Javascript upgrade

Greetings all!. I've just made an upgrade to my Blogger template. You can see it in action in both this post and the post below (as long as you have Javascript turned on OFC).

This feature is to make sure that huge long posts don't take up too much room on this front page.

Basically I just enclose some of my blog posting with a <div> tag which gets shown and hidden as required by the link below.

The cool little feature is that the link will be removed if I haven't included the appropriately classed div tag in the post. This means that short posts will display as they always have.

The next step might be some look and feel updates...

Bug 258077 - TB will not authenticate with POP3 server -since 20040824

I installed Thunderbird 0.8 and thought everything went well and dandy.

The trouble was that one of my email accounts actually wasn't getting the email correctly. I didn't notice this all that much as most of the email that comes through that account is either spam or mailing list messages. Until one day I wondered about the absence of the (usual) 100 or so spam messages which should have been coming down with my mail check.

I logged on to my email through it's web interface and lo and behold! - over 1200 messages greeted me!

I checked my POP3 access manually, then tried with Thunderbird again. Still no messages could be seen.

A little concerned by this, I whipped out Ethereal and started a sniff on port 110 traffic. Sure enough, Thunderbird and my email server were getting confused. Turns out that it was this bug: Bug 258077 - TB will not authenticate with POP3 server -since 20040824 and the workaround in comment number 8 worked a treat and right now I'm downloading a whole heap of email. This bug has been fixed so 0.9 should work fine.

This has got me thinking though; since I didn't seem to notice this missing account for about 10 days - perhaps I should get rid of it (and it's SPAM) altogether?

Gmail+Anything

Every now and then you stumble upon a nugget of pure gold on the internet. This is a great little bit of info which I found out about in a Slashdot comment.

Ever wished that you could have two or more email addresses? Well wish no more! This little trick works with Gmail and other MTAs as well.

The trick? This little character here --> +

If I'd like to give out an email address and use it to filter on (for example) I can give out aydsman+foo@gmail.com and it will be delivered to my inbox. In fact, I can put anything after the "+" that is allowed in a normal email address. See? Pretty darn cool isn't it?

Freaky optical illusion

I found this linked from one of the comments on a Slashdot story about optical illusions. I quite like optical illusions - especially ones which I can twist in by brain and "break". This one I couldn't do that to though. I even cut some of one square out and moved it around. As I moved it closer to the darker one the piece I was moving seemed to darken and vice versa as it moved to the lighter one. Totally Freaky!

Small changes

Gee, hope you aren't too surprised to see a post from me! It has been a while. <words type="famous last" >I am going to make an effort to post more often on here...</words>

I did make one little change to my blog layout. Bet you can't see what it is! Yes - it's the "Get Firefox!" button. I've decided that I should proudly display my browser preference (which I also share with Blogger.com) for all to see.

This is the part where I really should let you know about the advantages of Firefox but there are many others who have gone into that in far greater detail than I care to here.

Well, my bed is calling so farewell from another post.

"My name is mister Aydsi"

Pretty funny little virus story on The Register about a worm called "Amus"

Now, worms and viruses aren't funny at all - however this one has a twist. It uses the Microsoft Speech Engine which is built into Windows XP to talk to it's victims.

In case you're "clickaphobic" (or are just plain lazy) and don't want to click on the Register article link here's what the virus says:

How are you. I am back. My name is mister hamsi. I am seeing you. Haaaaaaaa. You must come to turkiye. I am cleaning your computer. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. 0. Gule. Gule.

...which I'm sure leaves you all much more enlightened.

Number One

I always wondered what it would be like for people to be number one in a Google search.

Well, thanks to my gorgeous girlfriend Melinda, I need not wonder any more.

What is more interesting than just the fact that the profile which is attached to this blog is number one is the fact that I've gone through the whole result set (the extended one that is) and every single page linked to in the results was a direct reference to myself.

I've always been pretty pleased with my nickname as it usually seemed quite unique and now I've got Google backing me up! :)

Neat little trick

I don't use Windows and Outlook at home, however it is standard fare in my work environment. One of the things that I like about Outlook 2003 is the fact that it can be configured to sit in that over-used, over-burdened but still useful system tray.

The trouble is, the context menu really sucks ass. Why, oh why, isn't there a New Message item in that menu? Why isn't there, now that I think about it a whole bloody new item sub-menu! It could have included:

• New Mail Message
• New Contact
• New Note

...and all the other crazy stuff which I usually never use. See, that would be USEFUL. Instead we have to drag Outlook's lumbering bulk up onto our screen and then locate a little "New Message" button and click it.

At least, that's what I *used* to do. Now I just click the quicklink icon for "New Email Message" which I created with the tips from Spongemental's weblog.

Give them a go. I have only used the new email one because that's what I do with Outlook most often. But you're free to go wild.

ENJOY!

RiverFire

Got back from Riverfire for another year. I can't believe that we're already at this stage of the year. Time does fly sometimes.

I did have a good time there, although am I the only one who goes along to this thing and sees the fireworks and feels a little let down? I don't know if it just wasn't as good as last year, or if it just is me expecting too much. I don't know.

Well, best get back to my friends and the post-fireworks drinks. Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Live from the Qld Seafood Festival

Well I'm out & about so I thought I'd try out this email submission feature.

Just a little while ago I was listening to Stringmansassy who are an INCREDIBLE Brisbane guitar & vocal duo. If you ever get the chance to experience them (and it is an experience) jump at the chance.

There aren't as many people here as I thought there would be. Perhaps everyone is saving it up for RiverFire tomorrow night.

Well I'll best be off to locate some food now. :)

aydsman at gmail.com!!!

Ok - it's official.

I have a GMail account. This is thanks to, and with encouragement of, my fantastic friend Joseph Cooney.

I had already passed on the offer of one invite from him, which he gave to Robin - a mutual friend of ours. This was because I really didn't see a huge need for 1 GB of webmail. I had thought myself quite happy with my current email software

Upon reflection though I thought about it. Exposing my email online would be more difficult while using a thick client, and I did enjoy the idea of being able to have access to my emails from work and while on holiday etc.

I only have two problems with it so far:

1. my inbox is empty (save the welcome message) so 1 GB of space really looks funny
2. it doesn't work from my phone

However - the first point should be cleared up pretty quickly and the second - well - perhaps someone out there has a workaround?

Hmmm...

Nothing wacky to post here (yet - just sat down in front of my monitors) but I was thinking before I wandered up to the computer...

I've posted three (count 'em below - 1, 2 3) times and have got no comments (nada, zip, none). Now I'm quite fine with this - AFAIK only one person knows about this blog right now - but it got me thinking about the strange "place" the internet is. I was thinking about how you float something out there on the web and then people - who you'll never, ever meet or talk to - will wander along and take a look.

Some of the time you don't even know it has happened. 6000 people could have read my blog since I created it last night. They could even have enjoyed it. However, I won't ever know that they've been.

It's a strange feeling. I can only liken it to giving a speech while standing blindfolded in the middle of a room - which might or might not have people in it. Since I've started thinking about it it sorta wierded me out.

Hmmmmm...

Ah well, new places on the internet await.

Firefox + MSDN = Garbled Code

If you've looked at MSDN through Firefox (or any Mozilla browser) you may have noticed that the code samples aren't displaying properly (they're all run together).

I pulled out the DOM Inspector - great tool, love it - and found it is a problem caused by one of their stylesheets setting the CSS "white-space" property to "normal" which tells the browser to collapse all white-space characters into one space. Obviously this ruins the formatting of the code blocks.

If you don't believe me head on over to a sample MSDN article - such as the String.GetEnumerator() method. See what I mean?

To fix this problem we can apply a user stylesheet to override their CSS white-space setting. Here is the fix...

1. Locate your profile directory. This should be at the following location on Windows with Firefox 0.9.x: "%home%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile name].[something]"
2. Open the "Chrome" sub-directory of your profile
3. Create or open the file "userContent.css"
4. Cut and paste the following CSS rule:

   /*
   * Microsoft seem to have stuffed the MSDN stylesheets by adding "white-space: normal;"
   * to "pre" elements.  Undo that here.
   */
   pre
   {
    white-space: pre !important;
   }

5. Restart Firefox and browse to your favourite MSDN code snippet!

There you are! Easy when you know how. :)

It's new! It's shiny!

Oooohhh!!! Aaaahhhh!!! Anyway - well I've made myself a little place to put down some thoughts. I've seen other blogs and sorta liked the idea and thought "well... why not?". I hope that I can write some interesting stuff. Failing that, I just hope I can write some stuff. Hope anyone who reads this enjoys it. :)