We flew to Geneva last Thursday evening and skiied in Italy and France over the weekend. Just holiday snaps. We were travelling with Ski Weekend. They usually run you around the Chamonix resorts, but at this time of year there’s often not much open in Chamonix itself so they take you further afield. Day 1 was a quick trip through the Mont Blanc tunnel to Courmayer. Which had good snow, nice pistes and few people.

I still have my ‘director of the management company for a building of 78 apartments’ hat on. It seems to have one of those little straps that goes under your chin. I don’t seem to be able to undo the strap… I hope that the worst is over. We held a meeting with the residents which went really well, we got 100% support for our actions and lots of offers of help.

The refactoring project rumbles on but my time with it is drawing to a close. This week the currency traders decided that they wanted to be able to manually override the live data in some circumstances. They wanted to be able to edit a live data point, set its value to a fixed amount and have all dependant displays take this new value into account. Like most things in computing an extra level of indirection saved the day…

I’ve been really busy this last week. The building in which I live is having some issues with its managing agent. I’m on the board of directors for the “company” that runs the building and this week things finally came to a head and we had to take over day to day management of the building from the managing agents that were previously “acting” for us. This has led to me being really busy with all kinds of stuff that I wouldn’t usually care to do…

I knew it would happen eventually… As mentioned earlier all of the email filtering code has been developed without any sign of a main(). Now that the time has come to create the actual filter program I found that I didn’t actually have a real version of one of the objects that I required, I only had a mock version for testing. The thing is, the mock version is pretty much all I need for the real version, so it looks like it’s time to promote it…

The refactoring project rolls on. Mostly it’s been more of the same so I haven’t bothered boring my reader with the details. This week we had an interesting bug to fix. The bug had appeared in a much earlier version, way back in July, but it had only been reported by one user and we could never duplicate the problem. This week we managed to duplicate it, and then we needed to work out what it was and when it was added to the source…

We have a Maytag fridge and very nice it is too. However, sometimes it seems to be too cold and things freeze up. After far too long procrastinating and just excepting that cold was how fridges were supposed to be I called Maytag for support… I hadn’t bothered to register the fridge when I bought it. We were busy with doing up the flat and sending in the registration card seemed low on the list of priorities.

We haven’t had time to go see Matrix Revolutions yet. Too much to do, too little time. We watched Reloaded on DVD last night and both enjoyed it much more than when we saw it originally at the cinema… I think we agreed that the reason we enjoyed it more (and that the fight scenes didn’t seem as excessively drawn out and that it didn’t seem quite so slow) was that we weren’t both sitting there waiting desperately for important plot stuff to occur.

The first two filters were pretty easy. I was on a roll and the other filters were implemented just as quickly… Now that I could parse 822 addresses blacklists and whitelists were easy to implement. Some refactoring could be done to remove the common ’list’ handling as effectively a blacklist is simply a !whitelist… Once I had a whitelist filter I decided that it might be useful to have a way of ORing two filters together, so we could filter a filter that does something like “if the message isnt in the whitelist then strip all attachments”… An Or filter was easy to implement and test once I created a mock filter that allowed me to programmatically control what I returned from the call to FilterMessage().

Second on my list of email filters was a filter that splits a ‘domain mailbox’ into several different mailboxes depending on the username that the email is addressed to. This is basically just an intelligent version of the mailbox writing filter. The problem was, it needed to understand RFC822 addressing… I have several POP3 mailboxes that work at a domain level. For example I can recieve pretty.much.anything@lenholgate.com. The guys that manage the domain supply me with a single POP3 mailbox and I’d like to split it locally using a mail filter.