MailSend - The Story of a Humble Command-Line Email Utility

Jim Lawless
I used to sell a command-line email utility that I had written for 32-bit implementations of Microsoft Windows. The utility was named MailSend ( not to be confused with the three or four other command-line mailers which share the name. ) The domain name that I used to host MailSend and other utilities, mailsend-online.com has come up for renewal. After 23 or so years of having that domain, I think it’s time to retire it.

A Command-Line MP3 player for Windows (Updates - 26 Jan 2024)

Jim Lawless
In 2009, I was tinkering with the Windows multimedia subsystem and I wrote a short program to play MP3 audio files from the command-line ( cmdmp3.exe ). I created a second program that was a GUI application ( cmdmp3win.exe ) for those who didn’t want the console window to show. Althought it’s technically a GUI application, no visible user interface is present unless an error occurs. I have released a new version of the sources and executable programs tonight ( 26 Jan 2024 ).

The October 10th Bug

Jim Lawless
Originally published on: Fri, 7 Oct 2011. The Y2K panic was not the first time I had encountered a date-oriented software bug. Years before Y2K problems were even a worry, I ran into a situation where an MS-DOS program written in C began to run amok on October 10th. There had been no new releases of this particular program in months. It had behaved normally running continuously on an unattended PC in a computer room.

A Jazzy Playlist

Jim Lawless
I put together a YouTube playlist of some of my favorite jazz / jazz-rock / jazz-blues tunes. This is just one list. I’ll make more. The entire YouTube list is here, with the songs shuffled a bit so that tunes from the same artist don’t necessarily play in sequence. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIZg5UVGaR2Mz5xLAPdnZCwTstb2V9xJM&si=-5w20YNMo4H49VpR Here’s a list of the performers, sorted alphabetically by the first name of the performer / group : Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Moanin’

Meeting One's Heroes at Baltimore Comic-Con 2023

Jim Lawless
My Secret Origin I had a head-start in reading comics with a hand-me-down collection. I began selecting my own comics in the early 1970’s. I was in the early years of elementary school, at the time. I’d never been to a large con before, but some fellow comic-book-loving friends were getting together at Baltimore Comic-Con this year. I made plans to join them. I was primarily interested in meeting with some of the professional writers and artists.

Stray Pointers Podcast

Jim Lawless
All episodes of The Stray Pointers Podcast can be found here https://sites.libsyn.com/481983

On Pascal

Jim Lawless
I saw a re-mention of a 2019 blog post tonight called I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it and the counterpart commentary at HackerNews/YCombinator … I thought that I’d reminisce a bit about my experience with Pascal and Delphi. Padawan Pascal Like many of my generation, I started out coding in 8-bit BASIC dialects and later began to code in assembly language. What I often did when writing assembly was picture the program in BASIC.

On Perl

Jim Lawless
I believe that I first encountered details of the Perl programming language in the pages of The C Users Journal. I suspect that it was Sydney Weinstein’s article “A Perl of Great Price” in the April 1990 issue of The CUJ. At the time, I was developing software professionally using C almost exclusively. Perl’s use of various sigils and symbols were offputting for me. I didn’t give the language too much thought after that.

Generate UML Sequence Diagrams from Text with PlantUML

Jim Lawless
Setup I recently needed to draw a UML sequence diagram. That’s usually something I’d do in Microsoft’s Visio ™. I was aware of text-to-chart utilities such as Medusa so I assumed that similar tools would be available for generating sequence diagrams. A quick search of the web yielded an open source tool called PlantUML. PlantUML is a set of tools for converting text scripts to various kinds of UML diagrams. To use the bare-bones setup for PlantUML, you’ll need a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Filmation Star Trek Cartoons

Jim Lawless
I saw that Paramount+ has the old Filmation Star Trek cartoons from 1973 / 1974. I began re-watching these episodes. Yesteryear was one of my favorites as a kid. Because of a mishap while using The Guardian of Forever, history is changed and Spock never lives to reach adulthood and his mother, Amanda, is also no longer alive. Isolating the pivotal point where time changes, Spock travels back through time to meet his family and his childhood self ( whose voice sounds like that of Linus from the Peanuts cartoons ) acting as a relative on religious travels.