Tech

After a few months of dealing with the enormous suckage that is Outlook Express, I’ve discovered a reason to install Linux: the Ximian Evolution Email client.

The key useful feature, for me, are vFolders (virtual folders), which are customized views of your email based on rulesets. You want a folder that shows you all the email from Jim? Create a vFolder rule based on his address. How about a vFolder that contains all the email from the people in Hosting? Create a vFolder rule that includes all of their addresses. Better yet, emails can exist in multiple folders at once.

Gallery is a steaming pile of monkey poop.

A few months back, I found traces of an attempted hack via Gallery. After doing some investigation, I found that my version had some serious gaping security holes.

Today, I happened to notice that within the last week, my entire Gallery installation had deleted itself (in a fit of existentialism, no doubt). Poof. Gone. There was no longer a directory called gallery/ .

Yes, Outlook Express sucks monkey nuts.

Sadly, there’s not a better email client for Windows .. or at least one that will work with my broken work mailserver.

OE has been taking three to four minutes to start up for a while now, and I just discovered why: it’s attempting to load all of my Instant Messaging clients, and is failing because I’ve manually removed Microsoft Messenger.

In some versions of OE, the option for disabling this ‘feature’ is missing. However, you can edit the registry to prevent OE from attempting to start messaging clients.

Robert wrote a great response to the previous post about proxies:

Just wanted to remind all you firewall busters out there that this doesn’t actually obscure your traffic at all. All this does is get around corporate firewalls with stupid restrictions. They can still see what you’re doing and you still get fired for looking at porn.

The reason for this is obvious after thinking about how the proxies work. The site mentions that some of these anonymize your traffic and thats true. The remote host may never know where you connected from. But in order to connect TO the proxy you still need to go through the firewall at work. That’s why they can still see what you’re doing.

Here’s a list of open proxies, for all your firewall-busting needs.

This page has a manual and a quick reference guide to Picazo phones.

Business tip for today: when you have a world-famous, instantly-recognizeable brand name, change it.

I mean really, you can’t have people buying your products. That might actually make money, and jeez, what would you do with that?

Instead of the simple, four-letter “Palm”, the insipid twits in Palm’s management spent two years in business meetings to come up with their new company name, “<a href=http://palmone.com/">PalmOne. Brilliant. And the lower-case L is the numeral 1. On purpose.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Tactics, which is my favorite of all the Final Fantasy games, and I think is one of the best RPG/Tactics game ever. Here’s the job FAQ I’ve been using.

I can’t find the controllers for my poor old PSX, so I’m using an excellent PSX emulator called EPSXE.

The emulation is remarkably fast, and excepting a few odd glitches, the game is very playable. Movie music doesn’t seem to play, but the in-game MIDI tracks seem to play just fine, although they do slow down if the machine starts running too many tasks. EPSXE handles input from my old Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad very well, even though the gamepad is missing many of the buttons of the original PSX controller.

Jimi has written a nice brief tutorial on installing and configuring Spamassassin on a Redhat Linux system.

Spamassassin has been a godsend for me: last week it caught 436 chunks of spam, with 8 false-negatives and zero false-positives.

This site has a freely-downloadable e-book on Solaris 9. I’ve glanced over it and it seems to be pretty decent so far.