I found out that I have been missing out on a neat grep option: l

grep -l "piece of text" *

This lists all files in the directory containing “piece of text”. Mighty useful when e.g. locating all calls to a specific function.

It is possible to configure Thunderbird to include the date and time of the mail being replied to. I.e. to replace

Foo wrote:
> Hello Bar!

with

On 02/05/2009 11:27 AM, Foo wrote:
> Hello Bar!

It isn’t done through the configuration dialogs, rather it is configured through user.js (which might have to be created). All one essentially has to do is create a file name user.js containing

user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

in the Thunderbird profile directory.

After upgrading to Thunderbird 2 I noticed that my sent e-mails weren’t being wrapped properly. The fix is to set

mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed

to false (in Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Config Editor).

TestFarm is a testing and monitoring tool which seems interesting and might warrant further investigation in the future.

Gri is a nice little “language for scientific graphics programming”. It’s basically a convenient way to turn heaps of raw data into graphs.

It seems hard to find good memory finders if one doesn’t know the name of them. A couple of good ones are called TSearch and WinHack.

Thunderbird recently decided to forget all about my profiles and configuration after the computer’s power had suddenly been cut off while thunderbird was closing. The problem was that thunderbird was stopped in the middle of writing the prefs.js file located within the profile’s directory, hence some sanity check failed when the preferences were reloaded and they were erased.

Luckely it wasn’t harder to restore than to fetch a recent backup and replace the prefs.js file. I would however have been able to save myself that trouble if I had stayed calm the first time thunderbird launched with a blank screen (instead of immediately restarting thunderbird) by copying the prefs.backup file stored in the profile directory. The prefs.backup file is thunderbird’s a backup of the prefs.js file which contains the state of the file prior the most recent change (i.e. it contains the working configuration the first time thunderbird launches with a corrupted configuration).

If you haven’t seen the null object pattern then please have a look. I can think of a fair few number of times when I could have saved myself some ugly code with that pattern.

Taskjuggler seems like an interesting program. It might take a bit of time to learn, but it seems to be able to do a lot of things.