Outlook and Remote Images

A trick used by email marketers (spammers and legitimates) is to reference an image on a remote server for inclusion in the email. The href to the image can be customised per email to include a unique identifier and as such can be used to track who has viewed the email and thus confirming that their email address is correct.

Many email clients now prevent this automatic download of server resources, however Microsoft Outlook (2003) give me the message on the right here when I reply to such a message, complete with a handy "Don't ask me again" tick box.

Well, someone at Microsoft deserves a kick in the pants - they've obviously spent time writing this message and implementing the tickbox and have left the responsibility of how to actually safely reply to such emails up to the user - if I want to reply and I don't want to download this remote content then I've got to make a note of the email address and enter it manually when composing a new email. Why didn't they just employ the same piece of code they used when viewing the email in the first place? Many reasons leap to mind but they're all derogatory.

Get it right Microsoft! Grrr...

MAME - it's what your mother warned you about

A while back someone mentioned MAME to me and the possibility of running old arcade games on your PC.

I checked it out but for whatever reason I had difficulty getting it to work. I tried it again just the other night and cool, it worked! I started downloading ROM's (err, only the ones I was legally entitled to play of course) and it wasn't long before I had written a web-based shell to manage the downloading, screenshots and launch functionality.

The coolest part is being able to launch the ROM's from my browser. I send a .phpw script (a php script, but named .phpw so that it doesn't get evaluated by the webserver [apache on localhost]) and associated .phpw files with the PHP CLI interpreter. The script changes directory to where MAME is installed and does a system() call to fire up MAME itself.

I was able to launch MAME from within a PHP script running on the webserver, but MAME was showing on the webserver's console instead, i.e., out of my view and taking up 95%+ of the CPU (as you would expect).

But, even cooler - much to the detriment of my other projects I want to get on the go - is that I found "Snow Bros", a game I spent - nay wasted - many many hours on when I was at polytech. One project I want to do is to build (or acquire) a stand-up arcade machine running MAME. Brett has one at his place and it's g33k t0 teh m4x! :)