I tried out Ximian Evolution today. It’s an email client, actually more a personal information manager, that looks a lot like Outlook, except that Ximian is free, runs on *ix and will probably not get your computer infected with 298374987 different interesting yet unfriendly viruses.

Hey, interestingly, it seems the correct plural is “viruses” and NOT “viri”. If you’re a pedant, dodge this.

In anycase, usually I use mutt which, unlike Evolution, is exclusively text-based and 100% hot-key (shortcut) driven. For example, to compose a mail, I would go “m”, type the address, the subject and the body of the mail, then ctrl-x-s-x-c and finally “y”. The mail is sent in record-time.

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The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head.

— Aristide Briand (1862 – 1932)

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At least, all operating systems that I’ve worked with suck in some way or another. These are not minor quibbles, but major problems. It seems these fundamental problems are present in both open and closed source OSen.

You’ve probably read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond, so you know the difference between the two methodologies. Most of the open source development that I’ve come into contact with adheres to the Bazaar philosophy. The problem with the Bazaar philosophy is that almost anyone is allowed to contribute to the code (of Linux for instance). A few of these contributers are very clever people, but in a maverick kind of way. Whatever the case may be, they do not work together in the close-knit coordinated groups that you find in good software houses with effective leadership, but rather in a hackish manner. This wouldn’t have been such a problem, were it not for the fact that the rest (and the majority) of the contributers are not sufficiently experienced, inept or just plain stupid. Partly due to these phenomena, open source software seems to suffer from a total lack of consistency (in form, function and quality). In addition, one finds hundreds of half-assed software efforts on the web that will NEVER be completed. Compare this image to what you read here for instance.

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As I was downloading OpenOffice for the wif last night, I couldn’t help noticing that it was coming down at a very respectable 110KByte/s via my home ADSL link. This of course means that my bandwidth upgrade is complete. Rejoice!

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This guide to user interface differences between Winblows and Mac OS X (by Apple) should be consulted when you ever have to think about getting that UI perfect. Apple makes several very valid and straightforward points.

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After some more hacking on the DRI Radeon drivers, I can now suspend/resume with running hardware-accelerated 3D applications. Whoohooo! See this posting for details.

Note that this is very different from our DriReInit work.

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Yahoo reports that a group of record labels (UMG, Sony, RCA and Warner Brothers Records) are suing American back-bone providers because they allow end-users to download illegal music from Listen4ever.com.

The preposterousness of this aside, should they succeed, a precedent for backbone-level censorship on the internet will be created. Personally, I don’t condone the illegal download of music (and I also don’t care if you do download your music like that), but I do feel very strongly about the current freedom of information flow.

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This article in Wired documents the efforts of a scientist to restore sight with brain implants and external signal processing and optical acquisition equipment. It also mentions the work of one or two other scientists in the field.

I read Neuromancer years ago and it was very good. I read it very recently again and suffered a severe attack of goose-flesh. Gibson’s visions of the future are super-naturally accurate: if you haven’t read this book yet, stop what you’re doing now and start. You’ll see that virtual reality (AFAICR, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace”), brain implants, artificial human augmentation and artificial intelligence are all there and that the current state of affairs is excitingly close to the bleak picture that Gibson paints. I hope I live long enough to see where it ends…

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It’s pure bliss when your workstation doesn’t need to reboot 43 times per day, but just keeps chugging along doing its job…

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Ben has frikking finally decided to update his Livejournal for a change. There is rejoicing.

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