Thunderbird losing downloaded mail

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Okay, this is irritating.  I just wanted to check some mail I’ve been expecting, but Thunderbird seems to have deleted all my stored emails for an account.  So it seems that its solution is to download absolutely every mail in the inbox again – yes, that’s >1000 emails it’s trying to download over my slow-ass connection.  Not to mention some mails where “newbie computer users” attach some 2MB Word document, a small image being most of it (at least Thunderbird allows you to restrict downloading message to a certain size).  And closing Thunderbird during this process causes it to restart every time it starts up again.  And I can’t seem to prioritise it to grab the latest mail or whatever.  WHY OH WHY??????!!!!

(above image shows my slow download speed)

I thought I selected to keep offline storage so it would use less bandwidth when loading emails.  Evidently, this means to refetch everything every now and then.  Maybe I should archive stuff…

Update: so I did go to move old emails to an archive folder, but it seems that Thunderbird is unable to figure out that I’m merely moving stuff, so when I actually try to access the folder, it goes to download everything again.  Well, as it’s not important, I guess I can leave it going whilst I’m doing something else later, but it’s a bit annoying.

I guess I really shouldn’t be complaining about free software – oh well.

There really isn’t much 1080p content out there

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Was trying to download the Kiss X sis Blu-ray rips, since I have plenty of anime and some download quota I just feel I must use.  Coalgirls has released it as 720p and 1080p, but I was a bit suss over the 1080p rips, so I downloaded the OP to see if it really was 1080p worthy.  The simple test is to take image captures from the video, and then downscale to 720p and upscale back to 1080p and compare with the original capture to see if there’s any difference between the two.  Trying this on some relatively more detailed scenes, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two (even with 2x zooming), so I guess I’ll be getting the 720p version of it (not that I’ll be re-watching it or anything, lol).

Whilst I was doing the comparisons, I decided to try it on the K-On! BD rips as I actually downloaded all 14 episodes of it (done by Thora).  I didn’t bother to check whether it really is 1080p worthy before I downloaded it (I thought Thora were relatively good with this stuff), so I decided to do it then.  Well, there actually does appear to be a slight difference – the original being a tad bit sharper than the upscale, however, I suspect this is due to the Lanczos resampler that I’m using – a sharpen filter can probably fix that.  Detail wise, there doesn’t actually appear to be any difference between the two.  So damn, I’ve wasted a bit of bandwidth and HDD space for something a bit useless >_>  I guess I’ll be double-checking 1080p rips before downloading them (if they offer a 720p version).

Well, I’ve known that there’s really not much 1080p material around, but I expected more to be available these days.  Especially anime – well, maybe I’m wrong, but I’d guess that it’s mostly done by CG or vectoring, so should easily scale up to arbitrary resolutions, but then, on the other hand, I guess there’s a detail limitation with these things.  As opposed to live action capture, where the studios need to deal with issues like limited optical resolutions of the cameras they use.

Forum Signature Link Spammers

Update: WTF?  Seems that spammers are targeting this post.  Comments disabled.  Ha! what are you gonna do now?

For forum admins out there, you may have noticed some “people” who register and make a few retarded posts (showing little intelligence) but with links in their signatures.

Clearly, these links are what admins would call spam, probably there to increase SEO rankings of a particular site (as Google considers a site with many inbound links on other websites to be “popular”).

I wrote a MyBB plugin which tries to mitigate the issue by hiding signatures of users with low post counts (pretty much all these spammers have 3 or fewer posts on the forum).  The plugin does its job, but I still keep getting these spammers every day on my main forum, despite their links actually not showing up (I get annoyed at their posts, as they show very little intelligence and just appear to be plain stupid).

Initially, these spammers seem to originate from Indian IPs and had a number of common traits (such as usernames which are a concatenation of two common names), but now IPs seem to range around the place a bit more (haven’t bothered to do WHOIS checks, but it’s no longer just the 116.*.*.* – 124.*.*.* range).  I guess once your site gets listed as a victim on their spam list, it just keeps getting hit.  And maybe they’re just using humans to bypass the CAPTCHA?  It still seems a little odd, since MyBB really isn’t the most widely used forum software, so specifically targeting it isn’t that productive (as opposed to other software), but if that’s the case, I guess some simple trip might stop these mostly automated scripts.

On the other hand, it appears some are done manually, because, I did see a case where the spammer actually edited his post, after realising the links didn’t show up.

NTFS Junctions FTW

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At work today, for some odd reason, I couldn’t write to my USB drive after noon, the computer spitting out access denied errors.  Took out the drive and reinserted, with the same effect.  I somewhat suspect the draconian IT dudes did something about my (maybe it affects others, I dunno) write access to removable storage (FYI, their security is rather draconian – I couldn’t even change the DPI settings of the screen, which was wrong and screwing up some displays; a number of work mates also have been complaining about not being able to access the calendar, cause access to that is denied).  Though, it’s a little odd, since I could write to it in the morning, and I didn’t log out through lunch.

I did, however, notice that I could change the label of the drive, so it didn’t appear to be a complete write block.  With nothing better to do, I decided to see what would happen if I set up an NTFS junction point on the C: drive to the USB drive.

Surprisingly, I could write to the USB drive through this junction.   Can’t say much more, but junctions FTW.

The Man Who Sued God

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Finished this movie a few days ago actually.  Haven’t bothered checking, but it seems to be based in Australia, so my guess – an Australian movie?  From what I’ve heard about Australian movies, this one doesn’t seem bad at all.

Overall, an interesting idea.  There’s a few WTFs or weird things at points (how did the church lawyer manage to get all those letters?), and I didn’t particularly like the ending portion of the movie, but not a bad one overall.

For those who don’t know about the movie, basically, it’s about some guy who’s boat got destroyed by lightning, and his insurance company refused to pay, claiming “an act of God”.  As he can’t sue the insurance companies, he goes to try suing God (or rather, representatives of God, the church) and an interesting case follows.

Office 2010

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Installed Office 2010 on all three of my computers yesterday (my main computer, parents’ computer and my netbook), after finding a way to activate Office without using the KMS service.  Bit of a shame that our MSDNAA doesn’t have Office, though they do have Project, Visio and Access (and maybe some other Office apps).

Initially installed 64-bit Office on my main machine, but later realised that MS doesn’t provide a 64-bit version of its common controls library (interestingly, it seems to be one of the few issues with 64-bit as opposed to 32-bit), so had to uninstall and install the 32-bit version.  Am a bit surprised with MS not including support for common controls in 64-bit Office – maybe someone will make some 64-bit components, which emulate the 32-bit behaviour (though, that has an issue that users of your “Office macro apps” will need to have this library installed).

Otherwise, I don’t terribly see that much of a difference between 2007 and 2010, so I guess upgrading is kinda moot (but of course, it’s cool, no?).  Heck, my workplace is still migrating from 2003 to 2007.

Reverse custom MyCode parser

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Decided to try writing a basic inverse preg_replace today, knowing that it would be impossible to make a “perfect” algo.

Potentially a number of uses for such, though I’m currently thinking along the lines of a WYSIWYG editor for MyBB (dunno if I’ll make one).  Well, I’ve gone around to making a basic one, which, in fact, probably works on most custom MyCodes posted in the MyBB community forums.  The basic idea is to switch replacement tokens ($1, $2 etc) with the source patterns, and vice versa, which happens to fit nicely with most posted custom MyCodes.

So, in other words, a pattern of \[b\](.*?)\[/b\] and replacement <strong>$1</strong>, after passing through my inverse function, comes out with a pattern of \<strong\>(.*?)\</strong\> and replacement of [b]$1[/b].

It does take into consideration the position and handles repetitions in replacement strings correctly, so a pattern of \[tag\](a)(b)\1\[/tag\] and replacement <strong>$2$1$2$1</strong>, comes out with a pattern of \<strong\>(b)(a)\1\2\</strong\> and replacement of [tag]$2$1$2[/tag].

Obviously, however, it cannot handle all patterns, or even many of them.  The inverse function can’t readily determine what to put in conditions/patterns which aren’t captured or used – it will try to make guesses sometimes, but it’s usually crap.

At the current stage, $0 replacement and nested subpatterns are a little problematic, but probably work.

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Limits of my music creativity

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It seems that every time I randomly start playing out a piece, it ends up being a I -> V -> VI -> III -> IV -> I -> IV -> V progression.  Okay, I haven’t exactly tried much to come up with anything else, but, well, I dunno, seems I like that progression for some reason.

Weird huh?
If I remember correctly, Pachabel’s Canon uses a similar progression, as well as the chorus of Fuwa Fuwa Time from K-On! [my piano version of the chorus; used crappy netbook microphone plus I know I stuffed up in the middle], so I guess it’s not too bad a sequence… Or perhaps, maybe I should try something more interesting some time.

F***ing Web Installers

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Why the f*** do some companies/people love web installers?  I mean, seriously, you download this 1MB installer, the only purpose of it being that it serves to download the real 21MB installer package.  Why can’t they just link to the installer package directly and eliminate this stupid intermediary step of downloading and running a web installer?

By the way, I wanted to download a new version of Skype to see if it resolved a weird issue I’ve been having, which is why I’m ranting.  It seems that Google loves to use web installers for Chrome too.

So why do I hate web installers?  Apart from seemingly offering nothing above traditional full package downloads (except maybe showing ads or similar) and the annoyance of having to download two things, it means you don’t actually have a copy of the installer locally.  That is, if you wish to reinstall a program, you need to download the damn thing again.  Or if you want to install it on a second computer, you can’t simply use an installer you’ve already downloaded (because the web installer usually deletes (or puts into a temp folder) the main installer package).

Also, our Uni has a fast internet connection (plus downloading from Google doesn’t count towards quota), so I like downloading Chrome from there, rather than through my slow home connection (and use up bandwidth).  Now, if you’ve got a web installer, this somehow becomes a little more difficult to do… (luckily Google actually does provide a standalone installer, though, conveniently, they don’t provide an easily findable link (well, I guess you can Google it)).

Now there are plenty of other reasons to hate web installers.  I’m sure there’s heaps more, but here’s a few:

  • Most don’t provide many options for selecting proxies; can also be an issue with some firewalls
  • More difficult, if not impossible, to use a download manager/accelerator
  • Some don’t even provide pausing functionality
  • Speed control can be more difficult (something a download manager like FDM could do)
  • Not really a direct fault of the web installer, but I find many mirrors actually mirror the web installer rather than the full installer, which means that if the server is down, or the link between you and the server is horribly slow, you’re kinda stuck

Now, I guess some applications, like Cygwin, it makes sense to have a web installer.  Having all Cygwin packages would be pretty big, and most people won’t even need anywhere near all of them.  In this case, it provides the benefit of reducing the amount of packages downloaded, though for apps like Chrome and Skype, this is stupid.
So please!  Please refrain from loving these stupid web installers so much!