Sunday 07 November 2010 at 09:46 am
My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.
With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.
I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it.
Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:
Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information.
Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove.
And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well.
So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.
Sunday 06 June 2010 at 01:38 am
First you go unethical by forcing users (stating security concerns) to upgrade to a newer firmware. And then, you don't even do a good QA on the firmware you release. It clearly looks you were in a hurry to strip off the "Other OS" feature.
I lost all my gameplay in the firmware upgrade.
Tuesday 01 June 2010 at 3:37 pm
The blog entry is about the F word.
What the fuck? You don't know what the F word is. Sigh!!!
Mea Culpa! Not your fault. It is quite offensive, no? More offensive than BC, MC, BsdK, LkB ?These are some of the usual terms used in our local derived languages in all its locally derived richness.
The word Fuck, many times, either from people with authority (HR) or the receiver, is termed and reacted to as a very offensive term. Usage of the word fuck is kind of blasphemy. In organizations, its usage can lead to harassments (to all those ultra fuckin' dumbs) and terminations. Sigh!!
Well! Yuck! to all those, who think that way.
Fuck is the most neutral word to express all kinds of feelings, be it anger, agression, disappointment, love, sex, celebration or anything else you can think of.
- Fuck you man
- I'm gonna fuckin' kill you.
- Fuck! It is painful.
- It was fuckin' amazing
- Let's fuck
See. How offensive it is. Now let's localize it with its equivalents.
- BC, Saala
- BC/MC, I'll kill you
- BC/MC, it is painful
- G phat gayi. It is so painful
- MC. Maza aa gaya
See. How nice it is. Not offensive at all. One can always argue that those words are not required to be used in the local languages, rather it is offensive terms not preferred. But be honest and ask yourself if you haven't used them when expressing yourself.
So when someone uses the F word, there isn't really a good reason to make those fucked up faces and feel offensive. The person is just making use of the best expressive neutral word to express himself.
At least, this way, while expressing himself, he still is sparing families and friends. So go ahead and make use of this wonderful F word and educate people on its endless possible usage. Or else if you still don't get it, I got 2 words: Fuck You.
Friday 29 May 2009 at 01:34 am
I've been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I've also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the *user*), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME.
Probably, many would disagree. Possibly, they might flame me too.I mean everyone supports GNOME as the default - Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu. And I always wonder WHY.
Was it the licensing ? I can't think of anything else. Anyways, why I still think that the GNOME design sucks, I'll give an example.
Evolution: Many call it the real killer app for GNOME. Maybe. There's one small feature in Evolution, that I've tried many times and I just feel that it is a UI design with stupidity at its best. The NewsGroup plugin of Evolution. Ever tried ? How fast can you subscribe to newsgroups there. Take these examples. I'd be interested to know how Evolution users subscribe to newsgroups.
I personally use leafnode to cache the news contents. In Kontact Knode, when the Gmane newsgroup listing appears, it appears with thousands of newsgroups. But KDE allows me to run a search on that list and find for the relevant newsgroup that I need.
Such a basic feature and I wonder what was there in the mind of the GNOME Evolution devs when they were designing that interface.
Thursday 11 December 2008 at 1:46 pm
Thanks to Pierre Chifflier, Debian now has setroubleshoot packaged. The good thing about setroubleshoot is that it gives you a very user friendly message about the SELinux violations that occur on your box while you were doing something.
Now that something is very difficult to define (at least for Debian). My day job requires me to work on the RHELdistribution which has very good SELinux policy defined (Same is the case with Fedora). Here's a list of things which Debian's SELinux policy lacks and that RHEL/Fedora's doesn't
- `acpi -V` raises a violataion
- `dmesg` raises a violation
- `apt-get update` raises a violation
- You can't suspend, that raises a violation
- nvidia module load raises a violation (Oh!! Well. That's binary-only. ;-) But the same doesn't raise a violation in Fedora)
So even though I'd love to use SELinux on Debian, I can't. Basic tasks are seen as violation by the Debian SELinux Policy. Try out enabling SELinux in Permissive mode and install setroubleshoot. You'll see setroubleshoot pop-up a SELinux violation every 5 seconds. Turns out that Debian's SELinux policy is becoming just too too much secure and thus interfering with the user using the OS.
Wednesday 15 August 2007 at 06:36 am
I must admit, Linux Power Management is Fuckin' Pathetic.
On a Dell XPS M1210 Laptop with a 6 Cell battery, I get a shitty 15 mins of power backup compared to 2 hrs on Microsoft Windows XP.
And woo, On my IBM T43 running Microsoft Windows XP, I watched a full movie on battery, and it still survived.
The Linux running laptop had no sound enabled.
Yes, Yes Yes!!! As many would say
- I wouldn't have rolled out a kernel optimized for my machine
- I should have run a lightweight window manager like FVWM (not KDE)
- I should have not used binary only drivers
- And many more reasons...........
But hey, Microsoft Windows XP has that too:
- It was playing a full movie under VLC (2+ hrs)
- It used the laptop's in-built speakers
- It had the antivirus software and others running.
Linux still is way behind for laptop usage
.
Wednesday 30 August 2006 at 6:29 pm
World Class Company - Third Class Ethics
Well!! After almost around 3 months after my exit from my previous employer (Dell R&D Center, Bangalore - India), I've now had some time to rant about the experiences I had.
Hereforth, unless explicitly mentioned, When Dell is quoted, I mean as Dell R&D Center, Bangalore - India, and not any other Dell facility because it is not fair for me to comment about the other centers since I've not worked there.
I worked for Dell's Linux Engineering Team for around 21 months. Dell being my debut Multi National Company, it was great and exciting to work.
- Dell is a great and renowned brand.
- It's a huge company with a huge userbase.
- And on top of all, it is a very successful company
The couple of things which I experienced at Dell were very frustrating. Interestingly, companies makes most such issues as company policies, often making no options for an individual to give a thought to it.
Though being in the Linux Engineering team and expected to work to all the fullest extents, you aren't given any resource for it. Well! Ah!! That's not within the company policy is what you hear.
Public Mailing List archives are blocked. Well! Company Policy. But still you hear, "We understand Linux, We support it."
Probably it was me, an odd, who had the feeling of being closed in a jail environment, working at Dell. It felt more to me like I'm again being ruled by the British Empire (East India Company).
With a belief in myself that not every company would be the same, the thought to quit Dell came to my mind after 21 months. A tough decision to make, but I had to.
Read More
Saturday 02 July 2005 at 7:05 pm
Yes, that’s rightly mentioned in the title. I’m not a fucking good speaker but this link might be good enough for explanations on why ESR and his open source fundas are shit.
Follow the facts, not the hype.
Free Software has always been about user rights and RMS has done great job.
For me personally, it’s been FSF because of which today what I am. Being a dumb chap from a rural town in a rural state of India and born in a complete business family, I had never dreamt of becoming a computer professional anyway. It was FSF and RMS’ idealisms that brought me today to where I am.
Long live RMS and long live the FSF.
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