I have a 400 meg folder on my laptop next to an 800 meg file. Apparently, on 16 November 2001, I was trying to extract the e-mail from the Messages file. Because I don’t know the format of the file, I had to deduce enough bits and pieces of it by Streaming through the file byte by byte to be able to pull it out. I lost the image in which I wrote the Workspace to do this, but I left an index file that presumably has the location of all the null bytes (0x00) in the file. I then streamed through the entire Messages file, pulling out any inter-null text larger than some arbitrary amount I figured to be the minimum header size.
It makes sense to do it this way because...? Um, well, the Squeak mailing list broke it, so I figured it ought to help solve the problem. Perhaps it’s my fault as well, seeing as I continued to use Outlook Express as long as I did, knowing that it’s in a proprietary format.
If I were doing it now, I would probably have used csplit, but at that point I had not fink’ed it. Or called Microsoft tech support (smek)? I vaguely remember lying around in my hotel bed, not quite having packed, waiting for the file to completely stream through, and having to move the mouse every once in a while to make sure that the processor clock would not slow down (something that seems to happen when virtual machines are the only things running). I do remember pizza and chicken wings somewhere in the room.
This was in Trumbull when I was helping out at GenColRe, some two weeks after I picked up my laptop. Cochlear. Cochleate. I had probably transferred the big corrupted file from my laptop.
Anyway, sorting out some of the files now, throwing away MIME-attached message files I won’t need. Ooh, forgot about the mailing list.
12:21:57 AM 
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