I was a little surprised to receive a second notice requesting that I fill out a jury duty questionnaire. I honestly don't remember receiving the first notice, though it's entirely possible I misplaced it.
Now I'm left wondering if I'll get jury duty in the near future, which would be interesting considering I don't have a car yet.
Normally I find Linux better suited to my needs than commercial OSs (including Mac OS X; sorry, Paul). It's easier to reconfigure something if you don't like its behavior, packages are easier to manage, and so on.
But sometimes, a simple task like playing a DVD can be a huge pain.
Ogle claims to be the first DVD player for Linux with menu support. It lets you skip chapters and fast forward - basic features you expect from a DVD player, implemented well. The lack of rewind is annoying, but not a dealbreaker.
Recently, Ogle has been having some trouble DVDs from Netflix. They will play fine for a while and then fast forward on their own. The discs look okay, so maybe it's a problem with my hardware. But not all DVDs exhibit the problem, so I'm at a loss.
All things considered, I figured I should look for another DVD player.
mplayer is, well, mplayer. It supports lots of formats. It plays DVDs, but does not support menus, meaning you have to know the title number (e.g. mplayer dvd://1). Also, gmplayer is proof that skins lead to horrible user interfaces. So scratch mplayer off the list.
xine plays a lot of different formats, like mplayer, but also supports DVD menus. Its default interface also has the skins problem. The gxine frontend is nice, but there's a bug in the current version. So these won't solve my problem.
Totem is another frontend for xine (or GStreamer), specifically designed for GNOME desktops. Sounds perfect. Unfortunately, I can't get it to deinterlace video. I think it's possible by mucking with ~/.gnome2/totem_config, though.
Finally, none of these players disable xscreensaver out of the box. I think mplayer has an option, and xine probably does. But not Totem, as far as I know. So I resort to ~/.bash_profile hackery:
totem() {
xscreensaver-command -exit
$(which totem)
xscreensaver -no-splash &
}Sigh.
I finished Count Zero last night. It made me want to go back and read Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive again, because I feel like there were a lot of little details I didn't pick up on.
Next up is Perdido Street Station.
I finally finished importing all the old email I could find (back to 1996 or so).
I used Eudora on my old Macs, starting whenever I first got Internet access. Eudora was a great client for its day. It used something that looks a lot like mbox format, only it used \r instead of \n for line breaks. Surprisingly, most of the emails had Message-ID headers, which made checking for duplicates rather easy…
…which is more than I can say for Outlook. I don't know why I ever thought Outlook was a decent mail client, but I did. I was stupid enough to use it for about 2 years early in college. Each month, I backed up my PST file and burned it to CD, just in case Outlook crapped its pants. To the credit of Microsoft, I don't think Outlook ever actually soiled itself, but I was probably lucky.
To convert my PST files into a usable format, I installed libpst. I took the mbox files from readpst, copied the contents to an import Maildir, and ran my script to check for duplicates. Any messages which the script didn't already know about, I filed appropriately.
This was working great until I hit a large chunk of mail which didn't have Message-ID headers. I could have guessed based on the combination of Subject and Date, but I resorted to checking each message individually. Sigh.
readpst seemed to have the most trouble with messages in my sent folder. I guess Outlook didn't add any useful information to the message until it sent it to the SMTP server. Basic stuff like To, From, and Date was present, but in nonstandard formats of course. Much of the To data included the person's name (e.g. BobbyNewmark - note the lack of spaces) but no email address. Presumably I had these people in my address book and Outlook waited until the last possible second to use the person's email address. Bonus.
I'll probably write a tiny script to convert these messages into a more useful format, but that will require guessing email addresses for people I haven't emailed for almost 3 years, in some cases.
[12:40:45 dwc@dulcinea ~]$ find Mail -type f | wc -l
80723
Why is this technology an anathema to me?
Marc Hoit, UF's Interim Associate Provost for IT, announced this morning that students will no longer be allowed to forward their GatorLink email to an off-campus account.
The Alligator has their standard, misleading coverage.
It will never cease to amaze me how some drivers, given the opportunity, will drive into the sidewalk to get to the turn lane. I can't think of a better way to put pedestrians in danger.
Also, if you're out walking Fido, try paying attention when he lunges at me. The button on your retractable leash is there for a reason.
GTK+ 2.6.2 was released into Gentoo x86 yesterday or today, which means I finally got a chance to try Evince. And, oh my god, it totally rocks.
If you haven't had the pleasure of viewing PDFs on Linux…you're lucky. Xpdf was still the best viewer in my opinion - it's not slow like GPdf and the scrolling makes sense.
But Evince is fast like Xpdf and - this is the best part - displays a thumbnail of each page off to the side like Apple's Preview. There's an ebuild available, though it hasn't made it into Portage proper yet. Add it to your overlay and give it a shot.