trog’s haus

I have been using Outlook Express for almost 10 years now. I have gigabytes of emails stored in it dating back that far.

Lots of the emails are from game publishers or various press sources and often include really ridiculously huge attachments. I often don’t need these attachments at all, so I’d like to be able to delete the attachments but keep the email just as a record.

Outlook Express, presumably through some sort of misguided security reason, doesn’t let you open an old email and just delete the attachment. What you can do is drag the email out to your desktop, where it will create a .eml file - basically a plain text version of the email with the attachments encoded. You can then just strip out the attachments manually (a relatively simple process) by opening them in a text editor and removing the relevant sections.

I got bored of doing this so wrote a quick PHP script to do it, using the PEAR mimeDecode package. It’s really rough and simple but basically consists of two parts:

1) a PHP script which parses the email, spits out the attachments, and spits out a re-written version of the email just in plain text.
2) a batch file which calls the PHP script, so you can just drag a .eml file onto the batch file and have it execute.

The PHP script is available here.

The batch file just looks like this - change it to suit your system:
c:\php\php.exe c:\utils\mailextract.php %1
pause

My brother and our mate spent about four hours on Monday night running through the Monty Hall Problem trying to wrap our heads around the numbers. My brother was convinced that Deal or No Deal was the same problem as Monty Hall. Our mate was convinced otherwise; I tended to agree with him based on my initial thoughts, but having some experience with the weird unintuitive nature of the Monty Hall Problem I deferred a decision until I’d thought about it some more.

This culminated in the creation of some PHP scripts to run a few zillion trials of both problems. The one for Deal or No Deal was quite simple to conceive and it seemed pretty clear almost straight away that it was not the same thing, especially after I started working on the Monty Hall version. Fortunately I found someone else had already done it in PHP so I just played with that.

Anyway, it’s probably obvious to anyone that knows a lot about conditional probability, but they’re not the same problem.

If anyone cares, the PHP script for the Deal or No Deal stuff is up here.

I just loaded On2 Flix Pro (video conversion software to create Flash videos) and was told there was an update.

The application doesn’t have the smarts to update itself directly, instead sending you to the website to download a zip file containing the new update.

It installed successfully (well, the first attempt failed trying to register itself online to make sure I wasn’t copying it - super annoying DRM ties each install to a particular piece of hardware, making it hard to move between computers), but then when I went to run it I got an AVG error informing me that there was a trojan horse in the file winprojector8.exe - PSW.Ldpinch.VKM to be exact.

I’m fairly confident this is a false positive, but I can’t be sure, because there’s no digital signature or md5 or anything for this file, OR the zip file that I downloaded the application in, OR the self-installing .exe that came out of the zip file.

In case anyone else is running into this error, here are the md5s for each file:

577cbe65ae7f718b365b560e5109773b SetupFlixProPC_8_545.exe
4dbc59a37e213fc096f69eb9f6085964 SetupFlixProPC_8_545.zip
260e655dd577e54cd3a215feb60aa021 winprojector8.exe (the allegedly infected file)

Currently Googling for the md5 of the infected file yields this virscan.org URL, which indicates a few other applications detect a trojan in this file as well.

I have contacted On2 support (usually I get a response within 24 hours) and await what I hope will just be a ‘false positive’ response.

If they’d published an md5 hash of these files, I wouldn’t need to be worried. But they didn’t, so I am.

If you’re putting a file on the Internet up for download, please always publish a hash of the file - md5sum or sha1sum would be best - so that people can verify that what they think they’re getting is what you want them to be getting.

A few years ago when I was actively hunting down dedicated server software for video games and directly dealing with users asking “hey, why don’t you run servers for Game X”, I wrote a form letter that I recommended gamers used as a basis for asking game developers and publishers questions about their dedicated server policy.

I’ve reproduced it below. I strongly advise everyone to use this form as often as possible.

More companies releasing more dedicated server software means more servers all over the world. It means it’s more likely that you’ll get a better gaming experience from your game. Companies like Valve Software understand this implicitly - their success selling games is certainly linked to their excellent dedicated server software, which means anyone anywhere in the world can experience their games the way they’re meant to be played.

“Dear Sir/Madam,

I have been keenly following the development of your upcoming game, [Insert Game Title Here]. I was very excited to see the release of your multiplayer game on my favourite gaming site, [Insert Site name here]. I went out and purchased it with alacrity and looked forward to playing it, but was disappointed when I was unable to find many local servers that provided me with a low-latency game - and thus my experience of the game was very poor.

I contacted my local game service provider (GSP) and asked if they would put up a game server for [this new multiplayer game]. My GSP is called [name of GSP], and they provide server support for a lot of other games that I like to play.

Unfortunately, they have informed me that due to the lack of support from the developer and publisher - specifically a lack of a standalone dedicated server product that complies with their service infrastructure - they will be unable to support your game.

Generally speaking, game service providers requires such games to make available a standalone dedicated server for Windows or Linux that runs as a console mode or Windows application. Games that require a hardware accelerated video mode are totally unsuitable for many game service providers as they are typically running servers that don’t have this sort of hardware available.

As a result, I - and many other gamers in [name of your country, state, city, etc] - will be unable to play your game in the environment in which it truly deserves. I am forced to play on slow servers in other countries with very poor network performance, which ultimately greatly reduces the enjoyment I get playing the game - and thus significantly reduces the liklihood that I will choose to purchase any other titles from you.

So, on behalf of the gamers all around the world that are currently in the same situation that I am in, I humbly request that you make available a standalone, dedicated server package that can be downloaded separately and independently of the main product.

Without a version like this, it is very probable that many game service providers around the world will have problems arranging resources to run servers for your new title, which will lead to less servers online, which of course means less chance that people wanting to play your title will be unable to do so in the environment for which it was designed.

Regards,
[Insert name here]“

The v9.04 Ubuntu release happened recently and as always I found myself battling to get the occasional ISO that wouldn’t come down cleanly via BitTorrent.

I thought I’d give the metalink versions a try with aria2c. Unfortunately the Ubuntu defaults to having a ‘maxconnections’ of one - which, as far as I can tell from the metalink spec, means you’ll only make 1 connection to a server (which will probably end up just being the torrent anyway, as it has the highest priority).

If you naughtily download the metalink file you can, of course, edit the resources section in the XML to be whatever maxconnections you want. I feel justified in doing this because a) I don’t think it will duly unburden the servers and b) I’m doing this to reduce the overall load by providing another mirror alternative, but morally I still feel a bit squeamish about it.

Anyway, my download speed went from like several hundred kilobytes a second via BitTorrent only to the following:

[#2 SIZE:409.6MiB/695.8MiB(58%) CN:113 SPD:5017.71KiB/s UP:18.86KiB/s(800.0KiB) ETA:58s]

So, it made 113 connections (a big chunk of them were BitTorrent ones obviously), and I ended up getting the file at around 5mbytes/sec. Nice!

If you’ve ever run a remotely popular Apache web server you might have used the mod_limitipconn module, which stops people from making too many simultaneous connections from the same IP address. With this module active, anyone trying to make too many connections will get an HTTP 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error message.

Now, over the years watching log files for downloads from AusGamers, we’ve seen a lot of weird shit. One of the more common problems we’ve seen is a constant stream of spammy requests coming from many users that have all been identifying as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)”. I looked at this ages ago and didn’t figure it out then, but after getting annoyed with it again I spent a bit more time today and have since figured out that this is the default User-Agent of the popular download manager, FlashGet.

Why it chooses to identify, by default, as IE running on Windows 98 is a bit beyond me, but that’s something I find annoying, because it made this harder than it should have to diagnose.

The real problem though is how FlashGet handles 503 errors. The RFC seems to imply that, without a Retry-After header, it should act as it should with a regular 500 error (”server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request”).

What FlashGet does though is re-attempts the download every 3 seconds - whether or not the Retry-After header is present! Every 3 seconds to me seems a bit unnecessarily aggressive, but failing to respect the Retry-After header is the real problem here, as there’s nothing server administrators can do to reduce the number of excess attempts (short of blocking this User-Agent completely - which, realistically, probably isn’t that bad an idea).

This means that, if you’re downloading using FlashGet and you’re using the defaults, the whole time you’re downloading from a server that is using 503s to try to block you from making too many connections, you’re also spamming the server with requests for files every 3 seconds. The default (as of version 1.9.6.1073) is to try to create 5 connections at once.

As a user, you probably don’t give a shit, but it’s a real pain in the ass for people running servers, as it means log files quickly fill up with thousands upon thousands of these attempts over the course of a single download from a single user. Start adding in thousands of users and you quickly end up with a really annoying situation.

What FlashGet should do:

Assuming that I’m right about the above (which I’m relatively confident about after some testing, though not 100%; it’s certainly possible I screwed up or missed something), here’s some changes I’d like to see (in increasing order of importance):

1) Change their default User-Agent to identify as FlashGet.
2) Change the default behaviour on 503s to wait longer than 3 seconds. I think 60 seconds is a reasonable “bare minimum”, though I would say the longer the better.
3) Make it respect the Retry-After header. This is super-important.

I have posted this as a suggestion on the official FlashGet forum.

A few people still seem unaware of this so just to clarify, Google Chrome (at least the current release build at v1.0.154.53) does not support downloading of files larger than 2^31 bytes (2,147,483,648 bytes, or about 2.1 gigabytes). If you try, you’ll get an error like this:

The webpage at http://syd1.ausgamers.com:88/downloads/1239230399/AOC_US_TRIAL_CLIENT-2-of-7.zip might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

If you click the “more information on this error” link, you’ll get this slightly obscure (but still understandable) error message: “Error 8 (net::ERR_FILE_TOO_BIG): Unknown error.” (I tested with this file, which is slightly more than 2.1gb.)

This is a fairly typical problem in a lot of software that does HTTP downloads, but it is very surprising to see such a simple bug in Chrome.

However, this appears to be fixed in the 2.x beta, so if you’re using Chrome and must have the ability to download large files within it, give that a try.

The FAT32 file size limit is about 4 gigabytes (4,294,967,296 bytes). This means that if you’re trying to download a file that is bigger than this (like a 14gb Age of Conan trial, for example), you’ll run into problems.

I keep forgetting the FAT32 filesize limit so this post exists so I never have to Google for it again.