"Hi, my name is Desktop Search, and I'm a memory hog."
"Hi, Desktop Search!"

I uninstalled the stupid search applications that had been imposed on me by the Office 2007 Beta and the Google Desktop whatchamacallits. My computer is running much smoother now. Stupid memory hogs.

From Wikipedia's take on Irony:

And the Universe said, "Ha! Ha! You suck!"

After reading the section of Verbal Irony, I don't think I'm sarcastic as often as I thought I was.

Sometimes I can't help myself. Fenux vs. the Iron Kingdoms is now up and running. All of my WarMachine and Hordes goodies will be going there.

With that in mind, that site will probably end up being a lot more active than this one.

There are certain questions you should always ask about an event you are going to attend. Here is my list. (This was taken from an actual conversation yesterday.)

• When is it?
• Where is it?
• How long will it last?
• Does it cost money>
• Is there a dress code?
• Do I need to bring fish?
• Do I need to cook the fish first?
• Should it be baked or fried?
• If fried, what kind of oil should I use? Vegetable? Peanut? Canola?

I was doing some work on the Limey Dragon Games & Hobbies site today and I killed it. At least for about 20 minutes. It was bad.

I was trying to fix a problem with the forum software on the site (from Plesk and tried to upgrade the forums. It failed, so I did a restore from the backup.

The problem is that Plesk's backup utility will ignore anything that isn't inside of the public html directory. That isn't a problem for most sites, but this one uses Geeklog. Geeklog puts a lot of it's core files, including configuration and plug-ins somewhere else. Plesk not only failed to back up those files, but it also deleted them when it did the restore.

Twenty minutes later, the site is back up and running, but I'm sure I've missed some configuration settings I tweaked the first time. We'll just have to locate them over time.

D'oh!

This was requested by Duck, so I thought I'd post it here, in case any one else cares. All of these are available from the Firefox extensions site.

There are a couple more that should be included on this list, but they're installed on my home computer and not the one at work where I am now.

• Tabbrowser Preferences - Gives added control to tabbed browsing
• Open Source in Tab - Keeps me from having too many windows open.
• PageStyle2Tab - It just looks cool.
• TabFX - More enhancements to tabbed browsing.
• Right-Click-Link - For the link that isn't a link.
• Extended Statusbar - Useful at times. Works like Opera's.
• SessionSaver .2 - "Magically restores your last browsing session."
• PDF Download - Because Acrobat doesn't always agree with Firefox.

There isn't an easy way to do it. I've looked, but that's never stopped me before. I will finish out this post later, but for now, I'm getting the details in so I don't forget.

Requirements: (To do it the way I did.)

• *.txt files from Mailman's list archives
• Unix shell and FTP access
• unix2dos command for Unix
• minimail - Cut+paste perl code to parse/create mbox files and mail messages
• Mark Lyon's GMail Loader (GML)
• A POP email account
• Outlook

Overview:

• Combine *.txt files for a list into one *.mbox file. (cat *.txt > listname.mbox)
• Append headers using minimail.pl.
• Convert to DOS text file format.
• Send to POP account using GML.

We append the "Sender:" and "To:" headers so that the rules I use in Outlook will auto sort them.

Append Headers Code: (Replace the last {} block in minimail.pl with this, making appropriate changes for each list.)

{
        sub rd { <> }
formail(&rd, sub {
        my $mymail = shift;
        append_header($mymail, "To: 'List Description' ");
        append_header($mymail, "Sender: listname-bounces@listserver.com");
        print mail2str($mymail);
        });
}

To Do List:

• Need to unobscure the email addresses so they aren't all "user at server.com".

I'd gotten over my last encounter with their Customer Service department (or at least mostly gotten over...). Then I discovered they'd overcharged us $45 this month. It's fixed now, but I'm still waiting for the day I get a correct invoice from them. They are 0 for 3.

When you've planned for every contingency, you know something is going to go wrong. I even said so yesterday (repeatedly) before I went to install the Isolated Wireless Network I mentioned in my last post.

The ethernet jack that was wired up for the router was installed when the building was built, by the same people who installed the telephones. I wasn't sure which jack was the other end of it, so I cheated and hooked up a tone probe the the line. What I discovered was that the ethernet jack was wired into the phone system punch down block. This is bad.