The World According to Marc

I was looking for a very simple plug-in architecture today so I “went a Google’n “.  Roy had a great little article (see “Add run-time functionality to your application by providing a plug-in mechanism” and “Search dynamically for plugins without Config Files”) on the how to build one that worked out perfectly.

Most articles, on any technical topic, seem to spend most of their time talking around the subject rather than giving me a solution I can actually use. I’m sure some will argue that this is because “theory is important” and that is all well and good. But sometimes I think it has more to too with proving the author’s intellectual superiority than some the reader’s education.  Roy does not seem to have this problem. And whenever I’m looking for a quick fix of just the facts, Roy always seems to have the answer.

Scott Jennings (a.k.a. “Lum the Mad”) is laughing at the misfortune of others. Now I’m laughing along with him.

I installed the corporate edition of Symantec AntiVirus for the first time yesterday. And aside from the poor quality of their documentation (my god this thing is confusing) I think I like it. But I found their licensing model quite amusing.

To license the product you go to a special website (the address for which is in .005 point type at the bottom of a page) and enter your license key. They then check that key and generate a license file, which they then proceed to email to you!

I found it odd that with the vast majority of viruses being sent by emails these days, an Anti-Virus company would be using attachments in their licensing scheme. This is especially true when you consider that a number of virus experts are pushing companies to outright ban file attachments at the mail server!

This got me to thinking about what it would be like were Symantec to take over the medical profession….

Patient: Doctor, do you have a cure for cancer?
Doctor: Yep. Just smoke 2 of these and call me in the morning.

I’ll save you from my extended version which included an AIDS prevention involving sex with 42 heroin addicts.

Ahhh! My eyes, my eyes! 

Exchange Server has a 32k limit to message delivery rules. No, not 32k per rule but 32k for all rules combined. This has been an annoying fact of life for Exchange users for a number of years now. If you were lucky you could get 40-50 rules per mailbox and while that was normally less than you wanted, it was enough to get by in a pinch.

But now that Microsoft has gone all “worldly” with Outlook 2003 and switched everything to Unicode things have gone from bad to worse. The problem is that text in Unicode is somewhere near twice the size of the same text in ANSI. So with the latest and greatest Exchange and Outlook combination we can now fit even fewer rules (by almost 50%) than before.

Well, isn’t that just wonderful in that make-my-email-a-painful-haemoid kind of way?