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Journeying Abroad – Life without Mozilla

It’s become almost a truism that if you use a Linux machine for your desktop, you must be running Firefox as your web browser, and Thunderbird as your mail client. The former is certainly more prevelant than than the latter, but even so, both of these programs are fairly common in the greater Linux community.
However, despite their popularity, they have their drawbacks. On the Firefox side, the program suffers from it’s core dependance on XUL, the XML based rendering engine that is at the core of the product. While XUL is remarkably flexible, powerful, and useful, it is also a performance hog. Firefox, even on yawl, my desktop machine, which should have enough oomph to drive it, can come to a painful crawl after only a few hours of use.
The memory leaks in Firefox are well known, and to Mozilla’s credit, they are being addressed in Firefox 3, currently under development.
On the Thunderbird side, I’ve been having some absolutely infuriating problems with sending mail. Hitting send will regularly cause a pause of 5-10 seconds in my complete desktop before the mail actually gets sent. I’ve checked DNS, my SMTP configuration, everything, I can’t find the problem.
So why not use this opportunity to play the field?
Here there be dragons…
For the last week, I’ve been on a No Mozilla campaign, with an audience of one. I have on occasion needed to start Firefox (most notably to view Google Calendar), but for the most part, I’ve been using Konqueror, the browser within KDE, as my primary web browser.
Konqueror has been remarkably stable and useful, I will happily admit. It is noticeably faster than Firefox in almost every way, and I’ve seen only 1-2 websites where rendering has failed completely (noteably Google). KDE’s inherent ability to allow keyboard redefinition has made the transition to Konqueror quite easy (for instance, Firefox uses ^L to jump to the address bar and edit/copy/whatever your current URL. Konqueror has ^L bound to ‘clear address bar’, something that was driving me bonkers for a few days, before I realized I was simply using the wrong function. A quick key redefinition, and I was happy again).
For the most part, all my plugins are working correctly as well. Konqueror adapts the Flash, Java, and Shockwave plugins as used in Firefox without any problems. In stream videos and animations work just fine.
Will I continue using Konqueror? Most likely I’ll stick with it for a while. I do miss a few basic things though. For instance, I use Google Browser Sync to make sure all my bookmark folders are synced across all my machines. My Konqueror installation does not have my, er, large selection of bookmarks I’ve accumulated. Secondly, I’ve been using Sage as my RSS reader (as it syncs in with the Firefox bookmarks quite nicely). That naturally won’t work with Konqueror, so I’m without a centralized RSS reader right now.
Even with these niggles, I’m finding myself using Konqueror more and more. Speed, stability, and functionality. How pleasant!
Great Dave, but what about mail?
Oh yeah, the mail. Well, this one doesn’t have quite as happy a story.
In my journey away from Thunderbird, the first choice was naturally KMail, the mail component of the Kontact system in KDE. I’d used KMail on and off several times over the year, and I’m sad to say, it really hasn’t improved at the pace other applications have. In many ways it’s quite pleasant to work with, snappy rendering, good layout and feel, complete and workable dialogs, but it still suffers from a Linux ‘half complete’ feel. The keyboard bindings for mail navigation are obtuse and, oddly, impossible to reassign (I even have a bug open on it – it’s still not fixed). The thread model in KMail is abysmal – making it very easy to freeze the entire interface on very large mailboxes, etc etc.
So KMail was okay for a bit, but wasn’t cutting the mustard for regular use. The next natural check was of course Evolution, the Gnome mail client.
I’ve used Evolution off and on a lot over the years, and in general, it’s okay. I don’t particularly like GTK based apps (I find them overly hungry for screen real estate, and a bad combination of eye candy and ham-handed attempts at UI design), and Evolution shows many of these traits. However, even with those faults, it’s not a bad client. I got it up and running without any problems, and it’s working fine.
So why am I gripey?
I miss Thunderbirds spam filtering. I get a LOT of spam. My monitors regularly log 500-700 spam messages a day into my inbox. boomer does an awesome job of catching the lions share of the spam (about 80%), but the rest shows up in my inbox. Thunderbird was catching perhaps 90% of -that- spam, and tagging it for me. I could review what was tagged, agree with whatever it set, hit “purge”, and it would all go away.
Evolution has very rudimentary junk filtering, and it’s not catching much of this spam. I’m finding myself spending much of my time just deleting spam messages, and growling.
Conclusions
Will I stick with Konqueror for a while? Yes, I think so. I have to rethink my RSS aggregation and viewing. I’m not keen on a locally managed RSS list (because I change machines so often), but I’m also not excited about a remote ‘web’ based system (Web 2.0 can bite me, and old sk00l type applications are not fast enough for my reading habits). So that need is still missing.
Will I stick with Evolution? Perhaps, if I can fix the spam filtering problem. Evolutions handling of multiple accounts is FAR better than Thunderbirds (have a bug open on that one too), and the UI is one I can deal with, if if if…
I’m just never satisfied I guess.

Head-Slap morning

Boy, nothing like realizing that one of your sites has not been serving up content for almost 2 months. The site is ‘up’, but any queries into it returned nothing. Very useful for a lookup/reference tool. :-/
One of these days I’ll get a monitoring system in place that’s more advanced than “Is the server up?”

Self-Portrait, cam and all




Self-Portrait, cam and all

Originally uploaded by eidolon

And, as promised in my final change jar post, I transferred the Coinstar number into an Amazon gift certificate, and went shopping. The amount I got from the change jar was just enough to get my dream Digital SLR camera, the Canon 400D, aka the Digital Rebel XTi.

It arrived yesterday, and, after fishing a spare CF card out of my parts bin, I’m happily taking pictures with it.

It has pointed out, however, that my Camera-Fu is seriously lacking, and I need to do some studying up. This camera has more settings, more fiddlings, more details than anything I’ve worked with before I have a lot to learn.

I took this picture last night while playing around with the mirrors a bit (was looking to take a picture of the camera itself, but ended up with this arrangement.)

One thing I hadn’t really considered. The images on the camera are something like 11meg each, and Flickr has an upload limit of 10meg. It means I can’t save the raw images I take directly to Flickr as my primary archive. I need to reconsider how I store / sort / upload pictures now.

But… Yay new camera!!!

Oh why must they taunt me so?!

This evening saw me visiting the New and Improved [tm] [reg us pat off] Natick Mall here in sunny Natick, MA. There’s been a major rebuilding going on over there, and seeing as this thing is only about a mile from me, and the fact that I had an evening free, I felt it was time to go take a look.

First, the original mall was of average size and layout. Natick Mall has always been slightly ‘upscale’ compared to others, but with the other biggies nearby like the Burlington Mall renovating and upscaling, some developer it was time to upgrade the Natick mall

And boy howdy did they.

I don’t want to get into a review of malls, but did you know that there are Wikipedia entries on malls? Weird, eh? But the entry for the Natick Mall does have pictures of the inside of the renovated space. According to the article:

This expansion project includes the renovation of approximately 100 new stores and the addition of two new anchors, (Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus), making Natick Collection the twelfth largest in the country, fourth largest on the East Coast, and the largest in New England.

Now, in this vast space, you’d think I could find something interesting.

Think again.

The newly expanded space has nothing of interest in it. It is huge, to be sure, well decorated, elegant to a fault, and simply drips of sophistication. It is, however, populated with… clothing stores, perfume stores, and luggage and pocketbook offerings. Many were outlet names, but it was simply store upon store upon store of clothing. A vast wasteland of chrome, steel, glass, and fashion manikins.

Until… in the midst of all this rampant hoity toity consumerism, I see one beacon of elegance that does not involve silk, tweed, or leather.

Apple has opened a store within this vast new space. Yes, it is similar to all the other stores, with the genius bar, young hip store attendees, and ranks of elegant hardware, but now they’ve gone and done it. They’ve put this store in my back yard.

So, naturally, I went in.

Those who have been in an Apple store need not hear the details of what the store was like. It had by far the most customers I’d seen in that entire bleak landscape for the mall, but wasn’t crowded, and it only took me a moment to find a free iPhone and start playing with it.

This was the second time I had touched an iPhone, and while there were no clear revelations from my first exposure, I was again impressed by the design, elegance, clarity of purpose, and all around “rightness” of this device. I left the store after a brief chat with one of the employees, and went in search of food, visions of well designed hardware and software systems dancing in my head.

I chanced by a Verizon store and had a chat with the folks there. My aging Treo 650 is on a Verizon plan, and I had recently heard about a possible offering for ‘tethered mode’ modem operation for $15/month. That might be handy, thought I, and went to ask them about it.

Oh no, not so fast. Sure it’s $15 a month. On top of an ‘unlimited’ data service plan ($49/mo). Oh, and it won’t work with the Treo 650, you’ll need to upgrade to a Treo 700p. “Oh, that should be fine. I’m within my upgrade window now, I should get a big discount” *flipflipflip* “Yep, you are, you’ll get a $150 discount on a new phone.” “So, if I wanted to upgrade from my 650 to a 700p, how much would it be?”

The sales person actually walked around and started referencing various displays, and said “$450, minus the $150 credit you’ll get.”. I glanced down at the display for the 700p there, and a brand new service, with the 700p, would run me $345. “But that sign says $350 if I buy a Treo 700p now, why don’t I just apply the $150 to that?” “Ah, that’s just for new subscribers.”

I’m really really really done with Verizon.

It looks like AT&T’s plans have FAR better data services, as well as a platform I’m interested in supporting. (The Verizon droid basically said I should ditch the Palm platform and use a Windows device. Not in my game plan, thanks)

There are only a few things stopping me from running pell-mell for iPhone land…

  • Initial cost is high. Even with the $200 price reduction, we’re still talking $400 out of my pocket (I’d get the 8gig version. Just makes sense). I don’t have that sort of cash right now, not to mention the new service activation with AT&T. My phone number SHOULD port. Will it?
  • Bluetooth limits. The iPhone is not a full bluetooth device. It supports only the Hands Free Profile (HFP) and the Headset Profile (HSP). No support for data access, OBX, A2DP, any of the cool things that Bluetooth can do. My biggest whine would be the lack of bluetooth keyboard support. I can get a mobile bluetooth keyboard that’s quite functional, and about the size of my Treo. But I couldn’t use it with the iPhone. Will Apple update this? A huge unknown.
  • The jump to Apple. I’ve avoided purchasing Apple products for me personally. It’s a slippery slope, but I cannot ignore that Apple’s designs are fantastic, and their support policies are the best in the business (see a recent post by a self-avowed Windows adherant). Should I make my first real foray into Apple land an iPhone?
  • Last but not least, do I really need it? In all honesty, the answer here is no. My 650 is working fine for me for now, though it’s aging, the Palm platform is most likely dying, and it’s twice the size and heft of the iPhone. I don’t need to change devices now.

So, I haven’t bought an iPhone yet. But durn Apple for putting a store right in my back yard. It’s a plot I tell ya.

So, remember that coin jar?

A month or two ago, I posted about calculating value of change by weight. The proof needed to validate this napkin-scratching figuring would be validated by dumping the change jar into a Coinstar machine, and seeing what happened.
Well, today I did just that. I hauled all 58lbs of coins to the local Stop n Shop and spent 20 minutes sending fistfuls of coins rattling into the machine’s clinking, calculating innards.
When all was said, done, clattered and kachinged, the display happily reported $673.00.
Originally I figured 52lbs of coins would be $544. I underestimated just a little bit, but it wasn’t that far off. One push of the “Pay me please!” button, and the machine happily spat out an Amazon.com gift certificate (and didn’t take anything ‘off the top’ for that, so now I’m off to go camera shopping. Woohoo!)

The Monitor Dilemma

I’m in a quandry.
Up until recently, I had 3 17″ 1280×1024 monitors on my desk. On the right, the monitor for clipper, the laptop. In the center, the nice Dell monitors, used for yawl, my primary looky-atty one. And on the left, the ‘spare’, which was used for various projects.
Well, the one on the left just went away to be part of Beth’s desktop. Which leaves a hole where there used to be a screen.
I’ve been considering upgrading my main monitor for quite a while, and tonight I sat down at my old T40 Thinkpad and marvelled at it’s 1400×1050 resolution. Pixel density was obviously an issue – a 15″ screen at that resolution will look finer than a 1280×1024 17″ monitor.
The thing that bothers me is that ‘high resolution’ monitors, (which nowadays are almost exclusively LCD), don’t seem to be catering to resolutions over 1280×1024, or more directly, 1400×900 (‘HD’ format displays). These resolutions are no improvement over what I have, and the monitors I do have are almost 2 years old.
I understand that LCD monitors are driven by the consumer and basic business market. It’s much harder to make 1000 high resolution LCD monitors (out of the million ‘normal’ monitors) than it is to crank out 1000 high resolution CRT displays, but dammit, it’s frustrating to see 19″ 1280×1024 monitors going for $170, while it’s nigh on impossible to find monitors that have a higher pixel density. Sure they have wider resolutions. Common ground is 1400 or 1600 horizontal resolution (Depending on if it’s ‘widescreen’ or not) and 1050 vertical resolution (yay another 26 pixels?), but nothing higher until you start talking $500 for a 24″ monitor.
“Nice whining, but what is it you really want?”
I want a dependable, high contrast LCD monitor that has a resolution of 1600×1200, or durned close to it, and I don’t want to fork out serious cash for something like the Apple Cinema displays. This was easy to find in the 21″ monitor CRT days, though the challenge THEN was finding a video card to drive it, a problem easy to solve with current video boards.
Any suggestions?
Update 9/9/07 Jonah, the dark and sinister influence on my life he is, points out that Dell actually has a decent 20″ monitor for $309 that has the specs I want. Hmmm.

Calendar sharing. Nirvana found?

What is seemingly the bane of existence for most non-Microsoft users is the constant problem of “How can we share calendars?” Exchange does this extremely well, and there are many a Linux zealot, when confronted with the “Okay, we’ll try Linux. How do we share calendars?” has had to hide in shame.

For me, the problem has been “how do I sync my Treo 650 so I can see my family and friends’ calendars, without having to manually do some rigamarole involving synchronizing through some Windows based custom tool?

My savior may have arrived in the form of a tool called GooSync.

The concept is simple. The world in general has failed to come up with a standard calendaring system that actually makes sense, and allows multiple people to share, view, and update each others’ calendars. iCalendar, while very good for publishing calendars and allowing people to subscribe to them for viewing, does a poor job of allowing others to update someone else’s calendar.

Along comes Google Calendar. Ahh, a good, interactive, free calendaring service that allows multiple users to share, update, and publish calendars interactively. Not only that, Google Calendar has a published API specification that allows users to write programs that interact with it.

I had been using CompanionLink to hotsync my Google Calendar down to my Treo, but after months of complaints to their tech support and sales department, explaining that without multiple calendar support, their tool had only limited functionality, and after they even said to me “If you can figure out a way to keep the calendars synchronized without duplicating entries, feel free to tell us how” (and I did), and still not getting an update, it was time to look elsewhere.

GooSync has a number of very strong advantages over CompanionLink and, frankly, any other tool I’ve seen so far.

  • The base version is free. It allows you to sync one personal calendar to and from the Treo to a single Google Calendar
  • For a small fee (about $20 a year), it supports multiple calendars, with read and write access.
  • It keeps all the calendar entries separate on the Treo, either via a text tag in the entry, or using categories.
  • It syncs wirelessly. That means it’ll use the Treo data network (whichever one you have) to talk to their servers to get updates and to post changes. This means you do NOT have to cradle-hotsync your Treo and run some Windows app to synchronize your calendars

That last item bears closer scrutiny. Once the GooSync client is installed on your phone, all subscriptions and maintenance to your calendar list is done via Goosync’s website. Want to add a new calendar to your phone? Go to the website, say “show me all my Google calendars” (and it does), and click the checkbox next to the one you want to show up on your Treo. On the phone, run the Synchronize function in the GooSync client, and 30 seconds later, your Treo is updated with all the new entries.

I’ve tried this with my own calendar, and shared calendars I have write access to, and it works perfectly. No duplicate records, nothing showing up in calendars that I didn’t have there before, it just plain works. I now have full control and view into all my Google Calendars from my phone.

With all the gloom and doom about the PalmOS platform (both from me, and also from very well known tech blogs like Engadget), this is a small ray of sunshine. Note that GooSync supports a ton of different devices, so even if you don’t have a ‘smartphone’ per se, you can probably sync your Google Calendar to your device.

Yay technology, and thank you Google for making it possible, and thank you GooSync!

Another Linux user. Our ranks grow.

About 6 months ago I was having a conversation with my roommate Beth, talking about her aging Dell laptop. She was considering getting a desktop machine to use as her primary workhorse for her up and coming graduate student immersion.

I thought a bit, and said “Hey, I could probably get you something decent. We could even make this an interesting experiment. Tell you what, I’ll get you a machine, but it’ll run Linux. Up for it?”

“Sure!”

And we were off…

Continue reading “Another Linux user. Our ranks grow.” →

Eve Crankiness

It’s mighty frustrating when your chief distraction / addiction starts being totally unuseable.
Grrr.
And, in the rant department, I really detest ‘debugging’ Windows problems, as I’ve had to do twice today. Windows gives you NO feedback on what’s going on. It either works, or it doesn’t, and the process for ‘fixing’ the problem involves playing whack-a-mole with driver versions, tools, and clicky-clicky interfaces. Except the mole is invisible, and the big bell is broken. You may fix the problem, but you won’t know it until you try again. And then it might work, it might not, or it might work on the next reboot, or, you may be blessed with your fix working, but may stop next time you reboot, or run an update, or move your mouse, or whatever.
I’m boggled by how people can call this platform ‘maintainable’, when the chief answer seems to consistently be “Doesn’t work? Reboot! If that doesn’t work, reinstall from scratch!”
*takes grumpy self off to bed*

Vague amusement at technology.

I find it terribly amusing, coming from a long history of data communications involvement, that my tactic, when deciding to walk away from my computer, is to turn the volume down so I don’t disturb others.

Why is this amusing?  Because I don’t even bat an eye at the fact that I’m streaming 128kbps worth of music from a server in California through 4 companies’ networks and 2 dozen routers, moving something like 20k worth of data a second (that’s 10 full pages of text, to give it context) into my machine where… it is not heard, and discarded.

We’ve become so bandwidth-jaded.

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Looking for a poster? Or maybe an album cover?

Back in high school I remember an image of a full size sailing vessel – a galleon or the like (we’re talking old school wooden round hull), but it was up on ice runners, and was zipping along on the ice, rather than in water.

It might have been part of the black light poster set, as so well catered to by Spencers or the like, or maybe it was an album cover?  Does anyone remember this image, or better yet, have a pointer to it? <a href=”http://images.google.com/”>images.google.com</a> is not helping me.

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