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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!

About two or three weeks ago we had quite much snow in Stuttgart. I wanted to blog about it, but I was too busy. So, here's our belated winter madness. This picture is me and my roomie, when we walked back home after being at a club early in the morning, amazed by the snow like little children.

Where I grew up as a kid we had much snow every winter. And we kids liked it because we weren't able to go to school when there was snow like 3 foot high. Snow up to your hips was nothing really special, and the snow stayed for months.

Here in Stuttgart we don't have much snow. Stuttgart is located in a valley, and the temperatures down in the valley are mild. In the last few years we had about two or three days of snow, and usually not more than 2 or 3 inch. But this year there was quite much snow for Stuttgart. I don't think we had that much show since I moved here in 1999.

Sometimes I'm happy that I don't have a car. But only sometimes.

The new castle coated with cream cheese frosting.

Now here are the pictures I took with my crappy cellphone cam. I'm surprised how proud he stands the snow.


William on the horse and the lion with a refreshing facial mask.

Please mind the letters that spell "Star Boy"...

Another angle of the center.

This is my street.

And here the famous Hoppenlau Friedhof that I had mentioned before on my blog. This time dressed in the latest winter fashion.

Is it sane when someone takes self pics at a graveyard??? I hope so.

Here's another impression of the Hoppenlau Friedhof in winter.


I know, you guys have way more snow right now. Post your pics to show me what snow really means. :-)

Today my friend Thomas and I met the Duo Sorellas, two artists who are in a show in Stuttgart.

Thomas and I were at a press show two days before the show officially started. It's a mixed show with many different artists. They showed only parts of the actual show, just to get an impression. It was quite amazing. It was one of those moments when I thought "Wow, you wouldn't expect such a great show in Stuttgart". For example there was another great Duo, two mind readers. And their show is very funny as well. She was blindfolded on stage while she was "reading" my insurance number from my insurance card. I mean, if it wasn't me I would say it was a fake ... but she couldn't know my insurance number, right?

Anyway, today we met the Sorellas, the two guys on the pictures in this post. We recorded about 15 minutes, but we were talking for more than an hour. They are very cordial and lovely guys. I'm always surprised how nice (quite) famous people are in interviews.

Those two have a very good reputation in Germany (and Europe) and were performing on quite famous stages, and also in Circus Roncalli for a few years in a row.

They're both openly gay. They're best friends, but they're not a couple. They told us about their experiences in different cities, which was very interesting. And they said that Stuttgart is one of the most gay-friendly cities they've been to.

Tomorrow we're going to see the regular show, and I'm looking forward to meeting them again. And I'm happy to see the other artists perform as well. I suppose this show will be fabulous.

I'm sure this post is boring for my regular readers, but it's about a workaround for a bug that kept me busy for some hours, and I didn't find any solution on the web that worked for me. I found some people that had the same problem, but the workaround that worked for them didn't work for me - which actually almost freaked me out. So, I hope this post is useful to anybody who has the same problem. I tried to write it as detailed as possible, in case there are people that aren't very familiar with a command shell and all that stuff.
If this post was helpful, please leave a note. Thanks. :)

A friend of mine bought a macbook recently, and he wanted to import mails from his outlook on his old PC to mail.app which came with his mac. We figured out that there's no way to do that directly. But you can import the mails into Thunderbird (which is my favourite mail program, by the way), and then you can import those to apple's mail.

At least that's what we were thinking. But it didn't work. Each folder contained only one big mail, it didn't create seperate entries for each mail. First I thought its a matter of line ending, since Unix and Windows use different characters to indicate the end of a line. Recoding Thunderbird's mail files didn't work.

I knew that the mbox file format that Thunderbird uses to store the mails is like this: Each folder is one file that contains all mails of the folder, and the beginning of a mail is marked by a line that starts with "From " and then some additional information. (Mind the space after "From", it's very important).

Most programs that use mbox files don't care about the data in the line after the "From ". A typical line in Thunderbird would look like that:
From - Mon 29 Dec 1997 23:45:58

Googling showed that mail.app is picky about the format of the From-Line, and there were some posts where people said that you need to replace the "-" by the address of the sender. I wrote a perl program that changed the From lines to something like this:
From sender@host.tld Mon 29 Dec 1997 23:45:58

But still, it didn't work. Still only one HUGE mail in each folder. It seemed like this worked for everybody except me. But I figured out that the date was not correctly formatted. Mail.app seems to expect the date in another format. It needs to look like this (mind the different order of the fields in date):
From sender@host.tld Mon Dec 29 23:45:58 1997

So, I wrote this perl program that fixes the mbox files, and finally it worked. This script changes the From line to the format that mail.app needs. It adds the actual email address of the sender, and changes the date (if neccessary).

If anybody has the same problem, here's how it works:

1. Save the file mboxfix to your desktop. But you probably want to skip this step after you've read the update at the bottom of this post.
2. Go to your Thunderbird mail dir (on windows it's probably c:\Documents and Settings\ YourUsername\ Applications\ Thunderbird\ Profiles\ default\ StrangeChars\ Mail, and on Mac its most likely /Users/ YourUsername/ Library/ Thunderbird/ Profiles/ default/ StrangeChars/ Mail. (I've inserted blanks for better line wrapping results))
3. For each mail folder there are three files or folders, e.g. Inbox, Inbox.msf, Inbox.sbd. Only the Inbox (without extensions) is important. Copy those files (one for each mail folder) to your desktop as well.
4. Open a Terminal on your Mac. (Applications -> Accessories (probably, I don't know the English name) -> Terminal).
5. Type cd Desktop and hit enter.
6. Type chmod 755 mboxfix and hit enter.
7. Now do this with each mailbox file (this example uses the mail folders Inbox, Sent, Private and Office. If you have different names, and/or more mail folders, alter the command to your needs:
   ./mboxfix Inbox Sent Private Office
8. This creates the files Inbox.mbox, Sent.mbox, Private.mbox and Office.mbox
9. Open Mail, go to "Import Messages", select "Import from Other", and point it to your desktop. Make sure to import only the files with the ending .mbox.
10. You're done. Clean up your desktop and say "thank you, Rian". :-)

Update (March, 25th): (see also post from March 25th, 2007)
Lars Kobbe created a Droplet out of my perl script. Just download my script wrapped up in Lars' Droplet here (i.e. skip step 1), and replace step 4 to step 7 by just dragging your mbox files on this Droplet.

Yup, I'm already in 2007, while my readers from America will stay in 2006 for at least 6 additional hours. Ok, guys, don't be afraid of 2007, it's fine, you can come over. :-)

"Gutes Neues!" (literally "good new one") is the German "Happy New Year" wish after midnight, when the "slide" has been successful.

Same procedure as every year ...

"Dinner for one" is a short TV show that's on TV in Germany each and every New Year's Eve since 1963. It's in the Guinnes Book of Records for being the most often broadcasted TV show ever worldwide. I can't imagine a New Year's Eve without this show. Most Germans watch this show every year, it has a very high audience rating and is on many channels on New Year's Eve. It's about the 90^th Birthday of Miss Sophie, she has invited her 4 closest friends. But her friends have died years ago, so the Butler plays their part. Thus, he drinks four times more alcohol and gets quite drunk. It starts slowly, but get's better every glass of booze.

The introduction is in German, the show itself is in English. For those of you that don't speak German, here's a translation of the first minutes:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, we're at the country estate of Miss Sophy. The last name of this ancient noble family will be concealed, due to confidentiality. Miss Sophie invited her 4 closest friends for a birthday dinner, and I'm going to explain the seating arrangements to you. Miss Sophy will sit at the head of the table, Sir Toby on her left, next to him Admiral von Schneider. On her right Mr. Pommeroy and Mr. Winterbottom. There's one problem, it's her 90^th birthday, her friends have already died a long time ago. She has burried the last one 25 years ago. Nevertheless, she doesn't want to forgo her birthday party, and because her guests can't attend the party (for obvious reasons) the butler fills in, which worked quite well during the last years. It will work again this year, because the procedure is exactly the same each year. James will ask 'Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophy', and she will answer 'Same procedure as every year, James'. With emphasis on 'every year'. You'll see the strangest birthday dinner ever, enjoy the party.

I know that some of my daily reads have problems right now, that's why I wish everybody a good, healthy, safe, successful and happy New Year, filled with love and laughter. May our futures be splendid, and may our dreams come true!
Picture of fireworks found on pixelquelle.de, taken by Pius Schuler.

On December 22th, I was on my way to my Mom. I had just left my apartment, and was walking to the closest bus stop to take a bus to central station, when I saw a guy driving towards me on his bike. Suddenly he smiled at me, and after a while I finally realized who it was: my former best friend Udo. I haven't seen him or even talked to him in almost 8 years. Seeing him again felt so good and made me very happy.

Although we didn't talk for such a long time, I felt very close to him. He is (or at least was) one of the very few people whom I can tell my problems openly. I'm very good in acting like everything is ok, even when I'm sad. Most people buy it. But I couldn't trick him, he always knew when something's bothering me.

Our friendship was very close. We saw each other almost every day. We were living 45 minutes apart, but I think I was able to drive it even being blindfolded. We were both living in small villages in the mountains, and we were driving to Stuttgart together at least twice each week. We hung out in clubs together each weekend. We also visited many themeparks--he's also addicted to roller coasters.

I also remember warm summer nights where we were sitting on meadows, and watching the stars.

When I moved to Stuttgart, he moved to another city. And he was working while I was free and vice versa.

You've probably seen me wearing a necklace on pictures, or my real-life friends have seen it for sure. It's a foreign coin from Spain with a hole in the middle on a black leather lace. He gave it to me a long, long time ago. I'm still wearing it almost every day in rememberance of our friendship. I should have showed it to him last week. I don't think he knows that I'm still wearing it. But probably he has seen it anyways.

Unfortunately I didn't have much time because I had to catch the bus. He turned around and walked to the bus station together with me. He's moved to Stuttgart, and is now living within walking distance. I was surprised he still knew my cell phone number by heart. There was no time to give me his current number. But he said he's going to call me after Christmas so we can meet up. I hope he really does. I would LOVE to get in touch with him again.