Customising Dates in Evolution

Evolution is Gnome's official email, calendar, contact, & task management software.  ie. I use it daily to check my emails.

I've always had a pet peeve with date formats that look like this:

It's fine when I'm thinking about mail relative to today.  However, sometimes I have to check for certain emails with regard to the absolute date.  For example, "What was all the correspondence to a certain customer on the 21st".  I would quickly scan the date column for 21/01/11, and find there isn't any.  However the 21st was last Friday, which is shown as "Fri 02:42 PM".  There are various reasons why this is not a good thing with regard to efficient human-machine interfaces, however there are also good reasons for a fuzzy date.

Since Linux gives you so much choice (in the right places) it's gratifying to see the option to change the date column to any of a number of presets, or your very own format:

As you can see, I've selected a simple day/month/year format:

Note: the version of Evolution used here is 2.32.1

hop counter

I was playing with traceroute and felt like "rolling my own" hop counter, so this is what I put together in a few seconds:

for ((i=1;i<21;i++)); do echo -n .; if ping -c 1 -t $i somehost.com >/dev/null 2>&1; then break; fi; done; echo " $i hops"

You'll reasonably quickly see a few dots (especially if the router in question doesn't respond to pings) and a final count.  You can of course tweak the options to ping to make it more like traceroute (max wait time, max hops, etc).  The output is something like:

.......... 10 hops

Now, for some reason `traceroute` needs superuser access for the ICMP option, and yet you can do the same with ping.