Ölbaum’s Delirium

Swiss International Air Lines is not doing well and is asking for help from the Swiss government, again. Fortunately, the procedure has been standardised last time it happened. It involves:

• Firing the current directors, giving them an indecent amount of money in compensation;
• Hiring a new board of directors, paying them an indecent amount of money each year;
• Renaming the company, by truncating its former name;
• Offering it an indecent amount of money to get it started.

Granted, this is nothing new. It was known in 2001, when Swissair was renamed Swiss, that it would happen again. What’s new however is a rumour concerning the composition of the new board of directors.

A major player in this year’s economical events is foreseen to bring Sw back to the top: Darl McBride, President and Chief Executive Officer of the SCO Group. In case the name rings a bell, the SCO Group is ill-known for a recent succession of hallucinated claims about the ownership of part of the Linux code, as well as a lawsuit against IBM accusing them of bringing stolen Unix code to Linux. In case it doesn’t ring any bell, don’t bother; someone has enough bells ringing in his cranium already, in spite of anything else. McBride is also believed to be the founder and president of the American Society for the Safekeeping of Harmful Organisations and Ludicrous Executives.

His strategy for Sw is expected to follow the same plan of action that brought SCO to its apogee this summer, including:

• Claiming ownership of the airplane trademark;¹
• Suing Boeing for stealing planes from Sw and selling them to Lufthansa;²
• Accusing other airlines of stealing secret memos from Sw, without which they would have never thought of making people pay to travel long distances by plane;³
• Enjoining Lufthansa passengers to pay a license fee of $5000 per hour of flight in an airplane, because it was stolen from Sw;⁴
• Accusing physics teachers of disclosing Sw trade secrets, like Bernoulli’s principle;⁵
• Removing one olive to the salads served for lunch in business class. Wait, I forgot, this has already been done.

With this plan, no doubt that Sw will be back in no time, ready for two more years of catastrophic management before asking for more money from the government.

# Posted by Ölbaum, evening time | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

jr and I were recently talking about how to make Microsoft Outbreak¹ send UTF-8 emails using the quoted-printable content transfer encoding². It seems that by default, Outbreak sends UTF-8 messages in Base64. Not only is it a waste of bandwidth — a quick test showed that an average UTF-8 message in French weights a third more in Base64 than in quoted-printable — but it is also problematic because some spam filters, especially those filtering mailing list posts, tend to give a high junk rating to Base64 messages on the grounds that an encoded attachment is probably a virus. Likewise, the recently released SpamSieve 2.0 can be configured to systematically flag Base64 HTML messages as spam.

Unsurprisingly, there is no setting in Outbreak to make it send quoted-printable UTF-8. This is because the problem is in the Exchange server. In Exchange mode, Outbreak sends messages using the MAPI³ interface, which leaves the burden of encoding to the server. And the server makes Base64. The million dollar question is therefore: how do you make Microsoft Exchange send UTF-8 emails using the quoted-printable content transfer encoding?

The short answer is: you can’t. The long answer is: it is not possible.

But if there’s only one thing we remember from the Mathematics courses we followed during our studies, it is this: when you don’t know how to solve a problem, try and reduce it to a previously solved form. In our case, to prevent the spam filters from rejecting our emails, we only need to prevent Exchange from sending them in Base64. And this is easy, provided we are properly equipped:

First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy Exchange server, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
— Armaments 2:18-21

# Posted by Ölbaum, late morning | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since Steve Jobs unveiled Mac OS X 10.3 at WWDC 2003, several web sites started discussing an apparently new feature called Expose. As no such thing is mentioned on Apple’s web site, it called for a bit of investigation. The results showed that the sites in question are referring to Exposé, the new window switching mechanism of Panther, and led to a saddening conclusion: many webmasters are running their site on a tight budget and cannot afford the eighth bit necessary to turn their old, useless ASCII character sub-sub-sub-set into something useful, closer to this ancient but none the less wonderful invention we call writing.

Therefore, I decided to help you, webmasters with a tight budget, by releasing the 8-THB 4000. The 8-THB 4000 is the extra bit everybody’s missing and I am giving it away free of charge¹.

But that’s not all! If you order within the next millennium, I’ll be adding no less than 51 ready to use packets of eight bits, suitable for writing in many European languages. Don’t be mistaken, these are not your every day bytes. They have been carefully selected and manually sorted to guarantee first-rate readability as well as a high degree of scalability. Moreover, they come with a handy user manual, complete with examples of how to use them in words and expressions borrowed from foreign languages.

Are you tired of your 7-bit ASCII? Well, in any case I am, so wait no more and take advantage of this incredible opportunity! All you have to do is save the following characters in a safe place, along with their user manual below.

 The 8-THB 4000

Á  À  Â  Ä  Ã  á  à  â  ä  ã
É  È  Ê  Ë     é  è  ê  ë
Í  Ì  Î  Ï     í  ì  î  ï
Ó  Ò  Ô  Ö  Õ  ó  ò  ô  ö  õ
Ú  Ù  Û  Ü     ú  ù  û  ü
Ç  ç  Ñ  ñ  Ø  ø  ß

 The 8-THB 4000: User Manual

Using the 8-THB 4000 is easy. First, write all the letters of the foreign word that you can type with your keyboard. Then copy-paste the missing characters from the 8-THB 4000. Here are a couple of examples to get you started:

apritif — apéritif
dj vu — déj vu — déjà vu
tte--tte — tête--tte — tête-à-tte — tête-à-tête

Now try yourself with the following words. Don’t worry, it can be daunting at first, but you’ll get used to it in no time.

à la carte
à propos
exposé
maître d’hôtel
Schweizerkäse²
übergeek

# Posted by Ölbaum, late morning | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)