Arrghhhh! You go to look at your gmail with Thunderbird (or Shredder if you’re running the TB3 beta) and it just spins and spins and hangs up and you can no longer access your email via Thunderbird. I’ve had this happen with several versions of Thunderbird and I thought I’d tried everything – kill the account and reinstall, try a new profile, etc etc. Nothing worked.

This last time, I also got the message

The current command did not succeed… The mail server responded: No messages match. (Failure).”

Finally, that let me find an answer at MozillaZine and Google Groups. I had never seen this suggested before and it’s so easy.

• Put the cursor over the Inbox in the offending account and right click (Windows) and select “Properties”
  

  Mailbox Properties

• Then just click the Rebuild Index button
  

  Mailbox Properties Dialog

I wish I had known that a couple years ago!

Indexing with Word is pretty good. You go to places in text that you want in the index, enter the text you want to appear in the index, push a button and shazam, an index, all aphabetical and formatted and everything. In theory. But I’ve had a strange problem in Word 2000. I was creating an index and some entries were missing. I went looking and realized they were in the index, but completely out of place. This is what the faulty index looks like when it’s generated by Word. Note the out of order entries in bold.

Floutet, Aima, 294
Floutetta. Vr Monthouz, Aima (dite la Floutetta)
Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami, 111, 164, 176, 515
Dentrue, Jeanne (fl. d’Emery, 357
Folliet, Pierre, 27

After tearing my hair out for a while I noticed a clue. See it? I finally noticed that the parentheses weren’t closed on the out of order items. When I looked, I realized that the markup in the actual text, that is the entry that is supposed to end up in the index in the first case was

Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard)

So at least in Word 2000, if you try to index text with a semicolon in it, it truncates everything from the semicolon on (the text in bold). That part just gets completely cut off and doesn’t show up in the generated index, but it isn’t entirely discarded. Note in particular what it’s done: it is now indexed alphabetically according to the truncated text that is now invisible. In other words, I tell it to index Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard), which I expect to appear like that under Mai, but instead it appears as
Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami and gets filed under Fm. Very strange behavior. I suppose I could use it to set an alternate order to my index. I can think of hundreds of situations where I would want to do this. Oh wait a minute, maybe not.

I wonder if Microsoft has fixed this in the intervening eight years. Since there’s nothing in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, I’m guessing it’s still not fixed unless there was a total rewrite of indexing and it got fixed by accident, but I don’t think there’s been a total rewrite of Word for a long, long time.

If you arrive here because you had the same problem in a newer version of Word, please leave a comment. For that matter, if you’ve tested it in another version of Word and the problem doesn’t exist, please leave a comment to that effect. Just curious.

I am an absolute Roboform lover. It’s gotten to the point that my wife and I can’t bear to use a computer without having Roboform on it and now own three licenses between us. My wife really likes the Google Chrome browser, but refuses to use any browser that doesn’t have Roboform integration. If you’re like us and you do most of your banking, pay your bills, lots of shopping and so on, you have dozens of logins. If so, it’s just painful to surf the web without Roboform.
How to set Roboform default logins. Read on » »

[Update: one commenter said that s/he objected to the high memory usage of this fix. Now there's a version 2 out that will take between .3 and 1.5 MB instead of 7MB or more. See my second comment (third overall).]

I started working on a new/old laptop (new to me, but was my wife’s before her employer bought her a work-dedicated machine). Yeah, my old laptop was pretty much unusable at this point (like go make a cup of tea while waiting for it to switch from a Firefox window to a Word window). Great! Except for one annoying thing: over in the task bar, the tooltips are partially or fully hidden. Sometimes this is marginally annoying (as in the example below). Sometimes the tool tip is so covered over by the system tray that you can’t even read the message box so if you don’t know which icon you’re looking for, you can’t find it. Uggh! How to fix hidden tooltips in Windows » »

Some stuff is worth paying for. Some stuff isn’t. But some stuff is worth paying for and it’s free anyway! Here’s my favorite free applications. The free software I would hate to live without. See the list » »

By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. What is more annoying is legitimate popups that are actually useful, but which are very unfriendly. Heres how to tame them in Firefox. Fix popup annoyances in Firefox. Read the simple solution» »

I’ve always wanted to be able to try out Apple’s Safari browser, but I’ve never really had the chance since I own a Windows computer and don’t plan on buying another one anytime soon (though my next computer might be an Apple). So now Apple has released Safari in beta for Windows. Excellent! Or maybe not.
Read why Safari is not installed on my machine » »

I totally messed things up with a botched uninstall of Adobe CS3. Basically, all I was trying to do was get rid of the absurd and unnecessary Version Cue Server, which absolutely should not be installed, and Version Cue, which should not be a default option. I was hoping it might help my group manage collaboration on InDesign documents, but it is not appropriate for what we want (I want real concurrent versioning for Word or InDesign, but I don’t think it’s possible). So anyway, I got stuck in this thing where I had some parts of CS3 removed, which was causing other parts to fail, but I could neither repair the installation nor remove the apps. So I was stuck. What follows is what I did step-by-step to get unstuck. Fix your bad CS3 install » »