Moving to mutt

I've been a long time Thunderbird user for reasons I don't entirely understand.

T-bird replaced Evolution for me after I couldn't stand that any more, and it was certainly a step up, but its never been more than tolerable. It liked to freeze for 15 seconds while it was busy, and it never quite did threading the way I wanted. Message formatting could be a pain too, which was often embarrassing, and lead to my ultimately being coaxed into giving mutt another look. So, for the past 5 hours, I've been a mutt user.

It's pretty ok.

I like getting rid of the mouse, as always, but there's still some things in the UI I'm missing:

1. The list of folders I get with c? doesn't show me which ones have new messages.


2. Changing folders is agonizingly slow, even with a local header cache. I probably don't need a 140,000-message archive of lkml for the past few months, but why can't I have it?


3. No Thunderbird means no Lightning, so now I need calendar software. Not really mutt's fault, but something to consider. I'll also need a new RSS feed reader.

Its definitely lighter and faster, and email in vim is a huge win, but its going to take some time before it really flows for me.

"Right-click-Save-As" notices considered harmful

Look at this web page. Now ignore for a moment the lack of CSS and general web-0.1 feel, and you'll notice an offence against one of my biggest pet peeves: a request that we "right click and save as."

I've seen it on all manner of website, with all manner of professional graphic artistry surrounding it, and I'd like to set the record straight: this instruction is a completely unnecessary inconvenience to the user.

The UI complaints against the action are obvious: we're asking the user to interact in a completely unintuitive way to do something they expect to be straight forward. "Click link, receive file" is the user's instinct, and the extra, awkward step can only trip them up. This isn't news; nobody wants their site to work this way. The problem is nobody is communicating that there is a better alternative.

Suppose we have a site with a large number of movies/documents/text files/et cetera in a downloads folder that we'd like to make sure always get offered to the user as a download rather than content in the browser window. All we need is a little Apache configuration like so:

<Directory>
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</Directory>

Now anything served out of that folder will prompt the user for a download location and be saved to their hard drive by the browser. It works just about everywhere. Even IE mostly gets it right (one exception and more configuration examples here).

For web application writers, just add "Content-Disposition: attachment" to your headers by whatever means your language/framework of choice prefers when you want your generated page to be downloaded rather than displayed.

This has been here for over a decade and people still don't seem to have figured it out. Tell your friends! Stop abusing your users! Together, we can end poor understanding of HTTP features.

Japan Linux Symposium

I was saving this post for when I had the pictures from my trip online, but Flickr is fighting me on that front, so I'm just going to have to wing it.

JLS was my first time out of the US. Tokyo was everything I imagined, and I'm already trying to find a way to go back. Its a fantastic city.

There weren't quite as many familiar faces at JLS as there were at other conferences I've been to, which was a nice excuse to make friends. I did bump into Marcel (who seems to update his blog less than I do :) and Dougsland (who seems to have no linkable internet presence), but I found myself shaking a lot more strangers' hands. I did manage to chat a little with Matz (who I assume has a blog somewhere, but here's his wikipedia for now). I thanked him for showing me how bad Java was.

Most of the technical bits of the conference seemed to be about tracing tools. Ftrace came up in 3 separate talks. I got the sense this had to do with how Linux is used in Japan. Getting quicker resolutions to problems was a big deal.

I mention "technical bits" of the conference because there seemed to be a slightly larger than average number of non-technical talks; particularly open source evangelism. This was probably the strangest thing about JLS: the sense that the Open Source way hadn't yet been embraced by the audience. Japan's industry knows Linux is something they want, but open source is strange to most of them, and getting them comfortable with free software was a continual theme.

On the Upstart front: I've been hacking on everything from a new config parser (the old one was a bit hairy) to the beginnings of the increasingly stabilized 1.0 semantics, to a few niceties for 0.6 that should help to get Fedora moved over in the interim. I'll try to detail those 1.0 semantics in a coming post, and I'll have more about my travels in Tokyo when I get the pictures online.