Friday, October 01, 2004

Miscellaneous Stuff for a Friday

New browser

Several weeks ago I switched to Firefox.  The switch was basically painless, just like everybody said it would be. 

In the past I have usually preferred to use Internet Explorer, in part because of the role I played in the development of its ancestors.  But my time as a browser hacker was a long time ago, and I am more pragmatic now.  Firefox is a better browser.

New mail client

My good experience with Firefox prompted me to try Thunderbird as my mail client.  I've been using Outlook 2003, but it's awfully slow and I don't use the Calendar/Contacts/Tasks stuff.  Part of my motivation for the switch was that I wanted to switch from POP to IMAP, and anecdotal evidence suggests that Outlook's IMAP support is really lame.

This transition has been a bit more painful than the change of browser.  I am now using Thunderbird for both email and RSS, but it's far from perfect.  I miss Outlook's virtual folders.  I miss having Lookout for really fast searching.  I miss NewsGator. 

I have yet to decide if I will switch back.  Even if I do, I think I'll stay an IMAP user.  I like running the spam filter on the server side instead of the client.  I get at least several hundred spams per day.  With IMAP, I don't have to download them to my desktop machine.

Doom 3

I'm not a serious gamer, but I recently decided to give Doom 3 a try.  Very cool, but it's amazing how hungry this game is for good video hardware.  I've tried it on the ATI Radeon 9800 and the nVidia 6800 GT, both with 256 MB.  (There is no comparison at all -- the nVidia is way better.)

By the way, now I can say that I know at least one person whose computer has less RAM than my video card, so I advance to the next level of geekiness.

New RDs

Congratulations to the new Microsoft Regional Directors, including a couple of guys I know because their companies are Vault users:  Jonathan Goodyear (of ASPSOFT) and Scott Watermasysk (of Telligent Systems).  It is gratifying to see that both of these firms seem to be doing really well right now.

And my condolences to Jonathan on the recent damage to his Porsche.  :-(

WTF

I love reading The Daily WTF.  I don't usually link to it, partially because I don't want to be explaining this acronym to my wife, my Mom or my daughters.  But Wednesday's entry was on the topic of version control so I just gotta give a link.

Chapter 6

I've been working on chapter 6 of my Source Control HOWTO, but it's coming slowly.  Thanks for your patience.  As I move to the more advanced concepts of source control, the writing takes a bit more time than it did on the early chapters.

The "first day of the month" blues

The first day of the month can be a little disconcerting for us here at SourceGear.  Our ecommerce system has a feature which tries to predict the total sales for the month using a very simplistic formula:  It calculates the average revenue per weekday so far and multiplies that times the number of weekdays in the month.

When I came in to the office this morning around 8:30am, our sales for the day so far were $1,099.  So, with 21 weekdays this month, our ecommerce system was predicting total October revenue of around $23,000.  Not good.  Let's just say that this would NOT get the bills paid around here.  :-(

We try not to take this thing too seriously, especially at the beginning of a month.

Photography Rant

I am gradually trying to become a "serious amateur" photographer.  The path seems like it should be straightforward.  A photographer is just a different flavor of geek, substituting glass and light for chips and logic.  I've learned a lot, but mostly I have learned how hard it can be to get a really good picture.

For the past several weeks, there has been a bird sitting in her nest in a small pine tree adjacent to my driveway.  At this very moment, I know that she is there, and the reason I know that she is there is that my camera is not.  She dutifully cares for her eggs, 24 hours a day, never leaving her nest except when I am trying to get a picture of her. 

I have made several attempts, using various combinations of long lenses, sneakiness, tripods and wireless remotes.  To date, I have been thoroughly outsmarted by a creature whose brain is smaller than my CapsLock key.  And every day when I get home from work, she is there, MOCKING ME.

I think for now I will confine my photographic pursuits to subjects which are incapable of flight.

I tried to sneak this silly tale into my latest MSDN column.  As it turns out, Chris Sells actually does read my stuff before he lets it get published.  The story didn't belong, so he made me cut it.  Yes, I concede that he was right, and I'll also admit that it doesn't really belong here either.  :-)