Who knew? Apparently setting public deadlines does help meeting them. While there are a few corners that are waiting for some additional tweaking the site now has a new design after nearly 11 years. As WordPress’ theming capabilities have improved over time what you’re looking at is actually standard Twenty Seventeen theme with a bit of customization and another bit of custom CSS. As far as I’m aware of mostly everything should work as before.
Theme update
I’ve been thinking about either making a new theme for this site or porting current one over to modern WordPress template for… well, I honestly cannot remember for how many years, at least a few. Never made it to it.
So, here’s the current plan: decide and execute on one of the two options before the end of this summer. By 1st September the latest. Mobile-friendly. Let’s see if writing it down publicly is the bit of motivation that I’ve been missing.
Also, hi to these few lost souls who still read this blog :)
A little Thunderbird layout tweak for more ergonomic use on laptops
I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird with classic layout. By default that means folderpane on the left, calendar on the right, message list on top center and message pane at the bottom center.
A while ago I realized that the time I spend selecting messages to read is minor compared to the time I spend reading them. As reading area is lower on screen you’re not exactly doing a favor to your posture if you’re reading on a laptop without external monitor connected.
So I made a small change to my userChrome CSS rules. That’s a file under your profile folder, more specifically userChrome.css file under chrome folder. If you’ve never used it before you need to create it.
You add the following: #messagesBox {-moz-box-direction: reverse;} which basically reverses the order of panes in the middle column. This way you’ll have message list at the bottom and message pane at the top. It’ll be strange at first but you won’t even notice it later, promise :)
This is not a solution to perfectionists, though. If you have filterbar or any other notification bar visible it’ll look strange. Maybe someone else wants to turn this to a proper extension which only reverts parts that make sense.
Quassel startup slow on Kubuntu 14.04 – part two
After finding there’s a performance regression in sqlite I finally found some time to pinpoint what exactly regressed. While I’m not 100% certain that the query I used for this is exactly the one Quassel uses, it is very likely.
It turns out in newer versions of sqlite the query planner wasn’t using an index present in Quassel’s database for sorting but instead used manual sort. And this slowed it down noticeably. Since reporting this issue it’s been fixed and will be included in the next release versioned as 3.8.7. When it reaches Utopic I can unlock sqlite from upgrading on my machine :)