School, Email

I had noticed before that Evolution had the option of using maildir format instead of mbox format for mail archives. I have several folders that are now approaching 10,000 messages, and it takes a *long* time to expunge the Spam out of them. It's been great. The conversion went easy, and delete times are now pretty much instant. Why does it default to mbox?

In other news, it's official: I've dropped my courses at Waterloo. Having started a month late because of screw ups in the distance ed department and because my text books were back ordered, I decided that I couldn't catch up and keep decent grades. I also decided that the Waterloo is not a good school for distance ed. The University of Athabasca and BC Open University have set such high expectations for me as to what a university should do. Specifically:

• Courses start at the beginning of every month
• When you sign up for a course, books are included in the tuition, and are shipped to you
• You never have to go there in person (unless you're doing a hands-on science lab). Everyone is capable of dealing with you by phone, email or web in a timely and accurate manner
• The term is 6 months instead of 4
• There are no arbitrary deadlines for assignments and paper
• Course extensions are trivial to get
• Write the exam and any center you want on whatever date you want

The whole Waterloo thing was a nice idea, and I'm a bit sad to drop the program there, but this is insane.

For hacking this week, I'm hoping that Ben Collins' suggestion for silo.conf will let us finish the Sparc installer. 232720 should theoretically be the last blocker for the netboot installer. I also want to look at TLS support in the Hurd and get the glibc ldconfig bug gone.

Supreme Court Quote

I just love this quote:

" . . . the demand for tolerance cannot be interpreted as the demand to approve of another person's beliefs or practices. When we ask people to be tolerant of others, we do not ask them to abandon their personal convictions. We merely ask them to respect the rights, values and ways of being of those who may not share those convictions. The belief that others are entitled to equal respect depends, not on the belief that their values are right, but on the belief that they have a claim to equal respect regardless of whether they are right. Learning about tolerance is therefore learning that other people's entitlement to respect from us does not depend on whether their views accord with our own. Children cannot learn this unless they are exposed to views that differ from those they are taught at home."
- Beverly McLachlin, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada
Cited from: Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, 2002 SCC 86.

It's too long for a sig, so it'll just have to stay here.