Update: I suck! I forgot to make the URLs in the links section actually links… updated now.
Thunderbird / Lightning / iCal
I recently started receiving emails including iCal invitations that needed to be answered, but I had no idea how, and Thunderbird does not come with any such functionality out of the box.
The “Lightning” add-on, however, does give Thunderbird features to handle that, and it works really well (if one makes one configuration change in Thunderbird: go to “View” and ensure that “Display Attachments Inline” is checked)
On my netbook, I must have already set this, as it just worked there, whilst I was dumbfounded and needed the guidance from this thread to get it to work on the desktop.
Now every email with an iCal thingy that needs to be responded to will display a question at the top of the email window/tab
chromebooks
I pretty much agree with everything said in this article and for those reasons, a computer running a “cloud OS” will not become a consideration for me, until the computer is running my cloud which I and only I have full control over.
Most people won’t, but I’ll take privacy over simplicity/ease of use (or whatever other selling point is being made about these products) any day of the week.
And while we are speaking about the cloud, and why I dislike it so much, it is convenient that the next topic is related:
dropbox
So, Dropbox, the simple cloud storage and file synchronization service turned out to have a rather huge security flaw: Their employees can (to my knowledge it hasn’t happened, but how would anyone except a potential offender know, and it is this uncertainty which makes me shy away from such services) access their users encrypted shares, since Dropbox stores the encryption keys.
Dropbox is probably just as legit as they have always been, and they have probably never done anything wrong, but I can’t say that incidents like these strengthen my confidence in “the cloud”, at least not clouds operated by third parties, or actually, anyone except for the individual herself.
And that is why it is good to see that alternatives are beginning to crop up.
Jsoup
A friend of mine is doing some Java (Android) hacking, and asked me if I knew of any good web scraping libraries. For Java, my answer was no. For Python I would have instantly responded “Beautiful Soup”. So my answer became: “If I were you, I’d Google for beautiful soup for Java”. And then I did that myself, finding this post which inevitably lead me here.
Links
If you aren’t embarrassed by v 1.0 you didn’t release it early enough
Why we need version control
Interesting ways of making the most of a small living space
Revelation of the week
Learning a programming language by using an IDE can be damaging almost beyond repair.
This might perhaps just be me, but I learned html (albeit not strictly a programming language) in notepad, and have had no problems with html ever.
The same is true for bash, Python, javascript and Erlang. C would be the exception, those damn pointers continues to elude my understanding (not the concept of them, the syntax).
And then there is Java. We were taught to interact with it through an IDE, Eclipse as it was. That was 2005. This Wednesday was the first time I managed to write some barely non-trivial Java, compile it, and execute it, outside the “safety” of an IDE.
The reason for this was that Eclipse, for reasons beyond my understanding, keep crashing a couple of seconds after starting up, and that I had a friend in need of a little technology demonstrator.
And that’s when it really dawned on me. Outside Eclipse… it’s not that I am all that lost, it’s just that everything takes longer, is more tedious, and I have thusly shied away from it, thereby reinforcing that exact pattern.
And that is surely detrimental. I don’t want to be tied to a specific tool in order to be able to perform above average. A specialized tool might perhaps increase the effectiveness further, but being lost without it… that’s just wrong.