Evan McNabb’s Blog

A few weeks ago, I decided to do something I figured would be a simple, straight-forward task: rename my buddy groups in Pidgin (Gaim). What resulted was a disaster. Hundreds of my AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Jabber contacts were deleted, renamed, shuffled, etc. I have no clue what happened.

I’m trying to piece together a coherent buddy list from a backup blist.xml file. If you used to see me on frequently but don’t any more, ping me and I’ll look into it - maybe you were one of the axed buddies.

I saw the following today while glancing through the classified ads in our local paper (North Carolina):

Yeah, I definitely did a double-take.

Every once in a while I stumble across something very useful, and I think, “I could have saved X days of my life if I would have had this 5 years ago…”. Well, I’ve found something to add to my list: The Firefox extension “It’s All Text!“.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

This extension allows you to edit a HTML text box in any editor - in my case I’ve chosen heavenly gvim. That’s right boys and girls, you can have vim bindings while updating Bugzilla.

If you haven’t given “It’s All Text!” a shot, do it now!

It’s amazing how quickly a terabyte of disk fills up when your significant other decides to record every episode of “Oprah”, “Dr. Phil”, and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”. This happened to me, and I realized my goal to record every episode of “The Simpsons” was in jeopardy.

When Lisa went to work, I started to delete her shows one by one, but each deletion required a confirmation, which ended up taking 5 seconds or so per recording. I realized I had hundreds of episodes to go, so I looked around for a way to automate it. To my surprise there was no good way to delete all the episodes of a show (or it sure wasn’t obvious).

I finally found the following technique to remove many episodes in one swoop:

1) In the Recording List, hit the “/” key to tag a recording. This adds it to the playlist. You can hold “/” down to quickly tag hundreds of episodes in seconds.

2) Type “m” to go to the Recording List Menu.

3) Select “Playlist options”.

4) Select “Delete”.

It will return to the Recording List and delete the files in the background. I love MythTV…

For years I’ve used Mutt as my main mail client for personal email, and Evolution or Thunderbird for my work mail. The only major feature I’ve missed in Mutt that the other clients have is a good way of seeing when new messages are delivered to one of my many folders. Mutt sidebar to the rescue! It shows a list of all of your mailboxes off to the side and how many messages are in each one. When a new message is delivered, it highlights that folder to the color of your choice: in my case blinding yellow.

Unfortunately, Mutt sidebar is not in the main Mutt tree, so you have to patch and recompile it. Until recently I used the stable branch of Mutt (1.4.2), but the only sidebar patches I found were for the development tree (1.5.13). I’m now using the latest and greatest, and enjoying my sidebar goodness!

For more info and a screenshot go to:
http://www.lunar-linux.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44

I recently ran into a nasty GTK/Thunderbird regression where Thunderbird won’t allow you to drag messages between folders. I guess that kind of defeats the purpose of a graphical mail client. I’m running FC6 on my laptop, but it sounds like this is a problem on multiple distros:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355248

For now I’ve downgraded to the previous version of GTK2 (from 2.10.8-1.fc6 to 2.10.4-10.fc6):

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/gtk2-2.10.4-10.fc6.i386.rpm

Update: This has been fixed in the latest Thunderbird update for FC6 (thunderbird-1.5.0.9-7.fc6)

We’re excited to announce that the day has finally come! At 8:01am on February 2, 2007, Ensley Kathryn McNabb was born at Western Wake Hospital in Cary North Carolina. She weighed a whopping 6 lbs (exactly) and was 18 inches long. Lisa and Ensley are doing great.

We’ve uploaded several photos and a short video clip to:
http://www.mcnabbs.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=1291

I’ve decided to start blogging again… for the fifth time. We’ll see how long it lasts this round.