I need a place to put the vast accumulation of completely random technical tidbits that have no correlation to any of the game/math/art/whatever stuff on the rest of my site but that I keep meaning to put on the internet, and so this is it, in all its glory. I'll add stuff here occasionally. I'll probably rearrange it as I add more.

Thunderbird

I use Thunderbird for my mail client most of the time, and I don't really like it, but hey, it's free and open source, so theoretically I can fix something if I really need to, which is not nothing.

A simple case of this happened today. An add-on I use called Extra Folder Columns got updated and I didn't like the new behavior, so I changed it. The Thunderbird add-on system makes it pretty simple to play with...you just download the .xpi, which like seemingly all package files these days is just a zip archive, and you edit the files in it. I use emacs, and so I can just open the archive directly, open the files inside it, edit the files, and when I save the files, it does the right thing and saves them back into the .xpi.

Specifically, the add-on was displaying a bunch of mandatory extra text in one of the columns (like this: "Folder name - Root folder name"), when the right thing, especially given that the job of this plugin is to add optional columns, was clearly just to add another optional column for the root folder name if the user wanted it. So, I did that. While I was in there I also removed the hard coded unread messages number, since there's already a column for it too!

I have no idea how to actually submit this plugin modification officially, so here it is:

different_extra_folder_columns-latest-tb.xpi

If the owner wants to download it and integrate the changes, I'll take this down. I guess it's pretty cheesy for me just to change the code and not the version number or name or anything, but hey, I need to work on my game.

Update: I finally got sick of saying 'no' to upgrade warnings, so I changed the id of the plugin, and renamed it to Different Extra Folder Columns!

Update: I updated it to work with Thunderbird 5.0