Burrowowl

Once in a long, long while I run across a truly hilarious online comic. Typically these either fall into disrepair (Chopping Block) or spiral into depressing, almost fetishistic neurosis (MegaTokyo). Thus far, The Order of The Stick has resisted the evil forces of entropy, and has been providing me with quality D&D comedy for months now. It follows a stereotypical adventuring party through their trials and tribulations. The current plot-arc has the main characters leveling up, and a couple of them are entertaining the notion of multi-classing. Enjoy.

The folks at Wired magazine have published an article entitled The BitTorrent Effect, including an interesting interview and look at Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent protocol (and official client). In typical Wired fashion, the article goes to great lengths to proclaim the death of the older, entrenched means of media distribution, which really isn’t what I was looking for in an article about BitTorrent and its creator. Give it a read anyway.

Oddly, no mention was made of the broad variety of user agents that utilize this protocol. From my personal experience, very few use Mr. Cohen’s original client, but some spinoff such as Bit Tornado or my personal client of choice, Azureus. The proliferation of such alternate interfaces speaks volumes to the success of the BitTorrent protocol and its perceived value amongst software developers and content-pirates alike.

Wired article: The BitTorrent Effect

Earlier today I had the pleasure of troubleshooting what looked an awful lot like Norton Internet Security wrecking havoc with Outlook Express, but it just wasn’t so. The user was attempting to send mail, and was getting an error to the effect that SMTP was failing for an unknown reason on port 0. As we all know, SMTP runs by default on TCP port 25, or alternately on TCP port 587. For it to be operating on another port would normally indicate either a misconfigured mail client or a seriously misbehaving firewall or mail proxy.

Disabling Norton can be a bit of a hit-or-miss endeavor, as it is somewhat notorious for not actually leaving your traffic alone when you tell it to. We attempted all the usual Norton-bypassing tricks, nearly going so far as to uninstall it, when we discovered that the problem was OE itself. Error 0x800C0131, the cryptic Microsoft code for unknown errors with SMTP transactions, can also be caused by, of all things, a corrupt DBX file. The telling symptom showed up when, on a whim, we check the “Sent Items” folder, which wouldn’t load, complete with another cryptic error message. The solution follows:

1. Open Outlook Express
2. Select Tools » Options » Maintenance
3. Click the button labeled “Store Folder…”
4. Select and copy the path to the Store Folder ([CTRL] + [C] to copy)
5. Close out of all Outlook express windows
6. Go to Start » Run and paste the Store Folder’s path in ([CTRL]+[V] to paste)
7. Click the button labeled “OK” to open your Store Folder
8. Delete the file named “Sent Items.dbx”
9. Restart Outlook Express
10. QED

Here’s a relevant Microsoft KB article. A big hat-tip to mcse.ms for having a Google-searchable forum. How such a thing can be reliably troubleshot from a starting point of “I can’t send mail” remains a mystery.

It looks like the long-awaited IKWG will be a little while more in the waiting. Originally the contents of this book were slated to be included with the IKCG, but there was just too much content, so they had to split it in two. This followup to the IKCG will include more of the nitty-gritty details about living in the Iron Kingdoms, as opposed to the game mechanisms needed to run a game there. Sections are expected to be included for each of the major cities in Western Immorren, including more that just a simply statblock of population sizes, wealth, and major industries. We can expect to find an awful lot of fluffy goodness in here.

Privateer Press announced today that they expect to have this out in March of 2005, the most specific promise-date we’ve seen since the original IKCG project was split. The sticker price on this should be around USD$39.95, but if it’s half as good as I expect it to be, it’ll be worth twice that. A smallish mock-up of the cover art is available on the Privateers’ site.

The 1.0 version of Mozilla Thunderbird is out as of yesterday. It’s officially suitable for public consumption now, though we’ve known this for quite some time now. In addition to having the great advantage of not being Outlook Express, Thunderbird has an excellent junkmail filter, thorough message rule capabilities, and a neat new feature (introduced in version 0.9) that allows for grouping messages by date, sender, subject, etc. in collapsable trees. Go check it out, download it, and ditch your old mail client.