I recently searched through the mozilla thunderbird extensions website and found 4 extensions that I didn't know about that actually prove to be quite useful.  I use Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 on Foresight Linux and have tested all of these extensions and verified that they work on that environment.  Hopefully, they'll help someone craft a more enjoyable email experience

Search for Sender

If you're like me, you like to group like items together in your inbox.  With this extension, you can group emails from the same sender as quickly as a right click.  Really, it's just a shortcut that places the sender email up into the search box and searches for you.  The nice part is, with this extension, you don't have to type it.  Quick, easy, and simple.  This has quickly become an extension that I cannot live without.

 SyncMab

SyncMab is an extension similar to foxmarks for Firefox.  With foxmarks, you keep all your bookmarks on a central server of your choosing so that your bookmarks are the same across all computers you use that have Firefox installed.  This is perfect for me since I have a set of work bookmarks and home bookmarks and like to be able to switch back and forth between them.  But what about thunderbird?  It doesn't have bookmarks right?  Exactly, but it does have contacts in your addressbook!  So, you'll be able to save your contacts to a server of your choosing and then on another computer with thunderbird you can synchronize your contacts by downloading that file using SyncMab.  It's brilliant and allows you to always have the same contacts across operating systems, across computers, and even to maintain multiple addressbooks

Display Quota

This extension will display a small graphic in Thunderbird that tells you how much space you have left in your IMAP mail account and can warn you when you get close to filling up.  This might not be too useful for those of you that use IMAP with huge quotas (gmail) but for others, it may be.  I have heard that some users do not like the popup that displays for warning on this extension.  For those users, Thunderbird has a built in function you can enable:

Open your configuration editor in Thunderbird and find the following keys: 

1. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.show - % when quota should show up


2. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.warning - % when quota becomes yellow


3. mail.quota.mainwindow_threshold.critical - % when quota becomes red

Thanks to goddess-gate.com for information on how to do this.

I've been drastically neglecting a few areas of my blog.  The main one is plugging it into social networks.  I've been using things like twitter, pownce, and stumbleupon...but I haven't truly plugged my blog into these services.

Now there are so many...I don't even know how to plug them all in

Which services are most important?  Which ones are you, the reader, using?  Thus far, the easiest way I've found to manage things is to choose one service like Tumblr or Pownce and aggregate all other services into it.  THEN to use friendfeed.com to envelop them into a stream.

I'm curious as to how others are managing things...I'd like to make Yet Another Linux Blog reach a larger audience and I think that this is a good starting point.  So if you have suggestions, please let me know

ISP's are beginning to bow to RIAA demands and spying on their users.  This is odd if you consider them a communications company...like the telephone companies are.  For example, do you talk on the cell phone each day? How about a LAN line? What if...AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile (I've probably hit about 80% of you) monitored your phone conversations? You're probably saying, "well, they already do" and you'd be right to some degree...but what if they monitored your line not for terrorism or keywords flagged by the US Government...what if they monitored your line for ANY illegal activity at all?

Say you were remarking to your friend about a deal down at Best Buy that was "a steal". Told your mom how you "swiped a $beverage" from your buddies house. What if these keywords flagged you as one who participated in illegal activity if you discussed them on the phone? And what if your carriers had a "3 strikes and you're out" policy? You'd find yourself phoneless based on the topics of your conversation. Sound far fetched?

It may not be. Compare the idea above to what Internet Service Providers (ISP) are doing. ISP's are bowing to the RIAA (and BPI) and spying on their users...monitoring the topic of your communication and cutting you off if your communications do not live up to their standards. Virgin Media in the UK is the first major ISP doing this...

It seems ridiculous that an ISP can tell you what you should or should commicate about...which isn't unlike a phone company telling you what to converse about over the phone. But it's happening.

Continue reading "Why the RIAA and ISP's are Stupid"

Has the mission of OLPC changed so much? I say it has. No longer are the five core principals initially employed when the project started valid. The original Five Core Principles were:

1. Child Ownership
2. Low Ages
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and Open Source

It's important to quote what is under #5 above:

The child with an XO is not just a passive consumer of knowledge,
but an active participant in a learning community. As the children grow and pursue new ideas, the software, content, resources, and tools should be able to grow with them. The very global nature of OLPC demands that growth be driven locally, in large part by the children themselves. Each child with an XO can leverage the learning of every other child. They teach each other, share ideas, and through the social nature of the interface, support each other's intellectual growth. Children are learners and teachers.

There is no inherent external dependency in being able to localize software into their language, fix the software to remove bugs, and repurpose the software to fit their needs. Nor is there any restriction in regard to redistribution; OLPC cannot know and should not control how the tools we create will be re-purposed in the future.

A world of great software and content is necessary to make this project succeed, both open and proprietary. Children need to be able to choose from all of it. In our context of learning where knowledge must be appropriated in order to be used, it is most appropriate for knowledge to be free. Further, every child has something to contribute; we need a free and open framework that supports and encourages the very
basic human need to express.

Give me a free and open environment and I will learn and teach with joy.

No longer is it about empowering a generation of children from poorer nations and letting them learn with the ability to help improve the platform they operate on...what it's now about:

"'The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible. Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter. It's about getting it into kids' hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for.'"

...just like a fun toy right? <sarcasm>Let's drop Nintendo DS gaming systems into their hands...laptops, laptops, laptops...that's what it is about...because we're all about getting the technology to the kids. </sarcasm> We're not about empowering them to learn about computers, networks, and software. We're not about them learning on a system where there are no limits. As RMS states, "Teaching children to use a proprietary (non-free) system such as Windows does not make the world a better place, because it
puts them under the power of the system's developer." That developer is Microsoft.

Congratulations go to Microsoft for bringing proprietary lockin to millions of kids worldwide who will no longer be able to take pride in their own contributions the the core OS, who will no longer feel community ownership, and who will no longer be the sole operator of their own open source software based XO.

Our children our the future and what we aren't teaching them with closed source software is just as important as what we ARE teaching them.

Why another package manger? Isn't there already too many of these out there? Why use Conary when I can apt-get? Apt-get is soooo much better. Dpkg gives you sooooo much more than anything could possibly give you. Conary is still beta quality...rpm and deb are much more developed mature.

If the person(s) asking the questions above actually understood what Conary is and CAN do...they would see this is a very limited view of Conary. Not only is conary a package management system vis-a-vis a system that manages EVERY single package of software on your system...it is also a powerful version control system for software packages and packaging. It's an enabling mechanism for packaging software quickly and easily.

I'd like to go over some of the things I think are great about Conary...clear up some of the "why is this needed" speak by showing how Conary actually gets things right and the common problems experienced by other package managers that it solves.

I saw that Lightning .8, a calendar extension for thunderbird, had been released and my heart jumped.  Had they fixed the memory leak that forced me to abandon it in version .7?

I used to use Lightning for my google calendar in versions before .7...

When .7 came out, it caused Thunderbird to rocket memory usage above 80% which brought my computer to a screeching halt.  I figured I'd not use it until next version (and submitted a bug report as well).

Today I downloaded .8 in hopes it would work better.  It doesn't.  Memory usage still skyrockets when attempting use the google calendar (provider addon) and the remember mismatched domains add on with it (otherwise you're unable to connect or get a popup every time you view).

Is it one of these plugins causing it?  Is it Lightning?  I'm leaning toward the latter...even when uninstalling the extensions, I still get memory usage skyrocketing.  Either way, syncing your google calendar with Lightning isn't a very smooth thing to do if it causes your Linux desktop to screech to a halt.

I guess there is always evolution with built in google calendar support.  Anyone else getting these problems?

At work, we use Zimbra for emailing.  I use Thunderbird with IMAP as my desktop client.  I've also seen that as of Zimbra 5.0 RC2, they will have the ability to sync with Lightning.  Good news!  Now if Lightning would stop leaking!

This 'featured' list is a default list for the "Linux" feed that users can select after installing. If they don't want to add their own linux feeds and would rather use the "expert feed" built in function, they'll download the Syndication list I've created for blogbridge. Sound like something you would like to be a part of?

The response to my initial post was a bit underwhelming...remember, this could be just a blog you read on a daily basis. If you have a linux website you can't do without and it has an RSS feed, let me know about it! If you don't feel like doing that, let the authors of those sites know that they can submit their site. Remember, those I choose will get a direct link from this blog to theirs...which is pretty valuable considering I'm in the top two results in google for search term "linux blog".

So, if you'd like to be considered or would like a favorite website of yours to be considered, please drop me a comment here with link to the site. I'll check it out and announce the selections in approximately 2 weeks.

Last night, I decided to install RealPlayer onto my fresh Foresight Linux 1.4.X install. I've replaced my main workstation with Foresight due to convenience (I use it at work) and I use RealPlayer from time to time for videos and music.

No package exists for RealPlayer in the repositories, so head over to Real.com and download the .bin file. After the .bin file has been downloaded, use the following commands to install:

chmod 755 RealPlayer10GOLD.bin && sudo ./RealPlayer10Gold.bin

In the terminal, it will ask you what directory you'd like to install RealPlayer into. I chose /opt/RealPlayer (you'll have to type it in) because I'd rather have the files installed there than in my home directory, which is where I downloaded the file to. After this, you'll have a shiny, new shortcut inside Applications >> Sound and Video >> RealPlayer. Click on this to launch the program and follow the wizard.

The wizard will setup the Mozilla (firefox) plugins for you but they still won't work solidly. This is because mplayer is overtaking the player duties for real media formats. To change this, gedit ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf and change these entries as shown below:

enable-rm=0
enable-smil=0
enable-helix=0

Save and close that document. You're set Restart Firefox and go to real.com and test out the player capabilities.

My main job here at rPath, Inc. is to document our technologies via the rPath Documentation Wiki. For this wiki, we use a Mediawiki Appliance. For those that don't know, the "appliance" I refer to here is a software appliance...something rPath technologies make easy to maintain and create. For more information see the definition of a software appliance here.

Moving on, I was ANNOYED by the fact that you have a small arrow "" that appears beside any image that references an external URL or any link that does the same. This is fine to let people know that links will take them to a different page...but what I was trying to do was to make a PDF Icon have the same link as the URL it was sitting beside:

So in the above image, if one clicked on the PDF icon or the "Application to Appliance: A Hands-on Guide (PDF)" the PDF would download.

Mediawiki doesn't provide a fantastic way for you to do this. However, after some snooping around via google, I found a fairly easy way to make things happen.

Would you like to have your blog about Linux become a featured blog on the BlogBridge.com Linux Topic Guide? How about a front page link in the "Blogs I Read" column on Yet Another Linux Blog?  If this piques your interest, read on.

I've been a BlogBridge user for quite some time since discovering it with the version 4 release. It has consistently been the best RSS feed reader I have used since that time. I accept no substitutes. They offer the BlogBridge service for free which allows you to publish feeds on BlogBridge.com publicly and share feeds/tags of posts. You can also download Topic Guides to hit the ground running with pre-populated feeds. I am an author of one of those feeds.

Previously, when I reviewed BlogBridge, I was asked to be the Linux Topic Guide at blogbridge.com. Specifics on how this works: I keep tabs on various Linux centric blogs and publish my feeds to blogbridge.com. Then, when someone installs Blogbridge, they may select the Topic Guide that I publish with pre-populated feeds of interest. If you're a BlogBridge user, you can also track down the linux feed or visit the Linux Topic Guide page at Blogbridge.com to see what sites are featured there.

In these past few years I've been doing this, many Linux sites have come and gone. I've changed jobs, states, and distributions. Since all of these changes have taken place, I've missed the launch of some great Linux blogs and websites. Therefore, I'm asking you, the reader to help me find new and exciting blogs and sites that I can feature for BlogBridge.com