From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Through an Internet rabbit hole this evening I was reminded of a big piece of Boulder business history and big (at the time) data processing.

As a kid, I was vaguely aware of a bulk mailing company called "Neodata" because (a) the Centennial Middle School computer club would occasionally feed students pizza while we organized Boulder Parks & Rec catalogs into big mail sacks that would go to every house in Boulder, and I think someone from Neodata was involved and (b) I'd noticed that subscription cards for Sesame Street Magazine had an address of "123 Sesame Street / Boulder, CO 80322", which was odd because I knew Boulder didn't have a Sesame St., so my mom explained that Neodata processed subscriptions for all sorts of magazines in Boulder and they had a whole zip code to themselves, so any street address could be used.

My rabbit hole led me to a lot of Neodata-related photos from the Boulder Carnegie Library for local history. I hadn't realized that Neodata's roots in Boulder go all the way back to 1949, when Esquire Magazine opened an office in Boulder to handle magazine subscriptions for Esquire and Coronet. (Yes, it took a whole building full of workers to handle subscriptions for a couple magazines back then.) Their original office was at 13th St. and Portland Pl., across from Casey Middle School. They later built a warehouse on Walnut east of 30th St., perhaps to make it easy to put mail bags on the train. (Based on this photo, it might be the building now occupied by The Spot rock climbing gym and the Brewers Association.)

In 1963, Esquire and The Nielsen Company created Neodata Services, Inc. to provide computerized magazine subscription services. They would've had some of the first computers in Boulder, and they were in town long before IBM. (The Bureau of Standards, now NIST, might've had an earlier computer.) Judging by the photos they might also have been one of Boulder's top employers for women in the 1950s. Fans of punch card systems, magnetic tape reels, and other old office technology will enjoy the collection too.

I hadn't heard anything about Neodata since some time in the 1990s. It turns out that they were purchased by EDS (the IT company founded by Ross Perot) and reorganized with several other EDS business units into "Centrobe" in 1997. A business profile in early 2000 notes that Centrobe processed 3% of all USPS mail and had offices in Louisville and Longmont; I think their Boulder office had closed. EDS was purchased by HP in 2007 and Centrobe got merged into Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I haven't been able to follow the trail further from the public Internet. Does HP still have a magazine subscription services department? Do they still operate in Boulder County?

Terms: x, y, z

Conditions: x < y, x + y != z, (x % y == 0 && x % z == 1)

I wonder how hard it would be to synthesize human laughter. On one hand, there are a lot less rules and quirks than synthesizing speech. On the other hand, fake laughter isn't funny (and may even be condescending) while fake speech carries most of the important information.

Background: My company's email server runs MS Exchange. They won't turn on IMAP support, so the ways to access one's email are MS Outlook, Webmail, and programs written to read the (undocumented?) webmail format. As far as I can tell, Evolution is the only mail user agent which runs on Linux and can access (through a plugin) MS Exchange. Evolution's theme animal is the primate: its old logo had a monkey, it was originally called Ximian Evolution, some of its background processes are named bonobo, and so forth. Though not my favorite mail user interface, Evolution works reasonably well. The evolution-exchange plugin, on the other hand, has gone through several revisions of bugginess. A year or two ago it had a tendency to crash Evolution at random, but these days the main bug is the moderately annoying habit of re-downloading mail I've already seen when I launch Evolution. I've got to give the developers credit for creating something that's at least usable given the unsupported environment in which they're working, but all things being equal I'd rather not have this setup for my mail.

This morning, I came in a little after 8:30 and stepped through my new mail. One item in my inbox was spam, so I hit the Junk button in Evolution and moved on. A few hours later, I got an instant message that a coworker had sent me an email with a stack trace. I heard my "new mail" beep, but the message didn't show up in my inbox. I asked him to resend and the same thing happened. I looked at my inbox via webmail and saw the messages, but Evolution still had no clue, even after a restart.

After a morning of not getting email, I dug around in the files Evolution stores. I could see my new mail in the file on disk, but I couldn't see it in the application. I deleted the index, the metadata file, the summary. No help. Since Evolution was clearly copying data from Exchange to files on disk, I started investigating other clients I could use to read and send mail, planning to leave Evolution as a mail delivery agent. While Sylpheed and its offspring Claws looked promising, they seem to require the internal use the MH storage format and I didn't want to add an MBox to MH step to an already somewhat fragile mail setup. I installed Thunderbird and started setup for a mailspool account. But then the Thunderbird GUI seemed to hang while loading my spool (which only contains 147 cron messages), so I figured I'd give Evolution one more try.

I looked back in my Inbox mbox file and noticed that the junk mail I'd received this morning was still there. "Hmm... maybe Evolution just flags spam, but doesn't move it." I took a gander in my Junk folder and sure enough, there was all the email I received today. Select, mark as "not junk," and my mail was magically back to its correct place. I have no idea why everything got auto-filed as junk. Maybe there's a sticky flag bug. Maybe its small sample size made it think something like "From" was a spam word and everything with "From" in it should be marked junk. Regardless, I turned off junk mail scanning and sighed about a wasted afternoon.

The lesson for today: An infinite number of monkeys will eventually misplace your email.

P.S. I think I saw that the Exchange protocol will soon be (more?) open. I hope that will quickly lead to quality plugins for a great many email programs so that Evolution can fight for natural selection with more than the null set.

Ubuntu's security update this morning includes a fix to ImageMagick with the comment

SECURITY UPDATE: overflow in PALM reading.

Magick indeed.

If a spy adopted an identity as a sweet old lady so that she'd appear softer and kinder, the spy would be auntie aliased.


I've noticed before that I'm punnier when I stay up past 1 AM the night before.

I wrote the following comment on a Slashdot question about moving cross country. Nobody moderated my comment, but I think it was clever:

You should choose a transfer protocol which is reliable, though it need not be ordered. If you select a connectionless transfer protocol you should make sure you have a good error detection and recovery plan in place.

The RTT will be high, but that's acceptable. The Interstates have high bandwidth, but U.S. highways often have fewer collisions and hops with nicer food. Make sure you set your TTL high -- frequent hops make collisions less likely.

I suggest using physical private key protection for your content. Every standard implementation at the automobile layer supports this.

Consider generating a checksum for each delivery unit. That way you will be able to tell at a glance if any packets or boxes are dropped en route.