Thunder from the Thunderbird

With my new Linux install, Ubuntu Lucid, I got my first experience of Thunderbird 3.

I've used Thunderbird for years to manage my non-work email; there's a server in a basement somewhere holding about 70 Gbytes of mail that I've accumulated over the years, and Thunderbird's been doing a fairly good job of getting me access to it, and storing offline copies of folders when I wanted it.

Thunderbird 3 continues that tradition, with two little twists:

• The default setting is now "Make offline copies of mail".
• The default setting per-mailbox is now "Make a copy of this mailbox".

The result: When I started Thunderbird, and left it running for a few hours, I wondered where my computer has gone.... the Thunderbird process had quickly passed multiple gigabytes in size, and the .thunderbird folder had grown to a hefty 14 Gbytes. System nearly unusable.

That's when I searched the options to find the two facts above, and discovered the third little twist:

There's no interface to turn off the backing copy for all folders.

There's also no interface to say what the default value for the "synchronized" bit on newly discovered folders should be; it seems to be always set to "true".

I have to go through my folders one at a time (and as you can imagine, there are a few of them), and turn off the backing store. And then I discover that Thunderbird hasn't even found them all; when I open a folder with subfolders, Thunderbird finds the new ones, and happily decides that these are more folders that need to be copied locally. So it's not even an one-pass operation.

I've given up for now and told Thunderbird not to use offline storage. That pass through the config editor was just too much for me.

Sigh. Mulberry, why did you leave us?

On being half the way there

Living between places is an interesting experience.

This fall, I'm working in Stockholm, Sweden, while my home remains in Trondheim, Norway.

Most of the time, it works fine, but occasionally, things just weird me out.... such as this week, when I wanted to pay for my gym membership.

First some background:

• I live in Norway, but work in Sweden. Which means that I have to pay tax in Sweden.
• Normally, Swedish authorities keep track of people by "personnumber" - the YYMMDD of your birthdate + a 4-digit serial number.
• A "personnummer" is only given to people who live in Sweden. I don't.
• So the Swedish authorities have said they won't give me a regular Swedish personnumber, they'll give me a "Samordningsnummer" - just like a personnumber, but they add 60 to the day of my birth, just to be different.

So far, so good - my bank allows me to create an account using that, my payroll authorities accept that for paying taxes, and so on. All is well.

Then I go down to the gym at Sats Zenit, sign up for a year's membership, and sign the papers that will allow them to deduct the monthly fee from my account.

No can do.

It turns out that their autogiro system (not the bank's, not the authorities', but the gym's) requires both a bank account number and a personnumber in order to deduct money.

And they won't accept my "samordningsnummer".

Not a big deal. I can afford to just pay the year's fees. But somehow, this little episode brought home to me that the way I currently live, I'm indeed between places - not all the way there.

And the world isn't quite used to people doing that.

Efaktura - how not to do it

My bank has this wonderful feature called "efaktura" - where a company can send me its bill through the bank, I can click it and approve it - all without a single paper being harmed, seemingly to the benefit of all.
But when I logged on to my bank today, I had 6 "eFaktura" waiting, and I quailed.

Why?

Because of what it entails.....

1. Click the "eFaktura" button. Get a list.
2. Click the name of the payee. This brings up a popup with the actual bill; checking what you're billed for is usually a good idea.
3. Click the triangle next to the payee and choose "approve". This brings up a window where I can (among other things) choose which account to pay from. So far, so good.
4. Click "Approve". Get an error message because the payment date is in the past.
5. Experiment with the calendar widget until you get to choose "tomorrow". ("ASAP" and "Today" are not options.) Hit "Approve" again.
   
6. Wait for the Java applet to start. This brings you a review.
   
7. Hit "Next".
8. Enter your password. (You may also be asked for your ID number and one-time password; the choice seems to be random.)
9. Get to the "confirmation" screen. There's no link going back to the list of "eFaktura", so you have to go back to "start" and find the "eFaktura" button again.

Oh, and remember to close the popup window.

This is stupid. If I could loop through 2-5 for all my "eFaktura", and then go through 6-9 once, like I do for my regular bills, I would be less disgusted. If the error message for "The payment date is in the past" showed a button for "pay ASAP", I'd feel that the person designing this MIGHT have thought about the user.

As it is, I'm unhappy.

Where in the world is the earphone plug?

I recently had the joyful experience of travelling on one of KLM's new Boeing 777 planes.
There are certain rituals you get used to when travelling long distances.... you find the plastic bag marked "not a toy for small children", open it, draw out the headset, spend a few minutes hunting for the headset socket, then sit back and listen to the music.

This time, the first parts of the ritual successfully completed, I encountered a problem: I couldn't find the earphone socket!

To make a long story short: I found it at last - inside the back of the armrest, next to where the seatbelt is attached.

There are two ways to get a plug into this socket - the more conventional one seems to be:

• Hold the plug in your right hand.
  
• Place your right elbow at the level of your knee.
• Twist your arm so that your lower arm is pointing straight back, and a little to the left.
• From that position, move your hand slightly up and away from the body, underneath the armrest, so that you can insert the plug (no peeking!) into the socket so conveniently placed at the back end of the armrest, an inch from your hip.

The alternative (and slightly less painful) procedure is to get up out of your seat, kneel down in a position appropriate to worshipping the god of hangovers, make eye contact with the socket, and insert the plug with a straight jab - hoping that the contortions required to get back into your seat won't dislodge it.

Now, KLM had obviously realized that this contribution to in-flight exercise wasn't going to endear them to all its customers - so a short extension cord (about 20 cm) had been attached next to the socket. But the installation instructions had left something to be desired.... the extension cord wasn't in fact plugged into the socket - it was looped back on itself, creating another puzzle that needed untangling.


Just to add insult to injury, I had to ask for a new headset in order to get sound in both ears.... twice. It's not a high quality device.

Sometimes I think that certain designers deserve cruel and unusual punishment. In this case, I was thinking that "those who design airplane seats..... should be condemned to travel in them".

One ray of light in an otherwise depressing experience: Their in-flight system DOES run Linux.


Postscript

A few weeks later, I made another trip on a similar plane, with the same kind of seat - this time with Northwest - and realized just what the designer had been thinking.

Northwest varies the ritual of the headphone - when you arrive at your seat, the headphone is already resting in the armrest compartment, plugged in for your use. And when you leave the plane, your headphone is not collected - you leave it, ready for the next passenger.

I'm not sure what they do for ear pad hygiene. But it's clear that the seat designers and the procedure designers had had a talk - just a pity that that the seat designers did not talk to enough procedure designers.

Oh well. I know how to find the earphone plug now.

The Continuing Story of Laptop Screen Resolutions

I have a new laptop. It runs linux (yay!), and it has a screen (duh).

The screen is 1440x900 pixels, and approximately 30x19 cm in size (that's 12" by 7.5" for you non-metric folks). Some elementary arithmetic gives a screen resolution of just about exactly 120 dpi.

Now, DPMI (or something) happily rattles this information on to the X server, which then duly loads up all my tools with 120-dpi fonts. All is wonderful, yes?

All is not wonderful.

The problem with this shenanigan is that the screen is SMALL. I want maximum information - and I usually sit close to the screen (unlike with my gigantic at-work monitors). And there is LOTS of software that has only ever been tested at 96 dpi resolution - the 120-dpi fonts simply don't fit into their dialog boxes, which conveniently have their sizes specified in pixels. (BLETCH!)

There's help to be had - deep in the KDE menus, "Control Center / Appearance & Themes / Fonts", there's a choice that says "Force fonts DPI", which I can toggle between "Disabled", "96 DPI" and "120 DPI". That fixes the issue for KDE-aware programs, and a seemingly random selection of other programs. Not all by any means!

But - why oh why is it that I have to go through this rigmarole to achieve the desired result, fixing only part of the problem - when it would be SO much simpler if I could just tell the X server to lie to the software about the screen resolution?

Ours not to wonder why.... that's the way it is.

Of course the RIGHT solution is to make people stop specify dialog boxes in pixels, and make them resizable to the font size. And pigs should fly, too.

Sigh.

OpenWRT: A Better Way to do Wireless

In my house, I have a wireless network. Big news - everyone has one.
The unusual aspect of this one was that occasionally, the access point didn't want to talk to one of my PCs. Headache? Lack of appreciation? Missing upgrade? I'll never know....

So I decided to pull out a spare Linksys WRT54G (old model!) I had lying around, install OpenWRT on it, and put it up instead. Worked like a charm...

NOTE: The docs at OpenWRT are NOT good. Stuff like this installation guide, where "getting started" consists of mostly empty space, is somewhat hard to decode. So why not write down some steps, like so many have before?

• Core. Having done this before, I went for the 2.4 kernel for the WRT54G (last time I tried, wireless didn't work on 2.6). Downloaded the right image from the download directory, got connected to the box, and upgraded. No problem.
• Find the router! Being not completely naive, I did this without connecting the box to my network, because it came up listening to 192.168.1.1 - the same as my home network's router. Fun would have resulted....
• Telnet to the found address, and set the password. Then, log out, and ssh to root@192.168.1.1. Note: If you have ever done that before, to a different 192.168.1.1, you're in trouble - luckily, OpenSSH's ssh client shows you exactly which host key to remove from your .ssh/known_hosts file.
  
• Reconfigure. Move it to a different IP address, turn off DHCP for the LAN, enable the wireless, set the SSID.. all done in /etc/config somewhere.
• Cross your fingers and reboot. It works!

The OpenWRT actually comes with a running web server. But on Kamikaze, there's absolutely nothing in it - all URLs give "URL not found".

Being a sucker for pretty pictures, I found X-WRT, which tries to make a web interface. But it says Kamikaze is a "work in progress". Danger?
A quick visit to #openwrt on irc.freenode.net reassured me: "Yes, but it works fine for some!"
Instructions are on the Wiki, NOT under "installation instructions" on the front page. But they're clear, explicit, and they work!

For now, Kamikaze is plain sailing. If I learn something more, I may say more. Until then, let's see if THIS one stays up for long...

On screens, docs and (un)gentlemen

I have now converted to the ubuntu religion.

One of my recent adventures concerned fitting a gigantic screen (1920x1200, 24 inch) monitor to my home workstation - a small box with a 915 Intel built-in chipset.

It didn't work.

Somehow, it insisted on coming up in 1600x1200 mode, giving everything a "stretched" appearance. On my usual solution (googling), I came up with a lot of tricks involving "915resolution", a tool for tweaking this graphics card.

Didn't work either.

More reading.... someone mentions a "new driver". Can I use this? YES!

Solution:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

answer default to *everything*, but enable 1920x1200 explicitly.

Voila! Now it works!

Lesson for the day:
There's tons of Linux documentation out there. Most of it is not up-to-date.