October 2004 Archives

Recently, we've been having some issues with Mozilla Thunderbird for Windows at work. To this point, I've never been completely certain that it was a problem with Thunderbird, but I believe my wife may have confirmed it today.

The problem occurs when sending mail via SMTP AUTH over a TLS connection. For some reason, Thunderbird gets into a bad state and starts asking you for a password and then not doing anything with it—or doing the wrong thing with it. Anyway, you'll never get to send your mail.

As if that weren't bad enough, we can't find cause for it or a work around for the problem. We can actually completely uninstall the application, remove the application data Thunderbird creates, reinstall, and reconfigure the application and the problem remains. I just went through that process with Terri this evening and it didn't fix the problem. She has to send mail through webmail now. We can sometimes work around the problem by turning of SMTP AUTH and TLS on computers that remain in Nichols, but that doesn't help those with laptops.

Well, I decided to go online and check to see if there was a bug for it in Bugzilla. I turned up several possibles, but the only one I could find discussing the problem dates back to January! All but the last correspondence is in January and the bug is still listed as "UNCONFIRMED." The last correspondence was a message asking if the problem was still occurring in July! This didn't sit well with me. Seems like a bug shouldn't just sit for that long.

So, I searched for a list of all Thunderbird bugs to see what they looked like. At my last check there were 2,404 bugs, which isn't alarming in and of itself. However, to look at the status and ownership, you see bad stuff. Nearly all of the tickets are owned by mscott@mozilla.org and of the 2,400+ bugs, 1,500 are of UNCONFIRMED status. Is anyone filing and reading these bugs at all? This doesn't, in my mind bode well for Thunderbird.

Now, that's all gut reaction. I happen to think the Firefox project has been a really stable one so far. There were a few snaffus with the preview release, but I've been pretty happy overall. What does the Bugzilla list look like for Firefox, to put this into context? Pulling up the Firefox bugs, there are around 4,586 bugs this time. This time, however, there are a fair number of tickets assigned to around a half dozen different developers. In fact, it looks like a good many of these have been sorted out. There are about 2,500 UNCONFIRMED tickets, but in light of the distribution of ownership with the other tickets this isn't quite as worrisome to me.

Anyway, this set off some warning bells. This isn't an informed opinion and doesn't mean that Thunderbird is a pile of dung, but just something that struck me as a little unsettling.

Okay, I've pretty much lost my mind at this point. This paper is simply killing me. In order to keep myself from going completely insane, I've been taking 15 minute breaks between writing my paper and have somehow managed to get Drupal working.

I've grown tired of Blosxom, so I was looking for a change. Travis has long been a fan of Drupal, but I was previously hesitant because I'm not a big fan of PHP applications in general. I generally consider PHP to be a good prototyping language, but I don't really care for how applications end up looking in the long run—that's a whole other blog, so I'll stop there.

Anyway, I took a look into Drupal 4.5 and I like what I see. It looks like they've done a lot of the stuff similar to the features I like in Bricolage and Everything. So, I'm giving it a shot.

At this point, I like it so much, I'm thinking of recommending it for use on our church site. I still need to figure out how that would look, but I think it's doable.