Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Released

We have something new from Mozilla, the folks who bring you Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.

Let's start with the Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Release Notes:

What's New in Thunderbird 2:

Message Tags: Create your own tags for organizing email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.

To be honest, this didn't thrill me. I didn't take advantage of this feature much in GMail though either. I know some will rave about this, to each their own. Tags are certainly popular with a large segment of the userbase.

Visual Theme: Thunderbird 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability and maximize screen real estate.

Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.

Advanced Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.

Nice.

Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services: Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.

This was a nice touch. It even defaulted a new GMail account to pop.gmail.com:993, and SSL, which is something that always had to be done manually, afterward. Definitely handy in the "newbie-friendly" sense, which is an area that an app like this really should be designed to handle well. I didn't see any trace of .Mac here though.

Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.

Improved New Mail Notification Alerts: New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message preview text.

Similar to some of the GMail-notifier add-ons for FireFox. Most useful when (periodic?) auto-downloading of mail is enabled.

Folder Summary Popups: Mouse over a folder with new messages to see a summary of the new messages in that folder.

Saved Search Folder Performance: Search results for saved search folders are now cached, improving folder loading performance.

Find As You Type: Finds and highlights message text as you type.

Always a good thing.

Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying messages to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.

This could be useful.

Updates to the Extension System: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.

I'm not sure I know what "enhanced security" really means there, but it's at a FeelsGood buzzword, at least.


New discoveries

One of the first places I check out in any Mozilla-based application, is Edit > Preferences, where of course, I discovered something new, but which will feel familiar to many FireFox users.

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General > Advanced Configuration > Config. Editor button brings up a new-to-Thunderbird interface reminiscent of about:config for FireFox. Those who want to tweak beyond to "chrome" of the GUI can probably sate their desires here. I still have yet to spend much time digging through the gems to be found here.

And if you add a new Address Book card, or edit an existing one, you will find something new there as well. Under the Contact tab, there are still three regions, Name, Internet, and Phones, as before. But there is a new checkbox at the bottom of the Internet region, "Allow remote images in HTML mail". Apparently this can now be configured on a per-person basis, which is certainly a nice option to have (and with the right level of granularity too.)


Possible problems

It's only fair to bring up the one flaw that I have found so far. Thunderbird pops up an error screen when connecting to GMail, stating "Unable to verify the identity of pop.gmail.com as a trusted site." and then, when clicking on "Examine certificate...":
Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons
It gives a couple of possibilities for this.
Perhaps Thunderbird doesn't recognize Equifax as a CA any more? Perhaps Google has changed something overnight and misconfigured their servers? Those seem unlikely. Perhaps I am the vicitim of a MitM attack, with someone spoofing GMail to get access to my private information? Somehow I suspect it is probably safe to assume otherwise.


What else is new?

There are certainly many new or improved features in Thunderbird 2 which I have not touched on here, and of course that's part of the excitement of a new release, discovering those for yourself. Have I gotten you sufficiently interested yet? Thunderbird 1.5 will only be supported until October 18, 2007.

Before you wander off to download a copy of Thunderbird 2.0.0.0, I should perhaps point you to the minimum system requirements.

Or, start at the Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Release Notes like I did with this post.

MyBlogLog used for surgery

(Surgical blogging?)

Isn't it funny how tools for bloggers can save costly and risky procedures in our offline lives these days?

I was talking with a friend from MyBlogLog the other day about some topics that I don't usually cover on this blog. But I noticed that her profile


contains some rather interesting characteristics. Not only is she a blogger, but apparently she is also about to put a number of people in the medical community out of a job.


Look closely at that profile. Check out the tools that she has available to her:




Isn't that impressive? No more do we need to worry about chemotherapy or radiation treatments. No more risks that come with surgery, just click on that link!



How about it? Does anyone else have any blogging tools they find useful in offline life? If so, leave a comment and tell us.

Boston "terrorized" by government

As I'm sure you have all heard by now, the city of Boston, Massachusetts was terrorized by it's own government the other day. Well, you certainly can't say the inanimate Lite-Brite-like boards, with LEDs and a couple of electronics were out there actively terrorizing anyone, can you? Particularly since they were there for a couple of weeks, flipping people the bird, without any such incident.

Now, you've never seen me link to CNN on here before, and actually, that still hasn't changed, but take a look at the the link below.

Six more weeks of terrorism indeed. But who will guarantee that the government will stop trying to terrorize us after only six more weeks?

Happy Groundhogs Day on Flickr

Be sure to read the story under the (original) photo. Did you know CNN had a sense of humour like this?

How to verify GnuPG 1.4.3 (and Gpg4win 1.0.0)

Obviously, when you see something like
GnuPG 1.4.3 released
you will want to verify that what you just downloaded is the real thing, before you trust it. Here is how.

gpg --verify gnupg-1.4.3.tar.bz2.sig

This checks whether the signature file matches the source file. You should see a message indicating that the signature is good and made by that signing key. Make sure that you have the right key, either by checking the fingerprint of that key with other sources or by checking that the key has been signed by a trustworthy other key.

Note, that you can retrieve the signing key using the command
finger wk@g10code.com
or using a keyserver like
gpg --recv-key 1CE0C630

The distribution key 1CE0C630 is signed by the well known key 5B0358A2. If you get an key expired message, you should retrieve a fresh copy as the expiration date might have been prolonged. NEVER USE A GNUPG VERSION YOU JUST DOWNLOADED TO CHECK THE INTEGRITY OF THE SOURCE - USE AN EXISTING GNUPG INSTALLATION!

* If you are not able to use an old version of GnuPG, you have to verify the SHA-1 checksum. Assuming you downloaded the file gnupg-1.4.3.tar.bz2, you would run the sha1sum command like this: sha1sum gnupg-1.4.3.tar.bz2
and check that the output matches the first line from the following list:

9e96b36e4f4d1e8bc5028c99fac674482cbdb370 gnupg-1.4.3.tar.bz2 7c0f5db594bed9a901d9be43c31f6c80c6080141 gnupg-1.4.3.tar.gz 5477211551e96ad689c7618ee39a2b9c186721ef gnupg-1.4.2.2-1.4.3.diff.bz2 abf49fa5dc71e291144780d47f2811d83ae5e1ba gnupg-w32cli-1.4.3.exe


And of course, the announcement:

"After struggling for 6 month with Windows pecularities, we are finally pleased to announce the *first stable release of Gpg4win*, version 1.0.0! (located here: Gpg4win 1.0.0 released)"

should lead you to do similar verification.

Regarding Gpg4win, if you are stuck on such a platform:

The *ready to use installer* is available at:

http://ftp.gpg4win.org/gpg4win-1.0.0.exe (6.8M) http://ftp.gpg4win.org/gpg4win-1.0.0.exe.sig

SHA1 and MD5 checksums are given below.

SHA1 checksum:
c0ccd90c9aec23447bcd883cfd0602712967cfc6 gpg4win-1.0.0.exe
MD5 checksum:
299fa8567a484ea32706b11d318dbe9a gpg4win-1.0.0.exe

Building the installer is not possible on Windows machines and works best on current Debian GNU/Linux systems (we use the mingw32 package from Sid).

It is of course "interesting" that you can not build the installer on that platform.

Migraine

I had an important meeting earlier.

Instead of being in attendance, I was incapacitated by agonizing head pain. This is very disappointing to me. I hope things like this do not happen often. (Ever again!)


ElGamal: 2048g/D7293928 800F 1C24 CE3B 978A D3B6 664E A01A 4164 B1D9 1163

Google is broken?

400 Bad Request

Google
Error

Bad Request

Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.





That's what lynx http://google.com/ gives.

That's what lynx http://google.com gives.

That's what lynx http://google.ca/ gives.

That's what lynx http://google.ca gives.

That's what lynx http://google.com/ig/ gives.

That's what lynx http://google.com/ig gives.

That's what lynx http://mail.google.com/ gives.

That's what lynx http://mail.google.com gives.

Are you noticing a pattern yet? Even omitting the trailing slash, google seems rather broken. If I could access google.com, perhaps I could look up an email address to write and complain, but obviously not even gmail is accessable.

Google should get their act together and fix this ASAP.

Someone who can reach them, please write them and tell them this. Point them to this post, if you like. You would think someone the size of google would know how to run a site without breaking it.

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