[mythtv-users] OT: GMail users (was Re: Thumbnail update after commercial job finishes)

[Michael T. Dean]

On a completely unrelated-to-the-original-thread issue, is it possible
for gmail users to report bugs to Google?  If so, /please/ someone tell
Google that there should be a space between the e-mail address and the
word "wrote" in an attribution.  Their text/plain version of the message
(when sent using multipart/alternative--i.e. in HTML and plain text)
actually has:

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:

which is extremely annoying for those of us who use the plain-text view
because replying to/quoting the HTML view ends up completely destroying
attributions*** when messages are sent to the list in plain text only
(biting tongue and trying not to say, "as they should be") and a) are
too obsessed to not fix the missing space or b) delete the e-mail
addresses from the attributions in case address owners don't want their
address scattered around web pages archiving the list contents.

I left the actual quote below and didn't fix the issue, and anyone with
an e-mail client that allows selecting the alternate view can see the
broken attributions in any e-mail response sent from gmail, so you can
have a lot more proof if you don't believe me (or think it's my client
that's broken).

If you don't want to ask Google to fix their one typo that causes
billions of typos, perhaps you could ask Google to send proper
HTML-formatted e-mails that can be properly quoted using /e/-mail
clients.****  Or, hey, how about both.  :)

You'd think Google could afford a proof-reader or two... ;)  They're
sure quick to correct me when I mistype a word in their search box (OK,
I'll admit that's useful), but shouldn't someone be correcting them?

Thanks,
Mike "the complainer"*****

***Attributions are destroyed when replying to/quoting a gmail HTML
message because the gmail_quote style is basically just a 0.8em indent
with a left border, so it's turned into spaces when converted to plain
text, and those spaces are irrelevant when the message is viewed in an
HTML archive.  And, to make matters worse, even when viewed as an
e-mail, the client doesn't understand that the "couple extra spaces here
and there" mean another level of quoting, so when you try to remove the
irrelevant information and use rewrap to clean up the line wrapping, it
often causes multiple levels of quotes to be merged.

****You know, by using some standard approach for specifying quoted
content--such as, oh, I don't know, maybe a ">", that's good enough for
every other mail client.  If they still want to prettify the HTML
message to it stands out as "better than all the rest," feel free to
describe to Google the wonders of invisible stuff in CSS (that, if done
properly--is still converted nicely to plain text).

*****I know what you're thinking...  What makes him think he has a right
to complain if he hasn't sent a patch.  Well, if gmail were open source,
I would send a patch, but when Google goes proprietary, I expect them to
do things right--to make their code better than I could make it since
they seem to imply (by locking me out of their code) that I have nothing
to contribute.

On 10/28/2008 07:56 PM, Jim Stichnoth wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>wrote:
>> And, for those who want a specific image, they can simply set a bookmark
>> and tell Myth to attempt to generate previews at bookmarks.
> On a related note, I was wondering if there is a way to lock the thumbnail
> to a particular frame even if the bookmark changes.  I have to collect all
> episodes of certain children's shows for my 4-year-old, and as part of the
> edit/transcode procedure, it would be nice to select a representative frame
> for the episode.
>
> Jim