Use Tables!

So after actually getting a complaint about it, I finally got fed up with Thunderbird sending text file attachments as inline attachments. I’d already been annoyed at GMail displaying things I sent myself inline, making it hard to copy diffs (because the amount of whitespace at the end needs to be exactly right) or easily save files.

Here’s how to tell Thunderbird to always send attachments as attachments, instead of inline:

1. Open the Thunderbird Preferences (this is under “Preferences” in the Edit menu, or “Options” in the Tools menu, depending on your OS).
2. Go to the Advanced section, and the General tab on there.
3. Click the Config Editor button on there.
4. Enter mail.content_disposition_type in the filter box.
5. Double-click the only item in the list (with the exact name mail.content_disposition_type, obviously), and enter 2 as its value (instead of the 0 it’s on originally).
6. Close the Config Editor with the [x], and close the Preferences with [OK].

You’re now done. Thunderbird will now send plain text files as an attachment. Any other non-binary files will still be sent inline. If you want all your files to be ‘real’ attachments rather than inline attachments, set the pref to 1 instead. Tip-of-the-hat to Marco for the tip about using 2 instead of 1.

All this information was obtained from LXR and the MozillaZine KB.

I meant to write this post a long, long time ago. I was prompted to actually do it right now when reading an article on the BBC News website about euthanasia. Read the rest of this entry »

I needed to find “two key papers on the future of Computer Mediated Communication” (and then summarize them and write a personal opinion on where we’re going).

The University of Amsterdam fortunately has a digital library you can access over VPN which allows you to search in lots of major databases. So I duly searched for:

“future” in Title AND  “Computer Mediated Communication” in All Words (after some failed other searches), in the “Informatiewetenschappen” subject area (”Information Science”, basically)
5th result from JSTOR:

“Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse” by Peter S. Bearman.

No comment.

Dear Cambridge. You are supposedly the 6th university in the field of technology in the world (link requires subscription). However, as graduate degrees you only offer a PhD, an MPhil or a “Diploma”. The latter being mostly courses from the second year of a BSc Computer Science. What on earth convinced you not to have a regular MSc degree? It’s baffling me, whatever the case.

In other news, I went to see Anna Ternheim in Lantaren-Venster yesterday. This was fun, though the dual concert approach wasn’t all that successful in my eyes - Vinicio Capossela simply makes a very different kind of music, so to me this didn’t better the experience much. I’m not sure if, in hindsight, I should have preferred missing his bit of the concert. Regardless, I liked the somewhat more intimate approach (about 200-300 people attended) than what you generally see on tv (this was the first ‘pop’ concert I ever attended - I’ve been to classical concerts before). I had a good time, though I unfortunately didn’t manage to get an autograph on the cd I bought, which is sort of a shame. Oh well.

Edit: You can listen to some of her music on MySpace. I wouldn’t normally link there, but this is the only place I can find where you can listen to “No Subtle Men”, which she sang last night and is absolutely great, if you ask me.

My weblog is blocked in the People’s Republic of China.

You can test your own website if you want to.

(to think I used to believe my secondary school rejecting submissions for the school newspaper was bad)

List of things on my mind, because I can’t be bothered (and don’t think you guys can) with separate posts for each of them.

• Trying to find time to co-write a paper and to get it accepted for a student conference on AI in Utrecht.
• Trying to find time to modify a paper on Ethics (specifically, Moral Relativism) that I wrote some time ago and submit that to ’something’ Dutch / UvA.
• Doing regular coursework, which involves
  • reading about 200-300 pages every week
  • writing summaries and questions for speakers on the subjects for all of them
  • working on a project with students from Stanford University and a Fortune 500 company in the tech industry. Can’t say much more than that, though for once it doesn’t involve engineering.
  • writing language processing tools in Python.
  • trying to catch up with lost classes from last block about Statistics and Stochastics.
  • writing knowledge processing tools and representations using Prolog and OWL.
• Working on my Mozilla project. I meant to write about this earlier, but the Mozilla Foundation has sponsored me to work on making the ChatZilla IRC client accessible (as is clear from that link, it also needs a better website, we’re working on that on the sidelines). In fact, I have a conference call concerning that starting in 10 minutes, so I’d better finish this up.
• Working on other Mozilla-related issues
• Trying to get some work done on some other Firefox extensions of mine.
• Figuring out what university I’d like to attend for my MSc.
• Visiting junks drug and alcohol addicts. We need to stop calling people garbage - things are garbage (see also the post title) but people never should be. Also, Amsterdam is strange in the sense that I just went to a church service done by the Drug section of the pastoral care (not sure if that’s the right way of putting it in English) and atop of us (ie, in the room above us) some snobby people were having champagne, for the opening of some exhibition or whatever. Stark contrast…

That will do for now. Off to that conference call!

I’m not sure who made this joke up, but it’s not funny. I already blew at least one of the courses I had the first part of this semester (because thanks to United Airlines I missed the exam), and now the schedulers have been conspiring to make me fail more of them this part of the semester. Oh, and I don’t know if this is just me, but there’s this day called “Friday”, which you can actually USE if you’re having trouble scheduling…

So I’m home a day late because United Airlines delayed my UA934 flight from LAX to LHR by 20 hours. So instead of leaving at 17.02 PDT on saturday, I left at 13.00 PDT on sunday. I was supposed to leave at noon, but the plane was delayed a bit longer that day. So United gave me vouchers for a hotel, transportation to and from the hotel, and dinner/breakfast vouchers. Because of the 1 hour delay I missed my scheduled flight (8.25 GMT+1) at LHR to AMS (though just barely) and had to get the next one (10.40 GMT+1).

As far as backlog is concerned: I realize this probably doesn’t measure up to what other people get, and that part of the messages are there due to the fact that I did actually use email while away, but here’s some frightening statistics on what Thunderbird reported when I turned on my home desktop computer today. (Thunderbird is my email program of choice. I use it to get copies of everything that hits my 2 gmail accounts and an old account at my parents’ ISP. While on the move, I use my laptop and gmail’s web access to stay on top of things)

Unread Mail: 297

Unread Blogposts: 88 (some duplication here, but not too much)

Unread Newsgroup posts: 347

I’ve kept on top of Facebook myself while away, and somewhat the same for bugmail, so that’s a large number of those emails gone out the window - still a lot of newsgroup posts though.

What scares me most is that I’m planning to leave for 6 or 7 weeks this summer - without email/internet access. So multiply the above by that… and you get an idea of what I’m worried about

I’ll write a more coherent post about my stay in the US and the CSUN conference later. Right now it’s time for sleep - I’ve been up for 24 hours by now.

Because bulleted lists rock:

• The Hilton is not for me. I’m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? Breakfast is not included in the night’s stay, so how does paying for that work? Is it a buffet or do I just get stuff from the waiters? It’s all solvable, and fortunately everyone there is paid to help even though I’m ignorant, but it’s annoying at times.
• “Public transport” is not part of the standard Southern California vocabulary. Getting around without a car and without spending a ridiculous amount of money on cabs is hard.
• “How are you, sir?” is the standard substitute for “How may I help you?”. This is confusing.
• Obesity is a real problem. After having breakfast, the ‘why’ for that is readily apparent as the continental breakfast I took was considered “a base” by the waiter, who told me at least 2 or 3 times I could get more stuff if I wanted to. I did not finish this “base” alone, though that admittedly might have something to do with my jet-lagginess and generally confused stomach.
• Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands should start being real Chinese restaurants, instead of serving all this stuff we call “Chinese” which is actually Indonesian/Malay (Babi Pangang, Nasi Goreng, Bami, etc.)
• Some stereotypes are not stereotypes, they’re simply true.

That will do for now. I’m off to see the Queen Mary.

One more thing - it amazes me, as it has for some time now, that as one travels to different places across the globe, every place has its own “colour scheme”. The easiest examples close to my home are the fact that brick houses make up most of the (nothern/middle) Netherlands, and once you cross the border to Belgium and France, the omnipresent red brickwork is replaced with grey/white plasterwork, the colours and fonts used on roadsigns change, the wildlife/trees are different… For some reason this and the different plants/nature/cars around mean the atmosphere changes. Perhaps this is what other people think “feeling on holiday” is all about, I’m not sure. I just find myself thinking, at times “gosh, this place is ugly” and then remembering I should really be thinking “gosh, this place is different“.

For those who didn’t know, I picked up a brand new shiny black Apple Macbook last thursday. I bought a black one because it meant I could get it three weeks earlier (that is, I would have had to wait 3 weeks to get a white one for an actually lower price). Read the rest of this entry »