---

Monday - 26 November 2001

Short Shrift Mode. As with most Mondays this semester, this will be a busy one. I need to finish reading Seamless Government by Russell M. Linden. I also have to catch up with things at work since I was off since last week Wednesday. So this will be a short one.

Sinclair Electronics. Now there's a name you probably haven't heard for awhile. I can remember building a LED watch from a kit developed by Sinclair. This was sometime in the early to mid-seventies so the watch wasn't as capable as your run-of-the-mill Casio now, but for the time, it was pretty snazzy (not to mention being able to wow friends with its glowing numerals in the dark).

So I was interested when InfoWorld's Brian Livingston had a link to what is reported to be the world's smallest AM radio. The radio, about the size of an ear-bud type earphone, is available through Sinclair Research here for about £9.95 (UK). If you'd rather have an FM radio, there is one available for £10.00.

It's good to see the old guy still kicking. Good show Sir Clive.

Welcome to Miami International, the M1 tank you are passing is for your own safety. Stop, throw your airline tickets out of the car and come out with your hands up. Have a Nice Day! Well, the tank part is real. See this article here from the Miami Herald. It seems they take their security very seriously there. Although having a tank may be a little overkill. All you really need is one person and an RPG. Typical government over reaction.

Aloha!

Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday

---

Tuesday - 27 November 2001

Beware of What You Wish. Yes, the ninth seeded University of Hawai'i Wahine volleyball team wanted to be in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament. What they didn't expect is to have to travel thousands of miles to be in the first round. In years past, the Wahine have hosted first and sometimes second round matches.

But this year, they will be traveling to Pullman, in Washington state, to play Washington State University. In order to get there, the Wahine will fly to Los Angeles; then to Salt Lake City, Utah; then to Spokane, Washington. Once there, they will take an 80-mile (~128km) bus ride to the campus. Oh well, just one more challenge to overcome.

On the Home Front. The carpenters began work on stripping the roof deck off our garage. All of the plywood has been removed so as soon as the weather permits, they will replace the wood and seal the deck. Speaking of weather, we had the first storm of the Winter last night -- much rain and wind. The roofers will need several days of sun so here's hoping for good weather over the next couple of weeks.

Aloha!

Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday

---

Hump Day Wednesday - 28 November 2001

Pegasus Mail 4.01. For those of you who are interested, Pegasus Mail 4.01 is available for download at www.pmail.com. This is the latest and greatest Internet email client from Kiwi David Harris.

As I've mentioned before, the Department of Health, where I used to work, used pmail as its default Netware mail client. And a good one it was. I've recommended it in the past, and for many people, it may be something worth evaluating now. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Eventually, Harris added Internet functionality so now pmail (as it's informally called) can be used in either or both configurations. Here at the Judiciary, we don't make use of the Netware support, which I think is a loss to everyone. But I digress.

I downloaded the almost 4MB file and began the install. It looked easy enough but I found what may be a bug. At some point, it asks you where to create the default mailbox. As a default, it chooses c:\pmail\mail (not to be confused with the default program directory which you can put in c:\program files\pmail, for example). Well, I didn't want to store my mail on the c: drive because I only put programs there and store my data on the d: drive, so I typed in d:\data\pmail. It took the input, if I remember right, and then gave an error message and then went on its merry way. Notwithstanding the message, it created the default mailbox files so I thought everything was okay.

Unfortunately, every time I restarted the program, it would give me the same error message about either not having a mailbox or having an incorrect path to one. This, even though it created the directory and default files just fine. So I uninstalled the program and tried reinstalling. But, and here comes the second problem, it became clear that the uninstall did not remove any of the registry entries created during the install. So I had to search the registry by using regedit (since regedt32, which comes with Windows 2000 Pro, does not include a search function) and deleted all entries relating to pmail.

As always, if you don't know what you are doing, do not edit the registry as this can make Windows unusable [as if it's usable now - ed.]. And even if you do know what you are doing, I urge you to make a backup copy before making any changes. But I digress yet again.

After editing the registry and uninstalling pmail, I rebooted and then tried installing using the default mailbox location. This seemed to solve the problem and pmail has been working like a champ since.

Having said that, I find it annoying to have a preview mode that I apparently can't turn off (if anyone knows how, please let me know). For the most part, I look at the sender and the subject lines to decide whether to open an email or just delete it. Having a preview pane just wastes display real estate that I would rather use for other purposes. But other than that, and the problem with the mailbox, Pegasus 4.01 works just fine for me. At least, so far. YMMV.

Rain? What Rain? Okay, fellow Daynoter Dan Bowman caught me fibbing again in yesterday's post. I have to admit, it does not rain in sunny Hawai'i. Ever. And if you see menehunes painting the grass green or hurriedly melting the overnight snow so the tourists, ahem, I mean valued visitors, won't see it, then it's just your imagination. Yah, that's the ticket. It's just your imagination. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Candid Camera. The local public servants [isn't that an oxymoron? - ed.] will begin installing digital video cameras to catch people running red lights or speeding. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this and I need to disclose that some of the money generated by this (and don't be fooled that the system is being installed for any other reason) will be coming to the Judiciary, which is where I work. But having said that, and this is my own opinion and not that of the Judiciary, I don't think it's a good idea to have surveillance cameras sprouting like poisonous mushrooms along public roads. Why? Because it is a very gentle, but slippery slope from there to having them inside your house to make sure you're not doing anything illegal.

Surely, you would not be opposed to making sure your neighbor isn't a terrorist plotting to bomb the local sports stadium. Right? Surely you would want to give the law enforcement community the critical tools that they need to ensure your safety. Right? So if it's okay to put a camera in your neighbor's house, it's okay then to install a camera inside your bedroom to prove that you're not doing anything depraved, debauched, immoral, or fattening. Right? Surely you would have no objection because you aren't doing anything wrong. Right?

What was that about giving up liberty for a little safety ("They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.")? Ben Franklin, where are ye now? As for me, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." -- Thomas Jefferson.

Aloha!

Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday

---

Thursday - 29 November 2001

Pegasus Preview Pane. Okay, a little spelunking in the newsgroup comp.mail.pegasus-mail.ms-windows finds there is a button to banish the preview mode. Only, it may not be visible. So when you are in the folder view (File/Mail Folders) look for a button named "Preview". If you don't see one, but you do see a green arrow pointing to the right, click on the arrow to scroll through the buttons until you see "Preview". Click on the preview button and it will change into "List" view.

By the way, given the number of bug reports in the newsgroup, you may want to wait until version 4.1 comes out.

Now, the next thing you would probably want to do is to convert the mail you have in your old mail client (e.g., Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.) to a format that Pegasus can use. I have to admit, Pegasus is not exactly user friendly when it comes to importing mail from other programs. So the short of it is you will probably need to find a third-party conversion program to get there from here (unless your email client stores mail in the common .mbx format).

Since I use MS Outlook Express 5.50, I did a Google(tm) search and found this page here. I then choose to try OE2MBX, which is supposed to work with version 5.x. Clicking on the link takes you to here. The program, written by Stephan Nedregaard, is released under the GNU GPL. It is available as a Windows or Linux executable (and source). I downloaded the Windows version. Note that the program is a command line program so you must open a DOS box to run it. You run the program as follows:

oe2mbx filename.dbx

Substitute the name of your Outlook Express folder for the "filename" above. Note that the program does not appear to support long file names so you will need to rename such files to a standard 8.3 format.

We should pause here to review some things. First, your Outloook Express mail files are probably in:

C:\Documents and Settings\your login name\Application Data\Identities\{some very long line of meaningless numbers}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

I found the files by opening a DOS box and typing in:

dir inbox*.* /s

I then changed into that directory and copied the .dbx files to a temporary directory (I also copied the oe2mbx file into the same temporary directory). By converting a copy of your file, you have the original just in case things don't go well with the conversion. As usual, anything you try here is done without warranty of any kind (see Disclaimer) so you best make sure to make a backup and do not fool around with the original.

Having said that, once the files were copied, I typed in oe2mbx inbox.dbx and in a few seconds, my 1,500 emails were converted to the .mbx format. Once the new file is created, in this case it was called inbox.dbx.mbx, you need to copy it to where you Pegasus mail is stored. In my case, it's the default of c:\pmail\mail.

Once the file is there, startup Pegasus mail and you should see the file as a folder in Folder view. I haven't checked all 1,500 converted emails so I can't say if all of them came out okay. I can say I saw two that were originally in HTML that were converted to text and two that included inline images that were stripped out. Whether there is a way around that I do not know. If someone knows of a free converter that is more user friendly or does a more accurate job of converting please let me know. YMMV.

Aloha!

Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday

---

Aloha Friday - 30 November 2001

It's Friday!

As My Guitar Gently Weeps. George "The Quite One" Harrison, singer, song writer, and former Beatle died yesterday of cancer. He authored such introspective songs as "Here Comes the Sun" and "Something". The multi-talented Harrison also produced films such as Monty Python's "Life of Brian" (one of my favorite movies).

In the end, he mentioned two things as being important in life, "Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait..." and secondly, "Love one another." George Harrison, part-time resident of Mau'i, dead at the age of 58. RIP.

Go Ahead, Make My Day. Warner Brothers released on DVD the Clint Eastwood "Dirty Harry" series of movies recently as a boxed-set. The set includes "Dirty Harry", "Magnum Force", "The Enforcer", "Sudden Impact", and the "Dead Pool." I think I'll pick up only the first of the series, if for no other reason then these immortal words;

Uh-uh. I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?"

Opera 6 Where Are You? One of the other Daynoters indicated that Opera 6.0 was shipping, which is probably true. If you can find it, that is. The link at the Opera site takes you to the version 5.12 download. Yes, you can walk through the ftp directory and find something that looks like 6.0, which perhaps it is, but they don't make it easy for you. Strange.

You should also be aware that the browser comes in two versions, the free adware supported one and the pay us to leave you alone one. If you paid for version 5, version 6 is a free upgrade. If you paid for version 4, then the upgrade if $15. Otherwise, you pay $39 (all prices are in US dollars). Also be aware that installing 6 into the same directory as earlier versions seems to over write the registration for the earlier version (unless, perhaps you paid for version 5). So, for whatever reason, if you want to go back to the earlier version, it would be a good idea to install 6 into a different directory.

As to the browser itself, you can see the press release here for the new stuff in this version. There's too much to list here, but the first improvement is in the speed of displaying pages. I don't see that much of a difference myself, but speed is your friend when it comes to browsers so I think this is a Good Thing. YMMV.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

---

Last Week    Mon    Tues    Wed    Thurs    Fri    Next Week
Diary Index   Link to the Daynotes Gang

© 2001 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved. Disclaimer