Terminally Incoherent

I use a nice dual CPU Sun JDS as my main development workstation at school. My mentor got it on a grant, and I get to mess around with it as I work on my thesis. This machine is so fast that it is sick and it looks pretty too. Gnome runs on it so smoothly that I actually doesn’t even bother me that much (I’m a hard core KDE user).

But, unfortunately the JDS itself sucks ass. That is my honest opinion. This is not to say that it is a bad distro - it just sucks compared to what I’m used to - and that is Debian, and Ubuntu. I like nice apt-based distributions, with large communities and tons of easily available precompiled packages available via good packet management system. JDS community is small, the choice of downloadable packages is even smaller, and the version of Yast I’m using does not give me an option to connect to an online repository.

Seriously, if you are buying machines from Sun have a choice between Solaris 10 and JDS go with Solaris, because the community support is far better. I spent over an hour trying to find an RPM of Subversion that would actually install on my system. Every time I found one, it had 5-6 unmet dependencies which of course were not included on my software CD bundle. When I hunted down rpm’s of those dependencies they had in turn more dependencies, and so on. I finally gave up and decided I’ll compile from source… But of course my gcc version was wrong, so that idea went out the window. I can tell you one thing - if apt-get was a woman, I would friken marry it (only if it was hot though). It is a gift from God and you will never know just how good it is until you are stuck without it.

Anyways, all I really needed was to check in some code into my new Subverision repository on another machine, and then check out some other code. If I actually needed to set up that machine as a svn server then I would probably put some extra effort into it, and find a way to get it working. But seeing how I only needed a client I decided to search for alternate solutions.

I need something that has no crazy dependencies, so I turned to Java wold. I was really impressed by SmartSVN. It is a really solid SVN client that completely outclasses eSvn and RapidSvn in usability and user friendliness. The UI is clear, and intuitive and very well designed. If you are looking for a nice, self contained client that will run on any platform, definitely check it out.

Of course the major downside is that it is a proprietary application. The Foundation version is free, but you need to pay for the more advanced features. The only Pro feature I find really useful is the repository browser (which does come in handy if you decide to move stuff around inside the repository - but how ofter do you really do that). Other than that, I think the Foundation has very adequate functionality - especially for the normal day-to-day use kind of stuff.

So, now I’m using SmartSVN on the JDS workstation, kdesvn on my laptop and TortoiseSVN on windows. I think I have all my bases covered.

Remember that Firefox Crop Circle I posted about some time ago? Guess what? I found it on Google maps!

click on image to see this in google maps

How awesome is that?

There are things on the internets that piss me off these days:

1. Online Comic Strips without a functional RSS feed (and no, the feed for your Live Journal does not count, unless it notifies me when you update your comic)
2. Sites with 16 different feeds for each different categories/sections, none of which encompasses all the content posted there
3. News Sites which can’t be bothered to publish a RSS feed
4. News Sites with an overactive RSS feed that racks up 50+ posts a day (I’m looking at you digg)
5. Blogs that do not allow comments especially the ones which pose questions to the reader or start their posts with the rhetorical “Can someone explain to me why…”
6. People who abandon their blog for 3 months, then write a 10 page dissertation apologizing the readers, and explaining why they were not blogging, only to disappear for another 3 months. Come on people - stop apologizing, and start blogging. Geez!
7. People who put intricate images as the background for their Myspace profiles, and then make sure all the text containers are transparent so that you can’t read shit without highlighting it
8. People who put music on their Myspace profiles. Playing music on your website was a shitty idea back in the 90’s and it is still a shitty idea now
9. Websites done completely in flash. If you see one of those, you can safely assume that it has no worthwhile content and move on
10. Webmasters who think that disabling right-click via javascript actually does something
11. Sites that excessively watermark their images - especially if they simply lifted them from another site.
12. People who do not use email because they are always signed into AIM, and utilize Myspace and Facebook for all other email-like stuff that can’t be done over IM.
13. Retards posting their lip syncing videos on YouTube
14. Retards posting videos of themselves singing on YouTube
15. All the so called “YouTube celebrities” that became (in)famous thanks to their lip syncin/singing videos
16. Dudes posting videos of “Ghost Riding the Whip” and not getting hurt. Unless you are run over, or you total your car, I’m not interested in that dumb shit
17. Companies which use “Beta” tag as a fashion statement (yes, Google, that means you)
18. Websites that use nested tables for layout
19. Websites that still refuse to enter the world of CSS and standards compliant design
20. Assholes who design IE only websites for no other reason than being fucken lazy

What pisses you off on the Internets lately?

You may or may not know that I used to run a Gigi Edgley fan site. It was long time ago, in ancient times, back when you could get good quality web hosting for free (unlimited free hosting and badnwidth @ crosswinds.net ftw!), no one knew who Gigi was, and her out of makeup pictures were rare as shit. That project kinda died, but I still think Gigi is awesome - as evidenced by the fact that she has her own dedicated category on this blog

Anyways, when I was one of the few relevant Google hits both for Gigi Edgley and Chiana I used to get a fair share of silly misdirected emails from people who thought that I was Gig or something. I haven’t archived any of that crap, probably cause I was a much nicer guy back then. I just politely pointed them towards the proper communication channels, and sent them a link to the disclaimer on the site.

I still occasionally find stuff like that in that old mailbox - but I rarely check it, so some of the good stuff probably drowns in the sea of spam. Hell, I was still getting some of these letters last November. Heh, I guess someone found my derilect corpse of a website in the hellish maelstrom of lameness that is tripod.

I guess I can sort of understand these mistakes. After all, it was a fan site and someone could potentially get confused. Granted they would have to get really, really drunk, then high, then suffer from SSMRFHS (Strikingly Sudden Mental Retardation from Hell Syndrome), then get a full frontal lobotomy, and finally suffer from a stroke, and get a brain tumor the size of a medium kangaroo, but still. It’s possible. I have seen stuff like that happen to the best of us…

But I never expected to be mistaken for Halle Berry. Please check out this comment though and please tell me how did this dude mistake my blog for some sort of an official Halle Berry website?

I seriously don’t get it. Do you?

Have you even needed to delete bunch of emails queued up on a POP3 server without actually downloading them? Sure, you could just telnet to port 110 and start deleting them manually, but what if you are dealing with hundreds of emails?

Here is my scenario. A lady calls me today saying that webmail is just unbearably slow for her, and she thinks it’s because she has to many emails in there. Sensing danger I telnetted in, and issued in a LIST command. I after watching the screen scroll for over a minute, I found out that there were over 1500 messages in the mailbox.

After some convincing the owner of the overflowing mailbox conceded to allow me delete everything prior to 2006 from the mailbox. She did not want to loose anything recent. Unfortunately deleting all these emails would not be easy, especially since the standard LIST command does not display dates. So I needed to figure out a better way.

Here is what you will need:

1. a windows box - unfortunately you need windows for this solution
2. Total Commander - the windows GUI based clone of Norton Commander/Midnight Commander. Yes, it’s not free, but it has 1 month free trial period.
3. The POP3 Plugin - a nice plugin for Total Commander which allows you to access POP3 servers

When installing the plugin you will need to specify the location of the Total Commander ini file. This file is usually located in the default windows directory:

C:\WINDOWS\wincmd.ini or
C:\WINNT\wincmd.ini

Once it is installed, open Total Commander. The POP3 access option is hidden under Network Neighborhood drive thing. To get there just click on the drive chooser in either panel and pick [-\-] from the list (by default it should be on [-c-]).

Inside, click on [POP3-SMTP Connections] directory. You can use the [Quick Connection] for a one-time session, or set up a permanent connection by giving it a name. In each case you will be prompted by a dialog asking you for POP3 and SMTP server.

You don’t need to set up SMTP as in this case we only care bout POP. The dialog is a little bit misleading because it looks like it wants you to type in the server address in the box. Unfortunately this is not the case. Click on the magic wand icon to access to proper POP3 login dialog which will ask you for the host name, username and password. It will then format the string which needs to go in the POP3 box appropriately. It should look something like this:

pop3.example.com:EncodedPwd(07F7DA1FB45E45)@username

I’m not exactly sure if the password is just converted to hex ASCII values, or if it is modified in some other way. The magic wand dialog will do the encoding, so you don’t need to worry about this.

Once you click OK, Total Commander should connect to the POP3 server. It will display your POP3 mailbox just as if it was a normal file-system directory full of .eml files. From there you can view or delete any massages with great ease just as if you were working with normal files.

Quick warning - Total Commander may appear to freeze while establishing the connection. This is normal, especially if your mailbox is huge. Just let it sit for a while and it will spring back to life.

Also, once I deleted bunch of files (around 200 at a time) TC disconnected from the server and returned to [-\-] forcing me to reconnect. No work was lost, and the emails were deleted as they should - it simply closed the connection after the task was done.

If you ever needed this type of access to POP3 mailboxes, definitely check it out. This nifty plugin might make worth buying the TC license something you might want to consider.

US flag explained:

found @ haha.nu; click to enlarge

Come on! You know this is true!

This image is part of a large campaign created by Grande Reportagem, a Portuguese news magazine. The creative team used the colors that appear on various national flags were to symbolize a social or political issue that were specific to the country in question. See more examples at haha.nu.

This actually made me chuckle out loud:

found on the internets; author unknown; click for full size

The only funny Garfield strips are the ones which have been somehow altered from the original.

I don’t usually post about music or interesting bands here, but I figured that I make an exception for these guys. Mike from freeindie.com emailed me today letting me know about The Kode. It is a band which specializes in making covers for old SNES era video game theme songs.

After checking out out their rendition of Super Mario or Mega Man I have to admit they are pretty good. You can download their album for free at the Free Indie site.

But I must say this - using a myspace profile as your official website is incredibly lame and retarded.

This morning I decided to upgrade my wordpress version to 2.0.5. The whole thing went smoothly, but several of the plugins which require you to actually edit some of the Wordpress files broke. I think I fixed all of them, but if you notice any glitches, please let me know.

Also, my stylesheet was reset to the default version. I restored most of the custom styles that I added over time, but if something looks weird please post a comment in this post and I’ll fix it ASAP.

Recently I mentioned that Peter Jackson will not be doing The Hobbit. Today User Friendly has posted a brilliant comic accurately capturing my worst fears regarding that movie:

comic © userfriendly.org

I think I would have to kill myself if this movie would see the light of day. This is of course the unrealistic worst-case scenario… But you know that without PJ this might likely be the general direction where the production is heading. Sigh…