Help Me Keep Outlook Out!
My church's office currently has two users using Outlook, two using Outlook Express and two using Thunderbird. Our new office administrator wants to replace the Outlook Express and Thunderbird installs with more copies of Outlook… and, I think, get a server to run Exchange on. This, obviously, is the opposite direction I was hoping we'd move it — it just means more security issues, and probably more broken systems for me to repair.
So, I need your help, ASAP. Does anyone know of a good groupware solution that will provide functionality comparable to Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Calendar? Or barring a Mozilla solution, some other Outlook alternative for Windows. What I mean is that we need shared calendars, shared address books, etc. The server can run GNU/Linux or something else, but the clients must be Windows. It must be as easy to use (or nearly as easy) as Outlook.
Is there such a solution? I don't think OpenGroupware or Kolab work with Mozilla to provide what needs to be provided, but correct me if I'm wrong. I can't imagine having to deal with a Microsoft server and a bunch of easily broken into Windows XP systems at church — that would be a mess!
Help!
GNU/Linux's Missing App for the Masses
GNU/Linux is great. But it is suffering in one area. I realized this when I started using Mac OS X and noticed that this kind of thing existed and worked well. I've now noticed it even more since I moved my mother over to GNU/Linux last week and found out she is not very pleased with this one part of GNU/Linux. What is it I am referring to? Photo organization and downloading tools!
They stink, for the most part, in GNU/Linux. Badly. Bring out the Glade Plug-ins bad. Open the windows and leave the house for a week bad.
iPhoto blasts away the competition, but fortunately, I'm not trying to get Mom moved over from a Mac. I wouldn't have even contemplated a move if she had a Mac. On a Mac things “just work.” But, she didn't use a Mac, she uses (well, used) Windows. She has a “Kodak EasyShare” camera with a camera dock, and she used Kodak's software that automatically downloads the photos and organizes them when you press a button on the camera dock. Needless to say, that software doesn't exist for GNU/Linux.
Linspire (fka Lindows) has been working on something called Lphoto and I thought perhaps that would work well. Mandrake's “dynamic” tool automatically sticks an icon on your GNOME or KDE desktop to launch gtkam or some such, but that isn't anywhere near automatic downloading and gtkam's interface is horrid at best. So, I edited the hotplug config to make Lphoto come up automatically. Kodak had made a poor clone of iPhoto, so I was hoping another poor clone of iPhoto might do the trick. Unfortunately, at least for now, Linspire's clone is worse than Kodak's. A lot worse.
But, it seemed to do the trick. Until yesterday, when I found out that it wasn't working right any longer. I went to check out my mother's computer and lo and behold, it took about 30 minutes to download 177 photos. I doubt I need to point out that such “speed” is pitiful. I tried some various ideas, including checking out flphoto (another gphoto2 based tool, like Lphoto). Flphoto, which has no relationship to Lphoto is way faster, which is bizarre since they both use gphoto2, but it has no way of keeping a list of albums together.
Finally, I've run into digikam, a program for KDE, which seems to run fine under GNOME too. It finally seems like something that is half way decent with some basic enhancement and effect tools and quick downloading. But its interface, like most KDE programs (click to read my editorial on that issue), is cluttered by too many features. Lots of features are nice, but it needs a cleaner way of displaying them, at the very least; iPhoto offers lots of functionality, but it isn't overwhelming even for a newbie. For now, I think it will work much better than any alternative I can find, but it seems amazing that no one has bothered to write a decent photo tool that mimics the iPhoto (or the Kodak Easyshare) interface and actually works right.
Well, maybe I'm being harsh on digikam. It looks like it has some nice stuff, but after one has used iPhoto it is hard to tolerate lesser programs. While Kodak's Easyshare software might not merit critical praise for its UI, my mother feels the same way about her migration from Easyshare to the abyss of Linux camera software. GNU/Linux developers really should quit developing the umpteenth Tetris clone or text editor and instead consider improving gtkam, digikam or Lphoto so that users will actually have a photo tool that the average user can deal with and everyone can enjoy without being envious of Mac OS and Windows users.
I'll post in a week or two if digikam improves the situation at all.
I'm Really Tired...
…I'm not sure why. I've fought with a lot of computer (read: Windows) problems for people today, but I do that all the time. Don't know why that's got to me today.
The MySQL License Question
MySQL AB's namesake database is a package that many would list among the crown jewels of Free Software. The Swedish company's database has been deployed over five million times by the company's own count. Yet, some, quite legitimately wonder if certain wording on the MySQL site might indicate the company is backing away from Free Software, and the GNU General Public License. We (OfB) wanted to know, so I contacted MySQL AB, the FSF and others to find out; read what I found at OfB.biz
QOTW #12: Better Late Than Never (Redux)
Yeah, it is late again. So sue me. Seriously, I am sorry to anyone who was anxiously awaiting QOTW #12. But it is finally here.
Do you get a lot of junk mail of the postal mail variety?
Yes! More than I even want to think about. Some really junky junk — the kind I've never requested anything to do with. Lots of Mac Mall, Dell, Hello Direct and PC Connection catalogs. Those stupid Internet Domain Registry of America fake billing mailers. Even some magazines I didn't request that I now receive but don't read.
On the other hand, I get some neat stuff too — CDW once sent me a “Tech Answer Wizard” (a computer problem lingo version of a Magic Eight Ball). Sun Microsystems once sent me some popcorn. AOL even sent something nifty — a AOL CD in a metal tin perfect for holding stuff.
On a side note: I haven't forgotten about the Christian spam registry… I'm hoping to put that online very soon.
Something to think about...
ALAN KEYES, IN MY ESTIMATION, is probably one of the most eloquent conservative figures presently in politics. Frankly, he was my favorite in the GOP Primary in 2000, alas he never garnered more than 10% of Republicans' support in polls, even at the best of times. Of course, he was running against two folks with far better political machines. Now that we have McCain and Bush working together so that we don't have to face four scary years of Kerry, the most liberal member of the senate, and his running mate, the fourth most liberal member of the senate (“the balanced ticket” they say…), it looks like the final member of the GOP 2000 trio is back in action too.
As you've all undoubtedly heard, Keyes is running for the senate seat in Illinois being vacated by Sen. Peter Fitzgerald ®. Jack Ryan might have been the original choice of the people of Illinois, but I think Keyes could be the really great blessing in disguise of the whole scandal mess concerning Ryan. Keyes has the oratorical skills needed to compete with Barak Obama, and his national renown should help fund raising efforts (a very important thing since he has to raise enough to compete with Obama's $10 million dollar war chest in just three months).
One thing Keyes would like to do is abolish the IRS. That's right, read his lips… no [income] taxes. Not “no more taxes,” but no IRS taxes at all. The interesting thing here is that this has been desired by conservatives for years, but never came to the mainstream until just last week. Last week, speaker of the House Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) started talking about pushing a plan to abolish the IRS in favor of a national sales tax if President Bush is in office over the next four years (because tax hiking liberal Sen. Kerry would never go for it).
Here's the deal. For most Americans, you'd probably pay the same amount to the government every year. Because, most Americans don't save their money, they spend it. So why is this a good thing? First, let's consider the obvious: does anyone really enjoy filling tax returns? Your time, money spent to pay for tax filling services and programs and so on are all things you would be saving. Most importantly, the money would stay in your pocket for longer. If you aren't self employed, most likely, your tax payments are coming right out of your check and straight into government coffers. With a sales tax system, it would stay in your pocket until you bought something — thus you'd make interest on your money.
Furthermore, many important things such as education and services aren't taxable. That makes Sen. Kerry's proposed tax credit for college education look down right small. Unlike a tax credit, you'd keep the money rather than waiting for a refund check to get your money back. You'd keep your money in your pocket where it should be. It would also encourage people to invest in the stock market and other long term investments because you wouldn't pay capital gains taxes when you pulled your money out to buy things after already paying taxes on the money when you earned it. It'd be the end of the death tax (double taxing at its worst) and the marriage penalty.
Something tells me if Americans vote for more positive change through four more years of Bush-Cheney, and Illinoisans vote for two more years of Rep. Dennis Hastert and six years of Alan Keyes, we could see some really great common sense changes to the tax system. Let's hope this happens!
C+SR Returns
I've turned SAFARI/Count+Stat Remote referrer tracker and hit counter back on. I know The Covenant sites use it, among others who read this blog, so I though I should post something.
The site that was overloading it appears to have used up its bandwidth quota on its server, so it is no longer causing congestion problems. I'll need to plan ahead it case it comes back on, however.
Nightmare Weekend
It wasn't the worst weekend possible, but let's just say it wasn't the best either. It all started Friday when I found out my mother's Windows ME based PC was no longer able to boot (“Windows Protection Fault” yada yada yada). It appeared that a virus had exploited the IE security holes and attacked her system. Considering that this was the second Windows ME reinstall the computer appeared to need in as many months, I suggested that we switch her system over to GNU/Linux.
So, I set about working on the system, first trying to repair Windows and then installing Fedora. I got done about 2:00 a.m. Yesterday morning, I was tired, but mostly refreshed.
Here's the catch: she likes to use MSN Groups and enjoys the Internet Explorer-only features that MSN makes available. She also likes JASC Paint Shop Pro. So, I do the logical thing: I get Win4Lin 5.1 for the system. Only problem is, Win4Lin doesn't support the distribution I had picked out for her system, Fedora Core 2. So I start playing around with generic kernel patches from NeTraverse (Win4Lin's developer) to see if I can get it to work. Finally I do, by switching to an entirely generic kernel without any of Red Hat's optimizations, but unfortunately that made it so that I couldn't get the nVidia drivers to install.
While I wanted her to have GNOME 2.6, I decided it wasn't worth fighting that. So I pulled out Mandrakelinux PowerPack+, which has Win4Lin enabled kernels and automatically installs support for the latest nVidia and ATI graphics cards. It goes in smoothly and I set about updating the system, migrating data and so forth. I worked until about midnight and decided to call it a night. I had hoped to give Mom's system back to her today (Sunday), but I was was a bit pooped from the late night the night before.
12:00 a.m.Before jumping into bed, I flipped on my laptop to check my e-mail. Only I couldn't connect to my e-mail. Asisaid and all of my other sites were crawling. I jumped over to serverforest.com only to see the server's load averages being reported at about 80 for each. That isn't good, if you're wondering. It is actually really, really bad unless there is some specific reason it should be that high. I tried logging into my administrative web interface or SSH but both were unavailable thanks to the high processor load.
12:15 a.m. I had no choice but to e-mail my data center and ask them to reboot the system. I can't do anything until the system is in a state other than a deadly resource tailspin. I start to panic, I'm suppose to be up within about seven hours to go on a short trip and a solution is nowhere in sight.
12:30 a.m. The data center technician starts trying different was of coaxing the system to reboot. Nothing works for a very long time and he eventually gives up on logging into the system. I begin to wonder if cPanel blasted apart my mail server again during a nightly update.
12:50 a.m. The server comes back on after being forced to reboot. The resource usage starts to climb again. Local bandwidth and load monitoring shows 100x increase over a two hour period — something is really wrong. It looks like it is going to be a long night. The amount of time I will have to sleep is shrinking.
1:15 a.m. I realize that SAFARI Count+Stat Remote, my referrer tracking tool is being hit hundreds of times a minute by one site, forcing dozens of copies of MySQL and Apache to load. I disable the script and place a message about it being temporarily out of order in its place.
1:40 a.m. Everything finally returns to normal. I go to bed. I can't sleep wondering if the onslaught might be a DoS rather than just CSR being used by a busy site. I get up a few hours later.
Today I'm pooped — two late nights and then getting up early this morning have really taken their toll. But, I did get my mother's computer almost ready to go back to her. I'm hoping to give it back to her tomorrow. The trip to see the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois that I went on with some family turned out very enjoyable, even despite lack of sleep.
Concerning CSR, I re-enabled it today and all seemed well, but it was starting to act up again, so its down for the moment. It is being used on a financial scam site in Australia that is, I think, spamming people and thus causing a massive amount of traffic every night (U.S. time, daytime down under). CSR doesn't presently have a way to block sites from using it, so I'm developing one to block this site that has caused so much trouble. sigh
So that is what I've been up to, how about all of you?
Keep'n on Truck'n
Another busy day — I'll hopefully be back tomorrow.
