Something that we did at my previous job, and that I have successfully lobbied for at my current one, is the Monday-morning meeting. The whole team gets together, everyone explains - in a few short sentences - what he's currently working on, and mentions anything else people might want to know about (when they will be absent, for example). The team-leader sometimes talks a little about upcoming projects or company news. Shouldn't take more than half an hour, and everyone gets up-to-speed on what people are working on. It's sort of like the agile "stand-up meeting", only once a week instead of every day.

Maybe you could introduce something like this? After all, why should you be the only one who has to explain what they're doing?

Pray tell, good sir. If your time is so precious, what are you doing on Slashdot?

Yeah. How dare those who know what they're talking about trample all over my wishful thinking.

Space flight is easy, man. They did it on Star Trek decades ago.

</sarcasm>

Clearly, powerful forces must be at work to perpetuate the cycle

Wow. I do believe a dose of Hanlon's Razor is in order here.

If that is true (and it may well be) I wonder why so many applications require administrator rights to run, not just to install. I suspect that is because historically applications always did have administrator access, and so developers expected this to always be the case. That is why I think Windows (even the modern, multi-user aware versions derived from NT) is still hobbled by its single-user history.

Windows users say: "Of course there aren't any Linux viruses. It's too small a target." Linux users say: "Of course there aren't any Linux viruses, it has far better security." The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

It probably helps that Unix was developed from the beginning as a multi-user system, where you had to think about not letting one user trample all over another, whereas Windows started out as a single-user system where users could only f*ck up their own stuff if they did something stupid. The whole multi-user security thing was bolted on afterwards.

On the other hand, if you can get a user to type whatever you tell them to, or if you have physical access to it, no system is secure.

Unhinged, more like.

But then any publicity is good publicity, right?

Yeah. Top Gear is about cars in the same way that MTV is about music.

And how do you hide functions? You put them behind a "private" or "protected" access specifier, but you still have to show them in the class definition in the header file. That's not hiding. That's saying "look at all my nifty functions, none of which you can use, neener neener neener".

In C you prefix those functions with a "static" keyword, and they aren't visible anywhere outside the original source file. Once you compile them into a .o file it's as if they never existed. That is hiding.

I suspect that may have been your only problem. I set "folder" to "imaps://hostname.of.mailserver", set an imap_user and an imap_pass and away it goes. No external program required.

You do need an external program (muttprofile) to switch between profiles/servers though, and that does take some setting up.

Whoa, never knew this existed. Thank you sir!

(What do you use to expand Word documents?)

I do that for all my dot-files (including ~/.muttrc). Log in to a new system, svn checkout ~/src/env, run make install there and boom, it's like coming home. Wonderful.

Really? How so?

I use mutt to read IMAP mail from multiple accounts and I've never had any problems.

Genuinely curious what you mean.

You could have left off the "to read on mutt" bit.

That should be "make -j dinner", obviously.