So Sony announced the details of PS3 during a E3 conference yesterday, and as expected people just started to bitch like no tomorrow. Some of the complains are justified but most of them are downright silly. Here's some examples:

• "Man, $500! That's so expensive! And that's not even the 'high-end' version!" – They are right the PS3 is a ridiculously expensive piece of hardware. It's only a little less expensive than this or that!
• "What's up with the controller!? Back to the old design while stole the motion sensing thing from Nintendo Wii huh?" – When Sony first revealed that boomerang shaped controller, people bitched like crazy (it's UGLY! OMIGOD!), now Sony goes back to the old design and adds a little something, they still bitch like crazy. May be they have a point about "stealing" the idea from Wii, but seriously, why are people getting all worked up about a friggin' controller? (I never understood all the brouhaha about Wii's controller either.) I can see the point if it's very uncomfortable to hold (how many people actually tried it?) but bitching about how "ugly" it is? Yeah, it must be pretty trendy nowadays to lug your game console on your back, with head-mounted display, and play a game of Call of Duty while walking down the street. The console and controller must look COOL so you won't look like a dork. Riiight. As for the motion sensing thing, I could care less whoever Sony stole the idea from, if it means games will make use of it, I'm totally fine with it.
• "Oh no! The 'low-end' version won't have HDMI output! OMIGOD! No HD gaming nor Blu-Ray movie in full resolution!" – Last time I heard, component input is capable of going 1080i, so what's the problem? I have to wonder just how many PS3 games are actually capable of outputting 1080p resolution. On the other hand, if you have the money to own a HDTV capable of 1080p, is the extra 100 bucks that big of a deal? The friggin' HDMI cable itself costs like $40!
• "Geez, no HDMI, looks like I'm staying with my Xbox 360 and I won't be getting a PS3!" – Same as above, if you already have a 1080p HDTV, already own a Xbox 360 (which doesn't have a HDMI port either), and WAS planning to buy a PS3, is that $100 such a deal breaker? It sounds really silly if you ask me.

Seriously, if there are games that you really want to play and you can afford the price, get it whenever it comes out. (Or wait til the price drops to your range or when the games you really want comes out or both.) If you can't afford it or there's no games that you like, then just stick with what you have. I'm sure as hell that I won't be getting the PS3 when it goes on sale on November. It's expensive as hell, and I only have a 20" analog TV to go with it, which is kind of pointless. In order to get a PS3, I'll have to save enough money to get a HDTV first, and it won't be a 1080p capable one. I'm actually really looking forward to FF13 and MGS4 and a PS3 GT, but I'll think about it when I have the money and I won't lose  sleep over it because I couldn't get one at launch.  While I'm saving the money, I'll go to my friend's place to play Dead or Alive 4…

Today Bram Moolenaar announced the release of Vim 7, the text editor that I've been "enslaved" to for several years. I've been using Vim to code since 2000 when I got frustrated with the clumisness of the notepad-type text editors while I simply couldn't get used to emacs. I had seen people use Vi/Vim to move around text files at amazing speed and make changes 10 times faster than what I could do. I gave Vim a try on and off before but I found the learning curve to be too steep. I knew in order to learn I'll have to force myself to use it day in and day out. So when I started to write code for a living I decided to bite the bullet and forced myself to learn Vim. Even now I don't consider myself to be a power user. I think of myself as somewhere between a newbie and an intermediate. But after using it for several years, when I have to use notepad or gedit or even Word, I find myself keep making these weird mistakes: pound on the Esc key after finished writing a sentence; use "hjkl" to move the cursor instead of the arrow keys; type "dd" thinking it will delete the whole line, etc etc. Alas, I've become a slave of vim.

Although I'm not a power user, there are a couple of new features in Vim 7 that I found incredibly useful: tabs and intelligent completion.

Vim 7 with tabs and a modern IDE-like auto completion.

I've always liked the split window mode of Vim, I found it very useful to do cut and paste across multiple files. In this new version they come up with a new trick: tabs. It allows you to switch between multiple files quickly by typing 'gt' in command mode. If you use Gvim or your terminal program supports it, you can even switch between tabs with a mouse click. Yes I know you can use :e to open multiple files and switch between them using :buf <buffe_number>, but it's no where as convenient as just typing 'gt'. Also having the tabs at the top of the screen gives you a good idea of which files you've opened. This feature is just incredibly useful and I probably will use it instead of the split window mode or using screen and have multiple instances of Vim running. (Split window mode is still useful when I have to type something while looking at another file.)

Another new feature is the improved auto completion. There was auto completion before v7 but this time it has been improved that it acts almost like a modern IDE (eg Visual Studio, Eclipse, or even Dreamweaver) when activated. I never really used the old auto completion because it was hard to see what choices you have without the little popup menu, but I think it has improved enough that I'll try to use it whenever I can. (Also, if you look at the screenshot above, it even works across multiple files!) One shortcoming that I noticed though, auto completion is only limited to the keywords already appeared in the files currently opened. If a particular keyword isn't already in the current opened file/files, auto complete will not have the keyword you're looking for. Eg. if you have a HTML file where there's no <table> tag yet and you type <ta then ctrl-p, the popup window will not have 'table' that you're looking for. Basically, it won't help you memorize the tags or function names or etc, it will only helps you type less whenever possible.

There are also other new features, but I don't find those to be particularly useful for me. I do like the better support for Unicode but I still could get it to display some of my UTF-8 encoded files correctly. Unicode support really has never been its forte and I'm not sure if v7 is any improvement. In any case, I was pretty satisfied with v6.4 and the tabs feature in v7 only makes it better. People who are using Vim really should give this new version a try.

When I first installed Fedora Core 5 on my computer, I specifically had x.org to use 60hz vertical refresh rate for my LCD monitor.  It worked fine, although not in GDM, but it was better than nothing.  Now, after a few updates with the kernel, x.org, and the official nvidia driver, I notice it goes back to 75hz again.  Even worse, if you launch the "screen resolution" preference under System->Preferences menu in Gnome, it won't even let me choose between 60hz or 75hz anymore. You can click on that up/down arrow thingy and nothing will happen. What's going on?

The now useless screen resolution preference.

I tried to change the settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to force a 60hz vertical refresh rate, but x.org completely ignores it. What the hell? And which one is the problem here, x.org, FC5, or the nvidia driver? It used to work, with the nvidia driver installed and all, but somewhere along the line it suddenly broke. I really don't like the 75hz refresh rate because it creates some visible artifacts on screen. 60hz works much better for me.

I've googled around as usual but there's never any good answers.  (If only my changes in xorg.conf wasn't being ignored…) If anyone knows what's up, please let me know. Here's my xorg.conf and Xorg.0.log. (WordPress.com won't let me use the <code> tag with the style attribute to create a iframe-like window, so I'll link them instead…)

I’ve decided to turn on Beagle on my FC5 box to give it a try. What I don’t understand is why it takes so damn long to index my hard drive. I set the environmental variable BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1 before I started beagled, and it’s been indexing my drive for the past 6+12+ hours. Why is it so slow? Does indexing really take that long?

Update: I’m fed up with it and I won’t bother anymore. Go to hell beagle. You can’t even find my little .bashrc in my home directory. Back to using locate……

Few days ago I decided to make the jump from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time but I haven’t been able to make up my mind until now. I’ve been using “YMail” for more than 8 years and it was my primary email account. I also have another one that I use to sign up for message boards, online shopping, and acting as a “spam abyss.” While YMail does the job adequately it leaves something to be desired.

What I like about YMail:

• Does its job, emails arrive without much delay. I gave Hotmail a try before I signed up for YMail many years ago. I sent a test email from a Hotmail account and it didn’t show up at the recipient’s end for a couple of hours. I found that unacceptable and went with Yahoo instead.
• Plain text emails are displayed with monospaced font. It makes reading tabular text and code much easier on the eyes. I’m a subscriber of sans.org’s security newsletters, and it drives me crazy to read them without monospaced font.
• A wide, and at least customizable, text area for writing emails. The default width is actually pathetically narrow, but it at least gives you the option of expanding it to 99 characters wide. A big, wide text area makes writing long emails a lot easier.
• YMail also comes with a calendar and notes. I don’t use the notes feature but I do use the calendar to send myself reminders such as to pay rent and etc.

What I don’t like about YMail:

• Ads, huge ads. If you don’t use any ad blockers you’ll be bombarded with ads of ridiculous sizes. It’s not unusual to see ads that take up half the width of the browser window and their obnoxious colors (eg pink background, or even worse, Flash-based) will drive you crazy. I use Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension and a custom userContent.css file to block out the majority of the ads, but a few of them (mostly text-based with obnoxious background colors) still slip through.
• Yahoo’s servers have become slower and slower over the years. I can click on the check mail button, wait 30s and there’ll be no response. There are times where I wrote a pretty long email, click send, and after 30s the browser would tell me the server took too long to respond. When I click the back button, I would lose the email I just wrote. This is very frustrating.
• The UI is slow. The non-AJAX YMail UI feels slow compared to Gmail or Windows Live Mail (or even just Hotmail). When the “server not responding” problem kicks in, the frustration really adds up.

Basically my problems with YMail are mostly about speed, UI responsiveness, and obnoxious ads. Gmail mostly doesn’t have these problems, but after a few days of serious use, I discovered it has its share of problems too.

What I like about Gmail:

• Unobtrusive ads. Sure Gmail has ads but they are nowhere as obnoxious as some of YMail’s ads and they are relatively small. If I really wanted to I can block them with some Greasemonkey scripts, but even as it is they don’t really bother me unlike YMail’s.
• Responsive UI. Gmail’s UI is simply more responsive. This is a really big plus. Also, it automatically checks whether I have new emails, so I don’t have to click the check mail button manually. (Yes, I’m a lazy person. ;-)
• Google’s servers seem to be faster and more reliable. At least I don’t have to wait 30s trying to send an email and get a server not responding error at the end. (The autosave feature helps prevent losing the email that you spent an hour to write because the server craps out.) It also never gets stuck connecting to the server when checking for new emails.
• Google Calendar. I made up my mind to switch after Google released Gcalendar beta to public. I want a calendar that integrates nicely with my email application. Gmail and Gcalendar do it rather nicely. Gcalendar still needs some improvements (task list, anyone?) but as it is I still find it more usable than Yahoo’s. One feature I most looking forward to try is sending reminder via SMS. I don’t own a PDA nor a smartphone, so this is going to be pretty useful for me.
• More storage space than I’ll ever need. Each Gmail account gives me 2.7gb of storage and it is still increasing slowly. I think Yahoo’s 1gb is more than enough since I don’t keep a lot of emails, but hey, it doesn’t hurt to get an extra 1.7gb of space…
• Email forwarding. Gmail allows me to forward incoming emails to another account. This is very useful since it allows me set up several Gmail accounts for different purposes, and I can manage all the emails from just one account.
• POP3 access. Gmail lets me check my email through POP3. Yahoo doesn’t offer this feature (or rather, it used to but not anymore) and I have been using YPOPs! to download emails to my computer. The program works but it’s not very convenient. Also YPOPs! is essentially a screen scraper that if Yahoo changed anything in YMail the application may need to be updated to function properly.

What I don’t like about Gmail:

• Cannot break up conversations. Grouping emails into “conversations” is a neat idea. Unfortunately it can get annoying when it groups the wrong emails into unrelated conversations. There’s no way to break them up and it’s all up to Gmail to get it right. Gmail mistakenly grouped several unrelated emails (which unfortunately have the same generic subject line “Re: hey”) that I forwarded from YMail into one conversation. Since I couldn’t break them up I had to download them to my computer instead.
• Emails aren’t displayed in monospaced font. I prefer to read plain text emails in monospaced font. Gmail doesn’t do that and there’s no option to change it. One way to get around it is to click the “Show Original” option and it will show the entire email along with its full header in another browser tab/window, which is in monospaced font. Obviously this is very inconvenient especially when you have to go through a large number of emails. Another way is to get a Greasemonkey script that changes the CSS font attribute of the email body. It works pretty well but I still prefer Gmail provides this as an option so I don’t have to install the Greasemonkey extension to begin with. Plus, it wouldn’t work if I’m using another person’s computer.
• Small text area when replying emails in plain text mode. When I reply an email in plain text mode, Gmail gives me a tiny text area below the email I’m looking at to write your reply. This text area is simply too small to write anything other than a short reply. I can’t even use the Resizable Textarea extension to make it bigger. Sure I can click on that little icon and it will open up a new browser window where I can resize the text area to my heart’s content. But why do I have to go through all these hoops? Interestingly, the textarea will expand if I switch rich formatting mode. Unfortunately, I prefer writing my emails in plain text.

Overall though, I feel that Gmail’s advantages outweight its problems. I resolved the monospaced font issue with a Greasemonkey script and I guess I’ll just put up with the small text area for now. The issue with conversation can get ugly if it keeps grabbing unrelated emails and puts them into one conversation. Let’s see what happens when I get more emails in. For now, I’m mostly satisfied with the switch. And with all the hassles I went through during the transition, it’ll take something really bad for me to go back.

Last night Fedora has released a pretty big batch of updates for Fedora Core 5, which included upgrades to Gnome 2.14.1 and KDE 3.5.2. They also released the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update as well. I was hoping these updates would fix some of my pet peeves I’ve been experiencing, but alas, they didn’t and it actually added some more.

My biggest pet peeve: for some reason some entries under the Places menu in Gnome have broken. When I tried to select any of them they would show me an error message like this:

In this case, I clicked on the “Desktop” link under Places, and this is what I got. I mean, not only it doesn’t work, the error message it shows doesn’t offer anything that would help me to resolve this problem. If you’re going to show me an error message when something doesn’t work as expected, you better give me more details than a crappy message like this. I’ve googled around and I couldn’t find anything. I was hoping an update to v2.14.1 may fix this issue, but it didn’t. If anyone knows what’s going on, please let me know. Geez.

Update – April 20: Okay I finally found a solution to this stupid problem. I knew the reason I got an error when opening those links is that Gnome somehow forgot what application to use when opening a link to a directory. (It should be Nautilus.) Basically the MIME types screwed up for whatever stupid reasons. Anyway, I hadn’t been able to find where they store these MIME types but after more digging through Google I finally found it. It’s under /usr/share/applications/. Take a look at the file /usr/share/applications/defaults.list,
and add this line to the file:

inode/directory=gnome-nautilus-folder-handler.desktop;

then run this command to update the MIME database (you need to do this as root):

update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

Basically this tells gnome to use that gnome-nautilus-folder-handler thing to open directories by default and update the MIME database so it will take effect right away. I found this problem to be very annoying as there’s absolutely nothing that tells you where you can edit the MIME types. You can’t even do it in GConf, which is supposed to be a tool for “advanced users” to customize Gnome further and etc. This shows just how far they are willing to “dumb down” Gnome and make things difficult in unexpected ways.

I also had problems after Firefox was upgraded to 1.5.0.2. Put it simply: my extensions were all broken. When I started Firefox after it was upgraded, it complained something about install.rdf, and I knew something’s wrong with the extensions. Then I found that none of my extensions worked anymore. At the end, I uninstalled all of the extensions, reinstalled Firefox, and then installed the extensions again. It worked this time but it sure was annoying.

Update – April 20: It seems that Fedora devs screwed up with some of the language packs and they had to release an update to the 1.5.0.2 update. Unfortunately this update gave me the same error message when I restarted Firefox, although it didn’t cause my extensions to break this time. I can’t help but ask why they have to include 15 million language packs in the Firefox package. I think they should be separate and optional only for users who need them. I don’t use any of them and it adds a lot of bloat to the already huge Firefox.

Mozilla announced that Firefox 1.5.0.2 is released. Great, more bug fixes and all. The problem is, the software update in my 1.5.0.1 keeps saying there’s no updates available. I would think if it’s released they should at least make sure it’ll be available through Firefox’s software update? Or is the update mechanism failed to work AGAIN? Really, for things like software update, if they can’t get it to work correctly, please disable it until it works again. I guess I’ll have to download the freakin’ setup program again and do the uninstall-install cycle again. PITA.

I just found out Google opened its Google Calendar Beta to the public. Anyone who has a Google/Gmail account can give it a try. As I’ve said in another post I’ve been looking for a calendar program and I settled with Outlook. I’ve used a little bit of Yahoo Mail’s calendar but I found it too slow to my liking. I’m curious to see if Google Calendar would offer a more usable/responsive UI as a “ajaxified” web application.

(click for the larger view)

This is your usual day/week/month view of the calendar. If you click on a day (or hour if you’re in day/week view) a box will appear that allows you to add an event to that time frame. It’s a quick and dirty way to add events.

(click for the larger view)

If you click on the “Create Event” link in the upper left area this is what you’ll see. It gives you many more options when creating an event, such as adding descriptions, to set repeats/reminders, making the event public/private, and etc.

(click for the larger view)

This is the search options box for Google Calendar. There’s really nothing special, just the same as Gmail’s.

(click for the larger view)

This is where you can change settings for Google Calendar. These are the general settings.

(click for the larger view)

This is where you can add, delete, and share your calendar.

(click for the larger view)

These are the notification settngs. Notice you can have reminders/invitations send to your cell phone as SMS messages. I have not tried it with my phone but this can be a very convenient feature.

(click for the larger view)

One thing that I found not working is adding holidays to my calendar. I tried adding US holidays but it gave me an error message saying I don’t have access to it. What kind of special access do I need to add US holidays anyway?

Update: I tried again an hour later and it worked! What’s up with that?

I’ve only spent a very short time with it but I like what I see so far. The more responsive UI makes it feels a lot more like a desktop calendar program and I definitely feel more comfortable with it than Yahoo’s. As expected from a beta that just opens to the public, there are quite a few rough edges. Besides that weird error when adding holidays, it’s also not as integrated with Gmail as I would’ve liked. Google Calendar itself has a link to your Gmail account but not vice versa. You can’t get to Google Calendar from within Gmail. I would like to see a tighter integration with Gmail, possibly “merging” the two together that I can click on a tab/link in Gmail and be able to see my calendars/events. Another thing that is missing is a task list. I can substitute it with events but it is still nice to have. Hopefully they will add this feature later.

As soon as Google straightens out some of these rough edges, I’m ready to dump Yahoo Mail for good and move onto Gmail. I know there’s the very promising new Yahoo Mail coming, but I’ve signed up for the beta for more than half a year and I still haven’t heard anything from Yahoo besides “it’ll be ready VERY SOON.” I’m just a little tired of waiting. I signed up for Windows Live Mail beta and I received my invitation within a couple of months. Not that I think Yahoo really cares about a Joe Blow user like me, but I’m as good as gone if Yahoo doesn’t show me anything new quickly. Both Google and Microsoft have been showing people what they have to offer and the handful of screenshots from Yahoo Mail’s closed beta simply isn’t good enough.

Today Apple announces a public beta of this Boot Camp bootloader that allows Windows XP to dual boot on a Intel based Mac. Besides the bootloader, it also comes with Windows drivers for the Mac hardware. Boot Camp will be part of OSX 10.5 when it comes out. The release of Boot Camp pretty much makes the effort of the 3rd parties to run XP on Intel Macs moot. This is a good thing because you get a nice bootloader to choose which OS you want to use and you get official Windows drivers from Apple. This makes buying a Mac more attractive for Windows users. If and when I can afford a new laptop, I would seriously consider a Mac.

As I look through the forums on many tech sites a lot of people seem to love the comment Apple makes on the Boot Camp page:

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

This is just silly and give me a friggin’ break. Of course Windows on a “Mac” is just like Windows on a PC, because there isn’t a whole lot of different between “Mac” hardware and PC hardware. Stop making it as if Macs are totally different than PCs, especially after Apple switched to the Intel platform. Running Windows on *any* platform will give you the same exact troubles and annoyances. I can run Linux on PC hardware or like some hackers do, slap x86 OSX on PC hardware and I would be just as “safe” as using a Mac. (I never have problems with worms and viruses in Windows, so I don’t know what’s the big deal. Not needing to waste resources on anti-virus/anti-spyware/firewall programs is a plus though.)

Another silly comment I read is “Muwahaha! Dell must be pretty upset now!” Come on now, upset about what? Dell doesn’t give a damn until Apple drops the price of their hardwares to Dell’s range, and/or large enterprises start buying Macs in bulk. To think that being able to dual boot XP on a Mac is going to greatly effect Dell is simply being ignorant and silly.

I have been a long time user of Mozilla Thunderbird, the open source email client, on Windows. I am mostly a webmail user and I only use a desktop email client to check emails from my ISP and a couple of other POP3-only accounts. At the beginning I decided to stay away from Outlook/Outlook Express because of the non-stop patching cycle due to worms and its inability to filter spam effectively. I have tried a few other clients and I ended up sticking with Thunderbird because it’s relatively safe from worms (one still needs to be careful with attachments though) and its Bayesian spam filter is pretty good. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was simple and good enough, until lately that is. Few days ago I decided to switch to Outlook 2003, leaving Thunderbird as backup.

The first and biggest reason for my switch: the lack of an integrated calendar. I have wanted a calendar integrated into the email client for a long time. I have looked around and I haven’t found anything remotely comparable to Outlook. Before someone suggests Evolution and Kontact, no they don’t count. I do use Linux but only for its development tools. Not to mention Evolution is dog slow and using Kontact isn’t that great under Gnome. (To be fair, if I have to choose one of the two it would be Kontact.) Then last week Mozilla.org released Lightning 0.1, a Thunderbird extension that would add calendar function to Thunderbird to make it just like Outlook. I have heard about Lightning being in development for quite a while. Somehow it took them very long to release a 0.1 and I was eager to give it a spin.

It is a 0.1 release indeed because it is very raw. The release notes says there are quite a few data-loss bugs and numerous other issues to be resolved. It obvious that it has a long way to go before it becomes usable. When one considers how long it took them to release 0.1, chances are Lightning won’t be usable for at least a couple of more years. I have waited a long time and I’m not willing to wait another year or two. I’m not accusing the Lightning team being lazy or anything. I simply think they don’t have enough developers to make the project go as fast as they would like.

Thunderbird, on the other hand, seems to suffer from the same problem. Its pace of development is quite a bit slower compared to Firefox. One can call it my pet peeve, but there’s this one bug in 1.5 that drives me absolutely crazy. I have a number of email accounts set up in Thunderbird and I check a couple of them more often than others. Whenever I launch Thunderbird as soon as the window shows up I would click on the down arrow on the Get Mail icon to pull up the list of accounts. What is happening here is that if I click on it too soon, Thunderbird would crash. To get around this problem, after the program window shows up I need to wait for a few seconds, may be click on other menu items or something, before I can click the Get Mail icon and not having it crash. One can ask why I couldn’t wait for few more seconds, and my answer is I think it’s silly that after I launched a program I have to “artificially” wait a bit more before I can use it. Sometimes I am really in a hurry or I simply forget, and it would crash and burn and I have to start over again. It drives me absolutely crazy and I don’t feel like putting up with it anymore.

So hello Outlook 2003.

Outlook’s calendar works quite well and it looks polished. I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately the application itself is not without problems. First of all, shortly after I installed Outlook I started to appreciate the way Thunderbird’s menu and preference panels are set up. Simply put, Outlook’s menu and preference panels are difficult to navigate. May be it’s unfamiliarity but I keep feeling like I have to get through hoops to find that preference I would like to change. Thunderbird is simpler and easier to navigate in this regard. To be fair, Thunderbird doesn’t have calendar, task list, and etc, so it *should* be simpler. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel lost navigating through Outlook’s menus and preferences. Until I can get used to it, I think the way it’s set up is clumsy and not very efficient.

The second problem is the default character encoding when displaying emails. I have set Windows to a non-English regional setting, but I have set Office’s default language to English through the Office Language Settings tool. I also have set the default language to English in Outlook’s preference. But for whatever stupid reason it still chooses to display some of my emails with wrong character encoding. Yes I can change it through the menu, but it’s for that particular email only and there doesn’t seem to be an option to make it the default. This is very annoying. I noticed it happens when the email header does not specify a character encoding. Shouldn’t Outlook have a default encoding option when the email message does not specify one? I really would like to know. As one can see from the picture, the font used is next to unreadable and having me to change it for every single email is a PITA. May be I’m missing something somewhere, it would be great if someone can enlighten me on this.

The feature that I miss the most from Thunderbird is the built-in Bayesian spam filter. It works quite well and I don’t have to upgrade the filter every month as Outlook requires. Outlook has some 3rd party plugins for this, but a lot of them aren’t free and the free ones aren’t very good. The one I tried causes Outlook’s memory usage to almost double. The good thing is my POP3 accounts don’t get a lot of spam, so it’s not a big issue. On the other hand, I sure as hell don’t miss the relatively long startup time. Outlook starts up a lot faster than Thunderbird and the difference is even bigger when compared to Evolution on Linux. One of the best things about Office is that its applications start up very quickly even on low-end machines. That’s why I can never get used to OpenOffice.org, it has some nice features, but it is just too slow.

At the end, by switching to Outlook, I get the very nice calendar feature I have wanted while giving up the simplicity and superiority as an email client in Thunderbird. If and when Lightning becomes as useful as (or at least pretty close) to Outlook, I may switch back to Thunderbird. But first, they better fix that damn bug which causes it to crash when clicking on the Get Mail icon.