November 2007 Archives

Since I started full-time at the university I've been using Outlook 2003 as my email client while at work, since it's the officially supported application by the IT department. I use Thunderbird at home, having done so for over 4 years, and though I like it I've found that some aspects of Outlook are just plain better.

The main feature is the email list display, which Outlook can do on two lines - sender and date one one line and the subject below. This is great on large resolution and widescreen displays like my MacBook as it allows you to have a narrow email list column and a wide message pane - with everything on one line in Thunderbird, the message pane gets squished to the side.

The group sort in the email list is also much better. When sorting by date, Thunderbird offers just 5 headings - 'Today', 'Yesterday', 'Last Week' (which is a 5 day period after 'yesterday') 'Two Weeks Ago' and 'Older Mail'. Outlook is much more flexible, with headings going back 3 weeks and emails from the previous five days sorted under separate headings, rather than a generic 'Last week'. This makes it much easier to find an email if you can remember when it was sent.

Outlook is also able to remove line breaks in emails when displaying them in the reading pane. Normally emails are 72 characters in width, which carriage returns. But if your reading pane is narrow - which, for the aformentioned reason, it is quite narrow on Thunderbird - then without removing the carriage returns your emails look bizarre with the lines wrapped over. Having the line breaks removed makes the messages much easier to read.

There's also the fact that Outlook natively supports Hotmail, whereas Thunderbird requires an extension, but as the extension works well and Hotmail is phasing out WebDAV access it's not a big deal.

Thunderbird is much better than Outlook in a number of ways - it supports the IMAP IDLE extension for push email, for example, along with message threading, and the wealth of extensions is welcome. Shortly after I first started using Thunderbird, back in 2003, I even wrote a list of 18 reasons why it is better than Outlook Express. Though Microsoft has replaced OE with Windows Mail in Vista, and I haven't honestly played with it much, as far as I know it still doesn't have many of the features that Thunderbird has. But there are still some features of Outlook that I really wish were in Thunderbird.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out. If you've been holding off the alpha builds you might want to try this, as it has all of the Firefox branding (as opposed to be Minefield or Gran Paradiso) and seems pretty stable - I haven't had a crash on Mac OS X yet, which ranks it better than the alphas.

Mac users especially may want to upgrade as Firefox is massively approved on OS X, though make sure you install the Proto theme which is a prototype of the new OS X theme. There are still some major changes to be made to it but it gives you an idea about how it will match more closely with the OS X look and feel. There are screenshots at Redemption in a Blog if you still need convincing.

I had my first ever emergency admission and overnight stay in hospital on Monday night. Basically it was an asthma attack, but one that was so serious that my own medication couldn't tame it, so Hari and I took a taxi to the A & E department at Bradford Royal Infirmary, where I was nebulised and stabilised.

I ended up spending the night, and most of the following day, at the hospital, and for a lot of the time I was on oxygen. But thankfully by yesterday afternoon I was good to go home and was discharged in the evening. I'm now feeling much, much better and my asthma symptoms have subsided dramatically, so I'm all well again.

As this was my first hospital visit, here's the good and bad things about my visit:

Good:

• A lot has been said about hygiene in NHS hospitals. All the rooms I was in looked very clean, and there were anti-bacterial handwash dispensers quite literally everywhere you looked. Hygiene is obviously taken seriously here.
• The staff were, for the most, part very friendly and helpful - the A & E staff especially.
• Food wasn't bad - better than I expected at least.
• All the beds had Patientline terminals, so a payment of £5 for the day got me my own personal phone number, about 20 Sky TV channels plus some radio channels, and internet access. It certainly helped to pass the time and let me update my friends via Facebook.
• And this is the NHS so all of my treatment was free. When you're hyperventilating and waiting to be seen, at least you only have to worry about getting better and not whether you can afford the treatment, or whether your insurance will cover your treatment. We're very fortunate to have the NHS in this country and I don't think everyone appreciates just how lucky we are to have it.

Bad

• There was a shortage of beds, so when the decision was made to keep me in at about 1am, it wasn't until 3am that I was on a ward. And then I got woken up by the ward doctor at 4:30am to go through my symptons, and with all the beeping machinery and people being moved around I didn't get an awful lot of sleep while I was there.
• There were about 25 people on my ward, all in the same room, and it was a mixed ward. I'm not too worried about this but there was a patient who was being quite loud and abusive, which isn't quite what I wanted. But hey, it's free treatment - can't have everything.
• It took about 3 hours from the doctor saying I could be discharged to me actually being able to get my coat on and leave. Admittedly the staff were busy but it would have been nicer to be back home at 5pm, not 8pm.

Still, on the whole I had a good first hospital experience, and I'd like to thank all the staff there who helped me get better. Especially the A & E staff who were very friendly and helpful. And thanks to Hari who was very supporting during my time of need.

I'm at vocab level 32 on FreeRice - anyone got higher?

(FreeRice is a site that helps you improve your vocabulary, and every time you get a question correct the site's owners donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. It's supported by advertising.)

Because I'm feeling uninspired, I'm going to link to some other interesting things I've seen around the web lately:

• Londonist is a blog about London from Gothamist, a similar blog about New York. Right now there's a lot about St Pancras International (see picture above), the new Eurostar station, which looks fantastic. They also used one of my photographs in an article.
• Michael Robertson, the entrepreneur who started mp3.com, Linspire and now mp3tunes.com, is writing about how his latest venture is being sued by EMI for purported copyright infringement. The suit is, hopefully, without merit for the reasons Michael explains, but it's a good background to what is wrong with the music industry.
• For those of you not following the political situation in Pakistan, the former international cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan has been arrested and charged under the country's anti-terrorism act. Imran is also the Chancellor of the University of Bradford, and as I am now an employee of the university I can't comment any further.
• Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, says that he predicts that Scotland will be independent from the rest of the United Kingdom in 10 years time. So The Guardian light-heartedly wonders what it will be like without Scotland, and the implications that independence will have for both countries. For example, what the Duke of Edinburgh will be called and whether he'd take the title of 'Duke of Miltom Keynes'.

As I hinted above, I now have a full-time job at the university. It's not the one I was interviewed for and it's only for a few months but it does mean I am in a better financial situation.

If you have a spare few minutes, have a read of George Monbiot's comment piece "The anti-speed-camera campaign is built on twisted truth and junk science". Here's some select quotes:

Despite endless attempts by the media to trivialise it, an RAC survey reveals that 62% of drivers still regard speeding as a serious offence. Even more surprisingly, as many as 82% of British people surveyed approve of speed cameras, and that percentage has risen slightly since the mid-1990s. There is a genuine silent majority here, which is rarely represented in the media.

In 2005, [Paul Smith of Safe Speed] challenged me to a radio debate. I accepted, and floored him with a simple question. Has he published his analysis in a peer-reviewed journal? A peer-reviewed journal subjects new scientific claims to expert scrutiny. Without it, those of us who aren't experts can't tell whether claims are a work of genius or total hogwash. No, he hadn't. In fact he had been asked by the leading journal in the field (Accident Analysis & Prevention) to submit his work for review, but he hadn't taken up the offer as he didn't "have time". (He went on to boast that he had spent 10,000 hours compiling his website.)

The comment piece refers to government plans to introduce tougher speeding penalties for those driving well over the limit, such as driving at 45 mph in a 30 mph zone. For the record, I support this, and would recommend adding another tier, whereby those caught driving at, say 60 mph in a 30 mph zone, should be forcibly castrated.

Leopard finally arrived for me today - I bought it from Amazon and selected super saver delivery, hence why it took a bit longer (but also saved me around £13) - and naturally I’ve spent the part of the day when I wasn’t food shopping in Tesco having a play around with it. Here’s my initial thoughts:

• Like the new dock. Some people don’t but I think it looks cool.
• Everything seems a bit snappier now which is good. I’m used to operating system updates slowing stuff down, not speeding it up.
• Not liking the translucent menu bar, had to change my desktop as a result. Would prefer it the option to make it a solid colour.
• New Finder is nice - like the new left panel and CoverFlow could be handy. Trying to work out why some network shares aren’t showing up though.
• Some programs, like AppFresh, not working.
• Firefox 3 beta 1 feels quite a bit faster in Leopard than it did in Tiger, which is good.
• Don’t have an external HD so not used Time Machine yet.
• Quick Look makes me happy in my pants.
• New firewall sucks major ass. And it’s off by default. Bad Apple.
• 4 updates to install once Leopard was installed, 2 required a restart.
• Install took about an hour, much of that was verifying the DVD was okay.
• Seems to take around 5-6 GB more disk space than Tiger did.
• Spaces looks good but I don’t know if I would use it.

Ever bought something online and noticed that 'enter coupon code here' box, but had no discount to enter?

RetailMeNot is a web site that allows the sharing of discount coupons and offers. Enter the URL of the site you are thinking of buying from, and it'll give you a list of coupon codes for that site, sorted by success rate.

So where does Firefox come into this? Well, there's an extension which lets you know if coupons are available for the site you're viewing, so you don't have to check manually each time. When it finds a site with known coupons, it pops up a bar along the top of your screen, allowing you to view the coupons available. What's more, it's based on a list that the extension updates weekly, so the web site cannot track your browsing habits.

You may have heard that there's a trojan horse virus masquerading as a codec pack for Mac users. You may get asked to install this by some, shall we say, "shady" sites in order to view videos, but actually, you're opening yourself up to some nasty stuff, as once installed the trojan will change your Mac's DNS system so that you may get redirected to phishing sites.

The good news is that this is a trojan and not a virus - it shouldn't spread to other machines and you actually have to consent to it being installed on your system (presumably through a bit of social engineering). And you have to give it your administrator password to actually do anything nasty, which should sound alarm bells.

Seeing as Macs have tended to avoid malware threats, here's some top tips for those who have forgotten what Windows users have to put up with:

1. If a program asks for your administrator password, don't type it in unless you trust the application.
2. If you're unsure of the origin of a program, you can use ClamXav, a free, open source virus scanner based on the popular ClamAV anti-virus software, to check it first.
3. And as for codecs, installing RealPlayer, Perian and Windows Media Components for QuickTime, or VLC, should have you covered. If you have all of those and a video still doesn't play, then it's probably dodgy, tied up with DRM or not worth watching.
4. Only download from sites you trust. If needed, install McAfee's SiteAdvisor if you're a Firefox user.