Thunderbird 0.4

Email

As you may have heard, Thunderbird 0.4 has been released, and it’s a delight. I’ve been using Thunderbird off and on since I first heard of the project. I snubbed 0.2, as it was quite clunky. 0.3 changed my mind and became my default email client over Outlook Express, and I also set it up for my mom. However it was not so much on Thunderbird’s merits of the time that I switched, because it was still quite rough in many areas, it was simply the least bad of all the IMAP email clients I have tried. (And I’ve tried them all.) However this new 0.4 version is a pleasure to use. The graphics have been completely revamped, which is a much bigger deal than I would have thought and really changes how I view the application. (Literally.) Of course they were pretty patchy before, it didn’t even have a separate icon for mail you had replied to. The other problem I had before was that the program would get hung up on something, I’m not sure what, but when it was nothing would work until I restarted the application, which was annoying to say the least. I haven’t even seen a hint of this problem for about two months now (I’ve been keeping up with the weekly builds).

It just does IMAP so well. Having all my email and folders on the server makes it easy to try different email clients and not worry about importing, exporting, or keeping my data in sync. A few minutes ago, just to make sure I wasn’t remembering things wrong, I opened up Outlook Express again to give it another go. That’ll probably be the last time I ever do. Moving IMAP messages to different folders in Outlook Express opens a dialog box that actually precludes you from doing anything else in the application, so if you’re moving a message with a large attachment or several messages you have to wait for everything to finish before you can do anything else. For someone who lives in their email client, that is simply unacceptable. Thunderbird does all that in the background, and it’s so fast with most things that the “IMAP lag” is gone.

It’s not perfect, there are a few things I hope the Thunderbird team addresses in future releases. First is the spell check, which rocks but always wants to spell check the name of the person I’m replying to in an email. Second when I forward a message inline it includes all the headers, which can often be twenty or thirty lines, most of it junk that isn’t important. Just give me from, to, subject, and when it was sent, and I’ll be happy.

Thunderbird understands that on some IMAP servers, including mine, some folders contain mail messages and some just contain other folders. Outlook Express would try to select these “holding” folders and return an error, where Thunderbird shows them in italics so they’re visually set apart from the folders that hold actual mail. Thunderbird is also supposed to have some great spam handling, but since I handle all that on the server side I can’t speak to that personally.

Bottom line: try it out. You have nothing to lose and you might just find that perfect email application you’ve been searching for. The best thing about it is I know that right now another version is in the works, and in a few months they’ll be a 0.5 I can rave about. Or I could wait until 2006 for a new version of OE to come out with Longhorn. Right.

Style Updates

Meta,

For better or worse, there have been a number of stylesheet updates around here, so you may notice things looking slightly different. First off are the shadows behind the main content box, for whose sake non-semantic elements were added to this page for the first time ever. How quick we are to sell out!

Speaking of selling out, text advertisements may appear at the top every now and then. Yes they suck but it’s the holidays and extra cash is always nice.

I moved the background image for the post titles from the anchor element to the h2 element to prevent the blinking when you rolled over the titles in IE on Windows. My Mother will be sorely disappointed as she thought that was a rather cool effect I had done intentionally. I wish!

Tantek and Eric informed me that my site was completely borked in respectively Mac IE 5 and Safari. This site is an experiment, so I make no guarantees as to browser compabilitiy but I try to be good about testing things on browsers available to me. Last night I used Greg’s Powerbook to see what was going on. It seems Safari was having trouble with some commented out content (the ads that are temporarily disabled) so I moved that from HTML comments to PHP comments. Commenting things out server-side is actually a much better practice because it keeps the source code maintainability for you the author but hides the comments from any visitors. There is also a savings in bandwidth, but in many cases that will be minimal. So as a best practice go from:

<-- Three extra divs added because prima the donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. -->

to:

<?php /* :-- Three extra divs added because the prima donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. And they'll never see this comment. MUHAHAHA! */ ?>

As for Mac IE, I wasn’t sure where to begin. It doesn’t handle the float on the menu list items well so instead of a nice tabby menu you have a series of giant honking bars in the header. I could go to display: inline for the navigation list items and work with the horizontal menu from there, but I’ve always prefered having the list items floated and the anchors as blocks, which you can’t do when the containing list element is inline. If I remember correctly Eric helped me around this problem before on the WordPress site (thank you!) by giving the items a fixed width, but I don’t have the space to burn here like I did on that menu.

Checking over my stats, Mac IE users make up approximately 2.1% of my viewing audience over the life of this site, and closer to 0.9% over the last month. Uowever is this low and declining number because other browsers are now in vogue on the Mac and IE hasn’t been updated recently to quench Mac users’ insatiable desire for upgrades? Or is it because my site looks so bad in their browser? The world may never know.

So the moral of the story is: the web is a jungle and watch your comments when on Safari.

Dotson Gig Tonight

Music

Well the last gig got canned due to torrential rain, and now this Monday I’m feeling a bit under the weather. That’s life! Here are the details again, try to make it out if you can:

Tonight at 7:30 PM I’ll be performing with the Dennis Dotson big band on lead alto. Our entire program is going to be exclusively music from the highly talented composer and pianist Joe LoCascio, who will also be playing with us. It is the first night of what they’re calling JazzFest 2003 and there are more details, including directions and a map, at JazzHouston. They say they’re charging for tickets but I don’t think they have in the past so I’m not sure about that. I’ve been looking forward to this gig and I think it’s going to be great, so if you’d like to hear some exciting jazz tonight, try to check it out.

By the way, welcome to December. It’s by far my favorite month of the year and I’m going to savor every minute of it. December is the month I look forward to when trudging through all the other months. Lot’s of exciting things planned this month, from HPUG to WordPress to even something with the elusive Mike. And that’s just the volunteer stuff.

Update: Thanks to all who came out. Having people you love in the audience makes performing a whole difference experience. 🙂

Breaking the Mold

Uncategorized

Leonard does things different:

Hey, it looks like I’m the ‘Feed of the Day’ over at Feedster. Just goes to show that you don’t need things like ‘regular updates’ or ‘finished templates’ or ‘permalinks’ and ‘date stamps.’

I would link to the post, if I could. (Poor man’s permalink: scroll down on his homepage to just above the pictures of the Treo 600 and the Sidekick.)

The Coffee Guy

Uncategorized,

I write this from the comfort of a tall stool in the brand new Coffee Guy store at I-10 and Highway 6/Addicks. Some of you may know the Coffee Guy as that cute little place at Richmond and Sage that mostly caters to a drive-thru crowd. They’ve decided to expand their business and have moved out to this swank new shop they built and designed from the ground up. The old place was so small it wasn’t really conducive to lounging the way most coffee shops are, plus it didn’t have any internet access, a requisite feature these days. I can’t speak for the coffee, because I’m not a coffee guy myself, but I can safely say that they have the best hot chocolate I’ve had anywhere—think multiple layers of whipped cream, caramel syrup, and chocolate syrup. However I have heard from people who do know coffee that The Coffee Guy at their previous location was quite good and I don’t see why this one should be any different.

With the new design they obviously had high-tech coffee lovers in mind, with power outlets everywhere, wi-fi and wired internet access, a big plasma TV, and lots of seats and tables. I can’t vouch for the coffee, but what I can vouch for is their internet connection, which has speeds consistent with a high-end cable connection. Connect to SSID TheCoffeeGuy and you’re good to go. I’ll have to tell my friends in the Houston Wireless Users Group about this. Here’s a few pictures I snapped:

Laptop counter, my laptop, and the plasma TV

I was going to end this on a bright note and recommend you try the Coffee Guy out, but Elissa (who works here) just tricked me into eating what’s called an “espresso pancake” by disguising it as a cookie, so I’m going to say whatever you do, do not visit or patronize The Coffee Guy. Unless of course you like good drinks and free internet.

How could Elissa do such a thing? Look at how evil she is! (She’s even evil looking with real cookies.) Anyway if you do decide to visit, I can tell you when Elissa isn’t working so it’ll be safe. Here’s their address:

14725 Katy Freeway
Houston, Texas 77079