Old Adidas Ad

Somehow the song for the old Adidas advert made it's way into my Ipod. It is an awsome song and a cool ad. You can watch it here: http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1586/

So right now I'm sitting here debating whether I should try to overcome my natural scepticism for Itunes (which is apparently the only source for the song)...

Mass Effect

It actually looks really intesting. Generally I don't find that BioWare have made any good games (no, Knights of the Old Republic sucked. I don't care what you think, it sucked. Jade Empire wasn't equally sucky, but still left you a bit disapointed). When I first saw articles about the upcoming Mass Effect I was to say the least sceptical. After having seen this video I must admit that I am a bit interested.

I removed my FeedMap

So, I removed my FeedMap. I really didn't intend to, but since it was possible to submit a blog using an adress but not possible to update the location without adding a Geo-tag to the rss (which is generated by BlogSpot of course) I really had no choice.

Sucks to have one strategy for submittin a new blog and another for updating. Thats minus -100 User Experience points for FeedMap! Shame on you.

CDO and MAPI vs. C#

In a wild side-project I have started investigating how to extract appointment information from an Exchange server. To be honest this work is more like archeology (often resulting in dead links to some long forgotten Microsoft or MSDN page) than any other form of... -logy.

After having looked at the MAPI implementation on the Windows side (mapi32.dll) I found myself reeeeally reluctant to do Interop against this .dll. Any documentation and/or samples are at best provided for C++ (not really a problem, just boring after having idled around in managed programming the last few years) and MCF (now this is a problem).

At first I glanced at the Mapi33 wrapper around Mapi32.dll, the price tag however quickly persuaded me to start looking in another direction. $1000 might seem like a lot of money for a wrapper around one single dll, but I'm sure the guy deserves it, personally I'm not that into this side-project yet.

Turns out I don't need that. The CDO (Collaboration Data Objects) provides a wrapper around the MAPI interface and exposes a lot of the objects. A simple interop to CDO.dll I can live with.

Only problem now is that we are back in Interop/COM-hell. At first I used the as operator in C# to cast stuff to the right type (since all types are object when you interop). What I did forget was that a new instance is created every time. This did take some while to set straight.

So, what I did at first was:

// Create session and logon
MAPI.Session session = new MAPI.Session();
session.Logon(name, password, true, true, this.Handle.ToInt64(), false,
String.Format("{0}\n{1}", server, mailbox));

// Get the folder
MAPI.Folder inboxFolder = session.Inbox as MAPI.Folder;

// Enumerate messages
MAPI.Message message = (MAPI.Message)(inboxFolder.Messages as MAPI.Messages).GetFirst(null);
while (message != null)
{
// do stuff with the message
message = (MAPI.Message)(inboxFolder.Messages as MAPI.Messages).GetNext();
}

Do yo see whats wrong here? Cause I didn't at first. Hint, as I said above, a new object is created every time you call get on a property. So, the MAPI.Messages object I get in the GetFirst-line, is not the same as I get in the GetNext-line. In this case it makes no difference, but when we start playing around with the Messagefilter we have a problem. The GetFirst-call creates a forward only pointer in the messages object that is then used by the GetNext-call. By calling the inboxFolder.Messages for every step, we get an infinite loop here (since every call to messages creates a new instance of and that new instance has a pointer that points to the first message in the list)....

The code above should be:

// Create session and logon
MAPI.Session session = new MAPI.Session();
session.Logon(name, password, true, true, this.Handle.ToInt64(), false,
String.Format("{0}\n{1}", server, mailbox));

// Get the folder
MAPI.Folder inboxFolder = session.Inbox as MAPI.Folder;

// Enumerate messages
MAPI.Messages messages = (MAPI.Messages)inboxFolder.Messages;
message = (MAPI.Message)messages.GetFirst(null);
while (message != null)
{
// do stuff with the message
message = (MAPI.Message)messages.GetNext();
}

A subtle but important difference that is.

So, the moral of the story is:

• You get lazy after having played around in Managed space for too long.
• I still don't like COM.
  

Hooked on Heroes

After having watched more than 10 episodes in less than a week I think it is time to be honest about it. I'm hooked on the tv-series Heroes. Good thing is that I have two accomplices (not named here, but you know who you are Stoffe and Tove).


Anyway, it's actually really good and I do recommend it...

Urville

I saw a short documentary on autistic people and especially on autistic people with savant characteristics. Most of the documentary featured a man namned Gilles Terhin who had out of his head created the imaginary city Urville. His feeling for details and his obsession with drawing this really produced some amazing pictures and views of his city. I was very impressed with the scenery in his pictures, the sheer amount of detail and the creative vision of this city. Is this a paradox, an autistic person with a vivid imagination? I dunno, but I liked it and could not resist buying his book that contained a lot of (maybe all?) of the drawings of Urville.
By the way, I wrote this post a few months back but didn't publish it then, can't remember why, but I'm doing it now.

I'm a Bongo, Bongo man

I got a pair of Bongos! Really cool instrument, too bad I suck on playing instruments. But I'm gonna give it a try, really put my back into it so to speak. First of all I need to find someone who can teach me the basic strikes and rythms to work with.
Note: Bongos shown in the picture are not the Bongos presently in my possesion.

I'm a Bongoman!