WAHIL.net

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird pretty extensively past few months. Even though I do have Microsoft Outlook installed on my work laptop – with the amount of mails  that I send and receive, Outlook just dies when the Inbox size shoots up and that’s an absolute killer. One of the problems with Thunderbird is that unlike Outlook, its an email-client, and not a complete PIM suite, and my work requires me to maintain an extensive calender system. But thanks to addons, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me show you how you can convert Mozilla Thunderbird to complete PIM suite.

The first thing we need to do, is have a Calender system in Mozilla Thunderbird. There are couple of addons for this, but IMO the Lightning project is probably the best of the lot. Lightning project also allows you to accept Outlook meeting invites, but we’ll get to that in a while.

Head over to Lightning project homepage, and download the addon as per your platform. Next, install the addon by clicking on Tools  -> Addons -> Install and then point it to the location where you have downloaded the addon. Restart Thunderbird and you will get a Calender and tasks pane on the lower left corner, and an events sidebar.

Read more…

The World Won’t End

First of all, its obvious that the world wouldn’t collapse in this case. Yes, there are plenty of software, either home and business dedicated, that relies 100% on Windows. Microsoft has a large market around its operating system, a market commonly driven by “sell plenty and earn even more” attitude. Such a single-crop area.

But life always would find some way. Something would have to happen – so let’s look at the possibilities, shall we?

Would diversity work ?

Not so long ago, a home computer was usually 8 bit machine, followed by 16 bit over time. I mean such traditional “consoles” like Atari, ZX Spectrum, Commodore/Amiga, and so on. Software developers, releasing a new game for instance, would prepare different versions for different hardware platforms. So it was possible back then! Well, actually, it still is – just look at game consoles like PlayStation, GameCube, DreamCast and so on – it is often possible for a game to be released for different platforms. Of course, not always and not all titles, but it happens.

The traditional model of software development (dated before Microsoft time) assumed the hardware to be a starting point, where this hardware creators were putting the operating system into and were selling applications. Look at IBM and Sun for example – still selling mainframe and server platforms. A tight ship, allowing everybody to earn decent money on each component. The only common things were OS standards (like POSIX) or communication protocols. Single crop area ? Yes, and also repeated over and over again.

In reality, PC class computers are currently the majority of hardware out there. One could say that this is Microsoft hardware, for which the named company creates its software (Windows, Office, more predominant amongst others). Microsoft Hardware ? Say, which hardware box doesn’t bear the ‘Designed for Microsoft Windows’ logo ? Only the less-known producers’ ones. As you can see, everything depends on the right attitude to customers (generating demand) and hardware developers (trade deals, certificate schemes). One must develop its market niche, create his own ‘typical approach’. This is the only way to guarantee biggest income to yourself.

Read more…