Month: August 2003

Oooh, Yves Piguet has carbonized GifBuilder!

Many were the hours I spent circa 1996 using the old version of GifBuilder under the old Mac OS…

Well, we spent the weekend in Iowa, and I’d love to recount the adventure, but I just don’t have the time right now…

In related news, it seems I’ll be going out east, towards College Park, Maryland in the near future. So if you’ve got anything to say about that particular location, let me know…

Recently I used the word ‘pundit’ and was asked to define the term. Upon reflection, I think the proper definition might be know it all jackass. Doubt me? Next time you encounter the word pundit, just use the phrase know it all jackass and see if it still makes sense.

Of course it all depends on the pundit being mentioned, but it seems to work with most pundits I’ve encountered so far…

So Microsoft is killing off Outlook Express. (via gemal.dk) Honestly, does this surprise anyone? (I mean anyone not familiar with Microsoft’s history and tactics.)

I’ve known a few people who have used Outlook Express under Mac OS 9. The first one switched from Eudora, and thought Outlook Express was really cool. It seemed to have all these cool features, and looked real nice. I told him that I preferred Eudora, if only because it stored email in text (mbox) files. Soon after his switch to Outlook Express, things went south. His mail got corrupted in some way, and he couldn’t access it anymore. Oddly enough I just helped someone else troubleshoot some problems with Outlook Express being able to send but not recieve mail. I suggested he try another mail application. He eventually reinstalled Outlook Express and that seemed to fix things, but for how long?

As far as mail clients I’d recommend? Well, under Mac OS X I’d say Mail.app will work quite well for most people, it’s got it’s issues, but it does an excellent job of filtering spam. I also use Thunderbird, though only for IMAP access. Still, it works quite well, and I’d recommend it to people using Outlook Express. Especially since there’s much less chance of Thunderbird development stopping. That seems to be the problem with Microsoft lately, they only thing you can rely on them to keep producing is bugs…

So they plan on screwing with the zip format? That just seems silly. Well, as long as they don’t mess with tar or gzip I think I’ll be ok. Right now I don’t use zip very often. On occasion I have to send files to novice Windows users, and in such a case, I choose zip. If I’m sending something to someone using the old Mac OS (pre OS X) I’ll usually stuffit and then binhex it. For Mac OS X users, you can create a disk image (dmg) file, and you can always gzip that if you want to, but for the majority of things I do, the old fashioned tarball suits me just fine. tar and gzip, can’t live without them…