mailto, Firefox och GMail
Kortis idag: jag har retat mig lite på att jag inte kan klicka på mailto-länkar i webbläsaren utan att Outlook dras igång på maskinen.
Jag hittade diverse add-ons till Firefox innan jag upptäckte att man i senare revisioner av Firefox faktiskt kan välja GMail som mailto-hanterare.
Det tackar vi särskilt för!
Hard to get good help these days
… but we got lucky. My mother-in-law is down for the day to help us out with Klara. They’re currently out walking.
For me, that means being able to sit around shamelessly and scratch my belly, read blogs, and write something of my own.
This time, a cry for help — I’m using Firefox almost exclusively, and there’s but one annoyance I found so far: there’s a toolbar called Kim’s favorites which is entirely empty.
I remove it whenever I start Firefox up, but it keeps coming back when the browser is restarted.
I know I’m pushing my luck, running as non-admin, but I don’t see how this could be a global setting. I’ve tried Regmon and Filemon, but haven’t seen anything suspicious-looking. I have tried to launch Firefox as administrator (no Administrator’s favorites toolbar in sight for some reason) and with my own user as part of the admin group (same behavior as when I’m not admin).
I’m at wit’s end. Running Firefox v.2.0.0.6. Hating the toolbar. Help!
This ought to demonstrate whether I have any useful readers.
UPDATE: It’s interesting to note that once I took the time to write this down, the damned toolbar has suddenly decided to disappear completely. This probably had something to do with my administrative experiments, but I’ll never know what. Not that I care much — the problem is solved!
GMail detects duplication
GMail’s auto-quoting feature had me confused for a while, and I thought it was just broken. Parsing MIME messages can be tricky, so I didn’t really mind, but bugs will annoy. For example, take a look at the stray line source of our mutual confusion below.
It’s marked in purple, which indicates it’s quoted from an earlier message, but there are no quote chars (”>”) like in the quote block above, so it looks a bit random. After some head-scratching and scrutiny, I think I know what’s going on.
It appears that GMail, for every line in every message, scans backwards through the conversation, and if a duplicate line is found, it’s considered a quote and marked as such.
At first I thought leading quote chars were a magic give-away, but GMail actually notices modifications in quoted lines, so things like snipped citations are rendered as content, not quotes. The duplicate detection seems to be the only rule at work.
I wonder if the same idea could be used to detect duplication in source code. Duplication comes in many guises, but simple line-by-line equality would be a nice first step to detect in a code-base, either on a file- or project basis. It would be interesting to see duplicate lines marked in Visual Studio, for example.
