BWare

So my work email server decided once again to be incompatible with Apple Mail ¹. I could see my inbox, but all archived mail Went Away ². Still, Outlook sucks. Search is horrible.

In looking for the solution, I found the interesting official Apple Exchange Support document:

11k emails max! 5k emails recommended! Are you kidding me. I’ve worked on the same projects for literally a decade ³. Since launch is scheduled for 2034, I expect to have a few more email strings that I’d like to refer back to in the course of my work. I don’t even know how to begin to cut my email back to 11k.

Fuck you MS, and what genius at work decided that Exchange was a good choice.

Sadly though, most of my old emails have been “archived”, thus seriously affecting their usefulness. “Archived” means that all the attachments have been moved from the email server to another server, thus destroying the integrity of the email for archival purposes while not actually saving any disk space. Old emails are just text and free-floating images now. Context is gone.

This is a Seriously Bad Thing – many of the decisions we made back then affect the design of the mission in 2034, and the data that will be taken in 2043, were based on arguments made in long email chains of plots of simulations and analysis and discussion. Those are now borked, in the name of saving space on one server, but not on another. Good work folks.

The same people are now implementing an ID-card based login identity verification. You can’t log in to any computers at work unless you plug your chip-enabled card into a USB dongle. Not sure how that works if you:

• Forget your card – turn around and drive back to Santa Monica/Palmdale/Irvine?
• Need to run an overnight simulation? This is the same card that gets you through the front gate.
• Need to use more than one system? I have two computers, laptop and desktop.
  I can’t run a sim on one and go to a meeting with the other? ⁴
• Need to log into my desktop from Germany to get a file? Because, you know, I’ve only been to Germany about 30 times now to work on a collaborative project. For work.

Let’s not even consider that most of the documents on my computer are also on my phone. Shall we attach a dongle to the phone to make me plug in a card to use that?

1. Officially supported, then in limbo, now officially unsupported
2. Still there in a search, but no mailboxes in the Archives anymore.
3. Don’t blame me. Blame JWST. Or blame the liars at JDEM aka WFIRST aka 2010 Decadal Committee aka NRO. Blame NASA HQ. Or better yet, blame Congress. We had buttons that said “TRL6 in 2006” We’d have been at TRL 9 aka Launch in 2010. We’d have beat LIGO, and everything that that implies.
4. Actually I have more than a dozen computers, but let’s hope IT never finds out about the others as that would be a lab-wrecking discovery – we need to have about six computer running simultaneously to make everything work, and that’s for just one of the three testbeds.