Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Monday 28 February 2005

Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin passed away this week-end.

He was one of the co-inventor of the Macintosh, one of the computer products that really revolutionned the computer world.

Monday 21 February 2005

Software Rant

  • I'm ranting about Evolution, its speed and its antispam (see bug 72411), I'm not alone. Someone should really start to replace this antispam by what we find in Thunderbird / Mozilla, including flagging as \Junk over IMAP (I couldn't find any reference in RFCs and couldn't find the code in Thunderbird, anyone has an idea?) see bug 72547. For reference, marking one message as junk on my laptop take 15 to 20sec, even if the message is local.
  • I'm ranting about MacOS X memory usage, I'm not alone. With 256MB the MacMini is barely usable. I'll get a 1GB memory...

Wednesday 9 February 2005

Google maps analyzed

Mapping Google explained, or how they achieve on the client side. These people are smart. Other map services do worse using Flash. Thank you jgwebber for the info.

Source: Slashdot

Oh don't reply to the people that complain about the lack of Europe, I'd repeat that this service is beta, and I expect Google to provide more maps. Canada works already.

Tuesday 8 February 2005

Newton nostalgia

I haven't been a Newton owner, but sometime I dream of a rebirth of the Newton. I have a Palm, and I really miss the handwritting recognition and the globalization of stored objects. For example, in my Palm, I still can't attach a note I previously wrote, to a new appointement in my agenda. The Newton did do more than that, but the Newton got steved. Probably too ahead on his own time and probably suffering from Apple's own marketing.

Here is some nostalgia from Engadget.com:

Software Patents Evilness

The main MS-Word competitor in Japan is in Jeopardy because of a software patent lawsuit.

Saturday 5 February 2005

How Microsoft works around the law

Microsoft got condamned by the EU to release Windows without Windows Media Player, as a ruling to a triel of monopoly abuse and unfair competition. Microsoft decided to no appeal and just following the ruling. According to Liberation (fr), they'll release "Windows XP reduced media edition" as a result. But the pricing stay the same as the version with Windows Media Player and the name make it explicitly considered as a stripped down product. So why would OEM pick it up as they can get more for the same price. Currently, there is no way to make Microsoft change there pricing, but this really looks like they are trying to mock the European Comission.

And justice for all...