2007

There were 259 posts published in 2007 (this is page 1 of 13).

Top Posts of 2007

Here are a collection of posts that I consider some of my best and most meaningful posts of the past year. This also includes posts where I discovered something new about myself or posts that marked a big event in my life. I decided this is a better way of reviewing the year than repeating everything in a single, gigantic post.

I've added snippets from each post to give you an idea what each one is about. If there are other posts you thought should be on this list, I'd love to hear about them!

Why I'm a Vegetarian
01/10

Read more...

Actually, sometime during the year (around April) I started keeping a vegan diet (no dairy or any product that comes from an animal). Starting 2008, I will be sticking to a 100% vegan diet.

My Naked Body and Money
02/20

At the end of the day, I don’t take any money with me to bed. I don’t go to sleep with my car, computer, food, auto gas, or for that matter my house. I sleep in my house, but might I might as well be sleeping in a cardboard box. When I wake up, I wake up with nothing but the skin on my bones. I need a safe shelter to sleep in, yes, but even shelter is a lifestyle item we’ve grown accustomed to having.

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The Impersonalization of Blogs
02/27

How can someone be personal on a blog when the information is bound to be made public? That would make the personal information public information — so whats the point? If you want to create a blog, go ahead. Just don’t expect to express yourself, especially your personal self, without letting everyone know about it.

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The Ice Gods are Angry
03/08

Then at 5:20pm, I get another call — this time from the first floor tenant at my Bowers St property. He says water is pouring out from his kitchen and bathroom ceiling. My stomach drops as I recall the last time this happen and the damage cost me $16k to repair. I told the tenant over the phone, how to turn off the water main, so the water would stop coming out of the broken pipe. After driving through rush hour traffic, I finally arrived around 6:30pm.

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Note: There were many others posts about leaky pipes throughout the year, but this post seemed to sum up the experience quite well.

The Echo of an Alternative Path
03/27

So, do I like the path my life has taken thus far? I won’t say that I don’t like it, but I can’t help but wonder and imagine how things could be different right now. Would I be in Baghdad, Iraq instead of Cambridge, Massachusetts? Would I be sleeping in a tent in the middle of the desert with gun shots echoing in the distance, instead of dealing with leaky water pipes and worrying about waking up late for work in the morning? Would I be driving a humvee, praying I don’t hit an IED, instead of trying to find a parking spot close to my apartment?

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Completed 16.6% of my Life
04/12

The human mind is a very powerful thing — so powerful in fact that I believe we assist nature in making us old by reminding ourselves of our age. We have this preconceived idea of how old we’re expected to live — how many people truly believe, and I mean as much as they believe they will die without air, that they will live to 150 years old?

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Finding the Synergy Between Control and Chaos
05/20

Mistakes are limits. They are dead end roads. When you discover a dead end road you don’t park your car and wait for the road to suddenly lead somewhere interesting. You turn around and find another route! Life teaches us lessons. We have the choice to learn from those lessons and use them to make more educated decisions, or to forget the lesson and make our journey that more difficult.

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Less is More
05/28

My solution to this is to live life expecting nothing. Without expectation there will be no disappointment. Attachment creates waste and drains life. Ownership creates unnecessary work. Expect less. Own less. Attach to less. My Dad has always said “Less is more”. I’ve never understood this more fully than I do now.

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Thea & Meera's Wedding
06/01

My sister Meera was married today, to Thea Bou. It was a long day, with three different traditional weddings all rolled into one: A Vedic wedding, a Khmer wedding, and the standard American wedding.

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Repetitive Immobility is Killing Me!
07/11

I crave the outdoors and yet I spend my days in the office, my evenings in a basement apartment with very little natural light and no ability to see the sky, and my weekends working inside on my rental properties or driving in the car. When I’m indoors I feel compelled to be sitting at my computer, whether for work or entertainment, because I refuse to hook up a television.

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Dirty Air
07/18

I can’t help but wonder how much of an effect living in the city has on a persons health. I spent the majority of the first 14 years of my life in a rural area with a lot more trees than houses, the following 10 years in a semi-rural area with more houses than trees, and the past 7 months in the city, where there are more dogs than there are trees!

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Man vs Wild and Survivorman
08/08

Entertainment is about risk and excitement, which is why Man vs Wild is more popular. Survivorman is more realistic, but who watches TV for realistic things? Anyone who believes a reality show, no matter what kind, is entirely unscripted really needs to get their head out of the dark area its in.

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I'm still adjusting... but is that bad?
08/09

Yesterday while I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, I realized that after having such a positive experience living in a “normal” apartment, I probably won’t want to go back to living in a basement or attic ever again. When that thought came to me, I suddenly realized why the rich never feel rich. Once you become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, its difficult to revert to anything less. I can already catch myself wishing I had a two bedroom apartment with more space and rooms that receive more sunlight throughout the day (my apartment only gets a little sunlight before 9am)!

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The amazing thing is, I'm moving into a two bedroom apartment starting January 1st, 2008!

Labor Day Weekend
09/04

Another major thing that happened early this past weekend was my firm decision about what I’m going to do with my properties. I’ve decided I will get rid of all of my properties, even if that means going bankrupt. I simply feel the time and energy I will spend maintaining even one property is not worth it. I would much rather have the freedom and clarity of mind that goes with knowing I don’t owe hundreds of thousands of dollars on a property while still being responsible for maintaining it. Owning a property will greatly restrict my options for travel and the financial freedom to do what I want with my life.

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This post was added here because it marks my decision to sell all of my rental properties.

Learning not to become discouraged
09/21

When we are in the competitive mind we often forget those we are competing with are directly responsible for our success, and not realizing this greatly inhibits our quality of life. Selfishness is the opposite of gratitude and to be discouraged about doing something is to be selfish and therefore ungrateful.

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How I started programming
10/01

I learned about programming when I was 12, three years after I began building computers. I asked my Dad one day (at the time he was working at Digital as a technical writer) how the games and programs on the computer were created. He didn’t know a whole lot about programming, but he knew of the BASIC programming language and told me I should get a book and learn it.

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Rejecting Limitations
10/10

Don’t accept your limitations, reject them. Treat every limitation like the rung on a ladder — if you don’t pull yourself above each one, you’re never going to get anywhere!

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Believe in Possibility
11/08

Believing we have limits, and doubting the possibility of that which we cannot even imagine, greatly limits the extent to what we can accomplish. After all, believing something is possible is the first step in making it a reality. Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean, Thomas Edison created the light bulb, and the Wright Brothers successfully proved manned flight was possible, by having strong belief in their possibility.

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Time is Relative
12/11

What if we could stage a giant experiment on human civilization in which we gradually slowed, over say a period of a hundred years, the mechanical timing of all clocks to a point where 1 second actually took 2 seconds to pass? Would we suddenly start living longer? (As far as we would know, we’d be living to 80 - 100 years, but in reality it would be 160 - 200 years!)

Read more...

Preparing for the move to Arlington

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm moving to Arlington. Katie, the current tenant, called me yesterday to inform me they finished moving out ahead of schedule and that the place is ready. I went by last night to pick up the keys and take a look at the place. It's at least four to five times the size of my current apartment -- and that's not even taking into account the extra space I have in the basement, back porch, and back yard!

It's been 40 degrees the past few days and a lot of snow has melted. I was hoping my truck bed would stay dry and snow-free for the rest of the week while I move, but it looks like Mother Nature has other plans. There is a winter snow advisory issued for tonight and we're supposed to get 5 - 9 inches of wet heavy snow. I think I'll cover my truck bed with a tarp tonight.

I'll be pretty busy moving for the next few days, but I'm going to take some pictures before I start filling up the space. I'll post pictures of the new place tomorrow.

Why I no longer have an AIM profile

For the past few years I've been using naim to communicate over the AIM and IRC networks. When my workplace agreed to use GoogleTalk to communicate, I thought I was doomed to a graphical IM client -- that is until I discovered Bitlbee.

Bitlbee "tunnels instant messaging traffic (including MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber) to a virtual IRC channel". This means I can use a console IRC client (such as naim or irssi) to connect to a Bitlbee server and then communicate over all those different IM networks from a single spot! Whether I'm talking to someone on AIM, Jabber, or IRC, it all looks like I'm talking to someone on IRC. So I setup a Bitlbee server at home and started using it to communicate with office workers (GoogleTalk uses the Jabber protocol).

A few days ago naim stopped communicating with the AIM network and rather than trying to restart naim to get the connection working again, I added my AIM account to Bitlbee and started using it to talk to my AIM buddies. Little did I know, however, that my AIM profile was gone. Apparently (unlike naim) Bitlbee doesn't support AIM profiles at all.

No big deal. Profiles are overrated anyway. 🙂 But for history sake (and to make this post a bit more interesting to read) here is my retired AIM profile:


Have a look at my blog and gallery.

Wikipedia - Gain knowledge.

WikiHow - Learn how.

I am who I am not because of what I am told, but because of where my intellect guides me.

Hello, my name is Raam Dev.

ETRADE Grammar Errors

How does a company as big as ETRADE allow for such content to be displayed on their website? I understand that the content isn't actually provided by ETRADE but by Briefing.com. But come on -- Stock Fall Further? Stocks Fall Further!

I decided to read the whole paragraph underneath the title to see if I could find any more grammar mistakes... and waddya know: "The financial sector continues to weight on the broader market,".

It really makes me wonder how many people are needed to proofread something that will be seen by so many visitors.

PowerBook G4 vs MacBook Pro

First of all, this isn't so much a review as it is a very simple comparison. My old PowerBook G4 laptop was nice -- even with only a 1.5ghz PowerPC processor it was quite snappy once it managed to get past the startup process. I'm sure the 1280MB RAM helped with the speed though, as Mac's seem to benefit a lot from extra memory.

My new MacBook Pro is blazing fast, and bumping the RAM to 4GB really made it fly. Now my laptop has 4x more memory, a much better CPU, and a much better graphics card than my desktop! I'm starting to wonder why I even have a desktop...

Despite their huge differences under the hood, these two laptops looked very similar side by side (the MacBook Pro is on the right):

Although almost everything else is smaller on the MacBook Pro, the battery and power supply are much bigger. Thankfully, the new MacBook Pro's don't seem to suffer from the annoying warped/bowed lid, as is partially visible on the picture up top (PowerBook is on the left).

I sold the PowerBook to my brothers' girlfriend and I'm writing most of this review from memory. Because of this I'm unable to honestly compare things like weight and differences between the keyboard/trackpad. But I can tell you one thing for sure: At the price you can pick up a used PowerBook for (dirt cheap), they're nice little laptops.

The PowerBook is as stable as any Mac and it's great for doing basic things. If you're a techie who needs a cheap but elegant *nix based system or if you're just wanting to explore the world of OS X, a used PowerBook is a great way to go. Keep in mind though, if it doesn't have an Intel processor (the PowerBooks have G4 PowerPC processors) you won't be able to run Microsoft Windows using VMWare or Parallels.

Happy Human Day!

I don't celebrate any holidays but I was thinking about Christmas and I realized that it's the one day of the entire year when the greatest number of people are collectively thinking about someone other than themselves. Sure, a birthday, an anniversary, or a graduation causes a number of people to think about someone else, but on no other day of the year are so many people thinking about others as they are on Christmas day.

I'm a strong believer in the power of thought and I'm sure that so many people collectively thinking good thoughts about others has a positive effect on all human beings. So, Happy Human Day!

Pretty Image Borders with CSS

You may have noticed a lot of the pictures I've been posting lately have a little border around them. I started doing this after I saw Raf's site and realized how easy it is to do with a CSS class.

One of the big annoyances I used to deal with when posting images was that I would always need to add border="0" to the <img> tag to prevent the ugly blue borders that appear when the image is surrounded with a link tag. Although it's possible, I didn't even think to disable all image borders in CSS. By why only disable them when we can make pretty borders too?

Here is the CSS I use (place it in your style.css file if you use one):

[sourcecode lang="css"]
.photo img, .photo a img {
border:1px solid #CCCCCC !important;
padding:5px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
[/sourcecode]

And here is how I use it when I'm writing a post in WordPress (keep in mind that I don't use the visual editor):

[sourcecode lang="html"]
<div class="photo">
<a href="http://raamdev.com">
<img src="http://images.raamdev.com/DSC_1112_640.JPG">
</a>
</div>
[/sourcecode]

And here is an example of the output:

The CSS border adds a touch of style to the image and without it the image border would appear sharp and out of place. Since I added .photo a img to the class definition, even images that are linked to something will appear with the nice border.

There are already buttons for creating links and adding images in the WordPress editor, but adding the <div> tags around the image does take a bit of time. Eventually I'd like to write a quick plugin for WordPress that adds a little photo button to the editor bar to automatically add the DIV tag with the proper CSS class already specified.

A True New Englander

There is an old lady who lives across the street from my second floor apartment. Last winter I remember seeing her outside during snowstorms shoveling her driveway and porch steps. She would spend hours chipping away at the ice on the road in front of her car, even though she would never use the car to go anywhere. By the time she went inside, everything she had cleared would be covered with snow again. But she kept shoveling, every snowstorm.

I wanted to take a picture of her shoveling, but every time I would get my camera out she would mysteriously stop shoveling and go inside -- as if she somehow knew I was going to take a picture and didn't want to be in it.

Today I saw her shoveling and quickly took out my camera. Sure enough, by the time I had the camera ready to go she was walking up the porch stairs headed inside. Frustrated, I put the camera down on the table. A few seconds later saw her coming out of the house and grabbed the camera again. I finally snapped this picture of the elusive old lady:

I then got ready to head into the office. I was driving in today since I needed my truck after work. As I was walking into the office building guess who I passed? Yes! The old lady had walked through the freezing cold, windy weather (it's only 25 degrees -- without the wind!) all the way into Central Square, half a mile away.

Yes, she is a true New Englander.

ERROR 406: Not Acceptable

The other day I was writing a script for work and discovered it wasn't behaving as expected. The web browser didn't give me any helpful information so I decided to use wget to see what the actual error was:

eris:~ raam$ wget --spider -v mysite.com
Connecting to mysite.com|69.16.69.151|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 406 Not Acceptable
16:19:28 ERROR 406: Not Acceptable.

Ah ha! ERROR 406: Not Acceptable. After doing some Googling I discovered the problem is related to an optional (though commonly installed) Apache module called mod_security. This module basically acts as a firewall for Apache to help prevent website attacks, specifically attacks through POST submissions.

To disable mod_security, you can place the following line in an .htaccess file on the root of your site:

SecFilterEngine off

I then confirmed that disabling mod_security actually fixed the problem:

eris:~ raam$ wget --spider -v mysite.com
Connecting to mysite.com|69.16.69.151|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK

So as you can see, the quick solution to fixing the Error 406 problem is to disable mod_security altogether using a .htaccess file. However, this leaves me wondering how much security I'm giving up by disabling mod_security.

I was in a hurry when this happened so I didn't spend much time investigating what exactly my script was doing that may have caused mod_security to freak out. Sometimes other applications cause the Error 406 problem, such as WordPress or Mambo, and you really don't have choice except to wait for a fix to be released. Since my own software caused the problem, figuring out why should be easy. I'll post my results when I determine what was.

Attic Studio Renovation

Back in 2003 I spent about $30,000 turning the attic of my 100 year old house into a beautiful studio apartment. I found these pictures while browsing my computer today.

Most of the framing and insulation was done by a contractor. I helped my uncle sheetrock the entire place. My dad and I did the painting, built the two closets, installed custom kitchen counters, and did some of the plumbing. I installed the lights, the hardwood floor, and the shower.

I lived in this studio for a few years until I moved into the partially renovated basement (where I happened to install the exact same shower). This attic studio is now rented for $750 a month.

Using .htaccess to force SSL (https)

I created a web application at work today and instead of implementing a full-blow authentication system (or spending time integrating it with our current authentication system) I decided to use HTTP Authentication.

Anyone who knows anything about HTTP Auth will tell you that it's very insecure. To add a level of security I used an .htaccess file (placed in the directory of the application) to force the use of SSL (https), which uses the certificate we've already installed to secure the rest of the site.

Here is what I added to the .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /path/to/app/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/path/to/app/$1 [R,L]

If you're already using an SSL certificate on your site, this is a great and easy way to secure HTTP Authentication.

Starting the winter season off with a bang

I predicted we would get a lot of snow this season -- looks like we're off to a good start.

I spent most of Sunday shoveling, but I'm glad I shoveled when I did. Nature has a funny way of teaching a lesson to those who put things off until tomorrow. Late in the day, the snow turned to rain and started coating everything with ice. This gave the snow a shiny and tough skin.

I really feel for the people with small cars and no 4-wheel drive. Without shoveling anything, I was able to drive my truck out of the 4 foot snow drifts around me while everyone else on my street spent hours shoveling their cars out. When I arrived in Cambridge, there were plenty of snowy spots to park my truck. 🙂

Snowboarding at Loon Mountain

I went snowboarding at Loon Mountain with my brother-in-law and his cousin. We only had an hour or two of sleep but we left bright and early (5am) and snowboarded most of the day (8am - 2:30pm).

It was freezing when we arrived (7 degrees without the wind) but it was nice because it wasn't packed and the lift lines were really short (until noon anyway). The clear sunny skies made for quite impressive views at the summit.

Uppercase table tags create extra whitespace in WordPress

When creating tables inside a WordPress post, using uppercase TABLE and/or TR tags causes additional whitespace to appear above the table. I say and/or TR tags because uppercase TABLE tags alone don't seem to create additional whitespace, however uppercase TR tags do. If you combine the use of uppercase TABLE and TR tags together, they create even more whitespace!

First, lets see what normal output looks like:

[html]
This is a simple sentence used to demonstrate an odd spacing effect when uppercase TABLE and TR tags are used in a table.

[/html]

WordPress output:

And now, if we copy the exact same content and make the TABLE and TR tags uppercase, look what happens:

[html]
This is a simple sentence used to demonstrate an odd spacing effect when uppercase TABLE and TR tags are used in a table.

[/html]

WordPress output:

I'm running the latest version of WordPress (v2.3.1 as of this post) and I have confirmed this oddity appears on multiple platforms (Mac OS X 10.4.11, Windows XP SP2) with multiple browsers (Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Windows and OS X, Internet Explorer 6.0.29 and Opera 9.22 on Windows, and Safari 3.0.4 on OS X).

Upon closer inspection of the actual output produced by WordPress in my browser (using view source), I discover the problem:

Browser output of the lowercase example:

[html]

This is a simple sentence used to demonstrate an odd spacing effect when uppercase TABLE and TR tags are used in a table.

[/html]

Browser output of the uppercase example:

[html]

This is a simple sentence used to demonstrate an odd spacing effect when uppercase TABLE and TR tags are used in a table.

[/html]

It appears that WordPress is looking for the <table> and <tr> tags and when it finds them it doesn't automatically add <br /> and <p> tags around them like it does with the rest of your post. (I don't use the visual editor, so I'm able to easily add hand-written HTML directly to my post.) However, the search for <table> and <tr> must be case sensitive which causes problems if your tags are anything but lowercase.

I would normally report this as a bug to WordPress, but I'm sure the reply will be that all XHTML must be lowercase and so the problem is not relevant. I say that's bad backwards compatibility. 😐

Winter storm gridlocks traffic, again

Earlier this year, in March, I wrote about how a Nor'easter caused endless Boston traffic. Well, that was nothing compared to the traffic today!

The visibility from my office window is horrible, but here's a picture I took:

When I talked to my dad on the phone he told me the streets in Lowell were gridlocked too. In addition to the visibility being horrible, I think the psychological fact that this is the first big storm of the season has people adjusting to the new driving conditions. Now wouldn't it be awesome if Google Street View was somehow live, and we could actually see what the highways looked like from our computers?

Well, the Massachusetts Turnpike Traffic Camera's will have to do for now. Here's what the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge looks like right now:

But sadly, the feed on the Mass. Turnpike Traffic site only allows you to watch for 4 minutes at a time. You can use this URL (thanks Thea!) to see the same feed without interruption! Here are some more shots of today's traffic:

  

Google Maps Street View: Boston added

A few days ago Google added Boston to their list of Street View cities. Google Street View basically lets you get on the ground and walk around as if you were there, only the pictures aren't live. How does this work? A car drives around with a camera mounted on top taking pictures of the street and the area around it. Those pictures, and the location data, are uploaded to Google and turned into the Street View maps you find find on Google Maps.

Here is where I work in Central Square, Cambridge (on the 8th floor of the tall building):

From the looks of the empty streets, they must have been driving around on a Sunday morning. When you click on the Street View button at the top of a Google map, all the blue area's are covered by street view. It's really cool to explore entire neighborhoods without even going there. This is an invaluable tool if you're moving to a new apartment and you want to easily check out the neighborhood before you sign the lease!!

Time is Relative

Wired has a great article about amateur time hackers who use off-the-shelf equipment purchased on eBay to run experiments with atomic clocks. One person in particular, Van Baak, conducted a very interesting experiment that seems to prove something that I have long found very interesting: Time is relative.

FTA:

A retired Unix kernel programmer, Van Baak began buying time instruments a decade ago, slowly building what today is probably the best-equipped, individually owned time lab in the world, exceeding the capability of many national labs. His gear lets him perform some impressive experiments. Two years ago, he realized he'd acquired the capability to offer his children a demonstration of one of the effects predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity -- a demonstration that Einstein himself couldn't have performed with the equipment of his day.

The theory says time passes slowly for someone near a massive object, as measured relative to someone farther away. On Earth, this effect is so small as to be undetectable to all but the most precise equipment, putting demonstrations beyond the reach of, say, a typical high school science fair. Consequently, "kids grow up thinking relativity is only for really fast speeds or really heavy gravity," says Van Baak.

He wanted his children to see that relativity is proportional. So he loaded the family's blue minivan with portable power supplies, monitoring equipment, and three HP 5071 cesium clocks. Three, because time is always marked relative to other clocks: More clocks mean more accurate time. With his three kids and some camping gear in tow, he drove the winding roads spiraling up Washington's Mt. Rainier and checked the family into a lodge 5,319 feet above sea level.

They hiked the trails, and the kids relaxed with board games and books, while in the imperceptibly lessened gravity, time moved a little bit faster than at home. Van Baak found himself explaining to park rangers more than once why a minivan filled with inscrutable equipment was idling in front of the national park lodge for hours on end. But the effort paid off. When the family returned to the suburbs two days later, the cesium clocks were off by the precise amount relativity predicted. He and his family had lived just a little more life than the neighbors.

"It was the best extra 22 nanoseconds I've ever spent with the kids," Van Baak says.

I wrote about this effect last year in a post called Timeless Living. In the post, I attempted to explain how time perceived by a common house fly is much different than the time perceived by humans. But I took it a step further and pondered whether our physical, material, mental, and social size also has an effect on how we individually perceive time:

Does that mean when we’re toddlers, time passes much slower because we are physically smaller? It probably does. But think beyond physical size. The older we become, the more “stuff” we accumulate, the more stuff we accumulate the more things become “ours” and the bigger “our” world becomes. Take me for example: I own three investment properties, and hold several different jobs. My world feels much bigger than it did before I owned any properties and when I held only one job. I know more people than I did 5 years ago and my social network has grown. I am larger in life than I was 5 years ago. Why wouldn’t that also cause time to pass quicker?

The interesting thing about all this talk of time and the perception of time is that clocks are a method of preventing such fluctuations. Clocks are used as an agreed measurement of time. We agree that time for me is the same as time for you. But by doing this are we limiting our individual ability to control the effect time has on our bodies?

What if we could stage a giant experiment on human civilization in which we gradually slowed, over say a period of a hundred years, the mechanical timing of all clocks to a point where 1 second actually took 2 seconds to pass? Would we suddenly start living longer? (As far as we would know, we'd be living to 80 - 100 years, but in reality it would be 160 - 200 years!)

On the other hand, what if we were aware of the extra time? What if you knew for certain that the normal life expectancy for all humans was 800 - 1000 years of age? Stop reading this for a few seconds and really try to believe that you're probably going to live with a healthy and functional body until you're 800 years old. How would your plans for life change? Would you be so worried about money? Would you be in such a rush to accomplish the things in life you wish to accomplish? How would your political views change? Don't you already feel less stressful about life? You just lived for a few extra nanoseconds -- now hold that thought and don't let it go.

An Extension for Reordering the Thunderbird Account List

I have several email accounts setup in Thunderbird (an awesome and open-source email client) and occasionally I want to reorder the accounts listed on the left folder pane. The way I've been doing this up until now is by modifying the prefs.js file located in my Thunderbird profile directory. There is a line that looks like this:

user_pref("mail.accountmanager.accounts", "account4,account1,account3,account2");

By simply reordering the accounts listed there, I can change the order of the accounts listed in Thunderbird. However, there are a few problems with this method. You cannot have Thunderbird open while you're editing the prefs.js file and the accounts don't have any kind of description associated with them, so figuring out which is which can be quite annoying. If you're lucky enough to be on a Unix-based system you can solve this using the grep command:


eris:~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/wlkj31iv.default raam$ grep -w "mail.server.server[0-9].name" prefs.js
user_pref("mail.server.server1.name", "Local Folders");
user_pref("mail.server.server2.name", "Raam Dev");
user_pref("mail.server.server3.name", "Akmai.net Support");
user_pref("mail.server.server4.name", "Akmai.net Admin");

But why should we have to go through all this trouble? I'm really surprised the Thunderbird developers haven't added a feature that allows you to reorder the accounts, but then maybe they're wondering why someone hasn't written an extension to do it. 🙂 Well thanks to chuonthis, we have exactly that.

If you're using Thunderbird, you can download the Folderpane Thunderbird extension and try it out. I've tested it on both Windows and OS X and it works great! No more editing configuration files to change something in the UI!