Computer Tips Email Address Translation

Karl, yea! I thought i sent you my new address, apparently i didn't; sorry about that. Thanks for the offer of spam help, but i deleted those old accounts for my new shiny gmail one. hey, hows the European traveling coming along?

Went treeplanting in Canada for the summer because I needed the cash, but it was a nice twist in my travels. Brutal job though. May be doing it again next or other summers, not that I have forced myself into a bit of shape. Should be updating the blob fairly soon, but I am also working on an extensive treeplanting website at the same time, as that is part of the experience. So I'd like to get that complete more first. But most of it is already up, if you'd like a sneak preview.

If you sent me an email from your new one, you should have received an automatic response asking you to go to a website and prove you are a real person. Do you remember receiving that? That is how my spamguard thing works, otherwise I was getting a thousand spam a day, costing me almost an hour of manual filtering (I've tried all sorts of filters but they also filter out the good stuff, so it was unacceptable) a day, and it is out of the question that I would just drop [email protected] and go with something else. So if you ever have a problem in the future, or want to go back to your old address, my spamguard costs 30 bucks a year and now I get ZERO spam. If something does sneak through (which requires that the spammer manually go to the website), I can easily remove them from my accepted list, or even block them outright. Great system. Only problem is that many people just don't bother going to the site, in which case I can go check what ended up in the spam box, from time to time. But I already know that it should all be spam, so the checking process is quite quick. Actually wrote about it all and that page is number one on google for "perfect email solution".

Blab blab. How are things going with you in general?

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Oh, yes, for downloading it is another script. Seems you become more programmer then I am ;-) Last year I don't write no one line of code...

okay, took a bit of fumbling but managed to get it working.

I hope to get financially back up on my feet so I can give you interesting projects again. Seems like you are doing well for yourself and that is cool. Seems that programmers and smart people like that will always come back faster from these previously suppressed economies. They can get jobs from the west without having to go there, and then their earnings filter out to the local economy.

Yes, the traveling and being in warm weather and on the beach is nice, although not many people would want to tolerate its downsides. In any case, I forcast that in about 5 to 10 years this will be more normal, and there will be a lot less problems with it. Wireless, mobile and satellite internet will be much more abundant and affordable, more people will be doing it, so getting across borders will not be such a big surprise, they will sell ready made caravans with all the high tech setup, and there will be more caravan parks and all that. It may even help against racism, intolerance, and the stupidity of local natives who never meet foreigners.

Was wondering, you don't happen to have a script like on the Abyss server with which one can surf folders freely (within a set directory and its subdirectories, not giving permission to go up to the root or other directories)? Not so necessary as your download script is working, but it forces me to compress everything and keep it in certain folders, no subfolders. What I am doing is uploading a lot of my software for others to download (password required), and as a backup for myself. Recently my harddrive burnt and I decided that I can take advantage of the 300gigs of space I have on my webhost server to back up EVERYTHING, even including an image of my harddrive. Which is rather amazing. My external harddrives were not functioning properly, neither was my DVD burner, so several things happened at once and I ended up losing lots of information.

And speaking of taking advantage of my 300gigs of webspace, I'm looking into installing my Desknow mail server onto something like that, but I don't think it offers that. I am asking Desknow if they have any suggestions. Do you happen to know something? I think it needs to have some Java server running for it to work, and then it can be installed on Linux or Unix. I am paying 2000$ a year to run my XP server in Prague and it is getting too costly for me. Plus I'd like something more reliable, which these webhost services can offer.

No stress on the above two points though. Only wondering if you already knew of something.

Have a good one,

I'm fine. Just have annual vacation, have short shop-tour to China, have tour to the forest for ginseng and found one!, and now return to my usual work. Bought new car, clothes myself in suit and necktie and become highpayable admin of a small IT-department in bank. I envy your possibility to move yourself where you want, now I can't venture to be so free.

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responding to your next email, which I haven't downloaded to my computer yet.

I would not go with option 3 (try another smtp company) because yours is the best I found, and I gave it an even bigger push on my email website. I just don't know why I am being plagued like this. Perhaps it is because I used that catchall for a while (*@kenax.cz), and since I advertised on Ukrainian and Russian websites etc. looking for translators and programmers etc., like you said in the past, I guess my address got hijacked by these people, my catchall bombarded with all their nonsensical addresses, in which case all of them were bounced back with the automatic challenge message, which inadvertently was sent to innocent people (as these spammer ars.holes use other people's identities), in which case some of them may have complained and put me on some spam blacklist. After all, since at that time I was receiving about a thousand spam a day, it meant I was sending out a thousand challenges messages a day to innocent people, and I became a spammer myself!!!

I surfed around the internet researching this and pumped your IP address and my domain kenax.cz through various test portals and nothing came up. Do you have any suggestions how I can find if my domain or combination with your IP address is listed on some blacklist somewhere?

Another option which occurred to me is that I could download much of my spam and find the most common email addresses sent to. Or could you find that out for me without me having to release a lot of emails to my inbox (which doesn't seem to automatically add their emails to the approved whitelist, although I thought I read that it does)? I now have about a thousand emails in my held mail. Is this considered a lot? Perhaps if some of my alias emails addresses, such as [email protected], are being heavily bombarded by spammers, I can erase those addresses and stop them from forwarding to your account. That would further reduce the daily number of outgoing challenge messages and perhaps bring my account and email address to a healthier level.

Is that a worthwhile strategy?

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just yesterday I got an idea for a potential class action suit and thought I would spread it around the net. I often help my friends clean up their computers, and many times realize what a mess it is in. Viruses and spam can cost an economy billions of dollars in terms of wasted time and resources. Apparently something like one third of computers have been hijacked by viruses so that they can be used by criminal organization for their means. But why is this necessary when it is fairly simple to protect a computer? I wrote down all my tips at http://001yourtranslationservice.com/computer-tips/ (need to update with more tips I came across not too long ago), but obviously most people just couldn’t be bothered to read all this. But I think there should be a law that whoever sells a computer must have the system sufficiently protected, with some simple instructions for the user. There are many free services out there which can protect the computer, so there is no reason for this, except laziness. Microsoft also sells its product with many ports open and vulnerable to attack, and its Outlook Express is also fairly vulnerable.

Just an idea. Take care,

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might have to make a change regardless because I think my website server company is changing their business model. I just hit hard return like 8 times to push your text down, does this at least let you see just my response? I can probably copy and paste everything into Text Editor then bring it back into Hotmail so it looks normal. We'll figure it out. Don't want to use my business account for you, mum and my friends because if you email at a busy time I will ignore it then it will get lost in the archive of old emails. If I get it here I can see it immediately (I don't get that many emails to this address) then - when I'm taking a break - can find it right away.-Keta

okay, makes sense. I have my personal and business emails all together, but I type fast and for me personal emails are a nice break from business. Or I can colour the emails in my inbox, like dark yellow means "deal with later", or I can even change the visible subject, so I'm quite good at organising or dealing with all incoming emails.

You can do this or just use the <<<<<<< and >>> characters. Could be less work than copy/pasting through notepad.

They recently also changed the face of Yahoo and my friend says he hates it. I guess like Facebook's recent change. They always try to add bells and whistles to wow new customers etc., but just end up pissing off existing ones. google usually likes to keep things simple and I've read it has been key to their success. Many have been complaining about their new bookmark thing, but I think it's great (people can vote on websites etc. and eventually I think they'll implement it into their algorithm).

I could never think of emailing online. Too damn slow and restricting, not to mention I'm not online all the time, but even if I was...

24 Nov 2008 02:13:08 +0200 Subject: RE: mum and generating rounded corners okay, got it, I have to view your emails in Fancy View, but the irritating thing about that is these types of email come out as bright yellow text on white background, so I have to ctrl A to select the entire text to be able to see it properly. My Windows is set up with yellow text and dark green background, cause I find it pleasant on my eyes, but cant seem to get the dark green background working in my email program. I said ignorant because I brought this issue up several times and it seemed you werent doing anything about it. Perhaps you could just go <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< quickly whenever you start writing, closing with or something, if you ever want to interject into an email as you respond while you read it? Otherwise you could read it quickly, and if you don't feel you need to make little snippit inputs in between my text, you can just write your response at the very beginning of the email, closing with -Keta as you usually do or something. Does Hotmail allow an Autoresponse? If so, you could always use that to migrate to another service, if you really hate it that much, and just check once a month or whatever to keep the account alive (that's one thing that immediately turned me off to Hotmail - you only get 2mb of memory, and you have to check once a month or they close your account. Lost my interest immediately). Or why not just write me from your business account? Or you can just cough up the cash (I imagine it wont be that expensive) and forward your hotmail to google or whatever. Otherwise, if you'd rather not bother with migration, my suggestions above should work. k Sender Allowed Oh yah, and I seriously hope you start to respond to your emails better. It probably takes me longer to scan through an entire letter looking for where you start to respond to me, rather than you just pressing ENTER twice and separating it somehow. I find it rather lazy and ignorant. Do you respond like this to your customers? Very unprofessional. Hotmail is garbage. With gmail you get 7 gigs of space, and you can forward your mail, forward copies, pop download from other providers, pop download from gmail itself, all of which Hotmail will charge you for. I can even set you up [email protected] if you like. I think its a combination of your and my email because it only happens with you. I do hit enter, like 8 times!! And, since the last time, started pasting your last response directly below as well so you don't have to try to find what you said in the endless text stream below.I don't use this email for customers, its purely for social. I can't change it because a whole universe of people from my past have this address but I don't have them as contacts or whatever so could never notify them of a change. Also this email is submitted as my contact on lists for freelance writers, graphics, photographers and resumes. Its on my website, my blog, my Facebook, MySpace, . . . everything.The way I'm doing it now should work better for you, with my pasting your last response BEFORE I hit reply. When I'm writing this it looks straightforward with your reply blocked out on top and my latest response below.you don't have to go and call me ignorant just because its not working for you at the moment. It might be Safari, maybe Hotmail doesn't like it. I can try it in Firefox.

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OK, so I will slowly start looking for the ideal one ... brunette or balckie ... :-)))) man, forget about porno, with 18MB/sec soon enough we'll be able to download a whole girlfriend!

reminds me of a theory I started developing many years ago. There will come a day when people can buy a suit with all sorts of sensors and pressure points, so that they can put it on while wearing some 3D glasses, go to a virtual cafe and strike up a conversation with whoever. Of course, the whoever can be a guy pretending to be a girl, or a girl pretending to be a plant or dog etc. If they like the conversation they can whisk off to some made up planet and have passionate sex in their sex suits. Or people wont bother dealing with people at all but rather with some artificial intelligence which will tell them whatever they want to hear. I think the internet and convenience of modern life is certainly making people pretty damn selfish as it is, so it will only get worse and people may find it increasingly difficult to even deal with others, because they wont have to, because they have their virtual, artificial intelligence sex friend...

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thought the latest developments might interest you.

So I decided on one virtual server, for about 20 bucks a month, 384 MBram, and about 20 gigs of space. Seemed like a good deal and was trying to set it up, but apparently they blocked me from setting up an account because my IP hookup (Turkey) did not match my stated address with credit card (Seattle, US). I exchanged many emails with them and it turns out that this match is required for the account set up and not afterwards. Apparently they are trying to stop spammers or something. I told them I thought it was a stupid and flawed system because what's stopping me from using a proxy server to masquerade my IP address, and why the big emphasis on the initial setup. Afterall, if it turns out I'm a spammer, this should be easy enough to find out, and simply shut down my account. I explained I'm a world traveller, blab blab blab, but they said there are "too many discrepancies" and simply declined. I told them I'd rather pay for a more expensive service than to send money to people who collaborated with the CIA and that was the end of that. Was in the process of trying out other services when something clicked in my head that I had arbitrarily noticed a few weeks ago, checked out my webhosting server (has 300 gigs of space and 3000 gigs of allowable monthly traffic) and indeed found that for 12 bucks a month I can set up a Microsoft Exchange Server as an email package, and then 9 bucks a month extra for the Microsoft Exchange Mobile Server, for when I buy a replacement PPC (my nephew broke mine). From what I've read about this Exchange Server I think it will do everything I need, and I'll set it up (first month for free) once some projects start coming in again. In the meantime, glad to have successfully reduced my total business costs to 7 bucks a month. So I think this is resolved and thank you for your willingness to help.

Been doing some good progress with my SEO (shocked to find I'm number one on google for Translation Services), and recently downloaded a lot of software and ebooks, so I have a feeling it could be around the corner when I start receiving some projects again.

Have a good one,

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hey right on. I was working on it yesterday, I need to flow the .pdf info into a database. Almost have the .aacdb file constructed, then will have to strip the .pdf into a .csv, then figure out how to import it into the proper fields without having to copy and paste every single line.

you have the data in pdf? Maybe consult with me before you start piddling away all sorts of your time. I'm a whiz at this sort of stuff and have done many things like this in the past. For example, I have an OCR program which can convert PDF files into Word. Then, in Microsoft Word, you can convert tabbed text format into tables, which can later be copy/pasted into Excel and from there saved as .csv files, for example. Know lots of little tricks, so the last thing you should be doing is copy/pasting individual fields or, heaven forbid, typing...

For the web thing, I am going to want to be able to put ads in specific places. Like for the Directory, if a particular mill advertised they wanted to be close to their listing, or a supplier or transporter wanted to be in the geographic region that they serviced. So I will need to be able to edit the website to add graphics.

I'm pretty sure .php sites can be edited in Dreamweaver, but we can figure this all out later. First things first is to get the workable database into MSA format.

What about a searchable .pdf? Could I put that on a locked part of the website, so only subscribers with the password could read it? I could do it by province, like how the Directory is done, so there would be five individual .pdf files. I could update and re upload whenever something changed. But then I guess they would all copy it and save it on their hard drives then give it to their 10 best friends. But they did that with the Directory too, when they bought the CD, and we still sold hundreds and hundreds every year. Whaddaya think?

I think if you had some sort of copyright statement, and a password protected directory (you can have different login details to different folders, by province or whatever), or some contract, or "I agree to these conditions" when they enter their login details, or the first time or whatever, you have sufficient safeguards there, and you can chase after people if they abuse it or whatever. But like you said, you can still sell hundreds and hundreds. One thing I've learned is the Bill Gates case. Mac was very monopolistic and wanted to make a bundle on its software as well as its hardware. Bill came along, copied them (true, in a shoddy way), but opened things up and made it more affordable. Cheap Taiwanese companies were immitating IBM PCs, Russian programmers were making up shit for Bill's open platform, and they eventually crushed Mac, Billy eventually had to buy 25% of shares in the company to stop them from going bankrupt. So there is power in free. Lots of programs are available for free and they survive by donations. If you go after people too much you can piss them off and lose them. So I think a careful balance is important, and if you find a big abuser, you are fully justified in going after them. But I wouldn't waste my time with small fry.

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Like I had planned to put each part of the address into a separate field (number, street, town, each in their own field) so people could search if they only knew part of the address, but that would involve my entering three hard returns in every single address in the old book and I am NOT doing that.

If they search and only know part of an address, that certainly is no reason to break up the address field into parts, since a search can easily look for PART of a field's content. Which is usually the default, otherwise you'd have to set in your search "match entire field" or something like that.

What's important is that you break things down into fields and individual tables properly. That is the fundamental backbone of a database. If you do not do it properly you create goulash and headaches in the future. And generally the database cannot be structured properly.

Below is a screenshot of the Relationships of my treeplanter database (a lot simpler than my translations accounting database). Just so you can see how things are structured. So that you understand the principle, to help you build the individual tables, it is important to separate the data into respective tables, to avoid duplication, which inflates and bloats the database, and slows down its use.

For example, instead of have a table with the fields:

job a, date x, by customer p, which has an address l, and telephone z, the job using translator d, who has email f...

Lumping all the shit into one table is bad. Here we want to create three tables: job, customer, translator. The customer table can have all appropriate fields, like its address and telephone etc. You do not need this information duplicated in the job table every time you have a job from that customer.

Same with the translator. That's what makes a Relation, and cleans up the data nicely. You have a job, with its relevant data, using a customer (ID is drawn from the customer table), hiring a certain translator. ID is always numerical (speeds up the database), unique for each record, and starting from 1, moving up consecutively. The IDs are bold in the below relationship table, and you can see how the relationships are set up. Should make logical sense to you. Make sure you thoroughly understand this principle before setting up all your tables. But worst case scenario, once you do have it broken down in fields etc., it is not the biggest problem to separate the fields into different tables.

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didn't I tell you to send me the shit so that I can analyse it before you start piddling around forever?

I would suggest that you first get into Word properly. Here is my quick and piece of shit export, which could be sufficient, because it breaks down things in their order. At least from what I checked. Now the hard returns will be a problem when converting Text to Table. In Word I made for myself a macro which converts hard returns (^p) to spaces, and then search and replaces double spaces to single spaces a few times, cleaning up a paragraph. I would select a paragraph, press ALT P (my shortcut for this macro), and it would get rid of all the hard returns for the selection. This might be the easiest.

Another option is to create a field for each item, search and replacing the document and replacing certain fields with certain numerical values (since each company record seems to have different fields all the time. Once that is done then I can figure out a way how to convert it all into a table.

oh yeah I remember what I was going to ask you: my company entries are not all the same length. Some are really long, they filled out every single thing, while others are much shorter (only six fields). is this going to be a nightmare when globally importing into the database? I understood something from the LSJ guy that the primary field (Company Name) can be somehow formatted so the computer knows it is meant to start a new database entry when it comes across it.

Not a big deal. You specify a field's size. I think for the web the field limit is 255 characters, where offline in MSA I can set it to "memo" type and it can be real big. The field can have hard returns within it. If the field contents are too big when you convert it for the web, it gets truncated and anything after 255 characters (including spaces and possibly hard returns) gets lost.

I lost my formatting when bringing the .rtf into Word . . . when I import the properly separated .xls (or .csv) file into the database how will it know when the entry ends and it should begin a new one?

It just knows, don't worry about it. For example, when you save as .csv, open it in Notepad or something and you'll see it uses " to separate the fields. You can also export into "tab delimited" format, which uses a tab to separate the fields. Generally you don't want tabs within your field, cause it can lead to problems. I think " within the field should be okay.

or will I have to import each company entry individually? Oh man, AND . .. for the fields they didn't fill out, it's going to drop things into the wrong place (like Production into Export, if they didn't fill out Export). Maybe I should just leave it at the Excel file?

You need each record (company) on a separate line, and the fields need to be lined up properly. A blank field is okay ("" in csv). If converting from text to table in Word, and I see they are not lined up, I just insert a tab, for example, in the right location, and then it lines up when converting. In this type of conversion, a hard return is always understood as a new line/record, where the tab, for example, can become the field separator. You need to remove the hard returns where not appropriate in this case.

Not to be a pain in the ass, but here's what the book looks like (except it's three columns instead of two, this is an old version). You can see that some company entries are really long, even if they are the same length there are different things filled out. How How

You have to do that manually by starting a new line (hard return), because you recognise it the company name and not a field name. Otherwise, you can get real fancy and do search and replace in Word, looking up the font size (search for special formatting), and replace it with itself but a hard return (^p) beforehand. Between Word's powerful Search and Replace, and its Convert Text to Table tool, you can save yourself a lot of work.