catching up

ethan on 2003-04-03T08:00:22

I've been away from use.perl for a while which is usually a good indication that I was busy with something else. Not necessarily in this order:

Downage of my monitor: iiyama replaced it immediately
laziness (heh, busy with laziness)
more involved with C than Perl (I know, it's a shame)
configuring Linux from Scratch and no vim-blogger there

The last point is fixed now and this entry also serves as a test. While installing the necessary Perl-modules (quite a bunch, most notably SOAP::Lite with a horrendous prerequesite list) I received some failures in the CPAN.pm session but now can no longer reproduce which module this was. It was definitely something SSL-related but testing all the relevant ones in ~root/.cpan/build odesn't exhibit the error. I should definitely start logging the output of 'make' from CPAN.pm.

Meanwhile I was most interested to see that non-programmers seem to become aware of Mail::Transport::Dbx. A couple of days ago I received this:


    Good Morning,

    I found this address in a Google Search, because I am trying to retrieve
    some e-mails which I stupidly deleted.  Being an ordinary computer user and
    not a programmer, how do I effectively get to open my 47Mb file and extract
    the messages?

    What do I download and how should I run it?

    If you can solve this, I will be forever grateful.

    Thank you.

The background appears to be that - once deleting an email - Outlook Express places them in a file called "Deleted Items.dbx" but provides no means to retrieve them back (which I seriously doubt, but alas: with Microsoft, all bets are off). Being the patient chap I am, I wrote 30 lines of C, compiled the stuff and sent him the Windows-binary (scrutinously pointing out that it's not a virus). I haven't yet heard from him again, possibly because running the program required opening a dos-window and piping its output into a txt-file.