Peter's Blog

I'm back to using Outlook for two reasons:

• the journal feature may be useable as a desktop notetaking tool. Being integrated into the email program means fewer apps running and a leaner and meaner system (ha). It does look like a half decent note taking tool, entries can be formatted, pictures pasted in etc.
• was reading how hackers can carry packet sniffers on memory keys and became paranoid about my unencrypted password floating around the ether(net). I looked into setting up ssl authentication on the exchange server but it involves messing around setting up an ssl certificate server and I couldn't be bothered.

I've given up on using folders to categorise my email: I leave it all in the inbox and rely in searching to find stuff. I have google desktop search to speed this up but that still thinks I am still using thunderbird and tries using that to display messages. How to persuade it I have vaccilated back to the evil ones?

I finally got around to setting up my signature in Thunderbird. To set up the signature you have to:

• Create a signature file. This is a straight text file containing your name, some interesting ascii art, a quote that makes you sound learned and a warning that for legal reasons, nobody should ever read your email.
• Open Tools/Account Settings/Manage Identities../Edit../Settings and click the 'Attach this signature' box.
• Click 'Choose' and navigate to your signature file.

When it comes to email I'm a top poster: life's too short to spend scrolling down email messages. If you top post you want your signature at the top of the message, not the bottom where nobody will read it. On the 'Composition & Addressing' tab there is a control to tell it to 'start my reply above the quote' and another to place my signature 'below my reply (above the quote)'. If you choose this option and save the settings and then reopen the settings again the signature is set to 'below the quote (recommended)': looks like a bug in Thunderbird 1.5.0 (or some evil microsoft loving, emacs using, big-endian favouring bottom poster has deliberately broken it).

To get top posting to work correctly you have to go into the file

C:\Documents and Settings\{windows username}\
   Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\
   {random letters}\prefs.js

and change the line that says:

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", false);

to say

user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", true);

I am back with Google Desktop Search. I was using MSN desktop search but I got tired of it not shutting down with the computer. I have moaned about GDS in the past, particularly that I don't like the idea of results appearing in a web browser because the only thing you can do is open them, you don't have Windows Explorer's right-click context menu. After months of using MSN search I have decided that this is not a big deal: on the whole I can remember where things are and I use salamander to access them, I only use search when I have lost something.

GDS integrates better with thunderbird than MSN search did: I installed an MSN thunderbird plugin but it never worked. GDS supports it out-of-the-box, although as I use IMAP it will only index the messages I actually open, not the 2400 messages in my archives (unless I view them all one at a time).

I have come to appreciate the various plugins available for the GDS sidebar, especially the email preview thing: in fact I find myself reading email on that rather than switching to thunderbird. There are many plugins available but their installation programs often seem excessively large (megabytes) for something that is hosted by another application and appears in a window two inches square.

I have stopped using Opera for now: it's mail reader was not showing me the contents of some messages so I abandoned it. Some emails can crash it and it is still not as compatible with web sites as firefox. It has got me hooked on gestures and I find myself gesturing in FireFox to no avail (except at microsoft.com). I have installed a gesture extension and am hoping the next point release of firefox doesn't break it.

I'm trying the Opera 9 preview as an alternative (or complement) to Firefox. Opera has been attractive to me in the past but always gave odd rendering problems or crashes that put me off. This version has been ok thus far and has features built in that are quite seductive. Ok firefox has extensions but these all seem to break every time they upgrade it and I have got fed up with reinstalling them (too high maintenance).

Opera goodies, some maybe all available as Firefox extensions but are bundled with opera:

• Fast Forward: this button seems to find the 'next' link on your page and clicks it for you. You can go through google results very quickly.
• gestures: right click and move the cursor around to control the browser: e.g. right click and move right does the fast forward action so takes you to the next page with no fuss and minimal physical effort.
• email client: this supports IMAP and works with Microsoft Exchange. It chucks all email in one folder and gives lots of options for searching through it. For example, you click on a contact name and see all the mail from that contact. Looks ok so far and is appealing as the memory footprint of Opera should be less than Firefox + Thunderbird. Only downside so far: cannot compose html email. Not a showstopper as I rarely bother to format email (like I rarely bother to format blog postings) and it does display html email (as a web browser should be able to).
• It supports widgets if you have a need for a huge clock that cannot be resized. There are only 9 of them so far (clock, calculator, calendar etc).

Possibly more cool: Opera Mini. This is a version of Opera written in Java so it works on my Sony-Ericsson K750i phone. This is a proper web browser, it supports http/html, it is not a crippled WAP thing so you can look at real web sites. It displays them in a tiny font that gets a lot of info on the screen. It communicates with a server at Opera which compresses the pages you are viewing and minimises the download: the front page of this site was a 8k! I installed it thusly:

• Download the .jar and .jad files for the k750i.
• Connect phone to USB
• Copy files to \MSSEMC\Media files\other
• Unplug phone (stopping USB devices on Windows 2000, not necessary on XP).
• On phone, go to 'My Items', Other.
• Select the .jar file, right click and Install. It will ask you if you want it installed as an Application or Game: you decide.
• For uk vodafone, go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Internet Profiles and create a new profile. Give it any name and set the 'Connect Using' field to 'Contract Internet'.
• Go to Settings/Connectivity/Internet Settings/Settings for Java(tm) and select here the new profile you created above.
• Go to My Items/Applications (or Games) and select Opera Mini. It will do a connectivity test. If it fails the internet profile for java above might be wrong.
• Enjoy

Been having problems with MSN Search Toolbar: it would throw up a few message boxes saying:

The ordinal 49 could not be located in the dynamic link library MAPI32.dll

and then the search would stop working.

I had a look in \winnt\system32 at the Mapi32.dll and found something odd:

• there was a file there called Mapi32_moz_bak.dll which was 892688 bytes long
• Mapi32.dll was only 4608 bytes long.

I renamed Mapi32.dll to Mapi32 broken.dll and renamed Mapi32_moz_bak.dll to Mapi32.dll and the toolbar was ok again.

I booted thunderbird (portable version, which may be significant) and it complained about not being the default email application. I set it to be default email application and it immediately broke mapi32.dll again.

Googled and found this article which says that indeed thunderbird fiddles with the Mapi32.dll file if it is made the default email application. It excuses itself by saying that this is how Microsoft designed it.

Conclusion: Microsoft's fault, either the dodgy design or the calculated attempt to stop people using thunderbird.

I finally snapped and started using thunderbird email filters. I have avoided this as experience with Outlook taught me that they were just a pain. Outlook (98?) used to randomly disable them for no apparent reason and I'd have to monitor them all the time. I think I managed to upgrade from the version of outlook that loaded new email messages before it loaded the filters, meaning the mail waiting before outlook was started up was not filtered.

I am getting dozens of virus notifications a day so I decided to create a Thunderbird filter to store them away somewhere. The filter settings in thunderbird allow you to mark a message as already read and, take this microsoft, THE TASKBAR NOTIFIER DOES NOT TRIGGER. No being hastled and having to restart Outlook to get rid of the notifier icon! The filter has been running for a day and so far no sign of it silently being disabled.

I have given up on the thunderbird junk filter as an email classifier for this kind of thing: it just does not learn that {Isolated} in a header means I couldn't care less (other people here deal with that). Real spam is handled elsewhere, the notifications from the spam filter are my spam.

Using another PC at work and getting tired of Microsoft Exchange Web Access, a pretty poor web email application. What to do?

Put Portable Thunderbird on a Freecom USB hard disk and carry that around the building. I would use a flash drive but I would have to use my own and I don't want it performing excessive writes and using up the flashes erase cycles. I am using IMAP and keeping all the messages on the server but I don't want to take any chances. Portable Firefox does try to limit writes to flash.

The USB hard drive does appear to make the other PC I am using take about two minutes longer to boot which is more time to make coffee.

I copied the profile directory from my static thunderbird install to the portable one and it all seems to work fine.

I seem to get a lot of people visiting this site looking at how to use thunderbird with Exchange. I don't think I ever described it in detail as I found it quite easy. I just enabled an IMAP service on the exchange server and I connect to that from Thunderbird using the standard procedure (username/password). IMAP has the advantage of keeping all the messages on the server so it is someone elses problem to back them up. Also searching through messages seems to work much faster as the server is good at that kind of thing and Microsofts local message archive format, the .pst file, is pretty poor. It is probably just as easy to set up POP3. Email is sent using authenticated smtp so I am prompted for username/password to send messages.

With this setup I don't get shared calendars or any other executive gimmicks but I don't use them anyway.

Sorry if this suggestion seems inane but as far as I know this is the only way this can be done.

Taking over someone else's pc I decided to install Google Desktop Search again as a new version had just come out. It still has some of the problems I had with it last time, mainly that by showing the results in a web browser you are pretty limited in your options: you can open it, you can open the folder it is in but if you right click you don't get a comprehensive context menu as in windows explorer (or Microsoft's Desktop Search). What I miss here is the choice of editing python scripts or running them.

The google thing does have a new sidebar to display rss feeds and stuff on your desktop all the time but I'm not sure I really need that kind of thing always there at a glance. When my boss buys me a 22" widescreen monitor I'll reserve the right 2" for google.

I installed it on my own work pc but after a while it annoyed me again: if I leave the pc long enough gds seems to gobble up all available memory, pushing everything else out to swap. I then have to wait a couple of minutes for everything to get swapped back in. The other pc I was using had win2k and 512Megs of ram, mine has Windows XP in 256M and swaps a lot anyway.

I tried blinkx as the 'smart folders' feature looked a bit like thunderbird stored searches for files instead of email messages. However, I was disapointed that the folder view again only gave the 'open' option, no context menu. Apart from this the interface was kinda annoying, tiny fonts, didn't index source code, mixed search results with obscure web search results from blogs, couldn't index thunderbird (as gds can), I uninstalled it in less than half an hour.

Maybe the latest Microsoft search thing will shutdown with windows without hanging? If there is an extension for it to handle thunderbird I might go back to that.

I've discovered Thunderbird saved searches. They allow me to create items in the tree thing on the left that act like folders full of messages that meet certain search characteristics. For example, I can have an item called 'fred' containing all messages from 'fred'. Previously to do this I would create a folder and get my filtering rules to try to shuffle incoming messages into the right folder. In outlook this was always flaky, in thunderbird I've never bothered. Saved searches are much easier to set up and have the advantage that if you change the search terms then the changes are applied immediately, you don't have to run all your messages through filtering rules again. Also messages can meet more than one search pattern: I could have a search for everyone in project X and I could also have searches for specific people in project X: the same messages could appear in both.

It's working nicely with Microsoft Exchange via IMAP: the searches occur instantly, no real overhead. This may be because the IMAP is offloading the search to the server. If the search was done locally I doubt that it would be so transparent.

Hum, as a concept these stored searches could be considered an alternative to tagging. Instead of manually having to mark an article as being about, say, ubuntu, the stored search would automatically search for the word ubuntu in the article and list the matches. It is more fiddly to create a search than a tag but they would require less maintenance. Tagging does give the possibility of structuring articles. Something else to think about.