After being warned several times for exceeding my Exchange mail quota limit by the kind sysadmins, I found that I can directly save email in my Ms Outlook Local Folder. Since then, I don’t have the need to regularly delete mails. The local folder slowly grows like a champion kid which drank Nespray milk everyday, until one day Outlook spit this message to me:

“The file MyLocalFolder.pst has reached its maximum size. To reduce the amount of data in this file, select some items that you no longer need, then permanently (shift + del) delete them.”

There’s a limit of 2GB for the size of an .OST or .PST file (the “local folder” file). You need to delete some items when you reach this limit. The fudged up thing is, I can’t even view the items in my Inbox, Sent folder, or whatever. How can I Shift+Delete if I can’t select them first? So, seems like, you cannot do anything when it reaches the limit. In short, the solution is, to make the file smaller so that you can open it, then only you can view your items and delete them.

To make it smaller, you have two options. First, a true way of the h4×0rzz, fire-up you hex editor, directly edit the PST file. Just remove some portion of the file to make the size smaller. Second, for mere mortals, use this tool called PST2GB (download). It will randomly (I think) pick some portion of the file and delete them.

Do take note that removing some part of the file means that some mail or task or calendar items will be deleted. That’s the price that I’m willing to pay, since most of my mails are garbage anyway :) But after doing this, the file would most probably be corrupted and you can’t open it in Outlook. So, next is to repair it. Use SCANPST (download) to fix the PST file. This tool should already be in your installer CD, but I don’t have the CD with me, so I downloaded it.

It may take some time to complete both process, since the file is a whopping 2GB in size. But if all went fine, you can redeem back (almost) all your happiness and joy of life, embedded in attachments forwarded by your true friends. You know what’s a “true friend” right? The ones who replied back to you after receiving those “true friend” chain mail; those are your true friends.

p.s: Add comment to this entry, if you are my true friend ;)

In real life, I’m a shy guy. Really. Shy guys like me always have problem when having to communicate with people. Which makes living a bit hard, because you know, you have to live among people. Well, okay, maybe you can live with goats, but I heard they doesn’t smell very nice. Even if you are okay with that, it’s quite hard if you don’t know their language, and don’t eat grass.

Okay, lets get back to the topic about living with people. When you’re living with them, you have to talk to them occasionally. I think, the correct manner is to look at people’s face — particularly their eyes — when talking to them. Well, I got issues with that. I always feel that I’m staring at them when I do that, or I feel they are feeling that I am staring at them. After a while, I’ll feel awkward, and move my eyes to look elsewhere.

The tension doubles when that particular person I’m talking to is from the opposite gender, i.e female. In attempt to avert the eye contact, I notice sometimes that I tend to direct my sight at somewhere between her chin and her chest. Somewhere at the lower neck. Sometime they notice, sometime they don’t. But if she noticed, she’d thought that I’m looking at her.. err.. breast. The she’ll feel embarrassed, I feel embarrassed, we both feel weird.

No, I am not looking at them. I am a very decent man (and quite handsome I might add). I wouldn’t do things like that, even if they look sooo nice. I would like to keep my reputation as a good innocent guy (and handsome). But when she’s not looking, thats a different story :)

I like Dilbert, I read the comic everyday via my RSS reader. It satisfies my need for geek humour. Dilbert’s joke is more on general things in an IT office. But this one, Bug Bash, is more towards software development. Which satisfies my need for that specific type of geekery. Totally awesome, check it out.

My headache today is brought to you by the letter “t” and “v” (say it Sesame Street style).

Okay, the story, I need to fetch some data from some table, and put it inside another table. The process is quite complex, so I cannot do a SQL directly to do it. So, I did it using DataTables and DataView. At some point in my program, I got something like this:

Dim someID As Integer = GetForSomewhere()
Dim dvFoo As DataView = dtFoo.DefaultView
dvFoo.Sort = "BarColumn"
Dim i As Integer = dvFoo.Find("BarColumn=" & someID)
InsertIntoSomeOtherTable(someID, dtFoo.Rows(i))

Seems OK right? Find a row, insert that row into another table. But the result I got was jumbled up. I need to pair it with the same “someID”, but seems that it got “paired” wrongly. Several hours debugging and wrangling with data later, I found out the menace. Do you notice the error? At the last line, what I should do is this:

InsertIntoSomeOtherTable(someID, dvFoo(i))

See? “dtFoo” and “dvFoo”. The dvFoo is sorted, but dtFoo is not. I use the same index to fetch a row from two sets with different order, of course I got the wrong one. Oh, what a day…

Aku dari dulu dah tahu “i18n” stands for “internationalization” dan “l10n” ialah “localization”. Tapi aku baru je tahu macam mana abbreviation tu boleh terbit. Sebab ada 18 huruf antara “i” dgn “n” dlm “internationalization”, dan 10 huruf antara “l” dgn “n” dlm “localization”. Another abbreviation following the same theme is “g11n” for “globalization”.

On a side note, projek lokalisasi perisian OpenOffice.org ke Bahasa Malaysia diberi nama “Singa Emas“. Aptly named. Singa -> Lion -> l10n. Emas -> MAS -> Malaysia.

p.s: Lain-lain projek lokalisasi, di sini.