Oren’s Weblog

I like this quote from Tim Bray’s Ongoing weblog:

The proportion of thought leaders who use IE on Windows is trending to zero.

and his resulting conclusion (when talking about Google’s new tagging feature):

releasing anything IE-only generally sucks.

At work in a previous job we used to joke about sending packages “Einstein Express – when it absolutely has to be there the day before yesterday.”

I was reminded of that when I saw CNET’s blurb on the new Casio Exilim Pro EX-P505 camera in their coverage of the PMA 2005 trade show:

The novel Past Movie mode uses a buffer to start recording 7 seconds before you press the shutter release.

Wow.

Ryan Barrett, a Silicon Valley software engineer with a distinguished resume, has put together a brief look comparing Pine and Gmail.

I started off this morning by managing to delete all the messages from my Inbox, which had almost 3000 messages in it.

Somewhere on the OSAF Wiki there was a page where they described several different common patterns of using email. One of them was methodically deleting or filing each email into a folder as it is read. Another was leaving all email in the Inbox and coping with it there (the fact that I can’t find that page now might suggest something about the effectiveness of wikis for managing lots of into) . Much as I’d like to behave in the former fashion, I’m much closer to the latter.

I was setting up a new account in Thunderbird on the Powerbook, looking at the same set server and folder set as my existing account, in order to use a different From: address. That worked fine, but I then realized there was a better way of accomplishing the same thing, so I deleted the account.

It was only after deleting the account that I realized that I had mistakenly set up the account using the default access method, which on Thunderbird (like many mail clients) is for POP instead of IMAP, and set to delete messages from the server after retrieving them.

Why would anyone ship an email client that by default deletes your messages from the server?

While there was a certain degree of liberation in suddenly being freed from all of the tasks I had facing me, I quickly realized that I was going to be in deep doo-doo without some of the messages in that Inbox.

Luckily, I was able to discover that, since I have Thunderbird on my Powerbook setup to make my Inbox messages available offline, there was a file named Inbox in my ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles directory. Seeing as the file was almost 66 megabytes and had a timestamp of just before I made my boneheaded mistake, I figured it was likely to be my Inbox – and it was!

The next task was how to access the Inbox, or the copy of it that I quickly made.

My first thought was to use Thunderbird’s Import facility, which can import mail from other programs, including Eudora, which uses the same mbox mailbox format as Thunderbird.

But the filenames for the Inbox file and the copy were greyed out when I ran the Import utility, so I couldn’t select them.

My colleague Zephyr suggested opening the file with Pine on the Powerbook.

I created a new collection in Pine, navigated to the Inbox file, and opened it – which worked beautfully! I was then able to save the 3000 messages back up to a new folder on the IMAP server, and all my messages were again accessible. Whew.

That’s no way to start a day.

But the moral of the story is, when you really need flexible ways to work with email, Pine is your friend!

Finally some good news on the intellectual property front!

From the BBC:

EU software patent law faces axe

During consultation the software patents bill could be substantially re-drafted or even scrapped.

Joel Spolsky, who produces the FogBugz bug tracking software (as well as writing the popular Joel on Software blog) has written an introduction to a new book called Project Management with FogBugz.

The introduction is terrific reading.

He starts by talking about restaurants in his neighborhood of Manhattan, particularly a very popular one called Isabella’s:

Here’s a clue as to why Isabella’s works. In ten years living in this neighborhood, I still go back there. All the time. Because they’ve never given me a single reason not to.

That actually says a lot.

Then he talks about other restaurants that have lots of problems, even though the food may be better than Isabella’s. And then he says:

Eventually, Isabella’s became a fabulously profitable and successful restaurant, not because of its food, but because it was debugged. Just getting what we programmers call “the edge cases” right was sufficient to keep people coming back, and telling their friends, and that’s enough to overcome a review where the New York Times calls your food “not very good.”

Letwin’s reply? “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday.”

There’s a good interview in Reason with author Neal Stephenson. Public Knowledge‘s Mike Godwin does the interview.

It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.