April 2007

The big green one was always my favourite, you never knew what was in the pod.

In this case, though, I come to sing the praises not of a hypersonic airborne truck but of the second major version of the Thunderbird e-mail client. For me, it has two new must-have features that fit in really well with the way I work:

• You can have replies filed in the same folder as the original message.

• There’s a folder view that just shows folders with new messages.

I have a lot of message filters active that file incoming mail into per-topic folders. Knowing which I need to look at, and not having to re-file outgoing replies, will save me a lot of time.

The one “gotcha” so far has been that some of the key bindings have been changed, at least on the Mac. In particular Shift-Pretzel-M no longer creates a new message, but instead moves the currently selected message to the last folder you moved something to… hilarity ensues. After some initial cursing along the lines of “where on earth did that message disappear to”, obviously.

After more than two decades, we’re finally moving flat at the end of the week. We’re not moving far, so things like our phone numbers won’t change. If you need our new postal address for some reason (how quaint, unless you want to send chocolate) then contact me directly.

There is likely to be a significant break in connectivity to those parts of the iay.org.uk empire that are hosted from the home systems as, unfortunately, there is something peculiar (perhaps a DACS) causing trouble on our new phone line. I can’t even order broadband until this is resolved, apparently. And that’s ignoring the secondary problem caused by the telco forgetting about part of our order, the result of which at present is that we’d need to install our router in the bathtub.

This will mean badly degraded e-mail, and downtime for SSH, CVS and the iay.org.uk Shibboleth entities. Much of the rest, including this blog, is hosted in California and shouldn’t be affected.

I couldn’t resist this T-shirt design from the people who bring us Everyone Loves Eric Raymond and Bruce Schneier Facts.

Obviously this is only going to be funny to (a) a very particular kind of nerd with (b) a very particular sense of humour. I suspect I’m not the only member of both sets, though.