Extra Pepperoni

Thanks Lyman!

Now I’m letting myself be be sucked into trying GTA (IV).

I have a compulsive personality, I like finishing things, and I enjoy computer games. I have developed a simple set of rules to avoid blowing all my time gaming.

1. I test games written by friends. I only have 3 friends who have written games. Howard wrote Spectre and Gridz, but was distracted running an ISP for a while. Andrew wrote Battle-Girl but we’re no longer in touch. Peter wrote Greebles, but doesn’t currently appear to have any plans for further game development. So I haven’t spent much time on friends’ games in several years, although beta testing gets pretty involved. I also played several Delta Tao games, and might even try Return to Dark Castle.
2. I play coin-op games. The sad thing here is that for years as a kid, I wished I could afford to spend a lot of time playing arcade games, but didn’t have lots of money to blow on it. Now that blowing a roll of quarters isn’t a big deal, I don’t have much interest or time, and don’t live near any arcades.
3. I play Marathon; I played through Marathon 1-3, and Halo 1 (really Marathon 4). Last week I bought an Xbox 360 (my first gaming console ever) to play Halo 2 & 3 — I’m waiting for Lyman’s extra 20gb Xbox hard drive and VGA cable so I can get started with Halo 2. Unfortunately I’m not good at FPS games, so it will probably take me a long time to work my way through Halo 2 and then Halo 3. My intention is to sell the Xbox after Halo 3, assuming it has any resale value at that point.
4. I don’t sweat the small stuff. When Luxor came out, I spent a few hours playing the demo, then deleted it. On the Xbox, I’m playing demos and freebies (which tend to come with 1-3 sample levels — pretty anemic) while I wait for the hard drive so I can play Halo 2. Halo 2 was only released for Xbox, not 360, so it needs to download patches from Xbox Live and store them on a hard drive; the 256mb flash card that came with mine is inadequate.

These rules keep me from sinking my life into video games. Also general lack of time, especially as a parent.

Outlook’s default behavior is to sort new messages to the top of mailbox windows. I prefer new messages at the bottom, but have noticed that when I start reading mail, threads with new messages appear at the top. So I tried reading mail the way Outlook wants me to, but it still sorted newer messages within each thread (”Conversation”) to the bottom of the group, and deleting messages still moved down (to an earlier message in this arrangement). Since it doesn’t work right either way, I might as well do it the way I’m used to: newest at bottom (as of the time I first display or last Refresh the mailbox; the newest stuff still floats to the top, which I cannot prevent).

Sometimes when I delete messages, Outlook selects the next message down (which is correct, given that I view messages in ascending date order). Other times it selects the top message in the mailbox, which is only the right thing to do if it’s the last message in the mailbox. This inconsistent behavior may be connected to whether any off-screen messages are selected, but that shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t have to wonder where the selection will go, or try not to select messages across more than one screenful at a time, or rush through selecting and deleting mail or collapsing threads, for fear of a new message coming in, removing my selection, and selecting, previewing, and (almost) marking one of those messages read, before I had a chance to delete, mark, or collapse it. This means that if client-side filters are active, the user must wait after launching Outlook, until it’s finished filing messages into the current mailbox, as new messages will constantly disrupt the selection until Outlook is finished running client-side filters. Even if Outlook has been running a while, it’s easy to select a few messages for processing, be interrupted by new mail, deal with whatever was previewed and start selecting again, be interrupted again, and have to deal with the second undesired selection/preview before attempting to return to manual selection for managing email. Amazingly frustrating, and a great way to “lose” unread mail.

With a multi-monitor setup, the best way to use Outlook is with the mailbox filling one display and the attached preview pane covering most of another display. Unfortunately, as I select different mailboxes, the preview turns off. Each mailbox has its own preview state, which is important because I generally only read messages (via preview) in my “fresh” search pseudo-mailbox. In other mailboxes, clicking a messages shouldn’t mark it read, so preview is a bad thing everywhere except in “fresh” (and often in “fresh”, as well!); unfortunately, viewing messages in their own windows is prohibitively slow. The very confusing thing is that sometimes Outlook spontaneously turns off the preview and shrinks the mailbox to its size excluding the preview. This leaves the mailbox covering one display but not extending onto the next; it looks maximized, but isn’t actually in the maximized state. When I switch back a mailbox with preview on (”fresh”), it reappears one character wide, rather than covering most of the secondary display as before. Very aggravating — I think the workaround will be that I must use one window for my “fresh” filter (with preview), and another for other mailboxes (no preview). Hopefully I can escape more bites from these two bugs.

In Outlook, it’s impossible to mark a message (un-)read from the message window, or even to determine directly what mailbox it’s in. I find myself searching across all mailboxes by title and refining by date (which I can see in the message window) to find out it message is, so I can mark it unread for later attention. It’s also impossible to open a message in a new window from the reading pane; the workaround is to Shift-Tab back into the mailbox window and then hit Enter to open a new message window from there.

I often want to delete a collapsed thread (”Conversation”). Outlook insists on expanding it first, which wastes time and often results in unread messages appearing and then being deleted — disconcerting, as it gives the impression I’m losing important (unread) mail. Worse, Outlook cannot mark a thread unread without expanding it, which moves the selection into the thread and marks that one or two messages read when deselected (unless the selection lasts a second or less, as I have set Outlook to mark messages read after a second, because I cannot eliminate the delay, and above one second it doesn’t automatically mark short messages which I read quickly as read; I have to go back and mark them read manually later). If I have just read a new message in threaded mode, and want to mark it unread, I have to either hit Control-Q to mark it read or move to another message and back (assuming I’ve had the current message previewed for at least a second), mark it unread (Control-U), then hit left-arrow to collapse the thread.

Worse is when I want to mark a whole thread unread (more common). Then I have to collapse the thread to implicitly select the whole thing (switching to and from the mouse slows me down, and I get too much mail to be inefficient in dealing with it); hit Control-U to mark the whole thread read (implicitly expanding it), then hit left-arrow within a second to collapse it again before Outlook decides I’ve read a message in preview.

When I delete a message, Outlook immediately selects (and previews, in “fresh”) another message. When I’m reading mail, this is generally what I want, so I can deal with the next message. When I’m trying to delete or file mail, it means Outlook automatically starts the process of dealing with another next message, and unless I’m very quick marks it pseudo-read (as soon as I deselect), so I must decide what to do about the new selection. This makes it harder to stop reading mail in the current mailbox, as every time I complete an action, Outlook picks the “next” message and engages me in dealing with it; stopping without losing unread status on a message I haven’t actually read yet requires contortions. When I know I’m about to stop, I tend to deal with a message or thread and then hit Control-up-arrow to jump to the top of the mailbox, which should be the first message I read (so already marked read), but is often a new message that’s come in recently; I then have to decide on and handle that before I can move on to another mailbox or activity.

Normally, when a thread (”Conversation”) is collapsed, Outlook deselects its messages. Sometimes (unpredictably) it still shows the preview for a hidden message, which breaks the Control-Q Control-U left-arrow dance, and I have to instead hit Control-Q Control-U left-arrow up-arrow to get a collapsed unread thread.

F5 (Refresh) doesn’t clear collapsed conversations; this is annoying. On the other hand, sometimes messages disappear immediately upon being marked read, which means I don’t even get a chance to mark them unread; they’re effectively just gone. I have no idea what triggers the second problem; fortunately it’s rare, as it tends to result in losing mail — often mail I was saving for later attention.

Control-Q marks individual messages read, but cannot be used on whole mailboxes (with the selection in the left-side mailbox column). There’s no good reason for this, as marking whole mailboxes read is a common function, and in the pop-up menu, it just doesn’t have the obvious keyboard shortcut.

Outlook cannot select multiple mailboxes at one time, which is ungood; on the other hand, it makes an effort to be helpful — when I select a mailbox, it kinda-sorta move the selection into the message list (which is pretty reliably what the user really wants, since you can’t do much with mailboxes except delete or move them). It’s all a bit confusing.

If I have a message which has been previewed for over a second, I know it’s effectively read (it will be marked as such as soon as I deselect it, unless I drag it into another mailbox first). It would be good if I could use Control-U to tell Outlook not to mark this message read as soon as it gets deselected, but instead I have to mark it read, then mark it unread, and then move away within a second — before the preview timer marks it mostly-read again.

I found a couple pages of Outlook keyboard shortcuts (the online help lists shortcuts too):

• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-keyboard-shortcuts-for-microsoft-outlook/
• http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_rnib003594.hcsp

Many of these are standard Windows shortcuts, but a few are useful and news to me.

Eudora stopped working on my home MBP recently, so I’m back to Thunderbird, and it strikes me how similar Thunderbird is to Outlook, even extending to some misfeatures (design flaws, not quite bugs), such as over-using the Esc key. Compared to Eudora, pine, and Apple Mail, Thunderbird is clearly much closer to Outlook. A few things are notable improvements, such as being able to mark messages Read and Unread with the M key, instead of Ctl-Q/Ctl-U, or S to flag messages (stored as an IMAP tag; this shows up in Eudora as Label 15). And with a mailbox selected, Ctl-Q doesn’t mark all its unread messages read, which it should.

In both Outlook and Thunderbird, Esc closes message windows; this is inconsistent with all other full windows, which are closed with Command-W, and makes messages feel particularly ephemeral. In Outlook, when I open a received message and hit the Space bar to scroll to the next page (which works in every other email client and browser I know), it instead inserts spaces at the beginning of the received message, which if course is not what I want.

I cannot find a good way to sort threads by date; I’d like every thread (perhaps every thread with new messages) grouped together, with the messages in each thread sorted internally by date, and the threads sorted by date (typically of the first message). In Outlook I can group “Conversations” by Subject: or group by From: line, but new messages keep showing up at the top of the mailbox, instead of the bottom (where they should sort, by date).

I have figured out more what’s wrong with Refresh. First, I have to hit F5 repeatedly to make Outlook clear more and more read messages from unread-only views; second, collapsed conversations are not cleared; I have to expand them out and then hit F5 again. This is particularly annoying because Outlook has such a strong tendency to always keep one message selected and thus read (although it’s not marked read, so I cannot simply mark it unread; I have to mark it read, then mark it unread, and then make sure Outlook doesn’t preview it again), so it’s quite difficult to reorganize a mailbox and get to a “clean” view (only new messages/threads) without losing some messages which Outlook insisted on selecting/previewing/marking read while rearranging.

And a little attention (not “love”) for IE: I still hit Ctl-L to select the URL for copying, and IE7 still fails to do it, bringing up a blank URL entry dialog, instead of selecting the URL in the current window as Safari & Firefox do. I shouldn’t need the mouse to copy the current URL.

I got Exceed, and after reassigning my left modifiers to X instead of Windows, kate is quite reasonable. It uses kompare for graphical diff, and comes with some CVS plugins. I prefer BBEdit’s diff display (although BBEdit’s diff has been broken for years). I’m not sure how I managed to view a couple windows in xemacs from kompare, but I can probably avoid that in the future…

kate is clunkier and less featureful, and not as configurable as I expect — the commands I want to assign to the toolbar, for instance, are not available in that context. On the other hand, BBEdit doesn’t use a toolbar at all, and rearranging menus is only supported in limited ways, so I’m not convinced kate is inferior here — it may just feel like that to me as a BBEdit user. Hopefully Subversion support is available for kate, but that doesn’t actually matter to me right now.

I need to get Copy & Paste working between Windows (including PuTTY) and Exceed; hopefully this will be straighforward, but it doesn’t just work.

Per IDM, UltraEdit cannot be installed without admin rights, which I do not expect to get, so that’s out — at least until they offer an alternate installer.

kate icons are a bit fuzzy, but they fit the Linux aesthetic, and the fonts are very nice.

I can write Outlook rules to match on Subject strings, but it lacks “Starts with” instead of “Contains”, so I cannot specify original messages, and distinguish from Re: for replies.

The filter area shows a list of criteria with checkmarks at the top with blue underlines under the keywords. The bottom shows the same labels, with the same blue underlines. But at the bottom they’re “links” to dialog boxes for entering the criteria, while at the top the same “links” aren’t clickable. Way to mis-use a visual cue, and do it in the most confusingly inconsistent way possible!

Oh, and the rules dialogs are all modal, so once I start creating a rule, I cannot open candidate messages to confirm the rule matches.

I’m still aggravated that I cannot match on partial strings, like “The Notification Agent” or “root@” (acrosss multiple machines) in the From: line. Matching on Subject: (especially unanchored) is much less precise.

When I delete multiple messages, why does Outlook select a random message, instead of the next one?

In Conversation mode (which would be a lot more useful if it didn’t waste 2 messages worth of space per “Conversation”), if I use down-arrow to select the next conversation, it expands the conversation instead. Use left/right to collapse/expand converations — they aren’t needed for mailbox navigation! At least Control-KP+ expands all Conversations.

I hit the accursed 32k rules limit. Despite this post, our systems cap rules at 32kb total (client-side + server-side). Apparently this will go to 256kb, once we’re upgraded to Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007. In the meantime, I’m spending a significant amount of time every day trying to make Outlook 2003 do decent filtering, with very limited success. In particular, Outlook is apparently unable to filter From: “root@*” as a catchall. This would make alerts easier to parse, as distinct from human-originated messages. Yuck!

pctony (congratulations on your Apache httpd PMC membership, Tony!) just informed me that comments here are broken. I knew Preview was broken, and am guessing that it’s a problem with my configuration of Admin-SSL, but hadn’t known it affected anyone other than myself. Admin-SSL in this configuration creates a disruption between the public (reading) side and the SSL-encrypted authenticated side, and preview & user logins for commenting both appear to be falling into that crack.

If I can’t get Admin-SSL working this way, I’ll come up with something else, although at this point I’m hoping Haris can tell me how to sort myself out.

In the meantime, I’m sorry for the inconvenience (especially Tony’s).

His two suggestions were to quote the path in the UltraEdit installer, or to use “dir /x” in CMD.COM to find the DOS-style 8.3 pathname of the destination folder. Unfortunately, I seem to have been wrong about the cause for their installer’s terribly vague “1925″ error message, as I tried another viable path (not containing spaces) today, and UE failed to install there too. Perhaps it’s a registry access issue — I sent email to IDM Software, and hope they have a more useful suggestion than “become an administrator”.

Q: I have several rules to mark bulk messages as read. How stupid is it that Outlook 2003 beeps, shows me the new mail notifier window, shows the new message in my “Unread Mail” filter; and then marks the message read and hides it?

A: Very.

It’s difficult to get a mailbox (”Search Folder”) or View/Filter to update; I’ve hit F5 (Refresh) several times, and watched read messages drop out of my “Unread Mail” search most times (but not reliably), but I haven’t had the patience to keep hitting F5 enough to see if the list of messages would eventually correct itself. I’ve switched to other mailboxes and back, but that doesn’t work most of the time either.

This is odd. I have to use View Options to see full headers (in the Message Options window), but while that’s open, the main Outlook program is visible but completely unresponsive. Message Options is apparently a super-modal dialog, which blocks “other applications”, and the Alt-Tab task switcher doesn’t even show the main Outlook icon. I thought Outlook had crashed, until I realized it was accessible again after I dismissed Message Options.

In fairness to Apple, I’ve seen cases in Leopard where Apple’s Command-Tab task switcher only shows some of the currently running applications (it sorts itself out fairly quickly), but Windows’ super-modal behavior is fscked up, and designed into the application (or the OS!).

I’ve been using Windows on a daily basis for 9 days now. At Rockefeller, I kept it on a VM (earlier, on a physical PC) which I could easily wipe and reinstall. I kept the few installers I need on a Mac so I could easily reinstall and be back in business. Now I have to do much more in XP/Outlook, and I have many gripes.

Things I Miss

These are mostly lacks in Windows, although not entirely.

• In the Alt-Tab task switcher, I cannot Hide (Command-H), Quit (Command-Q), or click an application’s icon to switch directly to it. This is aggravated by the fact that icons in the switcher often correspond to windows rather than on the Mac, where they correspond to applications (each with one or more windows), so there are many more icons to Tab through, and often several indistinguishable windows (4 Firefox windows generate 4 identical unlabeled icons; so do 4 open messages in Outlook). Considering Windows has had this feature for longer than Apple, it’s shockingly underpowered.
• I cannot hide the current application (window) from the keyboard (Command-H), or Hide Others (Command-Option-H).
• I miss BBEdit — working with notepad and vi for now; UltraEdit’s installer (recommended on TidBITS-Talk) doesn’t work in my environment. This will get worse as I start writing and editing more (code).
• BBEdit (particularly side-by-side diff and interactive reconciliation, which I should be able to find an alternative for, but sdiff isn’t it).
• bbedit (I miss opening files from the shell, including via sftp and from for loops).
• ssh keys for authentication.
• Seeing my personal email throughout the day — the financial/SEC/Sarbanes-Oxley environment requires a lot more separation between personal and work activities.
• Options (program-wide preferences) is not available from message windows — only from the mailbox viewer window. This is true in Thunderbird/Mac too; presumably copied from the MS model.
• Good filtering: Outlook’s filtering is very much wizard-driven, but not very flexible (no booleans & very limited criteria available); two filters that try to file the same message will put 2 “copies” of the message in different mailboxes; some options are handled on the server, while others are only performed on the client.
• BlackBerry filtering: The BlackBerry Curve shows everything in one mailbox; I’d like to see things grouped as I do on Outlook.

Things that bug me

• I can make Outlook sort a mailbox with the newest messages at the bottom (the default is newest-at-top), but then when I click the mailbox, Outlook selects the bottom (newest) message in a mailbox, whereas I want to read oldest first.
• I can make Outlook allow commas as address delimiters (which is what they are in the actual mail messages), but then I cannot type names, because we have autocomplete disabled and Outlook doesn’t recognize a correct “Last, First” recipient when it’s set to allow commas as delimiters (even though Outlook uses them once I click Check Names).
• Keyboard nickname completion (Command-L in Eudora); I can’t find a way to assign a keyboard shortcut to Check Names.
• I try to keep my mailbox “caught up” or “clean” (all messages read). Outlook doesn’t mark a message read until I deselect it. This means that when I’m done, to have it stop showing that last message as unread, I have to select something else.
• When I’m reading a bunch of new messages, and Outlook selects one I don’t want to read (see above about selecting the bottom/newest message), I have to click another message to get the Mark Unread contextual menu command; then I scroll up to the top and click on the first message.
• AutoCorrect absolutely would not let me type “SAs” (System Administrators) until I killed it.
• MS Office Communicator flashes in the Start bar and the Alt-Tab switcher, but it flashes the main window’s icon, instead of the one for the conversation with new activity. That’s just dumb.

Things I like

• Outlook can show me mailing list (group) membership. It’s called “Outlook Properties” in the menu, despite being maintained on the Exchange side, but after I got over thinking that couldn’t be the right place, this is quite handy.
• Outlook checks group memberships automatically when filtering; this cannot be turned off, so I cannot filter messages sent to a list separately from messages sent to a member of the list.

It feels very very strange to be unemployed — it’s been 7 years since the last time, and I was too freaked out at Shooting Gallery laying me off to feel this way. Now that I’m a grown-up (having kid(s) means you’re responsible, even when you’re irresponsible!) it’s a good thing that we’re covered by RU insurance past the start date for GS insurance, but the whole experience is still very odd. I wiped the third computer today at 5:30pm, and am copying data off computer #4 (old reppep.com) right now in preparation for retiring it (it’s falling apart, apparently — optical drive died an hour ago).

Now I just need Apple to update the MBP15s, so I can replace this PowerBook. It’s doing better than I thought, though — doesn’t seem any doubt that it will serve until the next update.

RU IT did right by me today — a grand spread, consisting of John’s pizza, baby back ribs, beef ribs (they looked like something from The Flintstones), and chicken wings. A nice (short) speech by Armand, and well wishes all around. Elaine hung a bunch of colorful signs, which delighted Julia.

I closed out my helpdesk tickets, turned in my keys (forgot to turn in my ID/swipe card, though), and updated the documentation on our load balancers again, as well as re-re-recapping for my co-workers. I had to say “Look, when you feel like you’re an idiot, don’t worry — I felt like that repeatedly for years while working with these. The Big-IPs are absurdly complicated. Two kernels, a super ’switch card’ that’s doing all kinds of crazy (non-switch) stuff, over 20 IP addresses, 8 networks, plenty of bugs, and delays in getting technical support. It’s not you!”

Maybe I’ll have some time to investigate Linux & Windows text editors.

I use Parallels Desktop for Mac to run the Action Request System (Remedy) for trouble ticket tracking at work. They have a webapp, but it’s not really usable.

A couple weeks ago, about when I upgraded my work desktop to Leopard, Parallels broke. I couldn’t connect to the Remedy server, or our voicemail system. I don’t really think about Parallels networking, but it’s all virtual so normal troubleshooting is unavailable. Basically there’s a fake DHCP server (or two) inside Parallels for the VMs, and I had very little visibility into why it was doing the wrong thing. I reinstalled Parallels but hadn’t spent much time on it, since I don’t use Remedy heavily.

It turns out I needed to re-set Parallels from Bridged to Shared networking mode, whereby it uses the Mac as a NAT server. The NAT alleviates many of my concerns about running Windows. But how & why did that setting get changed in the first place??

MacFUSE is great. I wrote a short bit on it for TidBITS. The elevator pitch is: MacFUSE allows mounting SFTP servers just like AFP/SMB/NFS shares, read-write access to NTFS filesystems (Tiger’s built-in NTFS access is read-only), and a whole passel of other filesystem options.

The article, “MacFUSE Explodes Options for Mac File Systems” is at: http://db.tidbits.com/article/8835.

There is a binary installer for the NTFS-3g module (ideal for Boot Camp users), but it doesn’t yet have a stable home. Currently, you must visit the macfuse-devel mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse-devel and look for a posting with the latest URL (as of today, see http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse-devel/browse_thread/thread/ee1c4555d3c90f4f).