My work machine is an Apple iBook. I didn’t choose it, so, Ade, I’ll have less of your “It’s a proprietary operating system on proprietary hardware.” I have to set up PGP or GPG for domain registrations and what not. I figured it would be easier to do using Thunderbird and Enigmail than trying to do it with Mac Mail, it would also give me the opprtunity to move to Thunderbird, which I had always planned to do anyway.

My problem was that I had 6 months of business emails tied up in the Mac Mail format. I noticed that Thunderbird could import from Eudora and Eudora could import from Mac Mail, so I tried this, but not only was Eudora horrible to use, but also it didn’t import my mail. Fortunately I found a little tool that would allow me to copy all of my mail from Mac Mail into an mbox file, which I figured I could then import into Thunderbird, or at least convince Thunderbird that it was my mail spool for an account. This didn’t work either, but I did find a way of tricking Thunderbird into thining my mbox was one of it’s own mailboxes, by renaming the mbox to the name of one of the Thunderbird mailboxes and copying it over the top.

So I got my mail into Thunderbird eventually, but it was a hassle. And I found Thunderbird on my smallish iBook screen to be not much fun to use and theres is only an old version of Enigmail for OS X so I went back to Mac Mail. I have since found some instructions on a better way to use GPG with Mac Mail so I will try again. Shame though, it would have been OK on a larger screen.

The point of this though, is why can Thunderbird only import from Netscape 4.x and Eudora? Surely mbox and maildir would be easy to implement and although harder, wouldn’t Mac Mail and Outlook/Outlook Express/Entourage import wizards make it easier, for those entrenched in the main competing email programs due to the need to keep existing important emails without needing to fire up another app, to move their mail over to Thunderbird? Surely this wouldn’t be a big engineering task. If I was a good enough programmer I’d do it myself. If I was rich enough, I would pay someone who was good enough to do it. Will you do it for me? Please?

While looking up links for another post, I came across this site about Linux Software RAID. The guy has a banner ad at the top of his page for GnuCash and as much as I dislike advertising, maybe it’s a really good idea for breaking into the brand-aware consciousness of non-Open Source and Free Software people. I think if people saw what they were missing, they might do something about getting it.

Most passive software users are aware of the big names and the latests versions (the amount of times I hear the phrase “Microsoft XP”, without the person knowing whether they are talking about Windows or Office, or indeed understanding the difference), maybe if we started adding a banner or other ad to our blogs and home pages, our own products might start to invade the minds of these people. Perhaps I should contact some projects that I’m find of and ask them for some banners and set up some kind of not-for-profit ad scheme.

Admittedly, most people have developed the ability to phase adverts out of their web browsing experience, we just subconsciously acknowledge an advert as an advert and ignore it’s content, we may not even notice what it advertises, so maybe this would be entirely futile, but the passive computer user might abosrb this kind of brand recognition, erm… passively.

Of course principles are bullshit without actions.

Oh. My. Good. God. Today is a strange day.

As people might know, I like looking at my web server stats. I was just having a quick check this morning, I always like to check the referrers, the most common search terms and the most popular files.

Today I proudly announce that I am top on Google for Poo Pictures. What the hell is going on? Here is the evidence:

While I was busy laughing at my questionable status amongst poo lovers in the world, I happened to notice the Ebay sponsored ad in the right hand column.

I thank you and goodnight 🙂

OK so I upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Cool. I also included the new Spam Karma 2.1 and Referrer Karma 2.2. I still have some wrinkles to iron out, but it should be good. The point of me telling you this is to let you know that if you get any weird messages about being a referrer spammer then you should let me know and I’ll whitelist your domain or the domain you came from.

Well the upgrade process wasn’t quite smooth. I did a fresh install last night on my own machine to see if it all hung together correctly, including whether the Rubric theme for WordPress 1.5.x worked on 2.0 and it all went great. So today I set about upgrading. I backed up my files, backed up my database and then went ahead with the upgrade. What did I get? A blank page. Ulp. Deleted the live system, deleted the db and then reinstalled my old db and my old files. Checked everything, all cool. Back as we were. So I double-checked the upgrade instructions and upgraded again, same result – blank front page.

I was just about to curse something and start again with just a plain WP2.0 and then add in Spam Karma, Referrer Karma and Rubric to see what was cauing the problem, but then I got bored and went off for a few hours.

When I came back, I decided to see if I could view the admin pages and low and behold, by blindly typing in the admin page address I could see the admin pages. That meant it wasn’t all bad. I decided to check whether the theme was installed properly and it seemed to be but I selected it as the theme again to make sure. Checked the front page. Bingo. Upgrade done. I guess my db was incorrectly referencing the theme or something.

I just had a few other bits and pieces left to sort out with Spam Karma and Referrer Karma and then it was done. I still have to get Referrer Karma to use the Spam Karma blacklist and sort out a few other things and then I’m done altogether.

I’ve watched a few films recently and so I thought I would share them with you, you lucky, lucky people.

The Producers

When I first saw this on the TV adverts, I thought it would be shit and then the idea started to grow on me so I went to see it. In a word – don’t. It irritated me so much that I walked out before the end of the second scene – the first scene after the intro and according to Radio 1 the day after, it seems I’m not the only one. It’s horrible, screechy and hideously over-acted to the point where it’s just too much and it’s worse than bad theatre. I just hated it. It’s true however that I don’t like musicals anyway and it never occurred to me that this was one, but it was just irritating.

Just Friends

I sneaked into this after walking out of the The Producers, as it was the only film still playing at that time, in fact it still hadn’t started so we saw the whole thing. If you like that American Pie, Road Trip and Without a Paddle kind of American high-school comedy then you’ll like this, it made me laugh hysterically in places. It also features the fabulous Amy Smart. If you don’t like those then you won’t like this. I have to say though, that in this case the lead male role was probably less of a likeable character than most of these kind of films, he wasn’t the kind of lovable dumbass, more a complete arsehole at times, but meh, these kind of films weren’t written with moral recompense in mind. Good mindless fun if you like that kind of thing.

March of the Penguins

I wanted to see this since mid-December when it first started attracting media attention after sending America into raptures, but it seems that it’s not on widescale release in the UK, even after the adverts claiming it was on show nationwide after an initial limited release at the end of last year. In fact it took a great deal of effort to see this.

Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it covers a year or so in the life of the Emperor penguins of the Antarctica, from leaving the sea and their 70 mile walk to their breeding ground, to finding a mate, breeding, nurturing the egg and the fight for survival of both the parents and their newly laid egg in the Antarctic winter. This a cute, lovable and informative film. If you like nature documentaries or have a heart at all, then you’ll love it. It wasn’t quite as heart rending as I was expecting, just a lot of giggles at the awkward, clumsy, fish-eating buffoons and lots of ahhs at the babies. Watch it if you can.

OK. I guess that’s it. Over and out.

Well WordPress 2.0 just got released and I’m waiting for my blog spam filter – Spam Karma 2 – to get a final update release to support WP2 and then I’ll be in feet first. It would be nice if the Rubric theme that I use were to get updated for WP2 also, but maybe it just works out of the box, I’ll have to test.

So I was looking into versions and stuff for my blog upgrade and the guy who remade the rubric theme to work with WP1.5 has a little thingy at the bottom of his page that says how many referrer spams have been blocked by Referrer Karma. It turns out that it’s by the same guy as Spam Karma and integrates with it. Thats great. Spam Karma solved my spam problem, but I still get thousands of porn web sites claiming to link to me, when they actually don’t, they’re just referrer spamming, which ruins my stats because I like looking at who links to me and where most of my traffic comes from. I think maybe 2 or 3 of my top 20 referrers are legitimate, the rest seem to be Italian hosted porn sites and drug sites. So anyway, I’ll be adding this in too as soon as I get WP2, Spam Karma 2 and rubric installed.

Anyway, while I was looking around I came across this article about the state of blog spamming, which is kinda worrying and it’s over 2 years old. I guess this is way old news to those of you who have been paying attention to this kind of thing for years and well, I kind of knew most of this anyway, but this article makes for pretty stark reading.

Sleep well 🙂