Category: technology

I heard SETI call my name

Who the hell knows why, but I was reminded of my old ‘do-a-bit-for-humanity’ thing that I used to maintain at varsity. SETI@HOME. Use your computer to analyse radio waves from the stars in order to find aliens.
For those who don’t know, it worked like this:

  1. Download a small programme
  2. The programme downloads a work unit
  3. Your computer starts spinning away at the work unit in the background
  4. CPU runs at 100% all the time
  5. However, SETI runs at a low priority, so if you want to run another programme it doesn’t hog your resources (in theory – things slow down a little anyway)

This is boring.
Ok. The point is this. I’m running BOINC now. BOINC is a distributed computing application (like SETI@HOME), but it schedules the operation of different projects. Thus, I am helping to predict climate-change, cure diseases (I think), play chess960 games, and look for aliens.

What’s that? Oh, still boring. ;)

Making Migration to Linux Easier

For some reason, most people don’t like fiddling with computers as much as I do. They just expect things to work. It’s a little like only ever eating out at restaurants, and never cooking the food yourself.
Taking this analogy further, I suppose all I really do is buy pre-prepared meals from Woolworths and then warm them up, adding salt and pepper when necessary. I not preparing the food myself, and I’m certainly not farming it.

Enough of that silliness. Changing from one operating system to another, you want to transfer all of your documents and settings with as little fuss as possible. Ubuntu are working on it, and the first release candidate for the script is just about ready.

This should hopefully encourage people to more readily make the switch.

Migrate from Thunderbird to Evolution on Linux

This post is going up not because it is particularly interesting, but because Google failed to be particularly helpful in solving this problem for me.
If you want to do things the other way around (Evolution to Thunderbird) then you won’t be short of resources.

Evolution has an import tool, nestling away under File > Import
Go on. Try that. It looks promising.

The thing opens up and assures you that it will guide you through the process of importing external files into Evolution. You follow its prompts and check the box to import data and settings from older problems. You discover it has less use than expected.
Apparently it searches for setting from Netscape, which is what Thunderbird is based on. What gives?

At this point I went ‘Gah!’ and turned to my good friend Google. Google! Why have you forsaken me?

What I should have done was turn to Evolution’s internal help files. They don’t look immediately useful either, but on closer inspection you will find a section on Migration from Outlook to Evolution.
Now this is sort of silly, but to migrate from Outlook to Evolution, you first need to import your data into Mozilla Mail (which is (kind of) Thunderbird)).
The reason is some drivel about the necessary library only being available on windows.
Come on Novell, you know that’s stupid. If you expect people to migrate from MS products to OSS, then you need to make it simpler than that. But I digress.

Your Thunderbird mbox files are hiding out here (well, mine are):
~/.mozilla-thunderbird/(random letters)/Mail/Local Folders/

They are the files without extensions, with names like Inbox, Sent, Drafts and so on.
If you’ve gone and made nested subfolders in your inbox (or any other folder for that matter), you’re in for a frustrating time because it is necessary to import each mbox file individually (unless you can write a script to do it, but if you could then you wouldn’t be reading this poorly explained effort).
If you have subfolders in Inbox, change directory to Inbox.sbd
One again the mbox files will have the same name as your folders. You’ll have to import each one, one at a time.
Welcome to the suck!

Here is how you import an mbox file now that you’ve found them:
Back to that largely useless import tool I mentioned earlier. It has an ‘import single file’ option. Guess what?
That’s right. Then browse to the folder and open it. If you’re lucky, the stupid importer will recognise that the file is indeed in mbox format. It might not. I found that sometimes it did, and other times it didn’t. Keep trying until it works, or alternatively, smack your computer with a sledge-hammer. Your call.

Assuming it works, click ‘Forward’ and then select the destination folder. Fortunately you are given the option to create a new folder, so that may bring a little relief in your world of pain.

Enjoy, you masochist you!

Internet Explorer for Linux

Or rather, a no mess no fuss approach to installing IE on your Linux desktop.

Why the hell would anyone want to do that? Haven’t I heard of Firefox? Other miscellaneous questions with a generally incredulous tone?

The reason is simple: Flash 8 (and those pesky non-compliant sites). Until macromedia get their asses into gear, this is what I have to resort to to get my weebls-stuff ‘On the Moon’ fix.

Classic Spam

I didn’t write this, but I did find it in my inbox.

Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!
Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as “Klinton-Levinsky”.
After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot!
It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to
shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.
What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more
attractive.
It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!

See our Voagra shop to enter upon the new phase of your life.
http://URL.removed

Ubuntu Upgrade: 5.04 –> 5.10

Being possessed of a masochistic streak, I decided that since a new
version of Ubuntu Linux was available, I would upgrade.
In a country where broadband internet access is taken for granted, this
would be a simple task of using the smart upgrade feature of Synaptic,
waiting a few moments for everything to download and install, and smiles
all round. Of course, even in that telecoms utopia, something would
probably go wrong, thus breaking one’s entire system and forcing a
complete re-installation (a.k.a. very bad things).

Telecoms Utopia is not a term with which sane people would describe
South Africa. Fortunately the fine people running the Ubuntu show know
that the world is not confined to Europe and North America. Gloriously
they sent me installation discs, free of charge. Hell, they sent me as
many as I’d like, so that I could distribute them, free of charge.

I am growing weary with this post as it is growing longer than intended.
The rest of the tale will be related using short sentences and where
ever possible, monosyllablic words.

I put disc in Pee See. I show Syn Ap Tic disc. I change all old re pos
it or ree to new ver shun. I smart up grade. It down load some pack age.
It take two days. It up grade. It no break Pee See.
I much glad! Vi va Ooh Boon Too! Vi va ANC!