Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

Dealing with Internet Explorer …

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Simple: Give up.

You heard me. Just give up. It absolutely has to be the worst browser I’ve ever had to deal with. I don’t know, there are lots of people using it, it’s a bulky browser, in my not so humble as it should be opinion, at the best of times. But when I start coding … well, it should just go away. And you can’t just ignore IE6 and 7 (IE 8 is a lot better than these two) because there are still too many people out there using old versions of IE. It’s a pain. I write some html, not a heck of a lot, and seeing that I’m using Linux to develop on accessing IE and testing with it is often a very out of my way process (not to mention illegal seeing that IE is bound to your copy of Windows and that without Windows you’re not actually allowed to use IE – at least, not as far as I understand). Grr, why must it be so broken? I can do html in a few minutes, and then often spend HOURS trying to make the most trivial of things work even remotely sanely in this piece of junk they call internet explode^H^Hrer.

End rant.

Direct Marketing Association – South Africa

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Whilst recently trying to track down yet another South African spam source I got directed to the DMA SA. Whilst the majority of spammers are not members of this association I’m pretty sure that this may help. The reason I say most is because I’ve dealt with my fair share of them (and even had some as clients), and this is the first time I got pointed to the DMA SA website at http://www.dmasa.org/ – a rather informative website.
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Using FireFox (3.5) to convert html to pdf

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

So I’ve been struggling to convert html to pdf. There are many attempts at this in the forms of perl scripts, some php dom parsers making use of pdflib or fpdf, and some of them even work … mostly. But without exception all of the solutions I’ve come across in the last month fails on gb2312 (chinese character sets). I’ve actually wanted to hit my head that the solution didn’t make itself apparent earlier … seeing that I’ve been opening the sample .html files with firefox for most of that month to see what it should look like. It’s been staring me in the face and I didn’t realize it.
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Stripping attachments out of email

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

So I developed the need to strip attachments out of emails … or rather, to get hold of the attachments and store them to disk.  A lot of googling later only one solution seemed to surface and seeing that I couldn’t get at metamail’s homepage and thus the packages I had to go another root.  So after posing the question in #glug.za on FreeNODE python once more came up.  This time I decided to just take the plunge and write some python …

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