Knittin' Crap: Lemon Shark Errata

Last year, Howie Woo posted a proposed correction to the Wikipedia entry for lemon sharks.

Sadly, and as much as I love his work, it pains me to say this, but Howie got it wrong.

This is what a real lemon shark looks like:^*
 

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^*Well, if you made one in inappropriate yarn because it was the only lemon-yellow yarn you had around, and that Wikipedia correction just could not wait!

Whiteboard Jungle: You Have Too Much Mail

I've given up on Mac Mail. It would just choke on the volume of messages I had. I could watch the wheels spinning in the activity monitor window, but nothing would actually be happening, and it was frequently freezing. I'd run tcpdump to watch the network traffic and Mail wasn't even actively communicating with the server. I'd have to kill it manually, and of course since it hadn't synced the changes, I would have to start all over again. Screw that. Now I'm trying Thunderbird (but still running iCal, which will work with DavMail for Exchange synchronization, which Thunderbird's Lightning plug-in won't do). Yes, it also has its annoyances, but it can keep up with the volume of mail. And at least I can dream that some of the more egregious deficiencies may eventually be either fixed or addressed by plug-ins. (Dude, why no regular expressions in filter definitions? Hello?)

I actually run Evolution at home for one of my personal accounts, which, of course, is virtually no-volume in comparison to work. Evolution apparently even has Exchange calendar support, but even with MacPorts, I can't see installing and running a heavy-weight Gnome application under OSuX. However, annoyance is the great motivator. Who knows. (On start up on my FreeBSD box, the thing is already sucking over 200Mb of RAM. I suppose I should look to see what Mail's and Thunderbird's footprints are like. (Dainty like Cinderella or more like a T Rex?))

Oooh, I've never done a heavy-duty filter in Evolution, but apparently it supports regular expressions! Hmmm... Ok, the next time Thunderbird annoys me, I'm installing Evolution on the MacBook.

Wait, noooooooo! There's no MacPort for Evolution!!!! Oh, wait, Novell offers their own installer directly! Wheee!

Why Don't They Just...?

As part of a new, intermittently-recurring series, I bring you...

Why Don't They Just....?

Because "common sense" is an oxymoron!

Yet again this week, airline passengers had to restrain a nut job using seatbelts and plastic handcuffs, and even then had difficulty keeping him in check. So, what I want to know is...

Why don't airliners just carry a roll of duct tape as a matter of course?

News: The Geek, The Bad, and The Dumbass

The Geek:

• This celeb hacker has some (well-deserved) biting words for Apple. Gee, I like him! Even with the fro-hawk.
• The unpronounceable and untypeable Icelandic volcano has actually helped the environment. The amount of ash it put in the atmosphere is dwarfed by the amount all those grounded European flights would have added in pollutants.
• These never-before-seen microscopic ocean creatures look like they popped out of a Doctor Who episode. Even more than the echidna.

The Bad:

• Social networking site Blippy exposed users' credit card numbers to the entire net, via Google. I've never heard of Blippy (remember, I don't even have a Facebook account), but if you've given them your credit card number, I'd call the bank and get a new number. And cancel your Blippy account.
• This sysadmin says he hates computers for being a pain in the ass. Dude, don't hate the computers. Hate the idiots who designed in all the stupid crap.
• Adblock. Use it. Love it. Just don't admit you use it on certain websites before reading their Terms of Service.
• Facebook has, yes, reduced user privacy control even more!

The Dumbass:

• This total moron who sawed off the tree branch he had leaned his ladder against is now suing his employer for failing to train him how not to place his ladder against the tree branch he was going to saw off.
• Facebook is introducing "Community Pages" where Facebook users can collectively share their knowledge. Considering what a large percentage of Facebook users appear to be total idiots, that sounds about as useful as an umbrella in a monsoon. And not just any umbrella. I mean those dinky umbrellas they put in tropical drinks.
• In case you ever find a prototype iPhone which, let's call it what it is, a total fucking moron left at a bar, you might want to familiarize yourself with some legalities.
• This divorcing couple sued each other over ownership of family photos. Apparently the company they paid to scan them in produced low-quality images, and instead of forcing the company to do a better job, they decided to spend way more in lawyer fees to get possession of the originals than it would have cost to re-do the scans.

Whiteboard Jungle: More on Mail

At first I thought my work MacBook Pro had OSuX 10.5 (Leopard) on it because it was an older model. Someone else in my group had managed to get a brand-new model, which would have shipped with 10.6 (Snow Leopard), though, so I asked him how the Exchange integration in Mail and iCal was under 10.6 . We checked. He didn't have Snow Leopard. He had plain ol' Leopard. Turns out Snow Leopard hasn't been approved for internal use yet for some rather questionable reasons, so he got the official 10.5 image. (Word on the street is that a new image will be available next month. No, I am most definitely not going to shell out $29 to Apple to pay for the upgrade myself in the interim.)

You may ask, why is this mail issue so important? Well, because yesterday morning I woke up to a notice in my mailbox that I was close to my 2Gb mailbox limit. Did I mention I've been there 2 ½ weeks? Of course, it's not like I will need to read every single message, as the vast majority are automatically-generated notices, most of which can also be deleted immediately or need, at most, a retention period of a day or two, just in case. I am getting a better idea of which emails fall into which categories, but my rules and so forth are still requiring tuning. But anyway, yes, that adds up to probably about 5000+ emails a week. And that, dear readers, is why I am acutely sensitive to crappy mail programs.

Also this week, I had to fly to the Bay Area for the day. I learned that I am exquisitely allergic to Silicon Valley in the spring. My nose would not stop running. I thought I was going to drown.

Also in the news: I used IRC today for the first time since I was a frosh. It made me feel... dirty.