Armageddon Days

Bit political, bit religious. Armageddon Days are Here (Again).

Spamalot

I went to see Spamalot last night in London.  It was an amazing show, happily sending up everything, especially itself.  I would happily go and see it again.  And again.  And again.

Nina Söderquist made a fantastic Lady of the Lake, the petulant diva of the show (well, along with Lancelot…).  Steven Kynman (Historian, Not Dead Fred, lead Minstrel and Prince Herbert) was also excellent, as was Andrew Spillett, who played Patsy (King Arthur’s “horse”).  Alan Dale, who played King Arthur, was a little wooden.  He was fine, but didn’t blow me away.

A special mention has to go to Ian Waller (”Swing”, which I think means dancers), who was the only person to write his biography in the spirit of the show (it starts “Ian started dancing at 7 but by 8.45 was back in bed thinking up a new career”).  Everyone else is far to serious.

The programme also contains a joke based on the subtitles of the original film.  Buy it and find out…

You Won’t Succeed In Broadway (If You Haven’t Any Jews)  was, I’m sure, a hilarious statement about musical theatre in New York.  However, it doesn’t translate very well to the West End of London.  It’s still a good song, but the joke isn’t that funny.

That said, I had an excellent time (right in front of the stage, on row A in the stalls!).  Go and see it!

The Heaven and Earth Show

David Mitchell complains about The Heaven and Earth Show.

Preacher of Atheism

An afternoon with Reverend Zero, the atheist vicar.

KMail in the flesh

I was asked for screenies…

Come back KMail: all is forgiven

I’m using KMail 1.9.50, and I love it!

There’s still the odd quirk hanging around, such as not saving expire settings, but on the whole it’s a pleasant experience. And I love the Oxygen theme.

There are various improvements over KMail from KDE 3, as well. For example, threading is specified on a per-folder basis - so you can disable threading on lists where people abuse it (such as my college mailing list, where people send emails to the list by using reply-all on a previous email) or where you don’t want to look for emails by thread but by date (such as sent-mail), but enable it on something like kde-core-devel.

It has a very weird interaction with the plasma system tray, though. Having started KMail, sorted through a bunch of emails and quit it again, my system tray looks like this:

Sharia Law in Britain?

There’s been a lot of fuss recently over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments on Sharia Law. Before you form your own opinion, I suggest you actually read his speech.

Mail clients

I’m starting to get really cheesed off with mail clients.

I’ve been using KMail for some time, and I love it. It does everything I want it to (well, almost - virtual folders would be fantastic, but I hear rumours that they are on their way…). Unfortunately, my KDE 4 setup first of all decided it didn’t want to run any KDE 3 apps, and when it changed its mind KMail just stopped working. It wouldn’t do anything that involved talking to a mail server (including setting up an account, since that involves checking the capabilities of the SMTP server).

I went for mutt for a while (which was what I used when I was a console junkie). But I’m addicted to GUIs now, and mutt didn’t understand KMail’s directory structure. And I didn’t have anything to tell me if a folder other than the main inbox had email in it.

Currently, I have a dovecot IMAP server running. This works quite well in that there are no directory structure problems. A bit of procmailing brings back the filtering I love so much (although I have to run fetchmail manually each login as KDE 4 doesn’t seem to support autostarting apps by symlinking them from the Autostart directory).

I decided to go with Mailody. On the whole, it’s quite good. I like a lot of the interface. I have a few gripes: next-unread doesn’t, in fact, go to the next unread message. It scrolls down the current message. Only when you are at the end of the current message does it skip to the next unread message. This is quite irritating on things like kde-commits.

Not only that, but it occasionally tells me “the SMTP server does not support authentication” when I try to send an email (this is nonsense - the SMTP server requires authentication). The solution is to save the message, close Mailody, open it again and re-send it.

Oh, and Mailody only supports one account, so I’m back to webmail for my university account.

“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” -the creator of mutt, circa 1995

[edit] It’s KMail from KDE 3 that’s decided to stop working, not KMail from KDE 4 [/edit]

Jesus: 1, Devil: 0, Slick: bemused

It’s an old story.

Evolution: Just a Theory

MrCopilot writes about the misunderstanding inherent in the phrase “Evolution is just a theory”.