Spudtater's Journal

I can't remember how long ago it was that some Thunderbird developer thought "wow, tabs! They're great in Firefox, so we absolutely have to implement them in Thunderbird too". Since then I've put up with them in the vain hope that either I'd get used to them, or the developers would change their minds and implement some sort of sane behaviour.

Yesterday I finally lost patience and managed to revert everything manually. This is how I did it:

1. To make email open in a new window instead of a tab, go Options > Advanced > Reading & Display and choose "Open messages in a new message window".
2. To turn off the overzealous search features, go to Options > Advanced > General, and uncheck "Enable Global Search and Indexer".
3. To get rid of the tab bar entirely, go to Options > Advanced > General > Config Editor, promise to be careful, search for the "mail.tabs.autoHide" option, and set it to "true".
4. After that, I chose to remove the reply/forward/etc. options from the bottom panel and put them back into the toolbar at the top, via the "Configure" right-click-menu option... that's more personal preference, though. Tweak away!

And now I have a usable mail program again.

How did I miss this story?

Jimi Heselden, recent owner of Segway, has died after driving his Segway off a cliff — supposedly while reversing to get out of the way of a hiker.

Not good news for sales, I would imagine.

I seem to be stumbling across quite a few odd links recently — most due to the Cheezburger network. Recent discoveries include:

• Ignobel prize winner Chonosuke Okamura, who made the startling discovery that every species of life on the planet was already around 425 million years ago — albeit in microscopic form. Or he may just have had an incredibly overactive imagination. Your call.
• Götz von Berlichingen, an absolutely bonkers German knight who got his arm blown off by a cannon, invented one of the earliest examples of a functional prosthetic hand, was twice made an outlaw, and has been attributed as inventor of the phrase "kiss my ass". In spite of his incredibly violent life, he lived to a ripe old age of around 80.
• The "Door to Hell" in Derweze, Turkmenistan — an underground cavern filled with natural gas which, after being accidentally punctured in 1971, was set on fire in order to prevent poisonous gas discharge — and has continued burning to this day.

Via Charlie's Diary

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

– "Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle", Howard Falcon-Lang, BBC News, 1 Sep 2010

public MyReturnClass<ILikeGenerics> doSomethingAndTimeIt1(MyClass parameter) {
    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    MyReturnClass<ILikeGenerics> result =
        doSomethingComplicatedHere(parameter, this.someInstanceVariable);

    log.debug("Took " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) + "ms");
    return result;
}

public MyReturnClass<ILikeGenerics> doSomethingAndTimeIt2(MyClass parameter) {
    long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

    try {
        return doSomethingComplicatedHere(parameter, this.someInstanceVariable);
    } finally {
        log.debug("Took " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) + "ms");
    }
}