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So I recently got a new laptop, and it came with XP Home, which as we all know, isn’t very cool. XP Home is the kid who pretended he didn’t want lunch, when in fact, he was simply too poor to eat. So I bought a copy of XP Media Center Edition (i.e.: The kid who always was showing off his “Lunchables”) to put on it. There are two interesting facts about this:

1. Windows XP MCE is windows Professional (the installer even says so), so it can join a domain, features all the user and security management tools, has file encryption, and Terminal Server built in. I don’t think Microsoft wants you to know this, though, as the full version of XP MCE costs $130 whereas the XP Pro costs $147 (prices from NewEgg).
2. Sony ships laptops with drivers that aren’t installable on XP MCE (at least, following instructions, I was unable to do so). So to upgrade, you have to upgrade to XP Professional, then “Repair” your Pro install with MCE.

So, I get my laptop all set up with XP Home and then realize that I don’t have Terminal Server/Remote Desktop, or file encryption (two things I like to have on my laptop). But I know that I have to do “#2″, above. What I need to do is back up my hard drive. Now, there are some ways to do this… like booting to knoppix and using `dd` to write it out to a samba share somewhere. But that’s annoying. What I need is an automated way to do it. And Norton Ghost costs money. Money I don’t want to spend, already having blown cash on a laptop and Windows.

Enter Partimage. Partimage is… well… read the site, fool! Basically it lets you back up your partitions, excluding free space, to a file, or to a server running their `partimaged` daemon. It understands most disk formats (XFS, Ext2, FAT, NTFS (experimental!)), can gzip/bzip2 your files, or span them across multiple chunks, and it can also restore the files, locally or from the server, at pretty amazing speeds (It takes about 5 minutes per gig, over a 100Mb network link). Though their NTFS support is “experimental” it backed up my disk and restored it just fine.

You can run it from the System Rescue CD to back up or restore, and it’s frickin’ SWEET. Most of all because it works, and that bastard in the pink shirt* doesn’t get any of my hard-earned cash.

Note: I see that the esteemed ESR has decided to move some terms out of the jargon lexicon. I’m one who believes that the Jargon File, being, after all, about Jargon, shouldn’t prune based on the “Jargonosity” of an entry, if at all. If we start removing historical references, all we’ll have left are entries like “intarweb” and “lunix” and “zomgroflbrbbbq” which is, well, stupid.

So today I made a fruitcake, based on the “Alton Brown” model, with a few subtle changes to bring it closer to the “pound cake” side of the “cake spectrum”… it turned out okay, though it was too “cake like” and not enough “brick like”. And, oddly, I find that the Alton Brown recipe doesn’t have nearly enough fruit. It needs more candied ginger, and… candied pineapple or something. Again-too much of the “cake” not enough of the “Brick”.

The other interesting thing I learned was that nuts really do taste better when you toast them a bit. When I was a kid, I hated nuts in cakes and such. …I positively abhored them in cookies. And only today did I realize that it’s because Mom didn’t know how to cook–of course, before Food Network, I’m not sure anyone in America knew how to cook, except Julia Child, and people thought she was crazy.

And I think that’s one of the problems with most American’s diets: they don’t have good food, so they simply do with more food. Though, these days, I think I see that turning around. A lot of my friends who have been fat have taken up cookery and things that verge more on cuisine to replace the mass amounts of flavorless junk they had previously been eating. Now, sure… sometimes you’ve got to eat a whole bucket of chicken wings and down a sixer of Pabst. Sure… once in a while. Hell–I just ate 3 no-bake cookies. (I had leftover nuts, so you see, I was obligated to make them!) But all in all, smaller portions of food that is actually worth tasting–not just shoveling in your maw–are healthier. I think maybe that’s the “magical secret” behind the alleged “healthy French” conundrum. Sure, the french may eat butter in everything, including their morning coffee, but since they don’t eat so incredibly much, they don’t turn into huge lumbering monstrosities, like your average midwesterner.

But, back to the cake… I had to subsitute dates for blueberries, and candy my own ginger , but these sort of first tries are my way of just figuring out how the thing works, so I can twist it to my will, and engineer the ultimate Yuletide Fruitwraith. The Fruitwraith will not stop until it has savaged your very taste-buds with its awesome spice-and-citrus punch–until it has consumed all of the space in your stomach–until it has aged to the point of unstoppable power, its dark engine powered by the same awful fuel that powered The Greats: Pollock, Bukowski, Dudley Moore.

This is my way of saying to you “I’ve watched too much of the Lord of the Rings recently”. Speaking of movies… …a friend of mine is judging the 2006 Metro Shorts - Detroit Film Competition/Festival. If you find yourself having produced a movie with an artistically redeeming quality, either by design or by accident ( …long… …drawn-out accident… ), I entreat you to submit it therein. You could very well be the next “That guy who directed Napoleon Dynamite”. Or you could end up being laughed out of the theatre for your animated short based on the secret life of cupcakes. Though, having known a fellow who made a movie about the secret life of a cupcake, I think it’s just that nobody understands your genius. Maybe Stoppard would, or… surely Beckett….

note: my wife hates Beckett, especially “Endgame“. I didn’t mind it, mostly because I enjoy the absurd, but also because I imagined the entire play being performed by muppets. My wife specifically complained that she thought that people living in ash cans was stupid. But… I think we all could name a trash-can-resident muppet.

This story starts, as so few do, with my need to access my mail on the web….

At first, I needed it so I could check my mail while I was doing the “finding yourself in Europe” bit. (For the record, I found myself, and I wasn’t quite so fat and boring as the fellow looking for me.) I ran some nasty java webmail program on Tomcat. It was perfectly hideous and, about three weeks in, gave up the ghost and started losing my messages. Needless to say, after a few days, most of them were nervous missives from my girlfriend at the time. I got home okay, well, better than okay, actually, but that’s not the point. I decided I hated webmail. It was silly… Mail… over the web. Didn’t god give us telnet for a reason? That reason was to type in IMAP commands.

…I got over that, too–shortly after getting over servlet containers and my girlfriend. I was, you see, too pretty for both of them. Especially that “java” with its “tomcat” and silly things like “coccoon” and “turbine pools“.

I moved on to SquirrelMail* because the new girlfriend needed to read the mail on the domain I set up for her, and she couldn’t do the cool thing and use ssh tunneling to set up an RDP connection to her laptop at home because she works for, I dunno, nazis or something…

I chose SquirrelMail based on a friend’s recommendation, and because it had the simplest requirements. I made this choice even though it uses the dreaded PHP (spits). In addition to using that much-reviled scripting language, SquirrelMail is ugly. It’s like… HTML 3.2 ugly. Netscape 4 ugly. Fred Savage ugly. It’s not pretty, is what I’m trying to get across here.

So I was reading arstechnica, and someone mentions roundcube, which is nifty. It uses the CSS, and the DHTML sauce all the kids are into. It also looks pretty. And, hey, it uses PostgreSQL or SQLite (I simply don’t roll with mySQL, you see).

Except, it doesn’t REALLY work with PostgreSQL. The CVS version does, but it has a broken creation script. It creates a message header column as a varchar(128). I don’t know about you, but my headers are significantly longer than 128 characters. So you have to go in and alter your columns. Well, okay, I’ll use SQLite. Except, I use Fedora Core 4. Which ships with PHP5. Now, usually PHP5 HAS SQLite2, but the fine folks at Fedora think that SQLite3 is what you want, so they remove SQLite support from the php they package.

…So back to the CVS source with me.

So now that I have it running, Roundcube is nice. I like the UI, I like the look, it’s all very slick. But it needs a “preview message”, and better Unicode support.

Oh, and, this is my most important point. Roundcube is an IMAP mail client. IMAP allows you access to your mail in a way that is very database like. Your mail is stored on the server, and you can retrieve headers, subjects, status, and so forth. All very neat and tidy: everything is represented by the IMAP server itself. So… I ask you… why does Roundcube need a database anyway? It actually saves your email to a table. What the Hell?! I got IMAP so I had all my mail saved already… in IMAP. This is what we call “duplication of effort” and it’s nuts. I could see having a small need for saving user preferences. Squirrelmail does this, in a directory. With prefs files. That makes sense to me. I think this proves a corrolary to Zawinski’s law: All programs that have expanded to read mail will eventually also expand to require an RDBMS to function.

*(Honestly, people, where do you GET these names?! “Tomcat”, “SquirrelMail”? “Firefox”? …I’ve got a friend to just refers to all of these with random animal names “yeah, is the new FireStoat ThunderGerbil out yet?”. I think my favorite is the GIMP. Ask yourself, what the hell does the GIMP do? Do you want to know? Is it wholesome? Could you recommend it to your grandmother?)