.4 to 1.0.7 on a Samba network? Ideally, I would just put all files somewhere, and call xcopy from the logon script. Unfortunately, it is almost certain to break stuff (particularly with extensions).
Isn't it out already? I have seen the O'Reilly cover
Other than for products (or news aggregating websites) that were originally coded by smart people having fun, is there any reason to start a project today in a fun and powerful language instead of any of the more boring scripting languages? :-)
This is not a rhetorical question (or in Slashdot: I am not trolling). I would actually like to know why developers would choose having fun over alternatives today on a new project.
Well, sort of, and for free:
I installed GoogleTalk on the first day, but it kept crashing.
So I set up Gaim to use my Google account, and never started GT again.
I can sure undesrtand why Google would need someone from Gaim.
( Besides, since it's also Gsomething, they had to )
By your own reasoning it should be safe for you to post your credit card number on /.
Why not?
Here it is: 4901 1791 0036 7030
Now what?
ZTree Don't leave $HOME without it.
Well, it seems that would be don't leave %USERPROFILE% without it, since it's only for Windows (and OS/2).
And if it's Windows, Total Commander seems to be much better. I wish Midnight Commander would be as good and feature rich as Total Commander. And I wish there was a Mac version.
So that's 17.4 millions now?
A few users are instructed in editing their H:\vacation.msg file in a text editor and renaming their "H:\.forward.not" file to "H:\.forward". For others (who are scared by a text editor and not sure how to rename a file), I do it myself over SSH. I'm not using procmail, but this is equivalent.
.forward and vacation.msg files.
Still, a nice web interface would be nice, which would take care of ensuring the sanity of the
Perhaps because they're not 'useless'...
... or 'evil'
:-)
I do believe they are.
There are basically 2 cases:
1. You don't get important mail needing an urgent reply: the uselessness is obvious
2. You do get important mail needing an urgent reply: the autoresponder replies that you are away. Useless again.
Email is not a phone, where you get the answering machine *before* saying your message and can decide to call somewhere else instead.
Email is closer to a fax. Would you like your fax spitting out pages of "sorry we cannot read your fax right now. signed: friendly fax machine at recipient.com"?
In the case of 2., the obvious solutions are:
- you read your business mail while away and do something about those which seem to require a quick reply.
- someone else in the office reads your email and does what has to be done.
evil was probably not the right word to use. But among the stupid/bad things autoresponders do:
- spam some poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a virus
- spam another poor stranger's mailbox whose address was used by a spammer
- burden your server's mail queue with mails to fake addresses
- confirm your email to a spammer
and of course, in the worst case:
- reply to a mailing list (on which someone else also has an autoresponder). This actually still happens, even though the programs involved never seem to be the ones I use (Mailman and vacation).
Anyway, if people still want an autoreponder after having understood all this, then so be it.
his is the sort of anecdote which gives the open source push a bad name
They don't really know or care about OSS. If someone gets a bad name, it's not OSS, it's me. And I get bothered with setting up their autoresponders. At least I know it's configured properly and will not flood mailing lists. And I will find a way so they can all set it up themselves.
I agree that as mail admin, it's not my role to impose my views about the "correct" use of email. But I did try to explain them. Too bad I was unsuccessful, and probably a sign that I was right in not trying a career in politics...
What mail client were your users using before the switch?
Outlook 2000
After?
Outlook 2003, alas!
The upgrade from Office 97 with Outlook 2000 to Office/Outlook 2003 was not easy. So during a few days, they used Thunderbird for email. Easy to set up, always works, leaves mails on the server (the way I set it up), no hassles.
But most users wanted Outlook. Only 2 still use Thunderbird. Probably my fault: I didn't do any training for Thunderbird. So I suspect that apart from the mushy Fisher-Price TB icons, their problem with TB was mainly that they thought they couldn't do some things because they didn't look in the menus. Nobody was able to give me rational reasons why they preferred Outlook. Anyway, I believe users should have the freedom to use what they like.
Aside from the autoresponder, were there other features that didn't work anymore?
There is no shared calendar, but nobody was using that anyway. If they do want that some day, I don't know what I could use for that and it may be a problem.
There is no central Exchange address book, but that was not needed. They have their own database with all the business contacts, including emails. If needed later, I can set up an LDAP solution or whatever.
Aside from the administrative benefits, were there other features that piggybacked their way in and were found to be useful?
- Free and excellent antivirus (ClamAV)
- Free and excellent spam filtering (a couple of RBLs, header checks in Postfix, and Spamassassin to mark the remaining spam as such)
- Remote administration through SSH. That is not only an admin benefit, but also a user benefit. With Exchange, if they had a problem/question/requirement, they had to wait for me to come by. Now, I can act immediately over SSH. (Of course, you can setup VNC to manage a GUI, but it is slow and clunky). There are also answers I can give them straight away by looking at the logs (X says he didn't get my email / Yes he did; mail.x.com accepted the mail at 12h32; he should ask his own mail admin. I didn't get the email from Y / True, it was rejected because it was 20 MB. etc.)
What safeguards to do you have in place to ensure that those emails are protected from prying eyes?
Nothing special. There is no particular need. There are no "prying eyes" inside the network, and they do regularly have their mail read by someone else to whom they give their password (it's not a bug, it's a feature).
There is no WiFi on the network. I try to explain to them they should use better passwords anyway, but most don't care.
As an admin, I can of course read everything if I want. But I don't want to, and more importantly, they have to fully trust their network admin. If they don't, they need to find another admin quickly anyway. In this regard, network admins are like bookkeepers and doctors. You cannot have one whom you don't trust.
I can give you the reasons why I moved away from Exchange. Others may have different reasons, and others may have good reasons to stay with Exchange. Anyway, this is my own example.
.forward files when needed, and looking for a good web interface so they can do it themselves. The Webmin interface I tried didn't work well, so I'm still looking, and may have to work on the Webmin module myself.
In a small (but growing) business of a dozen employees, an old NT server SBS edition with Exchange 5.5 needed to be replaced. I decided to go with a Linux server.
On the Exchange side, what I didn't like was:
1. all email is in a proprietary database, in a single (huge!) file. If something goes wrong with that file (as it once did), it's a nightmare to bring it back up, if it works at all. If you can't repair it, you loose anything that came in after the last backup.
2. speaking of backups, Exchange needs special Exchange-aware backup programs. You cannot just copy the files.
3. Lack of flexibility in handling of incoming mail, spam filtering, forwarding, etc.
4. No ssh access for quick and easy remote administration.
5. No simple text-file based configuration, meaning no grep or such to find some setting. You have to move around all the menus if you cannot remember where a setting was.
6. It is hard to move away from proprietary solutions like Exchange because you cannot just copy files and hand them over to another application. That's a good reason to do it rather sooner than later when it may become harder yet. It was not easy to move mailboxes from Exchange to IMAP.
So in the new setup, I used Postfix and Courier IMAP:
1. very easy and very flexible and powerful configuration
2. all configuration through simple text files which can be grep-ed, compared, backed-up, whatever.
3. simple backups through plain file copies or rsync
4. every mail is in it's own plain text file. Can be grep-ed, and if a file goes corrupt (didn't happen yet), it is only that single email.
5. easy administration. For example, I didn't implement quotas, but I'm considering setting up a little script that would check for the size of the maildirs and of single huge files, and send a little email to the users. Like "you are using up 1 GB for emails; please consider removing unnecessary stuff" or "Would you please check if you still need the 50 10 MB files in you mailbox". I can easily add a summary of the huge mails so the user knows which ones they are.
5. easy migration. If I ever decide I would like to replace Postfix or Courier with some other program, it's no problem. I'm not locked in the current programs. Not that I would want to move to other programs. I'm very happy with this setup. But I like to be sure I can if I ever wish to.
This has been running reliably for 6 months now, and I'm a very happy mail admin.
The users have only one complaint: they cannot set up an Out of Office auto-responder like they could on Exchange. I thought that was good, and tried to explain why auto-responders range between useless and evil, but had no success. They want it anyway. So I'm setting up vacation in their
I'm surprised. Can't you just buy good maps in the US? In Europe, we're used to 1:25'000 maps being available in most book stores and newspaper shops. Maybe not in all countries, but in most. These maps are issued by the national topographic agency.
I'm sure such maps exist for the US. Originally, it's the military who have them made for them. Are they not available to the public in the US?
The solution would be simple if users weren't so addicted to Outlook.
I replaced Exchange with Postfix and Courier IMAP, and I'm a happy mail admin since.
For the client side, I always hated Outlook, so I installed Thunderbird on all machines.
Unfortunately, out of a dozen users, only one seems to prefer Thunderbird. The others insist on using Outlook 2003, despite all the problems they regularly have with it. For example, Outlook doesn't start, complaining that the server is not accessible or something. They call me, and to make sure the server actually is accessible to them, I have them start TB which works immediately. Rebooting/restarting Outlook several times usually fixes it. But they still prefer Outlook.
Anyway, the only user who has no trouble is the Thunderbird user, and all his mails are automatically backed up every night, and since they are in text format with one file per mail, he cannot loose everything if a single file gets corrupted.
I never could get a clear explanation on what it is they dislike in Thunderbird, or what it is in the email part of Outlook that is so great for them. Maybe they just dislike the TB icons? I do find they look childish, but I don't choose and email client solely on the esthetics of the icons...
Well, I suppose this doesn't help you at all with your specific problem if your tied to Exchange...
If he's a competent manager (and financial results suggest he may be), he most certainly uses, at least occasionally, Firefox, Opera, Macs, OpenOffice, Linux, etc.
And he certainly hires people to use the competition and report on it's strengths and weaknesses.
What we may never know, however, is which of the competing products he actually likes.
Should be(looks alright in the preview. hopefully it stays like that in the post)
It's not a bug, it's a feature: it doesn't run on Windows. Works fine in Unix.
Links to the explanations are here, but it's not for novices.
to make things look difficult
(or like in another post :
it looks like perfectly normal code)
I don't think it does. I couldn't make sense out of it, even though I also cleaned it up first.
It doesn't run on Windows, and I've never used pipe in Unix, and very rarely used fork. So that's my excuse for not understanding it. But I suspect those who consider it as normal code don't quite understand it either. Or those who do must be quite great Perl hackers. On par with the author: Mark-Jason Dominus.
Anyway, the explanation is well worth reading.
Perl hackers may prefer to try to guess how it works from as little hints as possible:
Hint 1 | Hint 2 | Hint 3 | Hint 4 | Hint 5 | Hint 6 | Hint 7 | Hint 8 | Hint 9 | Hint 10 | Hint 11
Others will jump straight to the spoiler.