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Outdoor: Recumbing Running
Software: jnitodo squidefender Wormwarner
Latest books read: Lincoln Child - Deep Storm Lee Child - The Hard Way Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival Preston & Child - Still Life with Crows
Latest movies seen: Death Race The Objective Deception Hellboy - The Golden Army

23 September 2008

20:55: Today it is 5 years ago that I registered the jeroen.se domain.
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25 August 2008

17:46: Since a few weeks I use the jnitodo todo list manager for managing my todo list. jnitodo was written by myself, so it matches my requirements quite well and it might match yours!
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13 August 2008

12:51: Yesterday I ran into a bug in my Samsung S1060 digital camera. If you press the view photos button while the red-eye flash pictogram is flashing white and red it hangs and becomes unresponsive.
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11 August 2008

12:59: While migrating my account to another machine which uses openldap authentication I ran into the problem that cron were not working on the new machine. A quick look in the logs revealed the following error:
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29 July 2008

17:50: I often get the question how I manage to survive my long commute time during the week. This question is often raised when in a conversation it becomes clear that I travel over 4 hours per day by train. In this blog post I will try to give a small insight in how I manage this.
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09 July 2008

13:23: Just a quick blog post about how to run a command like uptime in more than one screen window. Just do crtl-a then
:at "#" stuff "uptime\015"
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28 June 2008

21:58: I just reached the 1000 kilometer mark with my recumbent bike. It took me 46 hours and 24 minutes, averaging a 21.55 km/h speed. The last month however my average cycling speed is increasing, so I should do the next 1000 kilometer in less time.
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Things I hate in email

By Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen

After email for years somethings people do when emailing me irritates me a lot, because it makes reading mail for me harder. This article discusses why I hate those things, and why you will end up in a filter when you are irritating.

HTML mail

One thing that is very annoying is HTML only mail. Half of the time I read my mail using ssh and mutt, which by default can not read HTML only mail. This makes it harder for me to read my email. In fact I have to save your message to a file and read it in on a reply, because I am to lazy to insert a html to plain text filter (My choice).

The norms of internet communication are that email interaction takes place by means of plain text messages, when you are sending HTML only mail you are rude, because you ignore the preference of the recipient (He, that's me). And I still don't understand why I should read mail from rude people.

No in Reply or Reference headers when replying

I use threading to sort my email. This makes it easier to find the context back when reading and replying to a mail discussion. RFC 2822 also specifies that email SHOULD have an In Reply header and Reference header when an email is a reply. When a client does not add those headers my thread sorting breaks, which eliminates almost completely the sorting I use for convenience. Hence I send all those messages directly to the broken box. The filter is quite simple:

:0
* ^Subject:.*[Rr][Ee]:
* !^In-Reply-To:
* !^References:
/usr/home/jnieuwen/Maildir/.broken/

Is all that is needed somewhere in your .procmailrc file.

Quoting wrong

Well this is easy to explain. Quoting the wrong way makes email hard to read, so by quoting wrong you are wasting my time. Why it is wrong is also very good illustrated by the following example:
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Quoting wrong is so irritating when having to deal with large volumes of email that I even wrote a wrong quote filter to avoid wrong quoted email to reach my mailbox. Finnaly note that RFC 1855 specifies how you should quote.

Lines longer then 80 characters

I normally have my windows maximized. When you are not using newlines after 80 characters lines become to long which makes mail hard to read. Research has proved that lines that can not be viewed without moving the head are uncomfortable to read.

No Subject

Some people just don't put a subject in their mail message. This creates problems when quickly scanning your inbox for a particular message. There are just no indications what the message is about. So it is very tempting to regard such messages as not interesting.

Conclusion

In fact all this above comes down to one thing, I hate it when people make it harder to read and reply to mail because they think they don't have to follow the norm when sending mail.

...I hate it when people make it harder to read and reply to mail...

Everything I say on these pages are opinions, they are not necessarily the truth.
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© 2002 - 2008 Ir. Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen
I know I'm not perfect but I can smile.