Has anyone else seen this? Every once in a while, Outlook 2003 starts hanging on every email that has attachments or embedded images, about for a minute or so. It is utterly annoying and I did not find any resolution for this on the Internet—I guess it is either the anti-virus software, or Outlook tries to do something with the network that eventually fails, but uh, come on, should not it just work?
In the last few months, I talked with quite a few ORF users who wrote External Agents to implement tests based more complex rules than otherwise allowed by ORF. I have also seen a few good agent proposals that never seen the light and I started wondering why and how could we help these agents born.
The first idea was to write an article about creating agents, with code samples in various languages from C# to PHP, etc., but the more I was thinking of this the more pointless the article seemed. After all, if you already know how to program in Perl, parsing command line parameters would not be big trouble, right? So why not start writing the agent?
My guess is that starting is hard. Banality or not, writing an agent takes a couple of things, like a command-line parser, a MIME parser, maybe a config reader/writer, a testing environment, etc. commonly called “PITA” and when you suddenly realize that, your great agent idea just does not seem that great.
Well, I may be easily wrong here, but if that is a real problem, would not a common source code platform for creating agents help?
What I have been thinking of is an open source C# external agent backbone, hosted on a collaborative development site such as SourceForge.net. The platform would already have most common things in place, like the command-line parser or the MIME parser. It would make adding new tests very easy (just implement a C# interface) and would have a built-in test environment. Due to the “plugin” architecture, you would need to run just one agent (thus save resources) and the end user could select which tests to run.
What do you think, would you participate?
Today, at 11:22AM local time we recorded the 10.000th ORF order. That’s the best Christmas present I can imagine. Thank you for putting your trust in us.
We are leaving now for a Christmas party and I will be back in January only, so I wish you Happy Holidays! See you in 2007.
15 orders left till the 10,000th ORF share-it! order.
Amazing. I mean, wow. When we started developing ORF Standard Edition back in 2002 (and selling that time for $25), we did not even dream of ORF growing into a software that filters more than 300.000.000 emails daily and protects ten thousands of mailboxes, in 86 countries all around the world, used by one-person businesses and 50,000+ employee giants and even ISPs. I just do not know what to say. With a little luck, we will record the 10,000th order tomorrow and even though this number has virtually nothing to do with the actual number of licenses sold, this is a great feeling, great responsibility and I still do not know what to say :)
As of writing this, an SMA order from Belgium and another from Benin was recorded and also an ORF EE order came in from Italy, so actually there are only 12 left. Edit: 1 left and champagne is cooling. Anyone, please? And… 5 digits! :)
Wow!
By the way, if you are the 10.000th, you will be fully refunded for your order :)
ORF PowerLog preprocessing works with large amounts of unsorted data and does this on “idle” priority (that means, PowerLog preprocessing will run only if your CPUs has nothing better to do). It is not entirely surprising that it is slow, but if your server deals with 1.000.000 emails a day, your daily PowerLog files are 500Mb large and preprocessing of a single PowerLog file takes some 19 hours, I guess you do not find solace in this. Neither did we, so optimizations were made and now ORF processes the 500Mb and 1.000.000 emails PowerLog .OPG file about 75 times faster, in about 15 minutes instead of 19 hours (measured on our test system). The improved preprocessing will be available in the next version.