Hawk’s Babble-Log

OMG (Oh My God)!

I never used Outlook due to the huge, gapping wide open security holes that it inherently has. Or had. Do some quick searches in Google and you’ll see what I mean. So I never used it at home or anywhere else, unless I had to.

But now I’m forced into using Microsoft Outlook here at work. At least, for the internal system. And I never knew how difficult it was to get an email address out of the thing! It’s like it’s been designed to hide the email address of all contacts in your Contacts list from you. Unless you dig, and I mean really dig, you’ll _never_ see an email address in Outlook.

How do you know if you’re sending to the correct email address? Well, you’re kinda screwed there. I’ve searched for a way to get it to display the email and it just won’t.

I’m kinda surprised that Microsoft hasn’t taken a clue by now, what with all the annoyances and discussions going on. I did a quick search and found that many other engineers have tried to tackle this problem.

Why has Microsoft not fixed this? It’s obviously annoying, and it has (as of yesterday) caused me to send to the wrong contact on more than one occasion. And it has also made it virtually impossible to verify that you’re sending to the correct contact.

Why has Microsoft not fixed this? A simple option to display the email along with the name would be sufficient.

My solution: One by one, hand-edit each Contact entry, copy the email address and paste it onto the end of the last name. It ain’t the best solution in the world, but it’s good enough for now. I can do it piecemeal, updating each contact as I go along.

The only other solution I found was to export the entire contact list, then switch fields around so that the email is imported back into one of the name fields. Like, WTF? Microsoft, it’s time _you_ fixed this annoyance. Isn’t the computer supposed to do the work for us? Isn’t it supposed to be easy to use?

Outlook is _not_ easy to use for this exact reason.

Thank goodness I have Thunderbird. And it imports from Outlook! How awsome is that?! You can download Thundbird for free here:

[http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/](http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/)

These are the programs I recommend for handling all manner of nasty stuff for Microsoft products:

- Avast! Antivirus
Excellent free virus scanner. All you need do is register with ‘em. Also does resident scanning. They update their definition lists often. Highly recommended. This program has, all by itself, removed several infestations that I’ve run across.
[http://avast.com/](http://avast.com/)

- ClamWin
Good, free, open-source virus scanner.
[http://clamwin.com/](http://clamwin.com/)

- SpyBot Search & Destroy
Excellent adware/spyware detection and removal tool. Also has a slew of advanced tools for experts.
[http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/](http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/)
or, if you don’t want the page in English:
[http://www.safer-networking.org/](http://www.safer-networking.org/)
NOTE: if you search for “Spybot”, you’ll find all mannor of other sites which are not the true homepage of the people who make SpyBot. Don’t be fooled into installing more spyware/adware/malware; always go to safer-networking.org.

- X-Cleaner
Good general-purpose utility. Most of it’s fuctions are disabled in the free version, but the most important one for our purposes is not, and it’s the first function on the list. X-Cleaner finds (and cleans) a lot of stuff.
[http://www.xblock.com/](http://www.xblock.com/)
Free version download page (as of today):
[http://www.xblock.com/freeware.php](http://www.xblock.com/freeware.php)
Free version download link direct to setup program (as of today):
[http://www.xblock.com/download/xcleaner_setup.exe](http://www.xblock.com/download/xcleaner_setup.exe)

To help you remove malware (in case the above programs can’t do it for you):

- autoruns
Probably the best way to remove stuff is to take it out of the startup when booting up in safe mode with command-line (F8). Windows has many, many ways to start programs up automatically (nearly all of which are hidden). This program lists ‘em all and lets you choose what gets run automatically every time you boot up. Extremely useful.
[http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html](http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html)

I’m trying to install GTK+ version 2 (2.10.4) on my CentOS 4.4 (Red Hat compatible) system. Right after I run the ‘./configure’ command, I get a complaint about having the incorrect version of glib installed:

checking for BASE\_DEPENDENCIES... Requested 'glib-2.0 >= 2.12.0' but version of GLib is 2.4.7
configure: error: Package requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.12.0 atk >= 1.9.0 pango >= 1.12.0 cairo >= 1.2.0) were not met.
Consider adjusting the PKG\_CONFIG\_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

So I download and install glib from source. It installs perfectly, no problemo. Then I go back to my gtk install dir and run ‘./configure’ again, but I get the _same exact complaint_.

This is really, _really_ annoying.

The thing to understand about this is that the newer glib I just installed was placed in ‘/usr/local/lib’, rather than ‘/usr/lib’. But ‘/usr/lib’ is checked first! So the old version is found rather than the new one I just installed.

Solution:

export PKG\_CONFIG\_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

This tells pkg-config where to look for the proper (newer) installed libraries. See here, this is the original:

> cat /usr/lib/pkgconfig/glib-2.0.pc
prefix=/usr
exec_prefix=/usr
libdir=/usr/lib
includedir=/usr/include

Name: GLib
Description: C Utility Library
Version: 2.4.7
Libs: -L${libdir} -lglib-2.0
Cflags: -I${includedir}/glib-2.0 -I${libdir}/glib-2.0/include

And this is the newer one I just installed:

> cat /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/glib-2.0.pc
prefix=/usr/local
exec\_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include

Name: GLib
Description: C Utility Library
Version: 2.12.3
Libs: -L${libdir} -lglib-2.0
Cflags: -I${includedir}/glib-2.0 -I${libdir}/glib-2.0/include

[http://gtk.org/](http://gtk.org/)

Technical issues like this are what is keeping Linux off the mainstream desktop.

Starring Jet Li, Betty Sun, Dong Yong, Shido Nakamura, and Collin Chou.

Directed by Ronnie Yu.

I’m sad to hear that this is Jet Li’s last epic martial arts film. But at the same time, I’m glad that he has come to a good point with himself and the reasons for which he began his study of the martial arts. I think everyone who studies martial arts, given enough time, comes to this point.

Good film. I liked the story, but I didn’t much care for the ending. I liked that he learned from his mistakes, and I liked the action scenes, but I didn’t like the ending. Still, I’ll buy it.

There is a scene where Jet fights a huge american wrestler-type guy. This guy is huge. And I don’t mean fat; I mean tall and muscular. He must have been two or three feet taller than Jet. This guy has creative lines of dialog, such as, “RAARRR!”, and “AAARRH!”, and “GRRRRRRRR!” He’s big and tough, but Jet manages to find ways to not get beat up by him. I like how the fight ends. The interesting thing about this guy is that he plays a very similar part in another martial arts movie, The Protector with Tony Ja. And he has the same creative lines with Tony.

I must take a moment and comment upon the good ol’ days when men fought with honor. What do I mean by this? Let me explain… In the middle of a fight with a Japanese guy, Jet manages to swap weapons. I don’t know if it was intentional or accidential, but the Japanese guy had a sword and Jet had a three section staff, and they swapped right in the middle of the fight. Now the Japanese guy has the three section staff, and Jet has the sword. Jet is good with virtually all weapons, so he kicks ass with it. But the Japanese guy has some trouble whipping the three section staff around and accidentially hits his head. Jet sees this and, without a word, stops fighting and offers the sword back to his opponent. That’s honor. He simply holds it out on his fingers for his opponent. The Japanese guy also has honor as he stops fighting, folds up Jet’s three section staff and hands it to Jet. Jet takes his three section staff and, for just a moment, has both weapons in his hands. Then the Japanese guy takes the sword back, and they resume the fight.

That was an awsome scene.

So, the film is good, but I just don’t like the ending very much. Nevertheless, I’ll buy it. Why? Because, well, I’ll buy anything with Jet Li in it.