Well, I’m still in the middle of the redesign. Actually we’re still missing the about and search pages and also some Amazon integration backend features. However, I’m quite busy with some other things, so I think I won’t get to these challanges till the end of October.
Just wanted to say to you: I apologize for any inconvinience. Please bear with me as I’m trying to get some things down my desk that need to get out during the next two weeks. Thank you for your patience!
Today they finally released the German language Debian package for Mozilla Thunderbird v0.8 and I took the opportunity to upgrade. While I haven’t worked with the new version very much, yet, I am already very pleased with the new release – although the overall look and feel of the application didn’t change that much.
First the possibility of having a global inbox is a good idea. When I switched from Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird earlier this year (you guess it: I was still on Windows then) the idea of having an own inbox for each pop3 account was a thing that I really hated. I have to admit that I really like the idea now as I use it to seperate my business and private mail. However many Outlook users might find it useful to configure Thunderbird to behave in a way they are familiar with.
Additionally the global inbox option makes it possible to direct emails from certain mailboxes to the inbox of another mailbox. This way I can direct emails from our company’s uplink provider, that arrive on a seperate mail account, directly to the inbox of my business mail account. As a result I can fold in the uplink info account and get some additional real screen estate back. Also I don’t have to monitor serveral accounts constantly.
Second I just found out, that they finally added an interface to the multiple identities feature. I don’t know if they added it only recently or if it’s availlable in v0.7 also, but that doesn’t seem to matter much. However, I’m now able to save additional screen estate. In earlier versions of Thunderbird I added additional accounts for each address I needed to send mail from. Now I just have my private account with additional identities for my mailing list addresses and my office account with additional identities for serveral different department’s addresses I need to use from time to time.
Third I see that they refined the search bar. That’s a good idea. I figured it out in no time, but less experienced users, we needed to provide support for, were quite surprised when we asked them how they liked the great message search features of Thunderbird.
Unfortunately I experienced one downside after the upgrade. The Enigmail extension’s Debian package hadn’t been upgraded to the new version of Thunderbird and so it was automatically uninstalled during the upgrade. Sorry to disappoint you, K., but I will install the correct version by hand later today (You guess it: This was a personal and private message for the person that launched the Projekt Secure Mail only recently).
The headline says it all.
Deutschland hat ewigen Bestand,
Es ist ein kerngesundes Land.
Mit seinen Eichen, seinen Linden,
Werd’ ich es immer wiederfinden.
Heinrich Heine, German poet (1797 – 1856)
The loneliness of being German, as The Guardian puts it, made me think. Here in Germany people tend to criticise all the American patriotism by saying: If we would do that we would all be entitled as “Nazis”. And in fact those people are right. However they would not be entitled as “Nazis” by people of other countries, but by their own people. And that’s the point. Germans think they are in fear of others, but in fact they are in fear of themselves. They are in fear of being remembered of things they want to forget.
I told them that I had been called a Kraut and a Nazi as a child, that I had been put on trial by other children and that I had also denied being German. I told them I had the feeling that being German was a forbidden identity, that I still have difficulty saying “we Germans” and would rather just say I was Irish. I asked them what they would say if they went on holiday and people called them Krauts and Nazis. Do you ignore it? Or do you make a joke of it and say “I’m a Kraut, and I’m proud”, like the great moment in the film of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments.
And here the Germans go again. Again they are remembered when travelling abroad. Of things they would rather like to undo, to somehow turn back the clock and change the world. Of things that seem false now, but of which you have no chance of making them forgotten. When I refer to “the Germans” in this post, I should rather write “we Germans”, but like the author of the Guardian article, who has a German-Irish origin, who is lucky because he at least has another nationality to fall back to if he is asked where he comes from, I’m in fear of writing “we Germans” and I’d rather like to go on writing “the Germans” and tell you to include myself with “them”.
In fact this summer was the first time I travelled around England and have not been entitled someone, who want[s] to own the world. Those things remeber us Germans – and now I really made it to reffering to “the Germans” as “us Germans” unintentionally – of times we want to forget. I mean, what should I say to the English veteran sitting next to me in the pub? That was even before my mother was born., I once said to one of them. But you used to., he said. Yes, maybe we used to, I thought to myself. And then: Luckily we actually never did! But I was somehow afraid of saying that. I mean, you are accused of doing something that your grandfather has done. Is that right? On the other hand, I am a German and so I have to live with that. I even can’t be angry about the English veteran. It seems like it is his right to remember me of the things that happened – at any time he wants to, in any English pub I go to. At least he was the one who helped freeing my country. However I hope you see the problem, you’re in as a German. You’re young, you’ve been educated to the means, that what we did was a thing, that was so horrible, it could never be made forgotten. You don’t want to be connected to the ideology of “Nazis” at home – and you don’t want to be connected to “Nazis” abroad. That’s why you try to hide your identity and are always in fear of the reaction of the foreign person sitting next to you, when it comes down to the question of Where do you come from?. I could lie to these questions and say I was from Austria or Switzerland, but you know what? I’m still German and somehow I never made it. I could actually never tell someone, that I was a Swiss guy. At least I admit that I did something wrong ages ago – although I have never done it myself. Maybe that is a positive sign.
The author of the Guardian article has his own positive signs he was able to find in our hopeless situation. See for yourself. Did I already say you should really read this article?
Maybe there is no such thing as a German national consciousness. Maybe the whole question of sovereignty is an anachronism and that the Germans have become the first true internationalists, with global tastes, speaking fluent English, at home everywhere in the world. But if nationhood is obsolete then so is identity. It would mean that there is no such thing as being German and that they possess no individuality, only the surrogate identities of Guinness T-shirts and being Irish in Irish pubs. Perhaps the Germans are in the process of going into exile, emigrating into a new global identity.
PapaScott has the news: Der, die, das Weblog. Duden evaluates, which article to use with the new word “Weblog”.
Dear Duden editorial staff, I vote for these:
Thank you!
I’ve just created a page that displays my PGP key my PGP key. It still needs some tweaking, though.
Die Bezirksregierung Braunschweig Dezernat 304 verkauft ein Polizei-Kfz
I’ll just quote this one:
Hinweis: Bei dieser Auktion handelt es sich um einen so genannten Privatverkauf, daher ist die Gewährleistung ausgeschlossen.
Ladies and Gents: This is not a joke! See the press release of the Braunschweig Police Department for more details.
Maciej Ceglowski demands four minutes and twenty seconds of your life. This one is a highly recommended reading (ehm, sorry, I mean listening).
What’s a trend, by the way? For me blogging is not a trend. Mobile phones are no trend either. “Why?”, you might ask. Well, the answer is, it’s actually not a trend, because it will last. There will always be bloggers and there will always be mobile phones in the world of humans. Even in 100 years. I’m quite shure of that, believe me. But what is a trend, then? Again, hear my glory answer: A trend is something, that is cool for some time, but after any given period of time a trend will slowly fade out of our society at regular intervals. Remember the Skyper? That was cool, wasn’t it? People used it all over Germany just a few years ago. I think it was around 1995-1997 or so. Now you can buy them at Ebay. I’ll dig deeper into that one at a later date, if I remember. That could be a Dave Winer topic, I think. On the other hand, I’m not that entrepreneur type of guy I would have needed to be to claim that.
WIRED: It’s been more than a month since the first news of Download.Ject, and you still haven’t issued a real fix for Internet Explorer. How long is it going to take?
TOULOUSE: The first step was to block this specific attack. The malicious software was being delivered from a server in Russia. We worked with law enforcement to get that shut down. And our product teams released an update that blocked the downloads that Ject had hacked. It was not specifically a security update for Internet Explorer. We’re still working on that.
WIRED: Meanwhile, Firefox and Opera look awfully appealing.
TOULOUSE: Security is really an industry-wide problem. Just this morning I had to install an update to Firefox to block a flaw that would’ve allowed an attacker to run a program on my system. We’re working around the clock to make Internet Explorer safer, and we’re making changes with our Windows XP Service Pack 2 to make browsing a lot more secure.
Quoted from: Wired Magazine: View – Microsoft’s War on Bugs