Random Developments

I’m going out on vacation today. So, no posts for the next three weeks, I guess.

The location box here on the left side of the page, however, will be kept up-to-date. If you want to know my whereabouts during this period, this is the place to check.

So I went to the theatre yesterday to watch “Matchstick Men”, where Nicolas Cage plays a, well, how can I say it… a really nice con-artist, who, while being great at his job, has some quirks on his personal life.

The week before I watched “The Italian Job”, a 2003 remake of a 1969 movie about a bunch of guys who steal a lot of money in Italy, get screwed by one of their own and decide to get back at him. I read somewhere that the 1969 version, starring Michael Caine, is much better, but the new one has Charlize Theron. Also, I’m pretty sure that the first version made no reference whatsoever to Napster, so, choose wisely.

But, going to the point of this post, one thing in common about these two movies is that both get us to like characters who, technically, are bad guys. The Italian Job crew are thiefs, and so are the Matchstick Men. However, we want them to succeed, at that’s not just because of Charlize’s looks or because Edward Norton’s character is much worse. So, why is it ?

My guess is that this is because they are shown as “likable”, gentle, even sweet people who just happen to have a different way of life. The Italian crew are not violent, they are very smart, and get screwed. Nicolas Cage’s character is seriously in need of a shrink, is not violent, and is smart. Is that enough to get us to like criminals ? Apparently yes, at least in the movies, as there are quite a lot of movies out there where they get people to cheer for the “bad” guys, usually thieves. “Ocean’s Eleven”, for example. Or “Lock, Stock an Two Smoking Barrels”. Or “Snatch”. Hell, even the guys in “Office Space” are thieves.

Is Hollywood making us, as a society, lenient towards thievery ?

Now, I may be oversimplifying, but, if Mel Gibson is really as religious as he seems to be, shouldn’t he take this as a hint from above ?

For quite a long time (ever since I outgrew Spry Mail) I was a user and evangelist for Becky (aka Rebecca), an excelent mail client from a (I think) small company in Japan. I still think it is a great software, with very useful features you can’t find anywhere else, but I recently switched to Thunderbird both at home and at work. And here’s why.

Becky is not open source (it’s not free, either, but this is not a problem for me; I bought a license years ago, and it was a good buy), and it seems to suffer from what I call the “lone developer syndrome”. That is, there is a small team working on it and there’s no way they can include everything that is expected from an e-mail application these days. For example, it does not do SSL, or any kind of digital signing. Even its sort-of-built-in support for PGP is awkward, to say the least.

Also, its built-in editor has a real problem when it comes to breaking long lines: its behaviour is very often exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, and rarely seems like the right thing to do. It also does not like multi-byte encodings (you can’t use accents in letters when using UTF-8, for example, which does sound weird). Speaking of UTF-8, Becky’s support for international charsets is surprisingly weak for a software that comes from Japan; I was never able to see Asian (or even Eastern European) characters in the message list. And don’t even think about sending HTML messages with Becky; it allows you to try, but the result may not be what you expect.

Becky does have a lot of good features, including two of the ones in the wishlist from my previous post. It is also very fast and light, so much so that it runs nicely in a lowly Pentium 100Mhz with 32 megs. It has the best remote handling of POP3 mailboxes (that is, handling the mailbox without actually downloading the messages) that I have seen since, well, Spry Mail (does anyone else even remember Spry Mail ?). It allows you to edit messages you received. It does IMAP exceedingly well. It even does NNTP, with the help of a plug-in.

But, worst of all (IMHO), it displays HTML messages by using an Internet Explorer component, and we all know how reliable and secure IE is. In fact, this is what prompted the switch for me: I had to small almost-incidents because of junk messages with content that caused undesired behaviour in IE and, in my environment, I can’t afford not reading HTML messages.

I still use Becky to check my work mailbox from home without downloading the messages, and my SO also uses it both at work and in her notebook, so in the end I did not leave Becky entirely. But you can say that our relationship is certainly cooler than it used to be.

I upgraded to the new release versions of Thunderbird and Firebird today. At first glance, there’s no visible difference from the previous version (no obvious new bells and whistles), but the release notes say that a bunch of bugs were corrected, and when you start to use them you notice new things hiding here and there.

The only bug I noticed in Thunderbird is that, when you are editing message filters, if you add a new header to the list of known headers, you can’t do anything else to the list of headers (including selecting the one you just added) until you Alt-tab out of the window and back. I was going to report it, but it already is bug #212625 in Bugzilla.

Also, one thing that surely needs work is the matter of installation. Granted, it is nice being able to just unzip/untar the package and run it, but the matter of having to reinstall your extensions is not so nice. Speaking of which, I don’t know how I lived without TabBrowser Extensions for so long. My other two favorites are the Mouse Gestures and Web Developer extensions (and Tagzilla for Thunderbird).

Wishlist, all for Thunderbird: different .sigs for different folders (so that you can use a different one depending on which mailing-list you’re e-mailing; very useful if you regularly send messages in more than one language); better accuracy in the bayesian spam filters; and the ability to view the text part of a text+html message.

I’m 0×20 years old today.

The good thing about being this old is that I can start counting in hex without using letters.

At least if you leave in the southern hemisphere, like me.

And, with summer, comes the daylight savings time. Which, for anyone involved with a large server farm, means that a multitude of clocks will have to skip one hour at a given point in time. For those of you blessed with living in a country where DST comes at a predictable moment, this is relatively easy: if your timezone is set correctly, the servers will do it for you by themselves, and all you have to worry about is whether you have any cron jobs that will be skipped but need to be ran anyway (with the reverse problem coming a few months later, of course).

This is not the case for me.

DST here starts at midnight on a (apparently) randomly selected Sunday in October, and ends on a randomly selected Sunday in February. The actual date is selected a few weeks in advance; this year, it will start on Oct. 19th and end on Feb. 15th. But what this means is that you (and by “you” I mean “we”) have just a few weeks to make sure that all your servers are going to switch gracefully to the new time at the right moment (this is very important for several applications, and less so for several others).

In our case, this means a long list of servers having their timezone files replaced and being rebooted in the middle of the night (a reboot being the safer way to guarantee that all processes will see the timezone change, when you have redundant servers for all services), a few servers a day, quickly enough so that all will be ok when the date comes. Of course, our timezone files already include an educated guess about the next time change (we’re betting on Oct. 17th, 2004 and Feb. 13th, 2005), but we don’t have a good track record on this…

All this is, actually, a convoluted way of asking: when will government realize that all aspects of a country need some stability, not just the economy? Jeez, can’t you just pick a date in advance for the next decade? Or at least until the next election, since the next president will probably want to change everything again.

Sorry, I just had to vent.

If I ever have kids, I want one just like this.