K-9 Mail: Synching Disabled

I had to re-install K-9 Mail yesterday due to a phone crash. After setting up my accounts it displayed the message “synching disabled”, which I had never see before. Synching manually worked fine, but it would never synch automatically.

Then I read a hint that I couldn’t believe, but I tried and it did work:

I had set up my accounts using WiFi. The hint tells you to delete all accounts, disable WiFi, enable 3G and create the accounts again.

Hard to believe, but it did the trick. Now it syncs flawlessly bother over 3G and WiFi.

When checking the K-9 Mail support forum I noticed that a lot of people had come across the same issue, but instead of helpful answers I only saw question after question from the K-9 team more or less stating that there was no error. I guess the sheer number of problem reports should teach them otherwise and the simple solution should give them a good hint as to where to look for the problem?

Edit 10-OCT-2011: Unfortunately the software fell back to the “synching disabled” behaviour a day later! I then change the setting to sync “always”, not only “when background sync is checked”, and this apparently works now.

I guess the new version of this application just does not properly pick up my global setting for background syncing.

Edit 06-JAN-2012: I recently installed ICS and tried reverting K9-Mail to “normal” settings – it works fine now. I am just not sure whether the fix is related to me installing ICS or to an unnoticed update to K9-Mail. Anyway, it works as expected again.

Nature – and Man’s Wrong Concept of Nature

The discussion on global warming shows very explicitly that we humans think of nature as “constant”. “Preserving” nature to us means to make it stay exactly as it is.

What a hubris!

First of all, when you look at the history of “nature reserves”, you can clearly see that we don’t understand nature at all. Whenever we try to preserve something, we create consequences that we did not consider.

For example shooting the wolves in Yellowstone National Park: the intention was to keep the population of Wapitis constant, the effect was an overpopulation of Wapitis, which resulted in a complete change in vegetation!

Second, nature is change itself! Nature does not mean stability, nature means adapting to ever-changing circumstances.

Even if there is a global warming (there are clues that there is, but there also is contradicting evidence), just let it happen, nature will adapt to it. Maybe without mankind in the long run, but it will adapt nevertheless.

Maybe the world will then not be inhabited by the creatures we like to see there, but there will be some form of life that is more adaptable than humans.