...more recent posts
Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003
winmail.dat
From time to time you may receive an email that says, "Check this out!", or "This picture is hilarious". But instead a a gif, jpeg, or some other recognizable file format, the attachment is a mysterious "winmail.dat" file.
Microsoft, being dissatisfied with mime encoding or uuencoding, has decided to invent their own method of attaching files to emails. Oh joy! I'm sure this is purely for my benefit, and has nothing to do with an attempt to undermine open standards and transparent protocols.
I've been doing my best to train Outlook users to check off the uuencode option, but I've found a new problem. Outlook is more than just an email program, it's a personal information manager. It handles schedules, to-do lists, contact database, etc. One can "forward" a contact, or a meeting schedule, or some other tidbit of Outlook information. This stuff is always sent in a winmail.dat.
My first idea to work around this was to forward those messages to a special email address tied to Outlook. Thus I could retain Eudora, which has served me faithfully since the mid-nineties, and is not a huge, gaping security hole, as my primary email client. But noooooooooo, you can't forward winmail.dat files. They must be sent directly from one Outlook client to another Outlook client. If Eudora is an intermediary, the winmail.dat is unintelligible at the recipient Outlook client. Nice, job Microsoft.
I came up with other ideas for workarounds, such as having two clients (Eudora and Outlook) service my pop account. But nothing that I could actually live with.
But then I found a man of God who is actively working to chip away at Evil. His program pulls apart the winmail.dat files into their original constituent components, and actually makes them useable. Can I get an "amen"?
"Aggressive Press Corps"
G. Dubya held his tenth solo press conference today. In the post-conference wrap-up, David Asman of Fox News Channel, said "But he sort of rose to the occasion when challenged by an aggressive press corps." In what alternate universe does this group of lap dogs appear to be aggressive?
In the pre-war solo press conference, Bush let it slip that "this is scripted". Yeah, we're talking about aggressive press corps. So I watched this one closely to see signs of scripting. A teleprompter would make it too obvious, but there are other telltales.
As with the March 6th solo, Bush seemed to be calling on the press in a pre-ordained order. He allowed not one follow-up, and got snippy at one reporter for interrupting with a request for a follow-up. Sacre bleu, speaking out of order at a press conference! At long last, does this aggressive press corps have no sense of decency?
Prior to most questions, the Dubster looked down to his podium in an apparent move to read his scripted answer while the scripted question was being asked. I'm just guessing about that, but it was a very consistent affectation. At times during an answer he looked down, as if looking for a missing talking point, and then resumed his answer with more vigor. He seemed to be trying to mask this downward looking guesture by pretending to be gassy. Chug too many O'Doul's this morning, Mr. Dubya?
This was not a press conference. This was a scripted series of monologues. And those were not questions, they were scripted cues for the monologues. Aggressive press corps, my ass, Mr. Asman.
older posts...