Y! Mail Beta slower than snail mail?

I’m not sure how many people experience this, but some of my e-mail is really delayed in Yahoo! Mail Beta. Yesterday, I just received an e-mail message that was actually sent to me last Thursday. That’s actually slower than if my friend had wrote me a letter and physically mailed it to me via the post office! Now, if this was a one time occurrence, I’d chalk it up to some slow mail servers on the other end. However, I’ve been experiencing this for the past few months where random pieces of e-mail would be really slow.

So… goodbye Yahoo!

I had noticed a few weeks ago that Windows Live Mail now works in Firefox, so I figured I’d give WLM another try. I used WLM a while back and was pretty satisfied with it – until I switched to Mac. Back then, WLM only worked in IE, so I had no choice but to check out other alternatives.

Welcome back Windows Live Mail

While I was setting up e-mail, I figured I’d give AIM Mail a try too – especially since Rose works on the PM team over there now

A new challenger?

Will I stick with WLM or AIM Mail? Who knows? (I’m sure many of you are thinking “who cares?” )

Free Zooomr Pro account? I'm there!

I’m probably one of the last people in the blogosphere to take advantage of this offer, but here’s my post to get myself upgraded to a Zooomr Pro account. They offer 4GB / month of upload capacity – double the Flickr limit – so maybe when I run out over there, I can switch to Zooomr?

Hey Zooomr guys, if you really want me to embrace the service, how about an import function from Flickr so I can store all my photos on your site? (I think that would quickly bust my 4GB monthly allotment)

Oh, and you really gotta buy zoomr.com if you really want people to be able to find your service

I wish Microsoft Academy existed

Mini-MSFT has a post up about an idea he had – starting a 3 month bootcamp for people when they’re hired at Microsoft he calls “Microsoft Academy”. I think that’s a great idea, and one that many other industries/companies have had for a long time. If they implemented this and they accepted high school students, that would be awesome.

Wait a second, did I say high school students? Yup. For me, spending 3 years at University of Michigan to get a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering was mostly a waste of time. I learned a lot about low level computer architecture, but as far as software is concerned, I already knew half of it and the other half I would’ve been able to pick up in a few weeks anyways. (And of course, it turns out I haven’t worked in the hardware industry yet)

Now, if there was a Microsoft Academy and I could’ve enrolled in that out of high school, I would’ve been all set – technically that is. Socially… well, I’m still probably not quite there

Little tool to extract all files out of Sharepoint

We’ve been using Microsoft Sharepoint here at Plaxo to organize our projects and files. For those who have used Sharepoint, you know it’s a love/hate relationship

Anyways, we needed to get a copy of all the files in our Sharepoint site recently. Looking around on the web, we found a few solutions, but couldn’t really find one that did exactly what we wanted. So, I wrote up a quick little app to grab all the files we needed out of Sharepoint, while preserving Sharepoint’s directory structure. It’s a command line tool and it doesn’t have any options.

It’s really not that hard; here’s the source in case you’re interested:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.IO;
 
// replace this string with your Sharepoint content DB connection string
string DBConnString = “Server=YOURSHAREPOINTSERVER;Database=CONTENTDATABASE;Trusted_Connection=True;”;
 
// create a DB connection
SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(DBConnString);
con.Open();
 
// the query to grab all the files.
// Note: Feel free to alter the LeafName like ‘%.extension’ arguments to suit your purpose
SqlCommand com = con.CreateCommand();
com.CommandText = “select DirName, LeafName, Content from Docs where (LeafName like ‘%.doc’ or LeafName like ‘%.xls’ or LeafName like ‘%.pdf’ or LeafName like ‘%.ppt’) and Content is not NULL”;
 
// execute query
SqlDataReader reader = com.ExecuteReader();
 
while (reader.Read())
{
    // grab the file’s directory and name
    string DirName = (string)reader["DirName"];
    string LeafName = (string)reader["LeafName"];
 
    // create directory for the file if it doesn’t yet exist
    if (!Directory.Exists(DirName))
    {
        Directory.CreateDirectory(DirName);
        Console.WriteLine(“Creating directory: “ + DirName);
    }
 
    // create a filestream to spit out the file
    FileStream fs = new FileStream(DirName + “/” + LeafName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write);
    BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(fs);
 
    // depending on the speed of your network, you may want to change the buffer size (it’s in bytes)
    int bufferSize = 1000000;
    long startIndex = 0;
    long retval = 0;
    byte[] outByte = new byte[bufferSize];
 
    // grab the file out of the db one chunk (of size bufferSize) at a time
    do
    {
        retval = reader.GetBytes(2, startIndex, outByte, 0, bufferSize);
        startIndex += bufferSize;
 
        writer.Write(outByte, 0, (int)retval);
        writer.Flush();
    } while (retval == bufferSize);
 
    // finish writing the file
    writer.Close();
    fs.Close();
 
    Console.WriteLine(“Finished writing file: “ + LeafName);
}
 
// close the DB connection and whatnots
reader.Close();
con.Close();

Here’s my VS.NET 2005 project file. If you need help with the code, please let me know.

Politicians using the web

I opened up my e-mail this morning and promptly got a spam message from Chuck Poochigian’s Attorney General campaign. Not only did they probably buy my e-mail address from some less-than-desirable source, the e-mail is part of a smear campaign on the opponent. I don’t know if the claims in the article are true – and it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is the fact that they decided to send me this message. (I will admit that their URL is hilarious though: pooch4ag )

I guess in all reality, they probably don’t care how I’m going to vote. After all, I’m probably in the minority. I have to assume their target market is busy buying some v1agara and discovering some amazing diet pills

I heard a session of Forum the other day with Mr. Poochigian talking about the issues he stands for but I don’t really remember what he said. So we can figure he probably had a 50/50 shot with me. Now there’s no way I’m going to vote for this guy. Who’s running his PR? They should be fired.