Proving the Obviously Untrue

I use Icedove for mail mainly (the Debian variant of Thunderbird - a long and not very interesting story). I generally like it. I've used pine and mutt, but generally get too much stuff to view to make a text mode editor much fun. I've used evolution, but it was for a long time very slow, so now I tend to use Icedove. It locks up rather frequently on imladris (my main machine) running Debian unstable, and while I've now downloaded some debugging symbols I haven't devoted the time to finding out why yet.

Anyway, there are three things about it that really, really peeve me:

• Why don't the damn tags in version 2+ actually stick (in my imap folders, in dovecot) so that I reliably see them using the same flaming program in work?
• The feature to show a newly received mail is great, but it would be one thousand times more useful if I could tell the program to only feature mail in certain folders and/or not others. I don't really need to be told about how many thousands of new messages I have in my spam filtering folders all the time.
• Why does the exact same program view emails on my laptop in such a way that I frequently see all the "Your editor does not support graphical content" stuff on such emails?

Yes, I've tried google, yes, I've tried FAQs. Can't find the answers. I'm sure I've looked right past them. Anybody?

BTW... Two posts in one day? Not an excess of free time, trying desperately to take my mind of one of my cats who is very ill atm.

On Saturday night, quite by accident, I sat down to watch "Einstein and Eddington" on the BBC. Einstein has been an inspiration to me from an early age, and I'd known a lot about his life and work, and for many years a picture of him has adorned my room or office, though not at the moment as it happens. I suppose in compensation einstein is the hostname of my work computer at the moment.

Anyway I was also for this reason aware of Arthur Eddington, and his famous experiment to verify that gravity bent starlight. I was also aware of his famous quote regarding being one of three men who understood General Relativity. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to see the historical context of the interaction between these men, and a bit more of Eddington's life. I would recommend the programme highly, so if you're in the UK you have a few more days to catch it on iPlayer.

Great performances from Tennant and Serkis.

I was just reading the BBC's article about the leaked details of BNP members.. It's an interesting story, although of course here in Northern Ireland we have our own unique brand of prejudiced politics. (This reminds me of Frankie Boyle joking about Al Qaeda trying to bring religious intolerance to Scotland, that they were centuries behind the competition and didn't even have their own football team. That and they were dealing with the kinds of people who punch burning men in the face.)

Anyway, I'm digressing. At the bottom of the page there was the usual comment form, but I think the disclaimers above and below the form bear some reading. Is this a trap for particularly mentally slow BNP members (yes, I know you're all making your own punch line now).

Update I did of course contact the BBC about this rather than just laugh about it here, and as is often the case, they fixed the problem with the usual efficiency.

Today I was asked to look at a computer that was claiming to be infested by viruses following clicking on a link from facebook. This was of course a Windows situation, so I was unsure how much help I could be given how long it's been since I had to use Windows.

Anyway, I booted up the computer which swapped incessantly due to the low memory it had, but also due to whatever malware was at play. So eventually windows booted up, launched Internet Explorer which was already suspicious, and the systray showed a flashing shield. It didn't take me too long to work out that the window full of virus reports was bogus. Eventually I killed all the running crap in the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) then loading the task manager to start closing various applications. I also closed the "WAV" and suspicious "cmd" processes that were taking much of the CPU and had no good reason to be running.

After that, I nuked the contents of "C:\Program Files\WAV" suspecting that to be the problem, and for good measure ran the registry editor (Start, Run, type regedit and hit enter) and searched for occurrences of WAV that pertained to this stuff and nuked them. That is, of course, not for the unwary. When I restarted all was well and the problem was gone. Well, I removed the shortcut on the desktop for the now non-existant WAV. I'm putting this here so it can be forwarded to a few other victims.

Friends shouldn't let friends run Windows. I know...