Tech

It feels strange heading back to Bushkill, PA for another 14 days of 12-14 hour days of Oracle training. At least this time around work is only paying for transportation as I received a course reset because the course I took back in March clearly needed a little more work before giving it to students for the first time. This time around I'll also, have the use of a rental car so I can drive to the grocery store and properly use the full kitchen. Not to say that I like cooking and I won't have much time to cook, but given how bad the food was the last time around I'll likely function a hell of a lot better with a diet that won't result in scurvy, diabetes and/or a heart attack.

Some rat bastard loaded several megs of comment spam into biohabit.org in about three hours. Thankfully a few mysql commands were able to purge all the spam. As a result of this new spamming technique I have disabled anonymous comments as with all of the work I have been doing on peak oil and permaculture I'm not going to have time or interest to deal with the above mentioned rat bastards for a while.

Ever since CivicSpace released 0.8.1rc1, most of the time at work and a fair amount of the time when I was around a computer at home have been spent testing and debugging CivicSpace. I found several issue with the upgrade process and several needed improvements to the new event module. It also appears that the new theme, groundswell, will be a lot easier to customize so hopefully re-implementing the look that the PSU webdesign course came up with won't be too painful.

From everything I have dug into, CivicSpace 0.8.1 looks like a wonderful release, but to make this even nicer I have been working with a guy in France who has written a drupal module that will generate a freemind file from the taxonomy and associated nodes (with the node teaser). This module hasn't been checked into drupal cvs yet and it still needs a little work but I can say is it generates a valid freemind.mm file. I haven't been able to get icons to display, but I haven't really tried that hard either.

I recently bought a used G3/800 iBook (from a very trusted source) and as this is my first time working with Apple's Mail app and I have to say that I'm really hating what it does to IMAP.  Maybe I'm missing something but near as I can tell it flat doesn't allow you to subscribe to specific folders.

Every single Mail app that I have used in the last two years (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook) has had better IMAP functionality and why the hell doesn't Apple's Mail app use the .mailboxlist like every other freaking IMAP app?   Near as I can tell it only allows you to  read only the inbox, or everything in my entire home directory.  I can reproduce the problem on Debian and Solaris boxes running different version of the IMAP server, both of which work fine with Thunderbird and Evolution.

Do you have a bunch of idea and have no way to sort them out? Then might I suggest you take a few minutes (read: NOW) to go to FreeMind homepage and install it on the platform of choice (Windows, Linux, OSX, anything that can run Java,...). I'm using it on Debian currently, but the Windows and Mac versions ran fine at work.

You do need to have Java installed (duh) and it is pretty damn amazing of being able to on the fly setup new branches, child nodes.... Here is an example of an export that you can create that is web browseable (requires java) and here is the HTML export.