The Mindful Coder

I don’t know why Apple doesn’t provide the three column layout that MS Outlook, Thunderbird and other clients have built in. On widescreen monitors, there really is no other layout that makes better use of the space available.

I found a nice little Mail plugin that almost satisfies my needs. It’s called Letterbox and is downloadable from http://harnly.net/software/letterbox/. My only gripe – and its probably something Letterbox doesn’t have much control over – is that the layout of the ‘fields’ shown in the middle column don’t work perfect for the 3 column layout. Ideally the way Apple lays out the fields in the middle column should be replaced by how the fields are laid out in Outlook with the date, size etc being shown as sub-text below the from and the subject.

Still works great!

I finally installed Window 7 via bootcamp after trying it out as a VM on my MacBook Pro for a month.

First of course I had to get around theridiculous restriction placed by Apple that bootcamp can be used only if the primary HDD is unpartitioned and is a single logical drive. WTF? How retarded is that? I tried to get clever by partitioning the mac primary partition *after* creating a bootcamp partition and installing Windows. If you do that, bootcamp stops recognizing your Windows partition. Messed up and idiotic but it’s not like Apple is known for listening to users. Anyway, I digress.

So, after I got on Win 7 via bootcamp, my Dell external display wouldn’t work. If I unplugged and plugged it back in via the mini display port, it would get recognized but try as I might, it would not allow me to duplicate or extend my display to the external monitor.

I guessed this was an issue with the nvidia drivers (nvidia GEForce 9600M GT). To fix the issue, download the latest Vista 64bit drivers from nvidia here.

Works just fine after a restart. If your monitor is not recognized even after a restart, unplug and plug it back into the mini-display port.

Note that this fix is for Win7 64bit. I don’t know if the same issue exists for Win7 x86. I would be interested in hearing back from you guys if you found the same issue on Win7 x86 or Vista.