technews @ kitt.co.za

hMailServer is my prefered email server. It is really good – very user friendly and its configuration is quite detailed and versatile. And of course it is free. :)

I recently installed it on a clean installation of a 64-bit operating system. On startup, the installer told me that the .NET framework version 2 is required and will now be downloaded. So I let it download and (I thought) install .NET. However, when it got to the step of configuring the database, the application would not start. All I got was the relatively non descriptive error “failed to initialize properly”. And the same error occurred when trying to start up the tools from the start menu.

I was just about ready to give up, having found no helpful hints online. However, when I got to the “Add or Remove Programs” dialog, I realised that the .NET framework is in fact still not installed. Curious but solvable. So I downloaded the .NET framework manually, and tried to install it. As it turns out, I accidentally downloaded the 32-bit version – which cannot be installed on a 64-bit operating system. The 64-bit version is about 10MB larger than the 32-bit, which made me realise that the hMailServer installer downloaded the wrong version for my operating system. I had to uninstall and reinstall hMailServer after this whole process, but now it is running perfectly.

Moral of the story – when installing hMailServer on a 64-bit OS, make sure that you have the .NET framework version 2 installed first!. :)

Dia is an open source tool for drawing structured diagrams. I used it quite extensively recently, and I discovered a very useful feature. How selection of multiple objects take place depends on where you start to draw the selection box (the dotted line in the screenshot below).

Dia screenshot showing the selection area

If you start the selection at the bottom right corner such as in the screenshot above, the selection will include any object touched by the area. So the result of this operation would be as shown below.

Dia selection - area selected from bottom right to top left

However, if you start the selection by starting at the top left corner and dragging towards the bottom right… only the objects enclosed completely by the chosen area will be selected (as shown below).

Dia selection - area selected from top left to bottom right

If this description does not quite make sense… go ahead, try it out. :)