März 2007

Import Mails from Thunderbird to Mail.app (Part II)

Some of you know, I was trying to import e-mails from Thunderbird to Apple's own Mail.app for a friend. It's supposed to work, but it just didn't. Mail showed only one huge e-mail in each folder, and the mail itself contained all other mails.

I wrote a litte perl script to fix the files so that Mail will import them properly. And I made my solution available on this blog in case somebody else is having the same problem. See the datails about the solution in my post from February, 6th.

This week I got an E-Mail from Lars Kobbe who used my script to fix his files. He also made a Droplet out of my perl skript, which makes using it easier for those of you that don't like the command line.

Just save the Droplet on your Desktop, drag your mbox-files on it, and it will fix the files for you without any need to use a command line.

Get Lars' Droplet here ...

My Tribute to Lionel Richie

To be honest, I didn't know much about Lionel Richie. Shame on me, I know. Then I was watching the very populer German show Wetten, Dass??? where he was guest. I realized that he is a very nice and friendly guy. He was a very congenial and pleasant guest.

Sometimes celebrity think they have to be snobbish, but Lionel Richie, who's a big star indeed, was very natural and just sweet. I was totally impressed.

He lost his bet on the show, and had to sing the song "Hello" with helium inhaled. It's so funny...

Way-back Singing--or: Yet another post about weird costumes

Did I ever write about the time when I was singing medieval songs with some friends? We started rehearsing for an annual celebration at the iron ore mine where I was working in my free time, and we just wanted to sing two or three ancient miner songs. And yes, we were wearing our traditional miner's garb like everybody from the mine does on celebrations. The first picture is taken from the local newspaper. It shows us in the ancient St. Georg's Chapel. I'm the one who's wearing the long trousers. I was still in highschool back then.

The audience liked it, so we started to rehearse regularly and sing other medieval songs as well. We were singing on many celebrations in our club after that, and we became quite popular. We were invited to official celebrations like 800-year anniversary celebrations of ancient cities (as top-act. Ok, you're not believing me, but it's true), and we were even singing in France and Italy. The next picture was in 1995 were we sang in front of some thousand people in Heilbronn (me is the one on the left).


If you were wondering how the traditional garbs look in color, here's another picture. This is an old shot of the entire miners club in front of the entrance to the ancient Frischglück iron ore mine.

And here's another picture of the ancient St. Georg's Chapel in my hometown. The chapel is near the castle and was build before 1290. It has precious frescos from about 1320 to 1340.

Cat-sitting

Hey, I'm in the great wilderness to take care of my Mom's cat. My Mom's on vacation for a week, so I'm here feeding and petting the cat.

My plan was to drive to Stuttgart every day for work, but it just didn't work. Usually it takes like 30 Minutes by car on the Autobahn (right, the thing with no speed limit), but yesterday I needed almost two and a half hour, so I decided to stay here for a litte vacation in the country.

The only thing I don't really like is no real internet access ... but I'll be back soon.

By the way, Sunday was a beautiful sunny day and my walking-season has started again. Yippie!

YES!!! Or: I just love Perl

During the last weeks my job has been utterly exhausting. I've just started to work for that company, and I had to port a quite complicated and sophisticated Java program to C#. I've done projects in both languages before, I can handle the languages, but I had absolutely no knowledge of the existing code. I mean, it was a completely new project for me, and I had to analyze it entirely to get the idea how it works. But the target device has many restrictions, so only about 20% of the C# language commands were available. A "simple" port wasn't possible. After spending 7 long and exhausting days (my first 7 days at that company), we decided to try a new approach.

We tried to run the Java program on the target device directly. It actually worked, but was ridiculously slow and just useless. No, that's not true. It was beyond useless. Imagine it like that: you hit the break in your car, but your car stops 4 minutes later, and during those 4 minutes you can neither use the steering wheel nor turn off the engine. So they decided to port it to C++.

I payed my bills with programming C++ before I started university, but I can hardly use it anymore. Shame on me! All I wanted to say is that the last days were very exhausting.

But at the start of this week, my boss assigned me a small project in Perl. Did I ever mention that I just love Perl? My friends even say it's my mother tongue, or some call me "the friendly perldoc".

I know that there are many people who hate perl, some say it's too cryptic or too complicated. Some say it's a write-only language (i.e. "you can't read what a program does by looking at its source code"). But, what the hell, it's a great language and I love it, really! If only life was as easy as Perl...

I finished the task in one afternoon, and that day was quite pleasant, and the first feeling of success at that company. After that day I was supposed to go back to C++. But my boss assigned me another tiny Perl task, so another pleasant day...

Yesterday my boss called me and it looks like I can drop the C++ project for now and start in a bigger Perl project. It sounds like heaven to me. My prayers have been heard!