Category Archives: Software

Thunderbird and ‘reply-to’

This is another one in the ‘Things to remember’ category.

For some reason, by default, Thunderbird does not use the ‘Reply-to’ header in emails. This headers tells mail software what address that replies should be sent to. It’s commonly used for mailing lists so that replies are sent to another address, such as the the mailing list itself, instead of the address that sent the message.

To change the default Thunderbird behavior, you have to tweak a setting.

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Http/2, Apache, & Lightsail

This post only covers the technical details of how to implement http/2 on an Apache web server running in Amazon Linux on Lightsail. It does not go into the details of what http/2 is or why use it. For that information, I suggest https://http2.github.io.

First you have to switch the Multi-Processing Modules (MPMs) from pre-fork (the default) to another one. I chose the event mpm for no particular reason.

To do this, edit /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-mpm.conf and make the following changes …

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Annoying Software

ZDNet UK has a great summary of some of the most annoying software products around.

I pretty much agree with them on all counts … although my personal annoyance with anything that tries to install the Yahoo tool bar goes way beyond what they indicate.

I also really dislike Java’s insistence on a background task that’s constantly checking for updates. Personally, I think that any stand alone product that requires Java should install it’s own copy. Updating Java without considering the requirements of the software that is dependent on it is asking for trouble.

“Important Message” in Quicken

I’ve been using Quicken for many years … and for the past 8 years or so I’ve had this annoying problem. Every time I would download transactions from my bank, I would get this dialog box popping up …

Important message from Bank One (Chicago)

Of course Bank One had been bought out by Chase a few years ago, so the message was clearly wrong.

I finally got fed up with the annoyance and started searching for a solution … and I found one on the Quicken Community forums.

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