Author: Chris Ilias

Deleting individual newsgroup messages in Thunderbird

Chris Ilias 9 Comments

Let’s say you’re reading a newsgroup with Thunderbird, and some spam gets posted. Or someone posts an offensive message you just want to remove from the message list. Or any case in which you just want to remove an individual article you’ve already downloaded.

In the past, it wasn’t possible to delete individual messages. At least not without exploiting the message aging feature. In the latest version of Thunderbird, you can delete individual messages. You just need to change a preference in the config editor to enable the feature.

  1. Go to Tools > Options > Advanced > General, and click on Config Editor.
  2. In the Config Editor, search for the preference: news.allow_delete_with_no_undo
  3. Double-click on it, to set the value to true.

After that, the delete command will work when you have any newsgroup messages selected.

When all you want to know is if the bug is fixed

Chris Ilias 2 Comments

For some specific bugs, I’ve added myself to the CC list, because I’m interested in knowing when the bug is fixed (and maybe when the target has changed). Problem is: because there has been a lot of discussion in a few of those bugs, I’ve been getting a lot of bugmail that I’m not interested in. I don’t want to remove myself from the CC list, because I still want to be notified when the bug is fixed.

I don’t know if I’m the only one with this issue, so I thought I’d share how I fixed it.

In my Bugzilla Preferences, there is an Email Preferences tab that allows me to choose what changes I get emailed about based on my relationship to the bug. In it, I turned off most options for when I am a voter of a bug. Then, for any bugs in which I only care if the bug is fixed, I vote for it instead of adding myself to the CC list.

I made that change over a week ago. So far, so good.

What is compacting folders in Thunderbird, and why you should do it

Chris Ilias 13 Comments

Are your Thunderbird folders taking up a lot of disk space, even though you only have a few messages? Is Thunderbird slow to open folders? It’s probably because you have not compacted your folders.

When you delete a message, it doesn’t really get deleted from the folder. It gets marked as deleted. Thunderbird sees that marking, and knows not to display the message. Compacting a folder will command Thunderbird to remove all messages marked as deleted from that folder.

To compact your folders, go to the File menu and select Compact Folders.
To compact an individual folder, right-click on the folder and select Compact.

If you’re having any issues, post in the Thunderbird Support forum at https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/ask

Firefox 4 Youtube HTML5

Chris Ilias 22 Comments

Okay, now that Firefox 4 is released and has been downloaded 40 million times, I want all Firefox users to do the following:

  1. Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5
  2. Click on “Join the HTML5 Trial“

Most Youtube videos you watch will be served in WebM format with HTML5 markup, instead of Flash.

Sidenote: Before you go thinking Firefox 4 is the first version of Firefox to support HTML5 video, it should be noted the HTML5 doesn’t specify video codec. Firefox has had support for HTML5 video since version 3.5.

How to change the colour of link previews in Firefox 4

Chris Ilias 3 Comments

In Firefox 3.6, if you want to see the destination URL of a link in a webpage, you can hover the mouse over the link, and the URL will be displayed in the status bar. In Firefox 4 Beta, the destination URL is now displayed in the Location bar.

There have been complaints the the light grey colour makes the text hard to read. This is something you can fix right now with a userChrome.css tweak.

  1. In Firefox, click on the Firefox button and go the Help menu, then select Troubleshooting Information. This will open the about:support page.
  2. Click on Open Containing Folder. That will open Windows explorer in your profile folder.
  3. Create a new folder called “chrome“.
  4. Navigate to the \chrome\ folder, then right-click and select New > Text Document.
  5. Name the file “userChrome.css“.
  6. Open userChrome.css, and insert this text: 
    .urlbar-over-link-box {color: #0000FF !important;}
  7. Save userChrome.css and restart Firefox. Link destinations should now appear in blue.

How to update Firefox 4 Beta

Chris Ilias 11 Comments

A new Firefox 4 Beta is out, and users looking to update may have noticed that the “Check for Updates” menu item no longer there. That’s because the Firefox updater has been moved to the About Firefox window.

To check for updates in Firefox 4, open the Firefox menu (or Help menu if you have the menu bar enabled), and click on About Firefox.

The About Firefox window will open and Firefox will automatically check for an update. If there is one available, Firefox will automatically download it.

When the download is finished, just click on Apply Update.

Firefox tip: Disable unused plugins

Chris Ilias 8 Comments

I used to post a lot of tips and tricks for Firefox and Thunderbird, but I haven’t posted in a long time. Here’s a new one.

If you’re having speed/stability issues with Firefox, the cause of the problem is often one or more plugins. Mozilla offers a plugincheck tool, that tells you if you have the latest version of each of your plugins, so you can make sure all of your plugins are up to date with the latest security and stability fixes.

But many people don’t realize how many plugins they have installed. Seeing so many plugins should be an eye-opener in terms of:

  • how many are listed
  • how many you were aware of
  • how many you use
  • how many you need

Unfortunately, many plugins get installed without us knowing. Even on my mac, when I look at my list of plugins, I see something called “iPhotoPhotocast“. I use iPhoto, but I don’t know what the plugin is for.

One tip that should help improve the stability and performance of your Firefox installation is to disable any plugins you don’t need. To do that, open the Tools menu and click on Add-ons to open the Add-ons manager.

For each plugin you don’t need, select it and click Disable.

  • If there is a plugin you need once in a blue moon, just re-enable it when you need it.
  • If you see a “Mozilla Default Plug-in“, leave it alone.

In my case, the only plugin I have enabled is Flash, because I watch videos on Youtube. I find that I’m needing it less and less using Firefox 4 Beta and joining the Youtube HTML5 Beta program.

Re: Why do I block ads?

Chris Ilias 14 Comments

Re: Why do I block ads?

I recently decided to block ads as well, but for different reasons. For the most part, advertising on the web is something I don’t mind. The deciding factor for me is whether or not it prevents me from seeing the content I want to see. This is what made pop-ups so annoying. They got in the way, and you had to close the pop-up just to see the page you came to see.

Unfortunately advertisers have been using Flash ads to provide the same experience.

It’s the same user experience, but different implementation. (In terms of Firefox development, this is bad because users are told that Firefox has a pop-up blocker, but it doesn’t block these pop-up ads.)

There are also cases where ads push the content out of the view area, forcing you to scroll down.

Sometimes just mousing over the content area of an ad will cause it to expand and prevent you from reading what you want.

Unfortunately, this has become way too common lately, and I finally decided to install Adblock Plus. I understand that many websites rely on ads for revenue, but so did netscape.com. That’s why the Mozilla pop-up blocker was disabled and hidden in Netscape 7. I’m sure something can be worked out, where advertisers are forced to use a technology that cannot get in the way of viewing other website content. If that were to happen, I would bet that a lot less users would have adblockers installed.

Goodbye Dreamhost

Chris Ilias 8 Comments

Wow…here’s the story…

I use Dreamhost to host ilias.ca. I have many ilias.ca email aliases. Most relay messages to a gmail account (for spam filtering, and a searchable web archive), which then forwards them to an IMAP account hosted on ilias.ca.

On Friday, Dreamhost decided to move some email accounts to new hardware . Here’s the blog post:

A small number of accounts had mail that was unable to be moved over to new hardware before we had to power down the last of our servers and move them out of the old data center. For now we are setting up those users (without the data) on the new system so they should still be functional and we’ll be working on restoring the data once we have moved the servers (the data is not lost, just not currently available). We apologize for this. we understand how important mail is and wanted to reassure those effected that we’re aware of the matter and are working to correct it.

So on Saturday morning, I woke up to find that all of my previous messages and user-created folders for other hosted ilias.ca addresses for that matter. In fact, I couldn’t even connect to my mail server until a DNS server update. It’s Monday now, and Dreamhost still has not fixed the issue.

Let’s add some extra weirdness to the matter. Today, my IMAP account stopped receiving messages, and started sending my Gmail account bounce messages. I contacted Dreamhost about this, and it appears the configuration was changed from being fully-hosted to a forward-only address with no destination. What this means: dataloss!

I put up with the occasional downtime because of the price, but dataloss? My previous messages being missing for over two days? So after speaking with all i have to say is Buh-bye to Dreamhost.

Does anyone have suggestions for a hosting service?