Scott MacGregor's Thoughts On Thunderbird

Thoughts On Thunderbird

One of our most important goals is to enhance the lives of Thunderbird users. We don’t know if we’ll ever have, as Mitchell states, “enough [people] to compete with other players for a consumer based product.” But we do know that millions of people use and depend on Thunderbird every day, and with dedicated resources and focus, we know that we can enhance the lives of millions more.Additionally, we want everyone to know that each developer, localizer, and tester means a great deal to us, and every contribution to Thunderbird is valued and important. Adding just one person to the effort, for example a dedicated Thunderbird build engineer, will make a huge difference. In fact, just that one person would have enabled us to release Thunderbird 2.0 a couple of months earlier.

FF extention: DocumentMap

DocumentMap is a great FireFox extension that lets you see the heading structure of the current document (not the DOM) in the sidebar... So you essentially get the same effect Acrobat Reader has with the what they call the bookmark view , but for web/html pages.

This is quite useful for huge (unstructered) HTML documents that are still structured enough to have proper headings defined (i.e. the h1, h2, ... tags)

I found this thanks to GullFOSS who use it as a better way to navigate the OpenOffice Developer's Guide:

Try it out and browse for example the Text Documents chapter of the Developer's Guide and press alt-o. I am sure you will like it.

Thanks...

.. and yes, the OOo Developer's Guide needs some more structure.

Mozilla Foundation to spin off Thunderbird ?

A recent post by Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker (mitchell's blog: Email Call to Action) call for a something like a vote on what Mozilla should be doing with Thunderbird:

"Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus - delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services - is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny."

And she gives 3 options:
Option 1. Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation [...]
Option 2. Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird [...]
Option 3. Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey [...]
(find the details at the original blog post).

Interestingly none of them reads "keep it as it is"... so this looks like they are abandoning their child... I'd hate that. Been a long time Netscape/ Mozilla-Mail / Thunderbird user. Especially now with the progress they made with TB 2.0. And now that SunBird / Lightning is finally (though still slowly) becoming a decent calender.
Forking TB into its on entity would probably weaken Firefox as well (gut feeling, can't really say why, but I think so).

Maybe Option 2 is the one to go to keep Thunderbird and Firefox really close.

EU's AntiGoogle

As reported, the EU has approved Germany to fund/subsidize the new European search engine, commonly known as the "AntiGoogle". Details here at EU OKs German online search-engine grant - Yahoo! News

In the details you will find that the money (120MEUR) goes mainly to SAP and Siemens (and other big companies)... So this really proves to be the Anti-Google: instead of letting innovation happen we give money to big over-managed corporations to "plan" for innovation... Totally the opposite of how Google came to life.

OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US

An Antic Disposition: OOXML Fails to Gain Approval in US

via Rob Weir

Sun ODF Plugin tips

For hints, tips and issues with the Sun ODF Plugin for MS Office, consult Malte Timmermann's Blog.

WebCrash2007 - The Entire Internet has Crashed

Great fun...

via m3s online pamphlet

Google docs new user interface

Just noticed that Google docs has a more advanced user interface and layout.




Seems a lot more well arranged now.

IT Conversations: Simon Phipps

Great interview...

IT Conversations: Simon Phipps: "Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer for [Sun Microsystems], joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss Sun's activities. "

JTRES 2007 in Vienna

JTRES 2007:

The 5th International Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-time and Embedded Systems - JTRES 2007

Institute of Computer Engineering
Vienna University of Technology
26-28 September 2007
Vienna, Austria

Sun ODF Plugin 1.0 for Microsoft Office FAQ

to be found on Malte Timmermann's Blog

Wikipedian Protester

via xkcd

Microsoft Office users can now import and export to ODF

StarOffice 8:

"The Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office allows users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug-in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). "

Download the ODF Plug-in.

Stylesheet fix for Weblog Publisher

Lately I noticed that the Sun Weblog Publisher uses an “additional” <p...> tag in list items <li>, which usually adds a line break right after the items bullet,

• 
  like this

I played around with the stylesheets of my blogs a bit to turn this off. The secret sauce looks like this:

ul li p {
display:inline;
}

To set the appearance or a paragraph that is nested within a list item of an unordered list to “inline” instead of “block”, so it no longer starts on a new line.

Hope this works now, I hate the manual edit...

Book: Everything is miscellaneous

Here's the book link to my earlier post on Everything is miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Vodafone selected as Apple's Euro iPhone partner?

Good news from endaget:

Vodafone selected as Apple's Euro iPhone partner? - Engadget

YAZLS: Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers - Engadget

Yet Another ZFS Leopard Story:

Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers - Engadget:

"Read / write ZFS beta for Leopard reportedly sent to developers"

Everything is miscellaneous – Tagging vs. Categories

I just listened to Phil Windley's inverview with David Weinberger on Technometria (via IT conversations).
I sum up David's thoughts (expressed in this interview) in my words:

„Miscellaneous“ is a container or category, but not a tag.

Meaning: if you really need to categorize things, i.e. you have to stuff them into a physical or virtual container, you sooner or later end up with a „Miscellaneous“ category (drower, folder, ...). That's because, if things need a container (...) you have to invent one for things that don't match your other containers. Check your kitchen or basement for proof.

Tags (as used by Google, Flickr, del.icio.us, ...) are not containers as such. They don't hold anything. Things can be tag-free (maybe they shouldn't, but they can). So there is no need for a „misc.“ tag.

Do never create a „Miscellaneous“ tag. It does not make sense.

Quite interesting (at the end of the interview) are David's and Phil's thoughs on egoistic (my word) and altruistic (their word) tagging, i.e. if you tag only for yourself (the early days of del.icio.us according to David) you will and should pick other tags than when you tag for others as well („ social“ tagging).

Listen in.

Google reader down ?

... again ?
Half a day without Google Reader... I feel like cut off from the (rss) world...

StarOffice 8 Update 7

Get it from SunSolve