Thursday, July 30, 2009

Thunderbird 3 attachment reminder

Today I got scared by Thunderbird 3 (beta), when it brought the following pop up when I was trying to send an email:



Huh?
Well at first I just hit "No, Send Now", because I never intended to attach a file...

Hours later it did it again with a different email, still did not want to attach anything.
Couldn't find any pattern when it would come up with the pop up or not.

Then I tried it out (could've googled it of course):
When the email you send contains the wort attached or attachment (or variations a I guess), but there is no attachment, Thunderbird assumes, you just forgot it... and warns you.

Try it yourself: Send an email that says "Attached you'll find nothing" to yourself, and voila...

Cool...

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Monday, July 20, 2009

Qando being really really stupid

Qando is an excellent service for quering up to date (and realtime) information about the (mainly) Viennese public transport.
I used to know it from the iPhone - or rather from my iPod touch only, where it was not THAT useful, because it only worked when I had a WiFi connection ... it does an excellent job on a fully GPRS/3G connected iPhone, though.

Found out that it is also available as a JavaME version for more or less or other handsets, including my E71.

Installs OK, starts fine, however, it could NOT access my GPS device (a common problem for JavaME apps).

But I wouldn't even let me enter station/address data by hand.
There is a search input field, but I failed miserably to enter anything there...

...except for numbers, I found out after a while.

And then I played with it a little more, and noticed that - get this! - emulate a T9 input, even when the phone has a full QWERTY keyboard!
So if I hit e.g. the 4-key 3 times it will walk through g-h-i... like it would on a 12 key phone[1].

Aaaaaa... how stupid can one be as a programmer. Who in this century (or the last 20-30 years for that mattters) codes keyboard input and key-stroke-decoding by hand! Let the opsys do that! That's what it is here for. Even on a phone.

So please, Qando programmers, you can do better! And it's a lot easier for you!
--
[1] or whatever the correct number of keys on a numeric-pad-only phone is.

No wait ...


via xkcd - A Webcomic - Estimation

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

XP/centrino crashes under Vbox 3.02

Just installed the newly released VirtualBox 3.02 today, and my (guest) XP started to crash after I de-installed the "old" (2.2.x) guest additions and installed the 3.02 additions.
Turned out that this is a known windows virtualization problem on Centrinos [1] like documented here.

So I rebooted (for the umpteenth time), F8-ed and selected the last known working settings, regedited the

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm

to the value 4.

Rebooted, and voila... works again.


---
[1] yes, this was on my beloved laptop.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

OpenOffice.org Calc shortcuts

I just learned that Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- add (or remove, respectively) a cell/line in Calc.

Haven't noticed that before, and I only learned it, because I wanted to zoom in/out (like in Firefox)...
Boy, I'm glad there was a popup, and I did not ruin my spreadsheet without knowing it...

Friday, July 03, 2009

Firefox 3.5 - finally

So, on Tuesday I upgraded all my machines to FireFox 3.5...
without any problems.

It really is a lot faster (still in the final, not only in the betas).
And finally also my twitter performance (as ranted about here) works smoothly again...

Go and upgrade.