Spontaneous Monotony

Following my problems with Firefox and Thunderbird, I’ve replaced them with the shiniest that Vole has to offer (IE7 and Outlook 2003 respectively). Sure, I lose some of the benefits of Extensions for both apps, but I’d rather keep my data intact.

EDIT: You might have noticed that I haven’t deleted the ‘Powered by Firefox’ link in the sidebar. That’s because, with the help of a few tweaks, I’ve been able to fix the problem in Firefox. I’m sticking with Outlook though.

Both Firefox and Thunderbird have, for some unknown fuckwitted reason, decided they don’t like loading settings. Nothing to do with the recent 1.5.0.1 update I’m sure, just a coincidence.

Firefox has forgotten all my settings (including stuff like ‘ask me where to save every file’) – although it’s kept my bookmarks fine which seems a bit strange. It has also deleted all its search engines (and I do mean ALL, the search box now does NOTHING because it doesn’t even have the default Google search) and refuses to install any new ones (the actual ‘want to install this search engine’? javascript box works fine, except that it doesn’t actually install the search engine).

Thunderbird has similarly decided that my profile folder doesn’t exist. The point of course being that it does, and is NOT corrupted (mbox2eml opened the mbox files no problem… do you see where this is going?). I have been able to restore my emails, address book and so on via a backup-and-reinstall, although the same can’t be said for the (OFFICIAL) Calendar extension. Sure, after restoring the files from the backup all of my calendars are back, the problem is that the same can’t be said for the events contained within the calendars (which is, after all, rather the point of the calendars themselves).

This is ironic – like many people I switched to Firefox because I was fed up with the security problems and functionality flaws of Internet Explorer, and then switched to Thunderbird because I was so impressed with Firefox. Never before though has either Microsoft product lost ALL of my data and settings in one fell swoop – they’ve had some pretty dodgy updates in their time (*cough* the SP2 fiasco) but never anything this bad. Put it this way – I’m about to go and dig out my Office 2003 CD to get Outlook reinstalled.

I’ve had to disable the flashy AJAX commenting because it doesn’t work well with Spam Karma 2. The commenting is now of the normal, page-refreshing variety.

It was a long time ago that people realised that Internet Explorer 6 was seriously flawed… like when it was released in 2001. Now it’s a running joke. The new version, IE7, is now available as a Preview version (aimed at technical users, the general-usage beta is slated for an summer April release). So far it seems nice, but I have a few minor (!) problems:

• The toolbar (File, View, Tools etc.) appeared the first time I ran the program, but now doesn’t, and there’s no obvious way of getting it back EDIT: Turns out that the toolbar is disabled by default (doesn’t explain why it appeared the first time I ran IE7!) but you can get it back by going to Tools (the icon at the top-right), then Toolbars, and choosing Classic Menu. Grr.
• The only way of seeing the browser history is via a keyboard shortcut, and if you didn’t have the presence of mind to guess that it would be Ctrl+H then you’d be totally stuck
• Various rendering problems – the fonts look a bit fuzzy in places, and a lot of AJAX doesn’t work. Hopefully these will be fixed

UPDATE: The new interface actually looks VERY Flock-like. Of course excessive use of silver, rounded corners etc. isn’t exclusive to Flock, but the appearance is very similar.

The feed handling ROCKS – similar to the likes of the Feedview extension for Firefox, but much more polished. You can actually view feeds as ordinary webpages as well as subscribing – although the subscription only seems to provide a link to the view page at the moment.

I have discovered a mistake in the post ‘Spam Karma 2 is no more‘ – my intrepretation of the ‘viral clause’ in the GPL (which requires that all derivative works be licensed under the GPL) was incorrect – I thought it meant that ANY code designed to be used in GPL software must itself be GPL licensed, but in fact it means that if you are re-distributing a modified version of GPL software then your modified version must be GPL licensed. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.