It's been a long time since my last post but today I want to give you a small update.

General stuff
I have been studying the Joint International Master (JIM) program since March now and from what I can tell it is not more difficult than the bachelor program but it is indeed more work. This is also the reason why I have been less active in the TYPO3 community lately. Now the exams are getting closer and I hope that there will be more time for community work after I got them done.

Since the JIM program includes one semester abroad I can't attend this years T3CON as I'll be in the U.S. at that time. Nevertheless I'm going to attend the first TYPO3 Developer Days in Dietikon from August 11 to 13. So if you're interested in meeting me or other TYPO3 devs and want to help developing TYPO3 you're welcome to come, too.

40tude Dialog crashed
Yesterday I wanted to read the latest posts in the newsgroups and to do this I started my prefered newsgroup reader - 40tude Dialog. But instead of serving me with fresh and hot discussions it just showed a scrembled screen and had lost all information about news servers, subscribed groups, signatures, post - everything...

I tried to install a newer version but that didn't help either. Instead I had to notice that the latest version was from Ferbruary 2005. Although 40tude is a great newsgroup reader and it really served me well I decided to switch to Thunderbird.

Thunderbird installed
The reasons for switching to Mozilla Thunderbird are obvious:

• it's skinnable - I really dislike the default theme!
• it's extendable and
• most important it's under current development

In my opinion 40tude is still better than Thunderbird but after having installed some extensions I'm quite satisfied with it now.

These are the extensions I've installed at the moment:

• MessageID-Finder - helps to find a message to a certain message id
• Mnenhy - enhancements with special focus on Mail&News
• Newsworthy - improves Thunderbird as a newsgroup reader
• Reply in Group - Adds a reply in group button to the main window
• Slim Extension List
• Update Notifier

As I don't like the default theme I've installed Tango which is really pleasent. Although these extension help a lot to improve Thunderbird as a newsgroup reader I still miss some 40tude features. For example when clicking on a thread 40tude would expand the thread or when marking a thread to follow it all the posts in that thread are downloaded immediately. Another thing is that I can't distinguish posts which are downloaded  from those which aren't.

If you have any other extensions you can recommend, please let me know.