Archive for March 2006

Jesse Keating: I am never happy

Jesse Keating: I am never happy:
Thunderbird
Pros:
– select quoting (with an extension)

Jesse, I did try a bunch of extensions (Quick Reply Extension and TB Reset Quote Header Extension), and none of them get it “right” like Evolution does. Have you had much other luck?

I’ve been using Thunderbird for about six months now, and personally I think Evolution is a lot more mature, even though it comes with its own set of problems. Now the question is, when will Evolution be cross-platform, and make it a true winner (seeing that it has calendering, Palm synchronization, and much more)?

Fedora’s shipping Mono. RHEL5 is likely to ship Mono. When’s Evolution going to be written in C#?

Pete Zaitcev: Torrenting FC-5 ISOs

Pete Zaitcev: Torrenting FC-5 ISOs:
I suppose I can uncover the mystery which bothers dwmw2. The main reason I’m torrenting FC-5 ISOs right now is that making my own ISOs from Rawhide RPMs is too much of a hassle. I would need to have all scripts on tap, which copy RPMs, copy comps or whatever it is that Anaconda needs, and, worst of all, generate images/. And God Forbid I hit a bug in installation. Mr. Jones and Mr. Katz would tell me “your ISO must be screwed, use a normal one”, and they would be right.

Pete, I think dwmw2 downloads trees, burns a boot.iso and does NFS installs. Its probably heaps better than downloading them, and making your own ISOs from the tree. It saves a lot of CDs (or CDRWs) and these installs can magically happen pretty unattended. This is my preferred way of installing.

And Jeremy, Peter and Paul are pretty amazing when it comes to anaconda bugs. Very responsive, and always willing to investigate.

Alas, I do torrent ISOs too, because the PPC torrent tends to not receive much traffic, and I’m doing my bit for the rest…

there can be only one

Its probably worth noting that my fedoraproject.org email address is actually byte@fedoraproject.org as opposed to it being both byte@ and colin@. Email is no longer maintained on the box itself, and there was no room for my two aliases ;-)

No wonder my Bugzilla folder was getting quiet for a while…

OOo is sufficient for evangelical use

In some surreal goodness, the Energizer Life Church in Hobart, Tasmania runs an all Mac shop, and they use (get this) Keynote for their announcements!

I told them all this was rather expensive and a misuse of church funds, and looking at Linux and OpenOffice.org will make sense in their next upgrade cycle. Besides, they can’t even get more volunteers to help, seeing that only two folk know how to use Keynote/OSX.

OOo has this wonderful advantage of being cross-platform. And even on a Mac, running in X11 full screen mode, is ideal for presentations. I’ll have to get playing with OOo Base in the near future, because combined with the Migration Assistant, there can be some powerful “NGO desktop”-styled switches.

Partitioning a hot topic!

Yes, MySQL 5.1’s new Partitioning feature definitely is a hot topic. Last week’s iPod Nano winner won thanks to interesting partitioning happenings, and this week’s one wins for the same reason.

With that, here comes a hearty congratulation to Jeremy Cole, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Jeremy’s been a long-time MySQL user, a one-time employee, and a great help on the mailing lists. In trying out new features in MySQL 5.1, he stumbled upon several bugs, one of which has been fixed. Again, the idea of repeatable bug reports is tantamount to how quickly a developer can fix a problem. (mysql#17541) Don’t forget to read his engaging blog, jcole’s weblog, which is already fed to Planet MySQL.

Want an iPod Nano next week? Its simple. File a useful, reproducible, non-duplicated bug report. Blog about it. That second step, is seemingly important. And I’ll notice it when I do my weekly bug hunt ;-)

In other news, if you want to meet Jeremy Cole, he’s presenting quite a bit at the MySQL Users Conference 2006:

Simple time trackers

In Linux, there are plenty of good time trackers (karm being probably the best). On OS X, all the interfaces seem clunky, and of course, you’ve got to fork out an obligatory set of dollars to use it. I don’t mind, but I’ve not found something easy to use.

I’m after:

*--------|--------|-----------*
|TaskName|<Button>|Logged time|
*--------|--------|-----------*

I expect to click a button, and have the time move right along for the task. When I feel like resetting it (some tasks, weekly, some monthly), I want to be able to just click a reset logged time option (right click menu feature).

Anyone know if something like this remotely exists for OS X? Consider this a time tracker for dummies or something (I really don’t need a complicated interface).


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