Thunderbird: June 2008 Archives

In setting up a buildbot master, and, reading some documentation, noticed that it has tons of status plugins, one of which is an IRC bot.

Before anything else, you need TwistedWords, an instant-messaging library. So I had to go ahead, download and install it.


cd tmp
lftpget -c http://tmrc.mit.edu/mirror/twisted/Words/8.1/TwistedWords-8.1.0.tar.bz2
tar jxvf TwistedWords-8.1.0.tar.bz2
cd TwistedWords-8.1.0
python setup.py install


Once installed, all I had to do is to make a 2-line change to the buildbot master's master.cfg config file


from buildbot.status import words
c['status'].append(words.IRC('irc.mozilla.org', 'thunderbot', ['maildev']))


Next thing you know, you've got an IRC bot announcing builds, and you can even ask for new builds straight from an irc /msg, cool.

Today, I ran into a very cool Thunderbird plugin, via David Ascher : ThreadVis

I remember having read the original IBM paper on this idea by Bernard J. Kerr
a while ago, and it was a very interesting take on thread visualization. I remember thinking at the time, bummer, I wish there was a Thunderbird plugin for this. Well, it took a little while, but it's finally here.

The idea is to use arcs to represent the relationship between the components of the thread. Why are most email threads displayed as trees, I am not sure. Looking at actual threads in my inbox with this addon confirmed to me that the idea has some merit. I especially love the fact that in this implementation, the arc length is relative to the time between 2 replies.

It's part of it's author's Master Thesis, so the extension also includes anonymized usage data extraction, to help him analyze how this is working out. It's optional, disabled by default, but do trun it on to help him out (I did).

If interested, install it directly from the official Mozilla Add-Ons site.