Distractions, reflections

I like the Mozilla community. I’ve moved over almost entirely to Firefox — particular, in thanks to IE View, a plug-in that allows me use Firefox for surfing, and then start up another window in IE when the page calls for it. For personal e-mail, I was a long time user of Eudora, but switched over to Thunderbird when it was released.

On my work e-mail on Lotus Notes client, I typically work up against the 3-month expiry deadline, with somewhere between 200 and 300 message in backlog. A lot of these are push e-mail, as subscriptions from magazines such as Business Week and Forbes. (I used to subscribe to the paper editions by mail, but my stack was so huge, I had to do something to simplify my life).

So, with Thunderbird v1.5 supporting RSS, I stopped my e-mail subscriptions . Unfortunately, as I started having problems with the RSS feeds stopping, the clock has been ticking. It’s not absolutely crucial to keep on top of everything, but there doesn’t seem to be much encouragement in terms of movement on Bugzilla. I’m sure they have their plate full.  Read more... (592 words, estimated 2:22 mins reading time)

Ugh. I’m not sure why, but Thunderbird is being a bit erratic in updating feeds. I’m not the only person that has found it. Ron Miller discovered this on Jan. 14, and then gave up on Thunderbird 1.5 on Feb. 1.

This led to the entry on Bugzilla, where it seems to be on a slow path to repair.

I haven’t quite given up, yet, but will let this stew for a few days ….

As I’m gradually moving over from push e-mails to RSS on Thunderbird, I’ve started to notice more and more mentions of RSS as being central to future web technologies.

Forbes had pointed out some internal messages from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie on the “services wave” in software. Ray wrote:

RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as ‘the UNIX pipe of the internet’ as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways.

In the movement away from a small number of news sources to the larger world of self-publishing in blogs, RSS seems to be more reasonable in handling pull technologies.

I’ve gradually been adding RSS Feeds to Thunderbird, and removing subscriptions that would be sent to my e-mail. (A lot of Yahoo Groups will support RSS feeds, although some don’t yet).

One annoying feature, so far: an RSS feed (e.g. from Business Week) comes up well in Thunderbird, i.e. it looks like it would in Firefox. However, when I click a link, it brings up a new tab in Firefox — not in Thunderbird. This is actually more-or-less what used to happen when I had the e-mail subscriptions sent to my Lotus Notes e-mail client, and clicking the link there would bring up a page in Firefox. Now that I can use Firefox to view RSS feeds more directly, reading has been a lot smoother.  Read more... (269 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

I’ve been using Sunrise and Plucker to read RSS feeds on my Palm TX.

On the other hand, I still use a Sony NetMD minidisc player to listen to podcasts (although I have a Sony HiMD minidisc recorder for capturing audio). In addition, my e-mail in-basket continues to overflow from push from Business Week.  Read more... (338 words, estimated 1:21 mins reading time)