Merry Christmas from Mozilla

To paraphrase the great poet, Ronnie James Dio, when there's lightning, it always brings me good stuff from the Mozilla foundation! Like a rainbow in the dark, Mozillazine is reporting that "With Lightning, Mozilla Thunderbird will have a set of user features that is much more competitive with Outlook, especially in enterprise usage."

Don't Check Gmail on Bloglines

I'm reposting IceBurrg's second comment in his More G-mail Goodness from Google story, because I think the comment is front-page worthy:

Check this out:

http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://gmail.google.com/gmail

If you subscribe with Bloglines, it saves your password and makes the feed available to everyone. At last check, there were over 20 mailboxes (and their passwords in the URL) available.

Do NOT check your G-mail with Bloglines.

More G-mail Goodness from Google

G-mail and RSS, a match made in geek heaven? While checking my G-mail this morning I noticed the live bookmark icon in Firefox's taskbar letting me know that there is an RSS feed available for this page. I immediately bookmarked it. After checking to make sure it worked, I went to G-mail's help to look up information on RSS. Sure enough, G-mail now has Atom feeds. Now, you can use an aggregator to check you G-mail! Bloglines just got a whole lot more useful!

Oh, You Naughty iSync, You!

I just submitted the following to macosxhints.com. Update: It got posted! Maybe they can use it, maybe not. Either way, here's a solution to a problem that's been driving me mad all day today:

Recently, my iSync got a little whacked out. The iSync on my work G4 Laptop wanted me to remove all my MS Exchange contacts currently installed within Address Book. I let it remove the contacts, thinking that it would repopulate the Address Book. But that didn't happen! iSync would connect correctly to my Exchange server, check both Address Book and Exchange contacts folder, and decide that no changes were necessary. Even though my Address Book was empty!

iSync's sync data must be messed up, I thought. I wanted to trash the sync data and let iSync start anew, but I couldn't find it!. Turns out it was stored within the main Library folder:

/Library/Application Support/SyncService/XXX/EngineData

Here, "XXX" is the uid -- an integer number used internally -- of your account. If you don't know the uid of your account, you can find it within /Utilities/NetInfo Manager.

I trashed everything within the XXX folder (WITH ISYNC OFF, OF COURSE), restarted iSync, and volia! iSync started jiving with Address Book correctly again.

Now, somebody with a little bit more iSync savvy can explain what within the EngineData folder was messed up; and how trashing the whole XXX folder was overkill. I'm just happy I got the contacts back in Address Book.

Show URLs In Your XHTML Print Page

For my XHTML coding bretheren out there, I link to Richard Czeiger's great work on displaying link URLs in a page's print view. Basically, our lovable standards-compliant browsers will use CSS 2.1 :after psuedo-element. But Microsoft's browser -- what is it called? -- doesn't like :after, so Richard put together some JavaScript to do the same thing. Thanks to the fine humans at web-graphics.com for the link.

Batch Renaming Shouldn't Be a Hidden AppleScript

So I'm needing to change the file extension within the filename of a bunch of JPEGs in OS X. This is a huge pain, of course; there's no easy way to batch change filenames within the GUI. I start looking up some sort of BSD bash script way to do it, and I found a few before stumbing over this gem of a hint:

Take a look at /Applications/AppleScript/Example Scripts/Finder Scripts. I found a script that will add extensions and prefixes, as well as one that will do wildcard renaming. Very useful!

Yes, very useful. Also useful is writing a script to run in the Terminal.

As IceBurrg pointed out to me, DOS 1.0 had the "ren" command that basically did batch renaming with wildcards. That's great; why didn't that carry over into Windows XP file management GUI or the Mac OS X Finder GUI? It really shouldn't be such a pain in the ass to rename several files, or change extensions.

My Contribution - Online Bookmarks

I am sure all of you know of, and some even use, the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension for Firefox.

With an XSL style sheet, the uploaded XBEL.xml file, and a little PHP magic you can use the uploaded XBEL to make a continually updated bookmarks page on your website. I did not develop this trick. I originally found this on a Gadgetopia Blog if you want to go straight to the source.

I have a zip file on my website which contains the PHP, XSL, CSS, and a sample XBEL file in case you want to use this trick yourself.

You can see a sample of the generated output by going to this address.

Thunder! Thunder! Oh, You Get The Point

Thunderbird 1.0 is go. Go get it from mozilla.org. As of this post, there are no contributed or localized builds -- sorry Russian-speaking folks.

ThinkPad - Old and Busted; Blade Servers - The New Hotness

Engadget is reporting that IBM may sell its PC division soon. The article's author notes, "it still seems somehow weird and wrong that one of the companies that basically helped invent personal computing has decided there’s no future/money in it." I think they decided that long ago, though; IBM hasn't been personal computer/laptop market seriously in a long time.

In other news, I feel no shame in making reference to an overused Will Smith quote.

Thunder! Thunder! Thunderbird HO! (Almost)

As a part of our mandated Mozilla.org loving, I am happy to announce that Thunderbird (the email client alternative) has a version 1.0 release candidate. You can pick up one of the 1.0 RCs for your own amusement. Looks like message threading, er, I mean grouping has been improved, along with better migration tools for Outlook 2003 & Eudora users.