Quick and Dirty HacksHacks, code, etc…

I’m terrible at following mailing lists, really, really poor at it I think this is related to the low signal to noise ratio when you’re subscribed to many lists. A thought occurred to me, and I wanted the tubes to give me their opinion.

Lets take for example there’s a load of mailing list messages coming in to my inbox, anything that catches my eye I read (I don’t have a problem with this so far), if it’s important I flag it for replying to later (this doesn’t always work as things drop below the inbox horizon), when a mailing list message is flagged I have a virtual folder with mailing list messages which are flagged in it (this can this be done now with evolution, with search folders although I just tried it and the search folder never appeared). Now, when I reply to a message the mailing list thread is flagged by the mail client in such a way as all followups which are in response to my original email are highlighted say in yellow (nice non threatening colour), and messages which are related are in a more washed out, but still noticeable lighter yellow.

This means that I can both keep track of which messages I feel the need to reply to, and also the messages which are in response to my messages. Some people rave about threaded views, but I still find that threaded views are difficult to navigate, also conversation views like googlemail don’t really work for me.

In order to make this work there’s one last feature  I don’t think evolution has (correct me if I’m wrong) which would be “Highlight messages with this header, or that header as this colour” – bears some thinking about I feel.

Along side this, having some default search folders configured in evolution could probably help usability, e.g. in apple mail there’s a combined inbox for your accounts which is essentially a search folder. Also, I’d like to be able to have search folders at the top, and switch off the “On this computer” menu, neither of which seem to be possible

I’ve just gotten a comment on my last blog post that reads;

“Why is this on planet gnome? Who gives a shit about you and your proprietary OS?”

Now, I’m not adverse to taking acerbic comments, I write some pretty provocative posts from time to time, expressing my opinions, ranting about this or that and to posts like that I expect a certain amount of debate and argument. I even come to expect threatening and purely insulting comments which are redirected to dev null.

However this comment, which flies in the face of;

“Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.”

is more than a bit much. Not only does no one apparently care about OSX, but nobody cares about me either…

To clarify, I use MacOSX and Windows as well as loving Linux and GNOME. Linux doesn’t do everything I need to do so its necessary from time to time to use a proprietary OS… However, as OSX is built on top of mostly open source software, adheres to open standards is generally accepted by GNOME developers as something worth taking a look at I don’t think I’ve crossed any ideological divide here.

I feel like I’ve just had to defend myself for doing nothing wrong *sigh*

Anyway, the point of this post is to call out the hostile readership of planet gnome. Those readers who will personally attack people ‘anonymously’ (henry.tss.usg.edu), need to be made aware how they damage the community, damage developers perception of who we are doing this for and in the end do nothing to make themselves heard, in this case the hostile reader got to be heard, because  I honestly think it’s time we outed them for what they are.

Also, this little bit of wordpress comment info made me chuckle;

“User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.219.4 Safari/532.1″

I guess this hostile reader didn’t realise that chrome is built on apples webkit project, and relies on EVIL PROPRIETARY CODE!!!! Oh, no wait… Erm Apple kept webkit nice and open didn’t they.

To end, here’s a note to pigeons in the wise words of Fletch from Porridge;

“One – bide your time. Two – keep your nose clean. And three – don’t let the bastards grind you down.” – I’ve searched for the video for this to no avail. Hopefully someone can poke a youtube link of it into the comments.

Update: This isn’t going to turn into an ideological debate about apple and their practises either so you people can stop commenting about that.

So I bit the bullet and got a copy of snow leopard delivered this morning.

Apparently it can’t install because the computer can’t start from my hard drive… Well obviously that’s false.

The problem seems to be related to partitioning, I did have a triple boot, leopard, xp and ubuntu. So after reading a few articles about this particular problem I started playing around (tweaking the disk size won’t work because of some bizarre journalling problem apparently, or mediakit something something depends on when you run it), deleted ubuntu and tried to put windows back in its original partitioned space, fail, as apparently you ALSO need 128Mib free between partitions using GPT for OSX to be happy…

One more moving of the NTFS partition to give it that 128Mib space and still nothing… I don’t know whether I should bother the 3+ hours it takes to move the NTFS partition to give it more than 128Mib space see if that helps but I’m at the point of futility :/

I have a feeling that I’m going to require a full re-install of all 3 os’s because apple love their quirky one size fits one approach to installers and the boot process.

The worst thing about it is that it took me days of playing around to get a triple boot working, now I’m probably going to have to do it all over again…

So to finish off this little post of futility and arguing with apples weird disk utility I add;

Dear Steve Jobs,
Please can you fix it for me to be able to install a triple boot with osx, windows and linux without me having to bend over backwards. Essentially get your installer team a clue and some error messages that can help diagnose and repair faults like this without me having to backup all of my data from my windows install and my mac osx install (which I really don’t know if I actually have enough space for).

Thankfully in this instance ubuntu was a fresh, unused install, so that wasn’t so hard to nuke and carry on.

kthanksbye

Update: If anyone else gets this problem you will have to ensure that there is LARGER than 128Mib of space between your Linux/Windows partitions and your OSX one before you can proceed. I’ve now managed to get the upgrade done