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!