29 May 2004

Oops, I did it again... Oops, I did it again... Microsoft have been in touch regarding some of the comments I've made in previous blog posts regarding mail and specifically importing mbox format mails into Outlook. Specifically I said "Evolution also uses the somewhat antiquated Unix standard of MBOX for mail files, a standard that Microsoft are forbidden to support because of anti-trust issues.". I followed this up in a post earlier today saying that I presumed Microsoft were not allowed to support MBox format emails, presumably because of anti-trust issues again. I lay myself prostrate at the feet of the great god of journalism for making assumptions and not checking my facts. Microsoft are not restricted in the formats they can support, and indeed Outlook supports importing of data from Eudora which uses the mBox format so I was categorically wrong. My apologies to Microsoft for this, and I promise to do more research or more categorically state when something is my opinion. Talking of which, I said that the mBox standard was antiquated, and the chap (or it could be a chapess, they want to remain anonymous and it's in my interests from the books and work point of view to honour that request) took a little offense to that. Specifically the person in question said that they didn't feel it was fair to call something that is still in use by modern apps such as Apples 'Mail' and Eudora antiquated. I've gotta disagree. The mbox format is very old, old enough I think to call it an antique. It's also not very well structured and definately not cutting edge in terms of repurposing data contained in emails. A format like XML for example would, is more up to date, can be validated with a schema and I think would be a much better idea. mBox is indeed still supported in many current apps, but that's just because it's a defacto standard. Something being a standard though doesn't necessarily imply that its right, good, useful, or scalable. Just my opinion.   9:27:38 PM    comment [] Take that Jobsey! Microsoft look to kill Apple, once and for all. Just got this from the Denver Post site, via a Slashdot news posting Microsoft to undercut iPod price with player Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, will begin selling portable music players for as much as 80 percent less than Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod. The Microsoft-branded devices will "look and feel" as good as the iPod for as little as $50, said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN at Microsoft Corp., at the Goldman Sachs fifth annual Internet Conference in Las Vegas. The iPod sells for $249 to $499. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., will release a number of music players when it launches its online music service later this year, giving customers more choices than Apple, Mehdi said. 8:11:32 PM    comment [] XBOX is back XBOX is back Well it is in my house, at least. I got an XBox the day they came available here in the UK, and paid the ridiculously exhorbitant price Microsoft charged. It looked like the future of home entertainment in many ways and from a technology point of view the possibilities seemed endless. XBox includes an Ethernet socket after all, so if Microsoft had decided to include USB sockets for a keyboard, a web browser and a cut down Outlook they would have had a great convergent device in living rooms around the world for music playing, gaming, web browsing and email. Alas, they dropped the ball somewhat. The games were also quite dissapointing, and so last year I gave it, and my entire game collection away to my 10 and 14 year old cousins. They still love me for that one. After seeing what a few other bloggers have been up to with it online though, getting together for gaming sessions on a Saturday night via XBox live, I decided to drop a seventh of my monthly pay cheque on a new machine, Xbox live starter kit (includes subscription to XBox live), a few games, a spare controller and a digital optical audio out cable to connect to my home cinema audio system. I'm in love with XBox all over again. In the time that I've been away the games seem to have improved. There was a strong push initially from XBox developers to make the games as real as possible, and that in my opinion just didn't equate to fun. I'm a big Nintendo fan and I love the attention Nintendo and their legions of Japanese developers pay to the old prime directive of playability. Well, the XBox developers seem to have caught on. I got the latest version of Project Gotham Racing (Project Gotham Racing 2) and it's awesome. It's a fantastic driving game on it's own, but the developers have really added a lot ot fun elements to it in the form of new types of driving challenge and so on. Best of all though XBox Live really brings the machine and it's games to life. Now I can while away the odd spare moment racing a car around the streets of various worldwide cities and at the end of the race compare my times to those of people online. I can even download recordings of those people's races to see just how they managed to trounce me score wise. Taking the machine online to actually compete against other people is also amazing. I've been playing PC online games for about as long as they have been around but the XBox online experience is just so much more intuitive. No more hunting around for just the right server to play on, just click quick game and woosh, you're in a server with a bunch of other eager racers ready to go. Now I can't wait to see what Microsoft do with XNA.   7:44:03 PM    comment [] The continuing email dilemma... The continuing email dilemma... In perhaps the first post I made to this blog I mentioned that while Linux had made it simple to go from Microsoft tools to open-source/free tools, going in the reverse direction was not so easy. A case in point is my email. It had been really easy to convert everything into first Microsoft Evolution (Microsoft's Outlook beater on the Mac) format, then Apple Mail format, and finally pure mbox format for use with Ximian's Evolution. You can pretty much import any standard known to man into that application, but don't even think about exporting. So, I have a ton of email still sitting in mbox format files on my server that I increasingly need to get hold of. I had put it out of my head for a while (like all the receipts I have to key into our home accounting system) but recently it's been popping back in more and more. I still don't have a solution though, and so when a chap dropped me a note from the blog asking how I'd got on, it spurred me to look into this some more. First up, the mbox format seems pretty simple and open. In fact, it's so simple and such a large standard on Unix and Linux based systems that I'm amazed Microsoft have not yet written a converter for it. Probably something to do with anti-trust issues no doubt. That by the way is a curious one isn't. The group of people out there that religiously preach about how we should all be free to write whatever code we want, and that we should all open and share it have through their actions denied one of the largest development teams in the world (Microsoft) the right to implement certain features and functionality in their own software since they call it "anti-competitive". Free software is great. The free software movement ... I don't think so! I digress, back to the mbox format. Basically what you have is a text file containing mails. New mails start on a line beginning with FROM:, and end when an emtpy line followed by the end of the file, or an empty line followed by a FROM line is met. Mail clients are supposed to prevent any confusion by prepending any lines beginning with FROM in the email itself with a > sign. Simple enough. Immediately following FROM we have a wealth of headers and options related to the email message which all must conform to the RFC822 standard, which has been around for yonks. If any of you suffer from insomnia, you HAVE to google for this and download it. And that's it. It's really straight forward. So now I'm looking at writing an importer. Ideally I'd like to do this in .NET so later on I'm going to take a look at the Office SDK for Visual Studio.NET and see what can be done. Wish me luck. 7:23:08 PM    comment []

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