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A few month ago I’ve written about an old Sci-Fi movie called “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. There seems to be some people working on Firefox who like this movie, too. If you have Firefox 3, type

about:robots

in the address bar:



Look what the page title says

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Here’s the second installment of the SwyxWare v6.12 feature blog posts. Similar to part 1, this change was rather easy, too. But in the end it cost more time than we anticipated.

One of the smallest features, in regard to implementation and testing effort is having the voicemail audio length shown in the subject. We realized that by changing this string in one script file from

"Voicemail from %n %u"

to "Voicemail from %n %u, Duration: %l"

You can use these placeholder in own ECR scripts when sending emails. Stay tuned for more v6.12 feature descriptions :-) [Original post on Tuesday, June 24th 2008. Repost Wednesday, June 25th after web site database problem]

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The Microsoft Malware Protection Team which is responsible for the Malicious Software Removal Tool running each month during Windows-Update) reports that this month they added detection and removal of some worm types targeting online game passwords. And they found some:

“After its first day in MSRT, Taterf components had been removed from over 700,000 machines! For comparison, Win32/Nuwar (aka ‘Storm worm’) was removed from less than half that in its first month.”

After one week over 1.2 million machines had been disinfected. Mind-boggling

[Original post on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008. Repost Wednesday, June 25th after web site database problem]

To start the week with a positive message: SwyxWare v6.12 is done.

Now our usual procedure takes place. Our distributors have already been informed. Tomorrow the release will be announced in Swyx Partnernet together with download links for our partners. At the end of the week the public download will be available. We do this three-step release to give distributors and partners a chance to prepare before their customers get the new version.

Technically it’s a bugfix release. Nevertheless, we included some new features, too. There’s SwyxIt! Dialer mode for SwyxPhone S315. That’s a new mode SwyxIt! can run with. It allows initiating a call on an S315 phone logged in with the same user account as SwyxIt!. It’s not full-featured CTI. You have to use a SwyxPhone Lxxx for that. Then we have SwyxIt! Web Extension which is a new user interface control to show a web page inside SwyxIt! depending on certain call states. SwyxIt! Messenger is a simple instant messaging feature built into SwyxIt!. And, by the...

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Mozilla tries to set a world record with Firefox 3 download day which starts today 19:00 CEST.

Esbjörn Svensson, one of the most talented and influential Jazz pianists of our time, founder of Swedish jazz trio E.S.T., died during a scuba diving accident two days ago. I still cannot believe it.

I had the privilege to see E.S.T. performing live many years ago in Cologne and last year here in Dortmund.

My thoughts are with his wife and children and his friends from E.S.T. Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström.

Yesterday while zapping through the TV channels I stayed a few minutes at ZDF where “How smart is Germany” was running, another one of these silly game shows. The host asked the following question:

I buy a ticket for the European soccer championship for 50€. I sell it for 60€, buy it back for 70€ and sell it again getting 80€. How much money do I earn? 0, 10, 20 or 30€

From the studio audience and the people participating via phone or online only about 25% knew the correct answer, If I remember correctly. In case you’re as fit in mathematics as most of the game show viewers yesterday, the answer is 20€.

And this post is all you’ll hear from me about soccer and Euro2008.

Hint for software developers. In Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 you can instruct Windows Error reporting to always create a process memory dump by setting this registry value in either

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps

All details here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb513638(VS.85).aspx

This is useful because per default Windows Error Reporting does not create a dump for every error.

I don't know if the guy is brave or suicidal:

If the embedded video does not work try this link

Ausnahmsweise mal ein deutschsprachiger Eintrag. Ich las soeben, das am Wochenende hier in der Stadt zwei Tankstellen ausgeraubt wurden. Man vermutet, das es in beiden Fällen der gleiche Täter war. Warum ich das erwähne? Der Artikel sagt, beim ersten Überfall hätte man eine dreistellige Summe erbeutet, beim zweiten eine vierstellige. Die Pointe?

Today is May 25th, also known as Towel Day. Everybody knows "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe". I spare you the quote about towels. You probably know that. But here are two from a completely different project:

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.  

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

They're from "Last Chance to see", a companion book to a BBC radio series, a documentary about endangered species Douglas Adams made together with zoologist Mark Carwardine.

Have a nice day. And don't forget your towel

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As stated in the first part of this two part "series" one of the drawbacks of the approach to run an ECR script for every outgoing calls is the special dialing prefix to use. This part describes how to circumvent this restriction. Note: If you haven't read part 1 I suggest that you read it before continuing with this one.

Sometimes customers ask if it's possible to let SwyxServer execute an ECR script for outgoing calls. The short answer is:

No, that's not possible. ECR scripts run for incoming calls to SwyxWare users only.

There's a longer answer to this question with a result you might not expect...

People often argue that open source software is much more secure because anybody can review the source code and find problems. That be not possible with closed source software like Windows. A nonsense argument.

Theories are valid until a counter-example is found.

Do you remember this from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe?:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

You can now experience that a little bit. Microsoft released a preview of it's WorldWide Telescope software. But don't try this at work. You probably won't get anything done today