From: Struan Donald Date: 20:55 on 22 Jan 2008 Subject: Thunderbird, how hard can it be? Short version: Thunderbird + IMAP + Exchange = hate. But you knew that already. Specifically in this case it's deleting messages. I'm in the happy situation of occasionally getting a big chunk of alerts where some process or other at $work throws its toys out the pram. This is fine, other than the clanking and whiring Thunderbird makes as it deals with downloading more than 3 messages at a time. The pain comes at the deleting stage. Long ago I learned the magic incantation of shift + delete to avoid the pain of watching Thunderbird wheeze as it moved things to the deleted messages folder. However it seems that even this does not save me. Now it frequently manages to lose the connection to Exchange in the process of deleting messages at which point I get to watch it start to download all the deleted messages again. After a short while it realises things are not as they should be and once again starts to delete them again. The entertainment of watching the message count frantically trying to keep up with this confusion doesn't really last. Struan
From: Struan Donald Date: 14:04 on 08 Nov 2007 Subject: exactly how many ways to configure my display settings do I need lenovo? Three apparently. The usual windows one, the one that comes with the graphics card drivers and the one that comes as part of the ThinkVantage suite of bloat. I've no idea which one of these takes precedence over the other and it seems to be pure luck if one of them works. Just one bit of software that actually worked and didn't look like it was designed using Crayola Form Designer 10,000 would have been fine. Thanks Struan PS, if you could also try and limit yourselves to installing just the one way of controlling the wifi, bluetooth and power management that would also be good.
From: Struan Donald Date: 23:13 on 26 Sep 2007 Subject: symantec firewall I might be a bit old fashioned but I've always thought the point of firewalls was to stop software on other computers connecting to my computer (or network but let's not run just yet). Symantec seems to find this rather a narrow definition and is keen to stop software on my computer connecting to other computers. And hey, this is windows so perhaps a bit of extra caution is required. What is galling is being told that php has tried to connect to the internet and has been blocked when the internet is the mysql server running on the _same_ machine. Can you not tell the difference between the internet and localhost? Could you just not be arsed to make an exception? Even more galling is the fact that there's no way to say connections to localhost are fine so you have to allow every single program one at a time... gah! Struan
From: Struan Donald Date: 21:41 on 03 Oct 2006 Subject: Visual Studio's resource editor Apparently the key to Microsoft's success is their developer tools. People are always praising them. These are people who have never resized a column in Visual Studio's resource editor only for it to be set back to the default width when they used CTRL-S to save the file. Perhaps after long enough this behaviour becomes endearing as opposed to enraging.
From: Struan Donald Date: 13:27 on 22 Sep 2005 Subject: Firefox 1.5 copy When I copy text I want to copy the text. It's simple. But not in firefox, oh no. If I select text that's also a link then it copies some sort of bizarre windowsy link object, becuase that's obviously what I wanted. And then to add more hate when I paste this into a plain text message in Outlook it turns the link into an attachment. Genius! Struan
Generated at 10:25 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi