phatness.com - still kickin

Driving me nuts.

If you are a developer on OS X and you are customer of JetBrains using IDEA the Java IDE, it is a cloudy year for you!

There are two critical bugs that haven't been fixed in over 6 months since being reported to JetBrains. IDEA enabled my fulltime switch to OS X and now it is unusable after 4 - 5 open files or half a work day. Whichever comes first.

Check it out:

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, who I have mucho respect for, linked to an article about how the Java support in the lastest version of Mac OS X is terrible. He then makes a very irresponsible statement:
"I fail to see why anyone (other than Java developers themselves) would care."

The problem with this statement is that you should care. Why? Well, because you are a Mac user. It will take a bit to explain. Humor me.

There are many upon many businesses out there that support the Mac platform ONLY because their Java applications will run on a Mac. But this isn't the complete reason. Hear me out.

Now, these businesses aren't Google, Microsoft, or IBM. You probably haven't heard the names of these businesses, let alone the names of the software they provide. They certainly aren't household names, and your mom and dad aren't using their applications. But they do represent a significant base of development energy. These are the guys that make it possible for the little guys and the medium guys to do business.

If you run your own IMAP server or if you use Thunderbird, you may have run into the problem where there are just too many emails in your folder and you need to delete them.

It seems that at a certain threshold of emails, trying to delete your email through any normal IMAP client is just impossible. I first had this happen when I was mail bombed with about 3000 emails. For some reason, Thunderbird just couldn't handle deleting them. I would select all the messages in my inbox and hit delete. Then it would sit there for hours just spinning.

My first thought was that this was a server problem. To troublshoot it, I created a groovy script to run through my inbox and delete the messages. It worked and actually finished it in 5 minutes! So it appears there is definitely a problem with Thunderbird and other clients.

Just a few days ago I had the same problem again. Only this was on a much larger scale. Due to a configuration problem in my postfix mail server, I had over 190,000 emails sent to my inbox in a matter of 36 hours. Yikes!

I ran the script and it took about 12 hours in total to finish it. Without it, I would just have had to delete the entire account and loose all of my email. And manually going through and deleting all that email would be impossible for all practical purposes.

The script was more than just a straight forward connect and delete. Committing the changes on 10,000 emails usually kills your IMAP server. To get around this, it processes a few then disconnects and reconnects. This is slower, but works.

Attached is the script if you run into this problem.

This is pretty cool.

P4Java

It's a java API for integrating with Perforce SCM servers. It's supposed to take the place of P4Package, the Perforce provided API.

I like the fact that its extensible and open source.

Appearance is everything and I hate it when I have to deal with applications that are designed to sub par standards. A great example of this is the Windows Command Prompt. While not as bad as the lack of a fully integrated bash shell, the fact that I'm looking at fonts created in 1991 or earlier really doesn't make the experience any better.

Read more to find out how to change the available fonts in the Windows Command Prompt.