My Computer 14 | ***Dave Does the Blog

Thursday Threesome

Been a looooong time since I did one of these weeklies. ::How High is Up?:: Onesome: How– many Apples in your orchard? Didn’t we just ask this one? Are you…

Been a looooong time since I did one of these weeklies.

::How High is Up?::
Onesome: How– many Apples in your orchard? Didn’t we just ask this one? Are you a Mac-o-phile, a Windows user, or one of those penguin people (Linux users)?

While we still have a (very old) Mac in our guest room (not powered on, I’d guess, for 2-3 years, which tells me we should, gasp, trash it), we’re pretty exclusively a Windows household. That’s not a matter of religion, but of practicality and happenstance. If we both worked at Mac-based companies, we’d probably have Macs at home. If I were a Linux admin, I’d probably have something like that.

Twosome: High is– what in height for your family? Are you a tall group? …a short stack? …or a mixed lot?

We’re determinedly middle-size — at 6’0″, I’m the tallest in our immediate family. Margie’s side of things runs to tall — her dad and brother both top 6′ by a substantial bit.

Threesome: Up– …and down and all around: Labor Day marked the end of Summer for those of us in the US (regardless of how the plants felt what with the temperatures out West and hurricanes in the East). How about you: what signals the change of seasons this time of year for you?

Sleeping under the covers. Turning on the heater on the drive in. And, of course, the cottonwoods beginning to turn (which they haven’t).

Google Talk update

Look! It’s the World’s Least Urgent Features! Well, not altogether true. But not much in the new Google Talk upgrade has me excited. File transfer: Look! Another reason for sysadmins…

Look! It’s the World’s Least Urgent Features!

Well, not altogether true. But not much in the new Google Talk upgrade has me excited.

File transfer: Look! Another reason for sysadmins to block Google Talk at your office!
Voice mail: Okay, I suppose if you make a lot of use of GTalk’s voice chat service, being able to leave a voice mail is cool. If you don’t … well …
Music tracking: Display the music you’re listening to! Or … not.

That’s all very nice. Now … when will we get Google Talk for SMS? That would be a feature I would use!

A distinctly un-merry Palm

So since some time last week, calendar synchronization between my Outlook and my Treo 650 has been failing. Outlook Calendar OLERR:03-0010 OLERR:0D-0028 OLERR:0D-000A OLERR:0D-0004 OLERR:0D-0001 – Desktop overwrite HH Sync…

So since some time last week, calendar synchronization between my Outlook and my Treo 650 has been failing.

Outlook Calendar
OLERR:03-0010
OLERR:0D-0028
OLERR:0D-000A
OLERR:0D-0004
OLERR:0D-0001
– Desktop overwrite HH Sync

Outlook Calendar synchronization failed
OLERR:15-0002
OLERR:06-0001

A search on the web finds this is a not-uncommon problem, and there are myriad solutions. These include things like:

Try overwriting the handheld with the desktop (as above).
Turn off the phone when syncing.
Make sure all recurring appointments have an end date.
Turn off the option to show calendar events on the phone screen.
Use the free filez utility to delete the CalendarDB-PDat file.
Start up Outlook with the /resetfolders flag.
Do a Help/Detect & Repair in Outlook. (Warning: this may send you down the path of mysterious SKU011.CAB error on MS Office.)

Just do a search on one of those OLERR errors, and you’ll find eleventy-dozen pages explaining a variety of solutions (as above). Options that are also suggested but that I am extremely reluctant to do:

Buy PocketMirror sync software, rather than using the Palm Outlook conduits.
Clean out all your appointments in Outlook (drag them into another calendar folder). Sync again at that point. Drag everything back.
Hard reset on the Palm. Restore stuff from backup.
Reinstall MS Office.
Reinstall Windows.

Bleah.

Focus!

I hate applications that steal focus. I really, really do. A focused window is the one that’s on the top. An application that steals focus is one that, when it…

I hate applications that steal focus. I really, really do.

A focused window is the one that’s on the top. An application that steals focus is one that, when it starts or when something happens in it, pops itself up to the top of the stack, bringing its window to the fore, and burying other windows that had focus under it.

This is a real problem when you’re typing something in a window, and suddenly another window (or dialog box) pops up. You can easily send a stray keystroke to the dialog, which it interprets as a response, etc. It also disrupts your train of thought, as you have to go digging back for the window you wanted, figure out what you were saying, etc.

Bleah.

It’s a fundamental Windows design (the old IBM OS/2 team fought the matter long and hard, apparently, and we see where it got them), though each new Windows release has chipped away at the “feature” of letting applications jump up and down and cut in line when they have something to say.

Bleah.

The Microsoft PowerToy “Tweak UI” has, among its many other spiffy why-isn’t-this-standard features, an option to prevent applications from stealing focus, and to leave their Task Bar icon blinking or highlighted when they’re requesting focus.

It’s a faboo setting, and has saved my sanity on several occasions … except that it would be even spiffier if Micro$oft Outlook didn’t ignore the setting and spatter whatever windows it’s opening on startup over whatever window is actually active, over and over and over again.*

Bleah.

Stealing focus is just wrong, folks. It’s rude. It’s annoying. And it’s dangerous, if it causes you to inadvertently provide a response to a dialog that you don’t realize in time is there. Unless it’s something warning me my PC is about to explode, or unless I configure an application to intentionally do so, applications shouldn’t do it. Even then, pop-ups and the like that steal focus should have no keyboard shortcuts or default responses that can be inadvertently clicked when they interrupt everything else
going on except for my busy fingers.

Bad design, all around.

* Actually, it may not be Outlook. I keep finding that Tweak UI setting changed back to allow apps to grab focus — which is really annoying. If I find out what’s doing it … Though, nevertheless, Outlook grabs focus way too often on startup. Bad dog! No cookie!

So why do I put up with ecto?

I tend to mutter and murmer and kvetch semi-silently about using ecto (or other blogging clients), such that folks wonder why I use them in the first place. Or, as…

I tend to mutter and murmer and kvetch semi-silently about using ecto (or other blogging clients), such that folks wonder why I use them in the first place. Or, as Doyce IMed, “I have a great tool I use for posting. It’s called Moveable Type.”

So why do I actually use an external client, instead of MT’s web-based one?

Like most things, it’s easier to bitch than to laud, so I should give some of the nice stuff back. I’d actually slated to do that during the Blogathon, but didn’t get around to it. So …

The Good: Here’s a list of features ecto has that I find convenient (or that are unique to it vs. the MT Web interface).

As an external client, no web windows to inadvertently close or have crash. Easy to save drafts.And ecto has an auto-save feature so that ever X minutes my post gets saved, no worries. [As someone who leaves drafts open for a while, and who occasionally has a browser crash, this has saved my butt repeatedly.]
Integrated listing of previous posts, so I can easily re-edit something.
Formatting buttons for bold/italic/underscore/strikethru. Also for left/center/right/justified paragraphs. Also for number points and bullet points. And blockquotes.
Customizable hyperlink tool. [So I have have links open in new windows/tabs.]
Integrated upload tool, particularly for images. And it remembers the directory I want files loaded to. And it remembers the <div> text I want it surrounded in to make the floating right (or left) little shadow boxes. [Priceless.]
Integrated customizable “now listening to” tool. [Which I use rarely.]
Integrated Amazon search-and-link too. Do a search for something in Amazon, and auto-insert a (customized) text, graphic, or both link, including your affiliate ID. [I’ve not used this myself, just started looking at it today.]
Other, customizableHTML formatting blocks and/or text blocks. Thetext blocks I used in my comics reviews over the Blogathon? A matter of a few minutes to set up, then I could replicate them all night long. And I can do it the same way the next time I edit a comic book review. [This is fabulously valuable to me, and worth nearly any inconvenience.]
Rich Text editor, so that you can actually see the italics/bolding/etc. you’ve put it.
Web preview, using your own CSS, so you can see how things actually will look (more or less) when posted.
Integrated spelling checker.
Font and size control. [I don’t use them, since I’ve got stuff set up for this through CSS.]
Prevent posting without Categories and/or Keywords being defined. [I set this on for Categories.]
Automated e-mail notification to people of new posts. [I don’t use this.]
Customizable conversion of keywords to Technorati tags. [Which I don’t use, but some folks would.]
Entry templates, if you do various similarly formatted posts. [Which I don’t use.]

The Bad: I do mutter, and I do grumble. Here are some of the problems I’m presently havingwith ecto(most UI oddities, feature gaps, and bugs).

Ecto currently either sets the post date to when the post is first opened for drafting, or updates everything (new posts and edited posts) to the save date-time.
The comments flag sometimes magically blips off.
There are some strange performance issues, where the program will occasionally lock up (and lock up some other stuff, too) for 30 seconds or so.
Because it’s natively a MacOS program, there are some odd interface gotchas.
Doesn’t do internal pings (trackbacks to other posts on my blog).
A few glitches here or there, esp. when I download a beta/test version to play with.

Now, that all said, the programmer on this, Alex Hung,is very responsive on the product forum, and I’ve rarely had a show-stopper for very long. And, the fact is, I can bridge over via the MT web interface when need be. Which sometimes I do anyway, if I’m just tweaking something minor on a post.

Ecto is a pay product, though pretty cheap ($18). I also recommend SharpMT, which, except for the Rich Text / Preview features, does 95% of the above, is stable, and is free.

Now, are these tools absolutely necessary? Absolutely not. And if you’re a casual blogger — a post or two a day, tops, and just plain text, etc. — they’re probably not worth it. For me, though, they make my life a lot easier (when they cough work), and whatever pains I have with them are more than compensated by the pleasures and power they bestow.

And that’s why.

BT06 – Music Software, Hark!

Speaking of music (I know we weren’t speaking of music, but I was in the next post to last, and that created a thought process. And I might as well…

Speaking of music (I know we weren’t speaking of music, but I was in the next post to last, and that created a thought process. And I might as well shake things up here a little bit) …

I use Apple’s iTunes for my music player on my PC. On 6.0.5 for Windows, which is the current version. It isn’t the best system in the world, and like most Mac ports to Windows there some oddities about how it behaves, but it works pretty well and pretty much meets all my needs. I don’t buy music online, just rip the CDs I own myself, and I do it to MP3, so some of the objections some folks have to iTunes are moot in that way.

I do like the integrated database with it, rather than simply treating everything as a collection of MP3 files and having to read all the internal MP3 data on them. I like tracking composers as well as artists, and sorting and searching by eleventy different criteria. I like making different playlists.

Here’s my main problem.

I have 7,862 music tracks in my iTunes library. That’s our entire CD collection, and it represents 17.5 days worth of audio, for a total of 19.72Gb. Which takes a huge chunk out of my hard drive (and since it’s a company computer, I can’t exactly ask for a new hard drive to fit my music better).

What I’d like to be able to do is migrate some of my music over to another drive. I even have an external drive I can use for the purpose. I’d like it to be accessible when the drive is plugged in, inaccessible when it’s not. Unfortunately, if iTunes has a way to split the library that way, I’ve not been able to find anything to that effect. Heck, from what I’ve been able to read, it’s a dicey proposition to put your iTunes library as a whole onto an external drive, or move it to some
place other than where it currently is.

If someone has a reasonable way to handle this, please offer up your suggestions. I’m all ears, at least when it comes to music.

(listening to: “String Serenade E major Op. 22 (Pro Arte Munich) – Allegro vivace” from Classic Gold – Dvorak)
(listening to: Riepl, Kevin, “CoV Theme” from City of Villains)

Home Technology in the News!

Things I got done over the weekend: Installed our new wireless router. Our old NetGear one had been hanging up on a regular basis — like, multiple times per evening. …

Things I got done over the weekend:

Installed our new wireless router. Our old NetGear one had been hanging up on a regular basis — like, multiple times per evening. A power cycle and waiting for the wireless to reconnect and all was good as new, but annoying. The LinkSys I replaced it with appears to be much more stable.
Installed Margie’s new Logitech wireless mouse. She’s still having problems with it, unfortunately. On the other hand, it was a great opportunity to clear out some unused cabling and stuff around her computer.
Got the 100Gb backup drive for my machine pretty cleared off, so I can keep doing backups to it. It had multiple images of my notebook from back a year or so ago when the damned thing was crashing regularly.

Things I did not get done:

Didn’t get the wireless on the old printer to work with the new router. Annoying.
Didn’t finish migrating Margie’s document files from her old machine to her new one. Yes, this is waaaaaay overdue.
Didn’t finish figuring out what I’m going to use the second backup drive for. Margie’s backups? Offline storage of photos and other high-space-taking items from my machine, possibly including a lot of my MP3s?
Didn’t get installed the Brother Multi-Function Printer / Copier / Scanner / Fax of the Gods that Margie picked up for us. Which will be really keen, once installed. And, being up-to-date wireless, hopefully it will work with the new hub.
Didn’t install MT 3.3 yet.

Continue reading “Home Technology in the News!”

That’s what I have Margie for

Well, actually, I have my Treo for that, too (which makes more sense to me, since it can also actually display the information), and my blog, and, well, heck,…

Zits, from 6 July 2006, by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

Well, actually, I have my Treo for that, too (which makes more sense to me, since it can also actually display the information), and my blog, and, well, heck, my laptop — but I rely on Margie as my Smart Life Backup.

Flash! Whoa-oh!

Allow me to just say that I really hate Macromedia Flash. Much of its use for animation is usually dubious (really, don’t need much distracting eye candy, thankyouverymuch), which is…

Allow me to just say that I really hate Macromedia Flash. Much of its use for animation is usually dubious (really, don’t need much distracting eye candy, thankyouverymuch), which is why I use the Flashblock extension in FF.

But, more importantly, what gets presented in Flash is not easily copyable. Text in Flash is acutally a graphic, so it can’t be selected and Copy/Pasted. And there’s no right-click context menu to save a graphic image that you see.

Which, no doubt, is sometimes the point. But it’s a freaking annoying point, and it’s freaking annoying that uComics is beginning to use Flash for some of comics offerings, such as Foxtrot. Not that it keeps folks who really want to from copying the comic (screen caps still work), but it makes it annoying to do so,

And, on a completely unrelated note, does anyone have a recommendation for a simple, fast graphics editor — something that I could basically pull up/paste a graphic image (e.g., a screen cap) and crop it, maybe save it as a few different types? The Microsoft Photo Editor worked great for that, as an example, but it got automagically deinstalled with Office 2003 (grump), and the MS Picture Manager is more of, well, a manager than an editor (and an annoying one at that). I have Paint Shop Pro, which I love, but which also takes a good minute to load up. I want something lean and quick, not something that will let me create the great American graphic image.

UPDATE: Interesting. Someone has posted a stand-alone version of MPE here (source here). Put into a directory and execute to expand it. It’s an older version (1999), but it doesn’t seem to have trashed my machine … yet.

Name! That! File!

Don’t recognize a mysterious system file on your PC? Visit WhatIsThatFile? and find out what it’s for (or if you should try and get rid of it). (via GeekPress)…

Don’t recognize a mysterious system file on your PC? Visit WhatIsThatFile? and find out what it’s for (or if you should try and get rid of it).

(via GeekPress)

Google Talk

New version of Google Talk out, mostly mild tweaks to the interface: You can now add icons for yourself. A minor tweak that the purists will likely hate, but fun…

New version of Google Talk out, mostly mild tweaks to the interface:

You can now add icons for yourself. A minor tweak that the purists will likely hate, but fun nonetheless.
You can change the overall format of conversations. I actually pretty much like the original format, to be honest>

Plus an announcement about Google Talk for the Blackberry. *sigh* Really wish it was available for easy chatting on something other than a persistent push connection (like Blackberries have), i.e., something similar to Yahoo! IM’s ability to sign in to YIM from my Treo. Alas.

I will note that Margie and I are still intermittently using the phone call feature when I travel. The fidelity is a whole lot better than an analog call.

Disk Space, the Final Frontier

I’ve been struggling for a few months with space on my notebook. XP has a nice emergency clean-up facility to do stuff (deleting temp files, compressing stuff), but bottom line,…

I’ve been struggling for a few months with space on my notebook. XP has a nice emergency clean-up facility to do stuff (deleting temp files, compressing stuff), but bottom line, I’ve got space issues.

Digging a bit deeper, and using some downloaded disk scanners, I’ve managed to clean off enough bits to go from 150Mb to over 5Gb free (on my 60Gb drive). I burned some large video files to disk, deleted installation files, goods tuff like that. The effort also included deleting some old Outlook Express mail folders, and my CoH Test server installation (from the CoV beta). That should help. For a while.

Problem is, I know where a huge chunk of the space is going:

I have many, many, many Gb of MP3 files. Basically, our whole CD collection. Nothing to be done about that without some major strategic planning. Maybe a small external drive (that I could carry with me) to dump the music to and then plug it in when I wanted it.
I have many Gb of digital photos, too. Some of this is duplicated here and there, and I need to spend an afternoon archiving stuff to disc and cleaning up the rest. Maybe Friday. Hah.

But I seem to be working for the nonce, so that’s all good.

Fonts

An interesting point made here: There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set…

An interesting point made here:

There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane.
And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That’s right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?

The problem it two-fold. First is that the above info is not altogether accurate — you don’t need to own Goudy to read a book set in it, but the publisher/printer did, in fact, buy that Goudy font and pay for it based on it being use to typeset a book. Ditto, presumably, for video presentations.

The second problem is more fundamental, and that’s the distributed nature of fonts on the web. The font itself is not driven by the service provider or web page, but by what’s installed on the person’s machine. The reason that Arial — or a whole slew of other fonts — are used so much is that they are already out on people’s machines, as stated. The best of the solutions the author describes in the rest of the article — creating open-source versions of classic fonts — will work only insofar as people are willing or able to download those fonts once created. And that’s a proposal I’m dubious will happen, unless it’s done automagically in conjunctoin with, say, browser downloads, similar to the way Micro$oft used to make Tahoma and Verdana and Georgia available for download. Imagine if Mozilla made some standard Open Source fonts available for download in a similar fashion with Firefox …

This is sometimes done on a site-by-site basis — Marn used to have a link, I think, to let her readers download the Mead Bold that her site is designed around. But to be successful, fonts need to be as easily available and downloadable as PDF readers and other plug-ins — easier, in fact, so that it’s transparent to the viewer.

Some day.

Minor techie accomplishments

Minor technical accomplishments/sidelights of the past few days: Got Margie’s “new” Treo set up to sync with her “new” PC at home. Complicated by the fact that it’s already set…

Minor technical accomplishments/sidelights of the past few days:

Got Margie’s “new” Treo set up to sync with her “new” PC at home. Complicated by the fact that it’s already set up to sync at her office — and not through the normal HotSync, but with some bizarro Lotus Notes OneConnect widgety thing.
Figured out around that, and then Margie talked her IT into letting her Treo push data back up to Notes (not just copy it down, duh), so it looks like she’s all set.
Created e-mail accounts for the (brother-in-law) nephews under that family domain (hosted under my domain). Coolness.
Initial consulting with a local friend (and frequent commenter here) about setting up a blog. Very much coolness, prospectively.

Migrating Firefox and Thunderbird

I mention it below, but it probably deserves its own entry. I moved Firefox and Thunderbird over to Margie’s new machine from her old one. In both cases, the migration…

I mention it below, but it probably deserves its own entry.

I moved Firefox and Thunderbird over to Margie’s new machine from her old one. In both cases, the migration was a pretty manual affair, assisted only by a few obscure articles I was able to Google for.

Mozilla is missing the boat here. Migration between PCs is a huge headache. If FF and TB could do this easily, it would be a massive selling point. Alas, I suspect it’s not going to happen soon for a couple of reasons:

Migration isn’t sexy. New features are sexy. The danger of open source software is that the contributors want to work on sexy stuff. (This is parallel to the problem with proprietary software, where new features are favored over basic functionality because they are more marketable.)
Migration is thankless. Not only is it technically complex with a multi-platform system like Firefox (it’s not a matter of migrating Windows-Windows, but every permutation of every platform that FF and TB support), but it’s an issue fraught with potential problems, any of which will lead to blame and things being seen as broken. If you don’t provide the functionality, nobody can claim its broken, right?

Nevertheless, this process was more involved and problematic than it should have been. I’d never recommend it to anyone who’s not technically proficient. If Mozilla wants these tools to become popularly used, there needs to be something beyond “Well, if you go to a new machine, just start with a fresh browser.”

Migrating Firefox

Upgraded Margie’s Old PC (OPC) to the current version of FF (which broke some extensions, but nothing critical).
Installed the latest version of FF to Margie’s New PC (NPC).
Copied the “Documents and Settings/Margie/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox” directory (which has all the profile settings for FF) from the OPC to the NPC (slightly complicated by Margie being “Compaq_User” on the NPC).
Everything … pretty much worked at that point. The one FF extension that isn’t just an extension (RoboForm) had to be installed and brought in sync, but it all worked pretty well.
Added some new extensions for her (in keeping with what I use).

Migrating Thunderbird

Upgraded Margie’s OPC to the current version of TB. At this point, TB stopped working on her OPC. Yikes. Crossed fingers.
Installed the latest version of TB to Margie’s NPC.
Copied the “Documents and Settings/Margie/Application Data/Thunderbird/[default profile]” directory (which has all the profile settings for TB) from the OPC to the NPC (slightly complicated by Margie being “Compaq_User” on the NPC).
This was a lot trickier than with FF, largely because that includes all the mail folders, which worked out to about 900+ Mb of data for Margie. Yikes. Zipped it and copied to a CD.
Modified the prefs.js file on the NPC to point to the right directory. Also, the profiles.ini file.
Fired up the new TB. Nothing. Doesn’t see the old mail. Pound at it awhile. Nothing.
Closed TB. Noticed that a completely new default directory got created (and the restored one deleted). Recopied the OPC profile in there, and modified the profiles.ini file to point to it
Everything … pretty much worked at that point. Breathed a sigh of relief.

If there’s an easier way to do either of these things, I couldn’t find reference on the various Mozilla pages. Indeed, even the article I linked to above is designed around moving a proflie within a given machine; the idea of migrating to a new machine and wanting to take your mail with you doesn’t seem to have occured to them.

Note that something like MozBackup might have made this easier (though it wasn’t clear that it supports the v1.5 of FF or TB — no reason it shouldn’t, but …) — but, again, if that’s the “recommended” solution, it needs to be a lot more clear in the Mozilla documentation.

Weekend Update

Not quote sure where the weekend went: Friday Spent the afternoon getting Firefox and Thunderbird installed on Margie’s new machine. Actually, the installation was trivial. The transfer of data from…

Not quote sure where the weekend went:

Friday

Spent the afternoon getting Firefox and Thunderbird installed on Margie’s new machine. Actually, the installation was trivial. The transfer of data from the old machine — especially the mail — was a lot more problematic. Here’s a clue for the Mozilla folks: people migrate machine — there should be a trivially difficult process for allowing this to happen. Instead, I had to do various web searches, copy hidden directories over, and pound on the keyboard a lot to get Margie’s new machine to see the old mail. (Not that OE or other programs are necessarily better, but this is a place where Mozilla’s open source origins really show through.)
Ran errands. Was reminded by the temps that, yes, it is still the dead of winter here, even if most of the time it doesn’t seem that way.
I went over to Doyce’s to watch Sin City with him and Stan and Ann (who’s up from Mexico). Fun movie.

Saturday

Ran some errands.
Got haircuts. First “pro” haircut I’ve gotten in a number of years. The stylist was a bit nonplussed that all I wanted was a couple of swipes from the electric clippers. I was nonplussed to be confronted with a mirror held to the back of my head. I guess it worked out even.
Played CoV with Margie.

Sunday

Raced home after church (grabbing a bite at Starbucks) to get the house in condition for folks to come over.
Folks came over — Stan, Ann, Doyce (with Kaylee), Randy — for the general Jan-Feb Birthdays. Ate much food, talked much talk, played Scattergories, watched Kung Fu Hustle (hilarious). Got some fun books.
Broke up early evening. Cleaned up. Played CoV with Margie.
Kitten started showing signs of an ear infection mid-afternoon, which was a bummer, since it meant she had to skip the birthday party at Monkey Bizness she was supposed to go to, as well as Margie having to get up multiple times overnight for her.

Could have used another day or two in there.

Scam, Spam, or Slam?

I find it vaguely amusing that the vitriolic People for the American Way e-mail I received today was flagged by Thunderbird. “Thunderbird thinks this is a possible scam.” It was…

I find it vaguely amusing that the vitriolic People for the American Way e-mail I received today was flagged by Thunderbird. “Thunderbird thinks this is a possible scam.”

It was probably because of a mismatch between the mailing address and return domain, or where the images were hosted, or something, but it was kind of funny.

(And I suspect most political action e-mails would be likely to have the same warning, so don’t consider this a partisan slur.)

Thunderbird 1.5 is go!

Upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5. Nothing too wildly faboo in terms of feature improvements, but, then, a mailer is a mailer. It does spell checking, which is nice. My IMAP configuration…

Upgraded to Thunderbird 1.5. Nothing too wildly faboo in terms of feature improvements, but, then, a mailer is a mailer. It does spell checking, which is nice. My IMAP configuration still doesn’t work (which I think is a server-end problem), and Tagzilla doesn’t work under the latest release (an upgrade is promised soon, but that makes doing my WIST mailings more difficult), but overall, no significant problems so far.

UPDATE: IMAP problems are now solved — had to indicate it was an SSL connection, which used not to be true. Huzzah.

Password strong! Strongest one there is!

The security folks at the company are once again pushing the concept of strong passwords out to the masses. I.e., Use “letter substitution” to create strong passwords: Special characters (@!$&#)…

The security folks at the company are once again pushing the concept of strong passwords out to the masses. I.e.,

Use “letter substitution” to create strong passwords: Special characters (@!$&#) and numbers can be used to replace letters. For example, the number one can be used to replace the letter “i”. The dollar sign ($) can be used to replace the letter “s”.

The word “password” can be changed to “pa$$w0rD”.
The word “construct” can be changed to “C0n$truct”.
The word “elevators” can be changed to “el3v@tors”.

Use compound words to create strong passwords: Compound words that we use every day are easy to remember. Spice them up with numbers and special characters. Also, misspell one or both of the words and you’ll get a great password.

The word “doghouse” can be changed to “d@wgh0wz”.
The word “ladybugs” can be changed to “LADYbug$”
The words “tuna fish” can be changed to “t00naFish”

Use a phrase to create a strong password: Using the first letter or the first few letters of each word in a poem, song, or phrase can also help construct a good password.

The phrase “Jack and Jill went up the hill to?” can be changed to “J&Jwuth2”.
The phrase “I love rock and roll” can be changed to “il0veR&R”.
The phrase “Company core value – People are our greatest asset” can be changed to “ccvP@0ga”.

Which is all very clever and very nice, except …

… who the hell is going to actually remember that? Especially if you’re also recommended to create a completely different one every 90 days?

And all those special characters not only make it a lot more likely you’re going to misspell your password, it’s going to make you type it a lot … more … slowly … which means that anyone watching you is going to figure it out.

I do have an appreciation for security, and for why the security folks like all these things. Heck, I used to oversee the IT security group. But, reality check? People aren’t going to do it, and if they do it it’s going to be a huge PitA. Which just makes people roll their eyes at the next IT security measure.

Huzzah! Resizeable Textarea returns!

One of the keenest Firefox extensions evah is back and working with FF 1.5. Resizeable Textarea lets you drag the corner of a form textarea to the size you want…

One of the keenest Firefox extensions evah is back and working with FF 1.5. Resizeable Textarea lets you drag the corner of a form textarea to the size you want it. Great for blog comments and other forms where you have to enter lots of text. The old version was not updated for 1.5, but this version is (and, better yet, it works).