Technology: July 2003 Archives

After seeing a poll on SlashDot for the number of operating systems you have worked with for at least an hour, I started thinking about my answer to that question. My first guess would be something like 6-8. After thinking a little bit more, I came to the following list:

• AIX
• Apollo Domain
• BeOS
• Commodore 64 OS
• DR-DOS
• FreeBSD
• HP-UX
• Irix
• IOS
• Linux (HAL91, Mandrake, muLinux, RedHat, Slackware, SUSe)
• Mac System 5/6/7
• MS-DOS
• Netware
• OS/2
• PalmOS
• SCO Unix
• Solaris
• Thu64
• VMS
• Windows 3.x
• Windows 9x/Me
• Windows NT/2000/XP
• Windows CE/PocketPC

That makes 23, amazing!!! Of course you can always discuss about the definition of an OS. I decided to group some closely relates OS's like Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me, and the different Linux distributions, but other people might consider each of them as a seperate OS. I have been thinking to group all flavours of Unix (including Linux) in one group, but than I would also have to group all flavours of Windows. Fact is that the different Unices can be very different from each other, so I left them alone.

What is your list? Have you worked with any OS that is not on my list? Just leave your list in a comment.

I missed an important (for me at least) event: two days ago, the Mozilla Thunderbird project released their first milestone (version 0.1).
I have been using a nightly built for some weeks now, and I am really happy with it. However I have ran into some minor issues, which I hope will be solved with this release. I am going to download and install it in my lunch break.

A month ago, I wrote about the shortcomings of Internet Explorer and how this might stop innovation on the Internet in the coming years.

All over the web, people have expressed their worries, and a lot of web designers are afraid to have to deal with an obsolete browser for many many years. And of course, an action has been started to convince users to switch to another browser: Use a Better Browser. They ask site owners to place a button on their site, linked to a page explaining why other browsers are better than IE.

Although I agree with them that IE is quickly becoming a dinosaur, I don't think that a button will let many users change their browser. However, they will change because of ---lack of--- features. If other browsers have features IE does not have, users might switch. Therefore, the best way to convince IE-users to show them the tabbed browser interface and pop-up blocking of Mozilla and create sites using code that is not supported by IE. Of course, degrade gracefully. Something as the position:fixed CSS property can serve for this purpose, for example for creating a floating navigation bar which will always be visible on the top of the screen. IE users will simply have to scroll up to navigate (as always), while visitors with newer browsers will have the benefits of having the navigation always at hand. Other features that can be used to create better sites, are described in Eric Meyer's css/edge. These won't work on IE, but won't make the page unusable.

So go ahead, design your pages using the latest coding possibilities, but degrade gracefully!!

Yesterday I have installed Mozilla Thunderbird on my computer. Until now I was using Microsoft Outlook Express to handle my mail, but I was far from satisfied with it. I never have been a great fan of OE, but since my computer is very old (1997) with limited resources (Cyrix P150+, 48Mb RAM), I am very careful not installing too much heavy software on it. Therefore I stick with the default Windows applications as much as possible, unless they are completely unworkable.

A while ago I already switched from IE6 (which was almost as old as my computer) to Mozilla Firebird for obvious reasons, and I never looked back to Internet Explorer anymore.

Outlook Express was also close to unworkable for me. Its limited filtering, habit of creating bloated e-mail and top posting were bugging me all the time. Time for a change, and my Mozilla experience lead me to Thunderbird. The only problem is that the Thunderbird project is still in a alpha stage, and therefore surely still contains some bugs. I decided to install it anyway, and until now I haven't found a single bug!

It feels a little bit slower than OE, but it certainly makes life a lot easier. I was able to import my Outlook Express address book and mail without problems, and was able to set up a (Bayesian) Spam filter in no time. I still have to do some additional configuring like specifying the signatures and adding my certificates, but my experience so-far is more than positive!!!

I am receiving a lot of Spam, way too much... The last years the amount of Spam I receive has been steadily growing, and now I receive about 50 messages per day. But I am not going to sit down and accept it; no, I am fighting Spam. I am fighting Spam because Spam takes away the pleasure and the functionality of a system I like and use a lot. Spam is about to destroy e-mail. I fight Spam in several ways, here is how...