Paul Hinks' Blog

One fairly persistent issue I have is some people I know insist on sending me emails from Windows mail (apparently Outlook is the worst offender) with the ‘Use Windows mail format’ option checked. This anti-social behaviour results in non-Windows users receiving attachments packaged up into a file called winmail.dat which they can’t open. Apparently this is just a wrapper around standard attachments that could be handled ok but MS prefer to use their own ’standards’ instead. Sometimes you can ask the mail sender to send the message in a standard format, but this is not always possible. I have done a little investigation and have discovered a few ways to deal with the problem.

Firstly, the OSX Mail app has an option to try viewing messages as alternate types – the option is under View|Message|Next Alternative option. This often manages to decode an attachment into plain text. If this fails there is a free application called Enough that you can drop the winmail.dat file onto and it seems to do a pretty good job of extracting the attachments from it. And finally there is a plug-in for Mail called Letter Opener which is expensive but handles the conversion inside Mail and make the attachments appear where they should be in the message. I’m guessing it’s expensive because it does a bunch of other things too – calendar conversion for one. It looks like it would be fairly to implement the attachment processing functionality on its own – I’m adding it to my to-do list of things to do on a quiet evening sometime.

I got a chance to investigate the strange access problems I found last week trying to scrape the iPhone Appstore. It looks to me like something has definitely changed on the server, but it’s hard to see what. My original script used curl with its default user string, and that seemed to suffer timeout problems on every page. So I by changed the agent string to the firefox one, which seemed to result in an immediate improvement, but it too started to suffer slowdowns as it progressed through the store. Finally I changed all timeouts to 5 minutes and it looks like every call returned successfully. So all I can think of is that requests that aren’t from the iPhone or iTunes are being served, but they’re being sent to the back of the queue. I don’t see much logic in all this, but the Apple do move in mysterious ways sometimes, and it’s always possible it’s a quirk rather than a policy decision. But the good news is that access is still being permitted at some level and we can go on cutting and dicing appstore content into something useful.

Not quite sure what’s going on with the AppStore. I just resumed my experiments and it appears that a couple of things have changed. Firstly calls from curl seem to be blocked – although changing the user agent seems to get round that. Why they would impose such a trivially bypassed hurdle is a bit of a mystery – surely if there is a target of a block there are better ways to keep them out, like ip address blocking. It is interesting that they aren’t moving to impose a total block from non-iTunes clients though, clearly that is a tacit admission that they are allowing store scraping at some level. More seriously, some of the browse URLs I was using previously don’t appear to work any more. I’m sure I can figure out what’s going on but I’m going to need more time than I have now to investigate. I’ll post back as soon as I figure it out.

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Had a discussion today with one of those people who gets all defensive when you mention that you use a Mac. I haven’t had one of those conversations in a while – most people don’t care, or they already know that the Mac is a better choice. I’ve been using a Mac for the best part of a decade now (since soon after the release of OSX in 2001) and the arguments started out being frequent and kind of fun quite soon became less frequent but rather tedious. I’m not going to re-hash the arguments here – the perceived higher cost (or “Apple tax” – c.f. “Microsoft tax”) and software compatibility issues, and even the use of Parallels as a case *against* a Mac (“you’ll only use it to run Windows anyway”) are incredibly boring and totally beside the point. I was a Windows developer for years. I know all about Windows. I still have to work on Windows for clients once in a while – and no I don’t try to convert them, unless there’s a pretty good reason to. I use a Mac because I like it – it does everything I need (and really well to boot) and I like the way it works. What really frustrates me is the implication that the Mac is trendy and therefore only people who can’t think for themselves would possibly use one. This kind of argument really annoys me, not least because I have met it lots of times over the years for different reasons – for example when I first started working on computers PCs were regarded as a fad (yes I’m old) and I was regarded with suspicion for advocating them over the minis and mainframes that the companies I worked in were using. I was also a strong advocate of Windows when that was released. On thing I will say is that back when they were considered subversive PCs were adopted by a small subset of leading edge opinion formers (mainly the more tech-savvy user and developer) and they gradually spread as people cottoned on to their advantages. I see a similar movement now with regard to people adopting Macs – many software developers, especially those on the leading edge of web development. use Macs as standard. I thought the argument was pretty much over, to be honest. I think the PC user now is like the Vax user I upset years ago when I said his beloved machine would be dead in five years time. Not that the PC will necessarily be dead in 5 years, but it’s certainly no longer the future of the industry. But as I said all this is boring. The next time someone questions my choice of OS I shall merely smile politely and let it pass.