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Wednesday Jan 30, 2008
Quick Folders - My Favorite Thunderbird Add-On
Quick Folders - My Favorite Thunderbird Add-On
Dealing with hundreds of e-mails has never been easy. I know people
that just delete all e-mails that can't be processed in the first run;
there are others that keep loooong history of all e-mail conversations,
just in case. Admittedly, I'm close to the second group. Not only did I develop quite complex folder structure in my Thunderbird, but I also keep some of the very first messages I got here. Just in case.
As long as you remember your folder structure and the message can be clearly filed, you're fine. Once the folder list exceeds the size of the window (and your memory), you're in trouble. And here comes the help: QuickFolders - Thunderbird Add-On
Similar to Favorite Folders in Thunderbird 2.x, you can choose folders that you mostly work with. The only difference, well, the most interesting and time saving difference is in user interface. Your bookmarked folders are shown in a toolbar, you can easily drop the mail to the folder there, you can quickly switch to the folder or rearrange the order of bookmarks in the toolbar.
Mamma Mia, it stopped working!
Horrible things happen in the life, even your favorite program can stop
working. Little did I know that I'm so addicted, until I lost all my
settings. "Never mind", I said, "I had too many items there anyway". I
recreated the list, happy, so happy again. Until I restarted my
Thunderbird. No bookmark! How disappointing.There is always a solution
Looking into advanced settings and <profile>/prefs.js file, I
found that the QuickFolder setting is indeed written there, so there
must be another problem. I switched the Error Console on and saw errors when the add ons was calling loadFolderView function. Quick googling gave me a hint, so I commented out the body of ensureNormalFolderView in
<your_profile>\extensions\quickfolders@curious.be\chrome\content\quickfolders.js
and everything started to work fine:
ensureNormalFolderView: function() {
/*** Commented out
if(loadFolderView != undefined) {
//default folder view to "All folders", so we can select it
loadFolderView(0);
}
***/
} ,
Later in the day, I realized that there is much easy way to fix the problem: just upgrade to latest version of Thunderbird (2.0 and higher).
So I can finally get back to my lovely e-mails.
Posted at 12:12AM Jan 30, 2008 by Pavel Suk in Open Source |
Monday Nov 19, 2007
Community or just a bunch of people?
Community or just a bunch of people?
When you're a t-shirt-wearing programmer or even a white-collar manager (is there anyone out there?), working on a live open source project, you always care about the community. The community of developers or real users, these thousands of smart Joes, Volkers or Lenkas, hopefully enjoying the project that you have also contributed to. And you wonder, is the community growing, is the product attractive enough to catch the attention of new users, while satisfying the old kids on the block? While you can measure all these attributes, there are also other fundamental questions.
Community life
Just think about the word community. And then compare it with your thoughts about your lovely project and its dispersed crowd. Do you see real community in the original sense of the word or is it about a bunch of people downloading your software and registering on some kind of dumb 3-page long web form? How would you know that the xK-head monster is alive and moreover, how do you drive behavior of your never to-be-seen peers?
So here is my simplified definition of vivid and enchanting community project and although I bet 5$ I missed a couple things there, it's my Top 3+1 List:
- Incentive to contribute to the project
Think of all sorts of rewards, power to make decisions, 'I made it' effect or other forms of satisfaction.
I'm sure everyone likes his nickname shining somewhere and it doesn't have to be gold plaque in the Hall of Fame.
- Help wanted
How to help must be crystal clear. If you want to have a group of people that shares something and you don't want to leave someone out, you need to offer newbies and random visitors a paved path and an open door to your party. Move the needle!
- Who's the Einstein 2.0? Challenge everyone!
Developers love challenges and if the work is too dull, don't expect smart folks showing up.
- It's not just about The Work, it's about The NetWork
Hey, people gathers in communities to meet other this-looks-like-me animals and have fun with them. They should be encouraged to help each other, not just to work on the big idea.
Posted at 07:00PM Nov 19, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Open Source |
Friday Mar 30, 2007
Firefox Search Plugin for blogs.sun.com and www.sun.com
Firefox Search Plugin for blogs.sun.com and www.sun.com
Tired of going to blogs.sun.com or sun.com just to start searching these pages?
Every click counts, time is money, so if you use Firefox and you are addicted to Search Bar (like me), you'll have to have the search engines for blogs.sun.com and www.sun.com. Just add the plugin directly from this page, clicking to the icon in Search Bar, as shown on the picture.
Optionally, you can also download the xml file
and put it into the searchplugins directory in your Firefox installation or profile.
There is also search engine for internal search, that can be useful if you're Sun employee.
How is it done?
It's pretty simple. Firefox uses Open Search description format, with some additional features. You don't have to bother to read complete specification, the best way is to start with the the article Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox. Everything is in one little XML file:
|
1. Short Name and Description
Change Short Name and Description as you like.
2. Image (optional)
Image is a little bit tricky, and you can eventually skip this step.
You need to put the image in a binary form to the XML file. Use or download your favorite icon or little png file (16x16 pixels) or create your own and convert it by URI kitchen.
3. URL and Parameters
It's the only critical part. You have to do a little reverse engineering to figure out the parameters and URL for search engine on particular site by looking into html source code, but it's not a big deal, if you're are at least familiar with basics of html editing. There should be something like
<form action = "the_url_to_the_search_method"> and you just need to use that URL for
template="the_url_to_the_search_method"
You can convert <input> tags easily to <Param>, using name and value. The only exception is the input tag that provides the search string. Parameter name must correspond with the name of input field, value always equals "{searchTerms}".
4. URL to Search Form (optional)
Replace the URL in <moz:SearchForm> by the URL that points to the Search Home Page and you're done.
5. Deployment & Testing
OK, not yet, as you need to put the XML file in proper directory (searchplugins in Firefox installation or your profile) and test it. If it doesn't show up, after restarting Firefox, check the XML for validity. You can open the XML file in Firefox or NetBeans. Missing closing tag is a typical mistake.
Posted at 04:49PM Mar 30, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Open Source | Comments[3]
Thursday Mar 15, 2007
Can piracy boost IT development?
Can piracy boost IT development?
According to Romania's president, Traian Băsescu, piracy rocks:"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," he said.
I'm not a big supporter of companies using their dominant position on the market to sell overpriced software, but I couldn't swallow the glorification of piracy either. For me it's the same like Vaclav Klaus, president of Czech Republic, saying:
"Car burglars, stealing cars in Germany, helped Czech economy to keep up with increased demand in transportation."
I wonder what these young IT experts in Romania would say, if their product is pirated. Would they mind?
But is there a way, how to get out from the too_expensive->can't_afford_it->let's_steal_it mindset? Sure, open source.
Why someone would bother to steal MS Office, if openoffice offers comparable solution? Do you need a webserver or application server, try Tomcat, Glassfish or other open source servers. Do I have to mention opensolaris or linux as an alternative OS?
So here is my message to it_guys@romania: Consider opensource alternative first!
And here is another one to companies that are still affected so much by piracy: Don't worry about piracy, start sharing!
Posted at 11:12AM Mar 15, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Open Source | Comments[4]
Thursday Mar 02, 2006
Czech Open Source 2006 - Survey
Open source is getting more and more attention in Czech
Republic. People that are around very popular server - www.root.cz came
with a survey [in Czech only] about
open source technologies. I was pleased to see the amount of
projects that have a contribution from local opensource
community. Sure, I was aware of NetBeans, OpenOffice.cz , Czech
Open Solaris User Group or CZilla
but there are some other, pretty interesting projects, like AV Centrum Silicon Hill. It's a
project that's run by students for students and it captures
presentations and broadcasts them via internet.
I'm going to vote now and
you can guess my preference ;-)
Posted at 09:42AM Mar 02, 2006 by Pavel Suk in Open Source | Comments[0]