Et tu, Cthulhu

My laptop went south a couple of days ago, so I’m having to make do with a screen that is bigger but endowed with fewer pixels. This has been a source of frustration, especially in Evolution, where I depend on the efficiency afforded me by the tri-pane view. Crank down the resolution a bit, and it’s suddenly not so efficient - there isn’t enough space to display the subjects in the message list anymore. The problem is compounded by useless mailer “Re:” and mailing list prefixes.

So, since I don’t need to see the mailing list and reply status repeated for every single mail, I cooked up a little patch to trim the subjects in the message view. When applied, it makes available a new column in View -> Current View -> Define Views… -> Edit -> Fields Shown… -> Available Fields. This column implements the trimming, and can be used instead of the traditional Subject one:

Traditional	Trimmed

The patch applies to both Evolution 2.22 and 2.24, although unfortunately, a couple of nasty, new bugs are preventing me from running the latter. If you happen to be running openSUSE Factory like me, and Evolution 2.24 is preventing you from getting work done, you can get my unofficial 2.22 build for Factory from the build service. It includes the above patch as an added bonus.

It’s that time of year again, which means I have to renew my Mexican FM2 visa. Everything was going smoothly until the immigrations clerk asked for the “founding declaration” of Novell and a list of all its employees (!). I provided the former document last year, so it should have already been in their files, and the latter document is not on the official list of required paperwork that I was given.

To top it off, these are confidential documents that Novell de Mexico cannot release to me, so the immigrations office has to make an official letter requesting it. Hopefully the added potential for screwups resulting from this process won’t be realized.