Author: koalie

E-mail stuck in Outbox

For the past couple of months I’ve been annoyed with Opera e-mail sometimes being stuck in Outbox, at the “Authenticating” stage. Sometimes. Hence the annoyance. Sometimes it works fine for days. And sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know what triggers it. I wish I knew 🙂 Assuredly I can’t be the only one experiencing this! I’ve looked and searched the Web, forums, Opera knowledge base and support pages.

I’m using Opera 9.64 on mac OS X 10.5.7 and outgoing e-mail talks to an SMTP server over TLS.

I just found a workaround that is not very satisfactory, but good enough so long as it does the trick: disconnect/reconnect wi-fi, try again, worky. <sigh />

I also found that even if the stuck message is removed from the Outbox, Opera will eventually deliver it. Sadly the original timestamp is not kept. So if I found another way to send that message, people will still receive it again. Later. <re-sigh />

I changed how Opera handles e-mail a couple of months ago, so that might be it. I used to ssh to a machine and Opera talked to localhost to pop and send.

Associations mots / images

En passant devant un cordonnier ce matin, je me suis rappelé qu’étant petite, j’associais l’image d’un cordonnier qui rafistolait des chaussures au mot “coordonnées”. D’ailleurs, je croyais que le métier c’était “coordonnier”, et lorsque ma mère parlait de “donner ses coordonnées”, je ne voyais vraiment pas le rapport.

Je me souviens d’une autre association rigolotte datant de la même époque, peu ou prou. C’était lorsque mon père courait après mon frère et moi, en nous menaçant d’une raclée, l’image que j’avais en tête était celle du papa courant en cercle derrière ses enfants, une clé démesurée a la main. Ça m’amusait au moins autant que ça nous amusait de faire courir mon père, qui lui aussi s’amusait à nous courir après. (Avertissement: La raclée n’était qu’un pretexte au jeu, pas une menace réelle.)

Fixed iCal 24-hour input problem

Since the Leopard (OS 10.5) upgrade, and until yesterday, I was quite reluctant to use iCal, for at least two reasons. Adding a new event no longer made appear the box of options, and second, it was time-consuming, after double or triple clicking on the entry, to figure out how best to input a start and end time in the box of options. For example, typing 14 in the hour field would instantly transform into 16. The up and down arrows were what I ended up using most of the time, because extending the event box with the mouse was not exactly accurate.

The reason is that I’m using custom time and date settings, a recipe that is just right for me (living in France and using English as work language) and that I spent a fair amount of time crafting and refining several years ago. I was loathe to have to touch it so as to compensate that fact that Apple had coupled iCal with input from international/regions preferences.

How easy the solution was: Open the System Preferences, look for International, select the Formats tab, look for the Times section, click on the “customize…” button, click on the hour and select “0-23” from the drop down menu. OK. Quit System Preferences. That is it.

This is not for you

There’s a house I like on the way between home and work and it’s for sale. So I looked up the realtor’s website and the price is EUR 870000. I didn’t go “ouch!” until I converted to French Francs. 5.7M! Ouch!

I’ve had the Pearl Jam song “this is not for you” in my head since then.