Thunderbird --> Evolution

I finally decided to migrate all my mails to evolution. I like Thunderbird, but the problem there is the poor integration into gnome and some bugs in the calendar (especially with google calendars). I hope that the Thunderbird development will continue and maybe put some effort in integrating Thunderbird into gnome.

The migration took me some days...the first step was to get all my pop mails from my main freemail account into gmail where I can get them via imap. Gmail is really nice to aggregate various mail accounts because it can get your mails via pop from every server you want!

Just be careful not to forward all the messages you get on gmail to the account you want to import :D You will get some nice messages from google that they are sorry, but they have given up because of a mail loop. I guess the message is worth doing it anyway ;)

Some thoughts about evolution:
What I like about evolution is the build in calendar and how Evolution integrates into gnome. Thats really great.

But I'm a little bit disappointed by Evolutions ui. I am used to Thunderbird and it could be that I just need some time to get used to Evolution, but as a "first user" the ui and the menus are quite confusing.

One example is the creation of a new appointment. I've never seen a bigger button-salad: The "Save", "Print" and "Close" buttons are somehow "grouped" together. There is a toggle button ("Show time as busy") in between of some normal buttons and the "Alarms" button opens a new window which uses 7/10 of the space for the "custom" alarm which is only one of the options in the dropdown list (and maybe the most rarely used one).

Another example is the compose mail window: half of the space of the window is used for other things then the text of the email, which should be the central part of the ui.

The notification area at the bottom of the main window is confusing too, when there are more things going on you can watch the buttons and labels fly around like in one of the good old videos of the 90's.

I really don't want to piss someone off: I respect the work everyone did for Evolution and I do understand as well that it's not easy to design complex ui's.

Sketch2Photo

Researchers from several Chinese universities and research projects have developed a new approach to combine various images freely available in the internet to one composed image. What the image should look like can be specified in a little sketch.


Photo: www.crunchgear.com

Read a detailed report here or visit the website of the researchers directly.

Google Wave Preview

Yesterday I got access to Google Wave Preview. I've tested it a little bit now, but for the moment I have only one other friend that uses it. That makes testing a little bit pointless ;)




I was really excited when I got the invitation, now I have to say that it's not that awesome as it seemed in the presentation. It's nice but still work in progress and you can see that a lot. It seems a little bit buggy to me.

Now to the big question: will it be the new email + im + everything in one?

I guess it will never substitute email as it was originally intended nor will it substitute IM between two persons. I see a big advantage in Google Wave when more than two people are involved in a discussion. Mailing lists are really a pain in the ass to read, so are Skype chat sessions with more than 2 buddies. Google Wave could be very nice even for two people to write wiki-like documents or to brainstorm, but not for a solid conversation.

Google Wave has some potential with the widgets you can use. For now there are not many widgets included (only Map, YesNoMaybe and Sudoku ;)), but that will change in future and there are a lot of people out there with good ideas for widgets.

For now: let's wait and see what comes next and how people accept it!

[EDIT]: Please don't comment on it wanting to get invited, I already used up my invitations.

Flashmob

greatest flashmob ever :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1fvk4GhKoQ

Corsica

I've spent the last two weeks with some friends in Corsica. It was a great holiday, I really enjoyed it. Our plan was to hike around for some days, we did two one day trips and one three day trip (planned for four days, but somehow we've been faster than we thought). After the hiking we spent another week at the beach on the west coast which was great for the legs to recover! :)




Corsica is a wonderful island, after striking it out from my to-go-list I have to put it there again: I'm definitely going to visit Corsica again! I liked the combination of mountains and beaches. In the center of the island there are some nice and high mountains (the highest mountain, Monte Cinto, is 2.706m high) to climb and after an hour drive you can enjoy the beach and the sea.



On our way back we stopped at Prato, the hometown of Cosimo Cecchi, to eat a pizza. We've been there only for two hours, but I have to say: Prato is worth a visit! (The pizza and the ice cream afterwards: great!)

The pictures can be found on my web album.

GCDS Videos

Thanks to Andre and Facebook I got the news that the GCDS-Videos are online.

You can find all of them here.

This is a good time for my personal gcds wrap up. Here are only some of the talks I enjoyed the most:

• Matthew Paul Thomas, Common interface bloopers
• Matthew Garrett, Power management
• Owen Taylor, Introduction to the Gnome Shell

There are also others I really liked, but not all of them appear on the site.

At this point I would like to thank all the people who helped to organize such a great event! The local team was awesome, they did a great job! Thanks guys...

Reading C

Reading C declarations (with all the magic) is easy...

A (good looking) friend of mine pointed me to this nice article, after reading it I had to ask: why isn't this the first thing you learn when learning C?

enjoy:
http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/CS652/How+To+Read+C+Declarations

(of course the "good looking" was his suggestion...)