From Twitter 02-10-2011

• 09:05:27: @jonk i've never heard of anyone here eating sardines & jam. There are eccentrics everywhere, of course.
  
• 09:06:33: RT @Phreak_Quency I do have to be up at 8am today :-( << Sounds like you're "up" now...
  
• 09:13:20: @dentalgaymer Happy birthday! Many happy returns of the day.
  
• 09:21:30: RT @ruskin147: @corfmeister @alicearnold1 loving your campaign to get @johnprescott to read shipping forecast....I'd pay to hear that...
  
• 13:22:16: It's easy being with people you like, but being with people you hate? That's a skill. -- Roy Chan
  
• 21:22:26: 7 year old benefactor supports LGBT equality http://bit.ly/f6LH4r There is joy and hope yet in this cold world.
  

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Today's great discovery

If you aren't into geekery, then perhaps you might want to skip this post.

For a while now, maybe a week, I have had difficulties with Thunderbird, Mozilla's email program. Up until the time I finally got my emails off the main computer and onto my netbook, I was doing OK. I had difficulty in transferring those emails, and did some tinkering with a Thunderbird file called profile.ini. Those of you who are as ancient as I will remember when DOS programs (remember DOS?) always came with an .ini file, which controlled various initial states of the program in question. config.ini was perhaps the most famous of these files.

So Thunderbird still uses a profile.ini file to control where it finds its, um, profile. The profile is not stored in the Program Files folder, it's stored in an area under Users, which would allow for several people to use Thunderbird on the same machine without falling all over each other.

In the course of my tinkering I found that there is a line in that file that looks like this:

Profile={profile address}

Now the people at Mozilla were crafty. They thought that people might want to place their profiles somewhere other than in Users. So, they had the possibility of two ways of entering the profile address. One was absolute, and one was relative. So, if my profile were in C:\Profiles\chris.profile, I would enter the line:

Profile=C:\Profiles\chris.profile

after telling Thunderbird that I wanted an absolute path to the profile.

However, if I wished to say that the profile was in the Thunderbird profile directory, and not use an absolute path, I would use a relative one:

Profile=.\Profiles\chris.profile

after telling Thunderbird that I wanted a relative path.

All of a sudden, last week I found that it was difficult to move emails into folders in groups. If I selected ten emails to move into a folder and then tried to move them with the mouse, nothing happened. Nada. Rien. Nihil.

If I downloaded emails from the server, I could not open them unless I exited Thunderbird and restarted it. I could not compact folders, and the Inbox folder (which needs to be compacted regularly) showed that it was holding something like "367% of 35.6MB".

Not good.

I stewed about this for about a week, but today I got a brainstorm. Instead of typing the relative path as I did above, I typed it:

Profile=Profiles\chris.profile

You will note that I removed the ".\" after the "Profile=" keyword. You will be delighted to know that this now works. It seems that while Mozilla believes that DOS-style .ini files are a good idea, it does not go so far as to parse DOS-style pathnames. Worse, instead of refusing to run and saying that it can't find the profile, it goes ahead and finds it but then doesn't allow certain operations to happen in it while allowing other things to happily continue to happen.

Is this a bug? Is this a feature? The jury's still out on that. I do know that this behaviour is not very intuitive and needs to be documented somewhere so that other people who are trying to bring their profiles over from another machine can do so without stumbling over this anachronism.

Fr Ray Comes Out

I just finished watching a TV program on Channel 4 called Fr Ray Comes Out. In it the Rev'd Ray Andrews, Priest in Charge of St. George the Martyr with St. Alphege & St. Jude at the Borough, just up the road from me, agonises about coming out to his parishioners in a Sunday sermon during Advent.

Ray is a truly nice guy, a good priest, loved by his parishioners, and very effective in what is a mixture of deprived council estates and luxury housing for stockbrokers in the City.

There is no official reaction from the Diocese shown in the film: Archdeacon Michael and Bishop Christopher weren't interviewed. It was a very personal journey for Ray.

Now you couldn't show something like this that didn't have a happy ending. He comes out of it a bit nervously, but the parishioners who were interviewed seemed to be positive, even though many of them had difficulties with the notion of homosexuality from a theological standpoint. It's always different when you know a gay person.

My networks in the deanery must be deficient, or else the news was kept very quiet. I shall have to ask Ethel, my friend who goes to weekday services over there, about it. (She got a cameo role for a moment or two.)

I'm having lunch with the Archdeacon on Tuesday so will ask about it. I know that Michael is comfortable with gay clergy, and the Diocese in general is comfortable with them. But will look for any fallout from the program and report.