Checksum Arcanius

I decided to upgrade to Thunderbird 0.8 yesterday, since I like doing things like that to keep my life exciting. I was not having any problems with having with 0.7, nor were there any features I needed in 0.8. The universal inbox sounded like it might be worthwhile, although it wasn’t really neccesary, since I do all my email collapsing via aliases before it reaches my server. On the other hand, I’m a big fan of clutter removal, and the unused “Comcast Email” and “Local Folders” did bother me a little bit.

The installation of Thunderbird went very smoothly – much better than the 0.6 -> 0.7 upgrade, which saw me uninstall the new version twice, and then install it again, to get things working correctly (like the about box, which insisted it was version 0.6 for a while after the initial install).

The trouble began when I thought I’d make an experiment out of transfering all my mail from my main account to my local folders. Well, you can’t select multiple folders, so either I had to drag them one by one (or – I didn’t realize this at the time – I could have dragged the entire inbox). Well, after the inbox and all the folders that come with it, I decided to move my sent folder as well – a gargantuan 100mb worth, I later found out. But then I got cold feet, realizing that I would have to edit all my settings, and everything was working fone, so there was really no need. So, I decided to move everything back. Now, dragging folders copies them, apparently, but dragging messages moves them. To only the contents of the root level inbox and my sent items folder, and my deleted items, did I need to drag back. Somehow, I missed the sent items, and after I deleted them from the Local Folders, I realized that they were also gone from my main email account folders – I just just misplaced over 100 millions bytes of data that I didn’t want to loose.

So I began searching for the undelete button. There is no reason they can’t have one, it turns out – all the messages are still there in a very readable form until you “Compact” the folder after deleting the message. But there is no undelete option. Can anyone say “feature request.” But hope was not lost. After all, I’m a TRC h4x0r, and I can deal with this kind of stuff.

After some more searching through the very readable mbox format “Sent” file in my Thudnerbird appication data directory on my computer and on searching for corresponding terms on Google, I came across this little gem of a page: Mozilla X-Mozilla-Status explained.

From this, I learned that deleted (“expunged”) is just a flag set on the message. 0x0008, in fact. So, I subtract 8 from the X-Mozilla-Status header for each message in my Sent folder, and all of the messages undelete. Like magic. Except that I suck at regular expressions (although I’m fairly certain there would be a way to do this one with regular expressions). Instead, I did it a little more manually, finding all the combinations of the X-Mozilla-Status that had the 0x0008 flag set, and replacing it with the same Satus, just not expunged.

Upon restarting Thunderbird and navigating to the Sent folder, Thunderbird had to spend a good amount of time – maybe 30 seconds – rebuilding the contents of the folder. But then, voila, all my email (as far as I can tell) reappeared, just like before.

I think its about time that I started actually backing up some on my data.

I now have five 80 gb hard drives. four of which I plan to put into my desktop (which currently hosts two) into a RAID-5, RAID-0, RAID-1+0, or RAID-0+1 configuration. The other will be kept as a backup in case one of the drives fails, and in teh meantime may serve as backup for my 100gb external drive, which stores most of my worthwhiel data, and will soon hopefully hold at least a copy of all of my worthwhile data. Backing that up seems like it would be a good idea, since I’ve been a really long time without suffering any drive failures. Not that the amount of time statistically matteres, but it sure feels like I’m pressing my luck…

A better googler than I (namely, Dan of Carputer fame) forwarded these links to me, which I used to tweak my Windows XP + Installed Applications (because its really one big organic entity) to a better state. I hope they help someone else too.

This one isn’t too uncommon, but the info there gave me a much better understanding of where to look in the registry to accomplish what I wanted: Customize the right click context menus

More uncommon (and also very cool, imho): Edit the Places bar locations in Open/Save As boxes

Cheers!

Simple: so you don’t have to look like a fool and publish gibberish like this.

“Because they are windowless, iframe elements support the zIndex attribute in Internet Explorer 5.5 and later. Windowed controls, such as select elements, ignore the zIndex attribute. If your applications were designed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, you might want to redesign pages containing iframe elements that are stacked on top of windowed controls. You can use the visibility attribute to hide windowed controls that you want an iframe element to overlap. You can also position windowed controls so that iframe elements do not overlap them.”

… Or Internet Explorer could follow the rules, and web designers wouldn’t have to worry about Select boxes appearing on top of divs, and other such crap that makes IE a pain to make webpages for.

I believe I have found a more elegant solution for my permalink problem – directories. I already had WordPress running running from from the /wp, directory, but with a duplicated index.php in the root directory, which acted as a front end. Now, I still have that same setup, but the internal pointer is to the copy inside the /wp directory, so all the links you see will have /wp in front of them now. So all I have to do is keep that direcotry untouched, and all my links should continue to work. So this is my little way to fight link rot, unless you already linked to me, but even then I won’t contribute to link rot until I move on from wordpress, if ever. Yay!

A friend recently convinced me to get PGP working on my system again. I went to the effort, and, for the first time since 1998, I have a PGP public key assciated with an email address I actually use. So, if you want to send me any sensitive data, or just want to attract the attention of the NSA, use the public key below to encrypt a message to me.
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After Bernie pointed out that my RSS feed had died, I began to investigate the situation. It turns out that if I want permalinks and RSS feeds to work without hacking away at WordPress’ code, I have to enable mod_rewrite, which I’m not planning on doing at this stage. I’d rather hack WordPress, which is not at all out of the question, considering that it is programmed in PHP. So, the permalinks ended up being not so permanent, but…. if you want to link to some post of mine and have it stick around for the forseeable future, consider linking via wp-pl.php instead of index.php. Index might go away, but I’ll try to keep wp-pl.php around even after I’m no longer using Wordpres (if that ever happens).

In other news, I probably lost at frisbee, but no one seemed to be keeping track, and then I went to a very productive (in my opinion) TRC Leadership meeting, followed by a TRC hack session that saw Hyperion pulled apart to get ready for an electronics rebuild, and perhaps more. Then after a chicken caesar salad, I mostly vegged out and played some counterstrike and chatted and whatnot. Good, lazy times. Just recharging the batteries, I guess.