2010-01-26

E-mail support with humor

I am maintaining a BMC AR-System environment with ITSM applications supporting ITIL applications including Incident, Problem and Change. This system is sending out a lot of e-mail notifications to all the users. Quite often the end user reporting an incident answers the receipt e-mail asking questions or sending additional feedback. Very often the system just receives autoreplies about the users being on vacation or on paternity leave.

The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.

Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.

So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.

I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.

"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."

OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)

2010-01-22

Europe got a new pro

Li Ting [6D] living in Austria just became pro through a test by the Kansai Ki-in at the age of 29. You can also read the new at the Austrian Go Association's homepage. Her pro status will be valid from 1st Mars 2010.

This is very good for European go! I hope she will play a lot of pro tournaments in Japan and become even stronger.

(Now I think we can make all European 7D to pros, found the European Go Pro Association and start our own pro circus in Europe)

2010-01-15

Eidogo for Blogger HOWTO

I got the question from a fellow weiqi playing blogger of how to post a game of weiqi to a blogger blog post.

Well, I have done it. Now I will try to explain how you can do the same. I remember that I had some problems to implement it myself. Mostly because I was not sure how the whole process works. After some trial and error I figured it out.

I found my first clues on the Eidogo homepage. This information is probably enough if you have a single copy of the board on your personal homepage. This description is not really enough if you want several boards with different games on your blog. At least not to my experience.


So this is how I did...

First we want to add the eidogo javascript to the blog. The first you might thing of is to add it to the html part of your post. That doesn't work for more than one board and post. Instead you want to add it to the header so it is included only once for your whole blog. Then you will never have to do this part again.

So go to the Layout section of your blog and click on Edit HTML. Maybe you already have done some of your own cusomizations there. At least I've made a lot of them. Before you start you want to do a backup of your template if you by mistake break anything. Then you can do your changes.

Down there in the later parts of the code you will see a row saying:

</head>

Just above this line you add:

<script src='http://eidogo.com/player/js/all.compressed.js' type='text/javascript'/>

Then save the template.

The next step you need to do for every blog post you want to add a weiqi board to. So you start writing a new blog entry. Write any free text and when it is time for your Eidogo board you hit Edit HTML.

Where you want to have your board you enter the text:

<div class="eidogo-player-auto">

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[7.50]
PW[Boywing]PB[Juãn]WR[5k]BR[4k]RE[W+Resign]
;B[dp]
;W[qp]
;B[dd]
;W[pd]))

</div>

The red code in the middle between the div-lines is the content of an sgf-file. Mine here only have four moves. You can use a complete game of course.

Notice that it doesn't work to preview your post...

Now publish your post and you will see something like this!


(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[7.50]
PW[Boywing]PB[Juãn]WR[5k]BR[4k]RE[W+Resign]
;B[dp]
;W[qp]
;B[dd]
;W[pd]))