Just found a great extension to Thunderbird that has cut down on the amount of time I spend sorting through the daily email flood. QuickFolders is a project created by Alexander Malfait and Axel Grude. They've obviously put a lot of time, thought and care into crafting this very configurable add-on.

Here's a screen shot from their site:

As you can see, you create a tool bar of your most-used email folders for easy access. You can also drag emails onto these tabs for quick organization. And there are lots of settings to play around with until you get it looking just right.

I think this is such vital functionality that it should be part of the next version of Thunderbird.

The project home page is at quickfolders.mozdev.org.

If you're a Thunderbird user, this one's a must-have.

There's been an update to the old NautilusSVN project called RabbitVCS which finally gives Ubuntu/Gnome SVN users something on par with the venerable Tortoise for Windows.

I've been testing it for a couple of days and it's really good. The only bug I've found is that if a file is deleted from disk, a commit won't delete the file from Subversion. Guess I won't be able to "sudo apt-get purge kdesvn" just yet, but hopefully soon!

It also has one of the best Open Source project sites I've ever seen. Check it out (pun intended) at www.rabbitvcs.org.

Here's my preso from MAX 2008. If you save the attachment you'll have the cheat sheet that was distributed at the session (until we ran out;)

Let me know if you have any questions or additional tips to share!

Breaking news from MAX2008. I picked up my Speaker's Badge last night, flipped it over and there it was:

"See you next year"
Los Angeles, California
October 4-7, 2009

Doing my one and only presentation this afternoon, then it's sitting back to enjoy other peoples' sessions.

Our next meeting will be on Thursday December 4th, 2008 at Oakham House on the Ryerson Campus, starting at 6:30pm:

Oakham House
Room: Oakham Lounge
55 Gould Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5B 1E9

http://www.oakhamhouse.com/pages/directions.php has directions and parking information.

The evening's theme will be MAX2008 Goodies. We'll look at new product announcements, betas and other news that comes out of the San Francisco MAX conference the week of November 17th.

If you're planning to attend MAX and would like to help present, just drop me a line.

As always, don't forget to register free at www.torontoflex.org so we know how many people to expect.

If you're interested in presenting an application or topic in the future that would be of interest to the group, let us know and we'll try to get you some time at an upcoming meeting.

Thanks,
Oliver

Ring..."Hello?"

"Would you like to participate in our survey?"

"Are you interested in a time-share opportunity?"

"Hi, this is Boris the mover. Need help with the moving? We lift all heavy thing for you..."

Sound familiar, usually right when you're sitting down for dinner?

I could swear I signed up for something like this a few years ago (completely ineffective), but here we go again. Starting September 30, 2008, Canadian residents will be able to register their phone numbers with the National Do Not Call List (DNCL).

Any US readers care to comment on the effectiveness of the National Do Not Call Registry?

Here's the link that will be slammed on September 30th: http://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/index-eng.html

Not only forcing Silverlight down our throats (see Ben Nadel's hilarious post), but Windows as well.

And the hypocrisy of using Flash all over their homepage is brilliant.

Nice work NBC.

Thank you from all the Linux and Mac users around the world who are shielded from viewing your advertising. The wonderful things that happen when two great companies get together!

This one's a real WTF.

If you're using Google hosted email (a great service, BTW) you occasionally run into a situation where you can login and read your email via Google's web interface, but when you try retrieving your email via POP you get a password error.

What the...?

Apparently, GMail wants you to verify the host system using a username, paswword, captcha login. The error message gives you no clue as to this problem. Doing a bit of digging, I discovered that you must go to a special URL for your domain, enter your username, password and captcha, and things will magically work again.

Here's a sample of the URL you'd need to visit to unlock an email account under yourdomain.com:

https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha

The logic of this whole "feature" escapes me. First, how is a user supposed to pass a catcha-based login from within a POP client? Second, how about giving the user half a clue in the POP server error message as to how to resolve the problem. Third, there's no logic behind when this kicks in. All the other accounts on my domain had no problem with a POP login.

From what I've read, others have run into this with their generic GMail accounts as well.

Anyone have an explanation beyond "it's a security thing"?

If you're running Apache, MySQL or just about any other service, this one's for you. I ran into Webmin over the weekend as I embarked on re-building my home server (all Linux!).

I was finding the new Apache configs a bit of a handful so I started searching. Didn't take long to find this amazing tool for Linux (there's a Windows alpha available as well).

And of course, it's free.

One thing I love about KDE is its default snapping behavior for all desktop windows. When I go back onto my work laptop (Windows) I miss this simple feature.

A fellow Toronto developer, Ivan Heckman from U of T, has created a great free utility that mimics this behavior in Windows. Check it out here.

So what's your favorite free Windows utility?

[Thanks Ivan!]