earth tech

Are you as annoyed as I am regarding the complete lack of regard for common sense shown by the Mozilla Thunderbird user interface designers? Have you spent the deep hours of many late nights weeping and tearing your hair because the abject stupidity of the so-called "Long Date Format" has cost you more con points than any of the twinks who are trying to pkill you for your grand-master-level armor?

If you answered "Yes" to the above, there may be a degree of relief in sight: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format has (finally) some information about how to make Thunderbird - at least - behave in a bit more civilized manner - more like an application that may be willing to live within the constraints of the system, and with the desires of potential users to have a mail application that doesn't hide from them things like the date, time, source of the message, etc.

While many of you may feel - as the Mozilla Designers obviously do - that the trend towards Complete Desktop Dis-functionality - usually combined by the software designers with a concerted assault on the sanity of any unfortunates who may happen to stumble into the precisely and deviously laid psyware traps (I mean, have you seen the error message that says "You WILL NOT use the international standard date formats, you pinko commie fag - you un-American hippie filth! SCREW YOU if you think you want to use this computer as god intended, fulfilling the natural relationship between man and machine - making the world a better place for yourself and the rest of you weak, puny, carbon-based SCUM! Screw YOU if you think this machine is going to do ANYTHING you tell it to. WE are in charge now, and you days as a system operator are NUMBERED!"?) - is some sort of fiscal holy grail, I am here to assure you that there are still some of us out here who hold to the Truths we have known and discovered through tribulation and discord these many long temporal units - you're just wrong. So there.

Anyway - vituperation and contempt for panty-waist UI designers and wussy software developers aside - here is the answer:

Of course, that will do you no good at all w/o the codes:

And finally, you should know what this is:

user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.today", 2);

FtR: This is Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.23 (20090817) running on heavily customized OpenSuSE 11.1 install to some kind of an HP notebook [luggable] which has not been moved or opened in months, but which has fairly good uptimes, only needing to restart when new kernels are installed, etc.

This blog post is supplied as a Mind Numbing Experience (MNE). No warranties are expressed or implied, and if you try anything you find written here, you r one sick fuck, and there's probably no help for you. Sorry. Peace out.

Labels: date, dysfunctional, fix, format, mozilla, thunderbird

posted by pd wilson   #   14:40

My HP/Compaq a220n died on 13 July, 2007. It does not complete the boot process, and appears to be hanging while executing the optical drive Power On Self Test (POST) code from the system BIOS.

I have since acquired an Acer AMD 64 Dual Core machine [will post the specs later] which came from Walmart pre-loaded with Windows VIsta.

I've been using the Acer for a couple weeks now, and am finding that Windows Vista sux even harder than Windows XP - this is Win95 territory, in fact. Crappy OS, crashes regularly, and runs slower the new, better hardware (this new system has a 64-bit dual core processor w/ 2Gig of RAM) than XP did on a system with only 512M of RAM and a 2 generations older processor.

This system is so slow that the cursor hangs for seconds at a time just while trying to move it across the screen, w/ nothing in particular running in the background.

The Vista user interface is ever cluckier to use than the XP interface (e.g. the new Start Menu is just utter crap - it doesn't fit on the screen, and going to "All Programs" gets me into a mess that need the arrow key pad to get out of without doing serious collateral damage to the menu itself as the brainded trackpad driver tries to drag and drop your menu items in places that, while not specified ahead of time, appear to be more malicious than just random.

In short, this machine

1. Appears to have a malign intelligence all its own
2. Obviously and very "vocally" HATES the user.
3. Appears to be pursuing some other-motivated agenda that has to have been conceived and implemented by Microsoft Corp at the expense of anyone with the temerity to actually try to do useful or productive work with a laptop computer.

Next order of business: Install a 64-bit OS that supports full multi-tasking. [note that Vista seems to be running 32-bit code in a 32-bit emulated environment running on top of the 64-bit hardware - probably why the machine is so slow - HAL is not your friend, anymore, it seems]

So despite the gifting a brand new, higher-end-than-what-we-had replacement for the HP, we still aren't able to accomplish any non-trivial tasks with the new machine until the system software is rebuilt and properly configured. Film at eleven.

Labels: dysfunctional, laptop, sux, sux0r, vista, windows

posted by pd wilson   #   18:51