More Heat Than Light
The discussion of Web application frameworks over at Daily Kos just goes to show that there are opinionated blowhards with no social skills whatsoever passionately committed to any programming language you can imagine. (via Riding Rails)
Another Online Reference
It’s Tempting
Aha
ReminderFox looks to be the missing piece I was looking for to handle appointment and task management in Mozilla-land.
Weaning, Part 1
Well, one small part of my plan to remove Microsoft software from my life has gone off reasonably smoothly - I've switched my e-mail, tasks, RSS, and related activity over. All in all this has proved to be rather painless.
On the mail server front, I dumped Exchange in favor of hMailServer, an open source e-mail server which handles the load of mail I get with less setup than Exchange required, less server resources, and generally less hassle. There are a lot of advanced Exchange features that hMailServer doesn't have, but I never used any of those features, so this is just fine with me.
For a mail client, I dumped Outlook 2003 (after looking at the Office 2007 beta, Outlook 2007 was never a serious contender for me) and went with Mozilla Thunderbird. This was a bit more painful; Thunderbird is rather lightweight in many areas compared to Outlook. On the other hand, the "lightweight" also extends to resource usage, and it's nice to have a mail client that starts quickly and doesn't drag the whole computer down. I imported my last six months' worth of mail to Thunderbird; the rest of the last five years is still accessible to me through a Copernic index if I need it, though giving up that archive is going to be a bit painful if I don't eventually import it all.
Dropping Outlook also meant getting rid of JetBrains Omea Pro, which I was using for RSS and general organization. After looking at a few alternatives I've settled on NewzCrawler for an RSS reader. Because of Larkware, it's important for me to keep a client-side archive of RSS posts, so all of the online readers are out for me, no matter how sexy they look. I'd ultimately like to replace NewzCrawler with something cross-platform but haven't found anything decent yet.
There are still a few pain points. Right now I have my task list in Evolution on the Ubuntu box, which is OK but not great; I'm so far pretty unimpressed with Mozilla Lightning for calendaring and tasks. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do there, but I can live with having things spread across two boxes for a bit. And I don't have things synchronized to my PocketPC either, though to tell the truth I wasn't much using it anyhow. Also missing is SharePoint calendar integration, important because for the moment we run our household calendar on a SharePoint server, though in the long run that won't matter because I'll probably replace that server with something else too.
All in all, moving to a different e-mail setup proved to be far less hassle than I expected it would be - which gives me hope for migrating some other things to non-Windows platforms as well.
On the mail server front, I dumped Exchange in favor of hMailServer, an open source e-mail server which handles the load of mail I get with less setup than Exchange required, less server resources, and generally less hassle. There are a lot of advanced Exchange features that hMailServer doesn't have, but I never used any of those features, so this is just fine with me.
For a mail client, I dumped Outlook 2003 (after looking at the Office 2007 beta, Outlook 2007 was never a serious contender for me) and went with Mozilla Thunderbird. This was a bit more painful; Thunderbird is rather lightweight in many areas compared to Outlook. On the other hand, the "lightweight" also extends to resource usage, and it's nice to have a mail client that starts quickly and doesn't drag the whole computer down. I imported my last six months' worth of mail to Thunderbird; the rest of the last five years is still accessible to me through a Copernic index if I need it, though giving up that archive is going to be a bit painful if I don't eventually import it all.
Dropping Outlook also meant getting rid of JetBrains Omea Pro, which I was using for RSS and general organization. After looking at a few alternatives I've settled on NewzCrawler for an RSS reader. Because of Larkware, it's important for me to keep a client-side archive of RSS posts, so all of the online readers are out for me, no matter how sexy they look. I'd ultimately like to replace NewzCrawler with something cross-platform but haven't found anything decent yet.
There are still a few pain points. Right now I have my task list in Evolution on the Ubuntu box, which is OK but not great; I'm so far pretty unimpressed with Mozilla Lightning for calendaring and tasks. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do there, but I can live with having things spread across two boxes for a bit. And I don't have things synchronized to my PocketPC either, though to tell the truth I wasn't much using it anyhow. Also missing is SharePoint calendar integration, important because for the moment we run our household calendar on a SharePoint server, though in the long run that won't matter because I'll probably replace that server with something else too.
All in all, moving to a different e-mail setup proved to be far less hassle than I expected it would be - which gives me hope for migrating some other things to non-Windows platforms as well.
Could be Interesting
Rank Stupidity
Of all the reasons why I'm getting ready to leave the Microsoft universe, lack of work is not one of them. I could easily spend 100 hours a week writing C# code at very comfortable hourly rates. That's why I just had to laugh this morning when I ran across the language partisan nonsense of C#: Is the Party Over? in which the author apparently argues that C# has failed because it's been upgraded several times. Huh?
Speaking of Python Web Frameworks
Ought to be on my Radar
I Can Think of Worse Wishes
And Then There’s Django
Of course, Rails isn't the only RAD framework for Web development in town, as I was reminded by reading A Rails/Django Comparison and Constructive reasons to use Django instead of Rails . I'll probably poke at Django a bit, but frankly, Python makes my head hurt. Well, so does Ruby, but Python makes my head hurt more.
Not on My Computer
Peter Gutman (who is a rather well-known and respected security researcher) recently published A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection looking at some of the costs and changes being forced on hardware vendors by Microsoft's design of Windows Vista. Sadly, these costs are going to affect all of us, whether we use Vista or not. But this sort of nonsense is why I'm ready to ditch Microsoft - and certainly won't be "upgrading" any of my computers to Vista.
Pointless Bling is Everywhere
Looking Glass on Ubuntu just goes to show that Vista and Mac don't have a monopoly on stupid wastes of GPU cycles. (via dzone)
My Next PC Will Likely be a Mac
VMware Fusion looks like a great way to preserve existing investments while I slowly migrate.
There Must be an Opportunity Here Somewhere
Computing in the cloud is a basic look at Amazon's EC2, which is such a neat concept that it really feels like there must be a use for it.
Hmmmmmm
Review: An MS Office Alternative To Think About is about the fifth review of ThinkFree I've seen this week. I hope they're buying a really nice Christmas present for their PR people.
Microformats Fascinate Me
A Method to Their Madness
A Linux start-up on the path to profits is a News.com story based on an interview with Canonical/Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. It's sort of comforting on one level to know that there's a serious business plan behind the Linux variant that I'm using to write this, but on another level, I'm not sure it matters -it's not like the software is going to explode or my non-existent license will expire if Canonical goes under.
A Little Scary, Actually
The Examined Software Life
An unexamined life is not worth living. - Socrates
Ran across a blog entry today from one of the Ubuntu maintainers, Features vs. Freedom . The particular issue he's wrestling with (whether to include binary 3D video drivers with a free software distribution) is of mild interest to me, but there is a larger meta-issue that ties back to the whole reason that I'm writing here at A Fresh Cup. Over the past several years I have become increasingly convinced that our software choices have consequences, and that (sadly) most developers never spend even a moment thinking about these consequences.
Choosing to use Microsoft software as the basis for my work, whatever else it may do, contributes to the growth and health of Microsoft. It supplies funds for Microsoft's continued initiatives in the area of intellectual property and DRM. And it seems to me that the ultimate consequence of these initiatives will be to limit my own freedom of action, both as a software user and a software developer. I realize that reasonable people can (and do) disagree on these points, but that's where it nets out for me.
Having come to that conclusion, the question is what I can and should do about it. In my younger days, I wouldn't have recognized any distinction between "can" and "should," but with age comes either wisdom or exhaustion. I know what my ethics tell me I should do (opt out of using and supporting Microsoft software). But I know that to do this, cold turkey, would have immediate bad consequences (such as an inability to put food on the table for my children). Hence the explorations that you're seeing in this blog. The hope is that I can find some way to if not eliminate, at least minimize, the contradictions between the "can" and the "should" in this area of my life, and so increase my happiness by bringing my actions into closer touch with my ethics.
Ran across a blog entry today from one of the Ubuntu maintainers, Features vs. Freedom . The particular issue he's wrestling with (whether to include binary 3D video drivers with a free software distribution) is of mild interest to me, but there is a larger meta-issue that ties back to the whole reason that I'm writing here at A Fresh Cup. Over the past several years I have become increasingly convinced that our software choices have consequences, and that (sadly) most developers never spend even a moment thinking about these consequences.
Choosing to use Microsoft software as the basis for my work, whatever else it may do, contributes to the growth and health of Microsoft. It supplies funds for Microsoft's continued initiatives in the area of intellectual property and DRM. And it seems to me that the ultimate consequence of these initiatives will be to limit my own freedom of action, both as a software user and a software developer. I realize that reasonable people can (and do) disagree on these points, but that's where it nets out for me.
Having come to that conclusion, the question is what I can and should do about it. In my younger days, I wouldn't have recognized any distinction between "can" and "should," but with age comes either wisdom or exhaustion. I know what my ethics tell me I should do (opt out of using and supporting Microsoft software). But I know that to do this, cold turkey, would have immediate bad consequences (such as an inability to put food on the table for my children). Hence the explorations that you're seeing in this blog. The hope is that I can find some way to if not eliminate, at least minimize, the contradictions between the "can" and the "should" in this area of my life, and so increase my happiness by bringing my actions into closer touch with my ethics.
subscribe via RSS