My Geek Notes

I was browsing around the other day and found that Thunderbird 2 had been released. I’ve been casually checking the mozilla site ever since I noticed that Thunderbird 2 was in beta. My current version of Thunderbird had not yet detected the upgrade but I thought what the heck I’ll give it a try.

Some of the new features like improved searching, custom message tagging, and advanced folder views, are really nice. Since on occasion TB on WinXP crashes, I was also hopping for an overall stability improvement, as well.

After I installed the new version, which was painless by the way, I noticed a rather annoying issue. All new messages in my Inbox were already marked read even though I had not opened the Inbox and had not read any messages. I started to look a little closer and the messages appeared to come in as un-read but then change almost immediately. After searching Google and the Thunderbird forums I found a few posts where others had the same issue. The forum posts had attributed it to the filtering rules.

After messing with the rules, turning them off etc. I still had the issue. Then I noticed that every time the message alert pops up the messages that appeared in the alert were getting marked read. One of the new features in the 2 version is that when a new message is received an alert pops up and tells you about the new message then disappears. The new pop alerts contain more message information, including a message preview, than they did the past versions. Yep you guessed it the message preview was marking the message as read when the alert was fired off.

The fix turned out to be pretty simple, don’t show message preview text in the alerts. To disable this setting open Thunderbird, Click on the Tools menu in the menu bar then click on Options under Tools. In the Options window, select the General Tab and click the Customize button next to the Show an alert checkbox. In the Customize New Mail Alert window, un-check the Message Preview Text checkbox and click the OK button. Click the OK button to close the Options window. That’s it, now you’ll still get the message alerts minus the preview and the message will not be marked read until you read it or mark it read yourself.

This is an update to a post I made about how the themes are broken in phpMyAdmin 2.10.x.

While getting a new development environment setup I thought I would check to see if any progress had been made to update some of the themes I use for phpMyAdmin. I found that the following themes have been updated and the version it works with:

The one I use the most:
Very small PMA-Version 2.7 - 2.10

Others that I usually download:
Arctic Ocean PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Grid PMA-Version 2.9 - 2.10
Silk PMA-Version 2.10
Paradice PMA-Version 2.10

The updated themes can be found here

Recently I’ve run into some issues with the way phpMyAdmin handles themes in the 2.10.x release. It appears that in 2.9.2 they changed the way some of the styles were set in the css files.

The result is that none of the themes that I regularly use, “Very small, and Arctic Ocean” look right. The most annoying thing is the tr.hover and tr.marker style are set so that when you browse data it makes the row text that your highlighting disappear. I know your saying why don’t you change the style in the css file? We’ll it’s not that simple, it appears that 2.9.2 made a lot of changes with regard to layout and themes. I can only guess that since none of the themes I use have been updated yet that the theme designers have found it a little difficult as well.

Generally I’m all for keeping up with the latest version in order to keep up with bug fixes and security patches but since the whole purpose of phpMyAdmin is to make it easier to manage your database and the data in that database, not being able to see the info in the row you selected is just not going to work.

So the version that I’ve found that works is 2.8.2.4

I’m hoping that the theme designers out there are working on getting their themes to work with the latest version of phpMyAdmin. Good Luck.