The trouble concerned the Javascripty popups used to insert links and images.

Yesterday they didn’t work.

Today they do.

Problem solved, it appears.

So when I do get in the interface, I tend to want to change things for change’s sake. Hence the new theme.

At least that’s the way it looks right now in Firefox 3.6.x for PowerPC Mac. Running TenFourFox — the Firefox 4.x code built for PowerPC Macintosh — seems to help.

I was able to easily bring all the messages from my Windows Thunderbird install into my OpenBSD Thunderbird, and now all of my e-mail is in one place.

The reason for this was switching over from IMAP to POP because I was (and am)  not comfortable leaving my mail on the server and want to have it all on my local drive (and backed up to CDs/DVDs).

To consolidate my two Thunderbird archives into one, I took the whole local directory from one, burned it to a CD, moved it to the other PC and then used ImportExport Tools to bring the folders into my current Thunderbird local directory one by one. Once I had the new folders in my new Thunderbird install, I then distributed the messages to the appropriate folders and deleted the temporary folders I created to hold the transferred mail.

I continue to think that this import-export function should be done wholly in Thunderbird with Mozilla-maintained code, but having an add-on that works is better than nothing at all.

Using IMAP, as I did for a few years, allows for quite a bit of flexibility, since the mail stays on the server and I can use any number of clients to access it from any number of machines.

To give me some added flexibility now that I’m POP-ping the mail down to one computer, I have Thunderbird configured to keep the last 10 days’ worth of mail on the server so I can use my mail service’s Web interface at any time to see all the mail in the past 10 days.

The one problem with this 10-day solution is that any e-mail I write in Thunderbird goes into the Sent file on my local machine and is never on the server. To get around this, if I write an e-mail that I’d like to have access to via the Web address, I BCC it to myself so it goes on the server as well.

I do the same thing if I write an e-mail in the Web interface, copying myself so I have it both on the server and in my local directory.

Before I close, I should say that I chose Thunderbird as my mail client because I’d been using it for a few years (and was comfortable with it) and because it’s a cross-platform app that runs in Windows, Linux, Mac OS and every BSD. I really like any app I can easily get in every OS I run (or might run).

For a normal Web server with nothing but HTML pages (and no PHP, Perl/CGI), OpenBSD couldn’t be an easier system to use. It’s when things get more complicated that this that the non-OpenBSD geek is especially challenged.

But as I say, there is a WordPress port for OpenBSD, as well as WordPress packages for GNU/Linux systems such as Debian. I also seem to remember talk about a Movable Type package for Debian Lenny, and if it made the installation and configuration of the blogging system easier, I’d be all for it.

As it is now, between installing and configuring MySQL (or PostgreSQL), making sure PHP and Perl are running and getting all the directory permissions correctly set, putting together one of these blogging systems, even on Linux, is no trivial matter. The last time I set up Movable Type, all the MySQL issues I was having prompted me to dump it and use SQLite as my database software. At least MT gives you some options in this regard.

I know there’s a reason why this project uses Movable Type, and I’ll probably figure it out eventually, but in the mean time, I remain baffled by all that is MT.

The problem being that I can hardly keep track of anything that I didn’t write and post instantly. I’ve got three notebooks, each a different size (one “moleskin” type book, though no skins were harmed in its making; one composition book; one steno notepad), and a number of computers ($15 Laptop, $0 Laptop, converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, Dell Optiplex GX520, iBook G4), have of which change Linux distros as often as most people change underwear (that’s daily, for those of you not following), with /home partitions constantly moving, being deleted and otherwise being ignored.

So the theory is that by centralizing everything on Google Docs, I can better keep track of what is where, what is going where and what went where. That’s the theory anyway.

And while I’m on the subject, it’s time for me to make complete backups of all my blogs, especially Click, which has the most posts and is on a server that is nowhere near as reliable as those of Google or WordPress. The great thing about WordPress, as far as backups go, is the ability to export the entire blog as XML. For Google, and probably for Movable Type, I’ll just have to save monthly archives going all the way back

But I haven’t been the most prolific blogger of late. It all began when the esteemed, highly qualified individuals who run the insidesocal.com blogs (including Click) decided that the best way to stop DNS-level spam attacks was to put an IP block on the entire European continent, costing me every link I could hope to get for Linux-related material (yep, Linux and FOSS is huge in Europe; where else would they even think of publishing “Debian Fur Dummies”?).

So I stopped pimping Click and started this blog, also throwing items to the great LXer. Losing Distrowatch as a source of links to reviews of Linux and BSD distros was probably the biggest blow. So I’ve pretty much been not caring about traffic on Click, which hovers at a steady 150-250 a day.

But since this is gOS test, I figured I’d use it’s version of Gparted. It’s as lousy at reading the partition table in a timely manner as the version in Puppy. Has nobody but me noticed this? It makes Gparted all but unusable.

Not that commercial applications don’t have soul-killing bugs in them, but Gparted has been screwed up for so long now, won’t anybody fix it already? It’s the same thing as the Ted word processor in Debian. I’ve checked — all the dependencies are there. But you can neither open nor create a file in Ted. The RTF word processing app works fine in Damn Small Linux (where it’s the main WP app) and in Puppy (where it is an easily-added package). But it’s useless in Debian. Like Gparted in … just about everything.

But the bright side is that I discovered the Gparted and Partition Magic live CDs. I heard that development on PM is going to cease, and that would be a very bad thing, indeed. Hopefully somebody else will take up the mantle and either continue Partition Magic or start their own live CD focused on partitioning hard drives. That’s the beauty of open source: out of the ashes, a new project can always arise.

Anyhow, I deleted all the partitions from my drive, and I’m waiting the <em>next</em> half-hour for Gparted to scan the drive again so I can create new ones.

P.S. Even though Gparted takes so long to scan the drive, it makes changes to the partitions as quickly as it ever did.