Chock one up in the oops column. This whole past week I’ve been yarking at OIT to put my Savin Copier on an access control list for our plain-jane SMTP server here on campus. Through a labyrinth of miscommunication it turns out the task was done in December 2009, but I didn’t learn of that fact until a week ago, somewhat through 2011! Oh well, bygones. So now I have my copier set up to send email and yesterday I started to clean my office.

Let me repeat that bit. I. CLEANED. MY. OFFICE.

Yes, that’s right. God help us all. So I started putting order into the bitter waters of the chaotic sea. Mostly it was sorting wheat and chaff. There is only a bit of wheat (the mac stuff) in comparison to the chaff (everything else). Mostly it was sorting legacy bullshit into legacy bullshit containers, so everything with a PS/2 connector, bullshit. Everything that was vogue pre-2005, bullshit. The blizzard of little Blackberry devices? Utter bullshit. So all of it went into boxes, marked with a Sharpie and stacked neat as ya please. I even got a chance to move Frankenserver into the machine room. For those that don’t know, Frankenserver is the nickname I gave to a Mac Mini that is running OS X Snow Leopard, then that runs VirtualBox, which has a Windows 2003 Server image loaded on that. In there is SQL Server 2000 SP4, IIS 6 (or 7, don’t care which) and a copy of our production database’s sample database for training. It’s slow, but it works and I got it done without having to buy a single G-D thing.

Along with all of this meandering malarkey, I also had a giant pile of dead paper that was in a Z-filer on a platform that now supports a rather viney plant. The paper mocks me. It just sits there, dead and cryptic. Yes I could leaf through it, but the minute I do I feel this odd laziness come over me. It would be so much better if all of it was in PDF format and up on Evernote. Frankly my dear, everything ends up in Evernote. I drank the kool-aid, and I liked it. So I got it in my head to pull all the staples out of this paperwork and try out my copier’s new handy-dandy Scan-to-Email which is set to my Evernote Email Address. I loaded up the giant stack and let the ADF chew through it. Voop veep voop veep. I then gathered it all up and threw it in our fancy new “Security Level 4” crosscut shredder. Done and done.

I felt quite satisfied that I had tamed a bit of the paper tiger in my office and confident that what I had scanned was safely stuffed away in my Evernote archive. This morning I opened Evernote and looked through the results. This is where my punishment reigns supreme. A list of files, “FILE 1/5” and when I looked into them, they weren’t PDF’s but 2MB chunks of text! Hells Bells. What had happened was I had scanned so much that the scanner in the copier converted all my PDF files into base64 text files and then split them up into 2MB segments and mailed them out. So there they were, all my files, in a funky format and not very handy to have. I extracted the files, one at a time, renamed them, then used the ‘cat’ command to join them all together in the right order, stripped off the SMTP wrapper at the beginning and fed them all into this neat little command:

openssl base64 -d -in-out

Thanks for this little gem goes to Mac OSX Hints and a fellow named Chris Janton. I knew that openssl did a lot of heavy-lifting in OSX, but not this far! I should have assumed it did. So passing my stupid base64 text chunk into openssl, spit out my hefty PDF files and then I cleaned up Evernote, re-added the hefty PDF files and alls-well-that-ends-well.

Discovering this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my morning, but at least I wasn’t lost on how to fix it. I spent only a bit of time considering what your “average computer user” would have done, and they would have likely just deleted the Evernote bits and declared the entire thing a loss. It’s rather a shame that my estimation for other people’s cleverness with computers is so abysmally low. But that’s another blog post altogether. 🙂