VIM to write mails in Thunderbird

Posted in articles on June 30th, 2010 by Alain M. Lafon
While at work, I have to use Windows. Since Windows doesn’t ship with a decent mail/calendar solution (nope, Outlook doesn’t qualiy – keywords “winmail.dat” and “ics support” should trigger your memory), I had to build a custom setup.

Thunderbird is a good basis and does the job well. It’s sleek and has good IMAP support. Combine that with plugins for VCS support, Lightning for an integrated calendar and the provider for Google Calendar, you find yourself with a decent toolset. What kept bugging me is editing the mails.  Coming from mutt/VIM, I might be biased on that one. Heck, I’m even using the Vimperator plugin in Firefox and find that it brightens each and every day.

Anyway, there is release to that pain! There’s a plugin called “External Editor” – it works in Windows as it does in real OSs and it’s actually quite a charm as you can see. You can find all you need on globs.org. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be happy.

Tips: Customize your mail view to show the feature “External Editor” or use the pre-defined shortcut CTRL+e to open your custom editor (that is VIM for me^^).

Have fun and enjoy the sweet life(;  

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iOS 4 Mail.app Fail

Posted in personal on June 26th, 2010 by Alain M. Lafon
Do I have to say that neither OS X Mail.app nor Roundcube webmail show me emails from 01.01.70 aka Epoch time 00000000? I cannot open or delete them. That bugs me a bit. And what about this stray email from 01.01.01? Which year exactly is that? First day after Christ?

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True story – Software Engineering fail (follow up)

Posted in personal on June 26th, 2010 by Alain M. Lafon
Funny thing – or should I say: True story!

In my most recent blog post “I want to work in a company which” I wrote about some issues of a random company. I published this article three days before news of this particular company struck me again in agony. While reading this, keep in mind that this company has no direct connection to me whatsoever.

Apparently the head of department of sales and marketing walked up to the programmers of his division. I have been told he normally would not even be seen in closer proximity of the tech department. However, this time he was obviously in pain and instantly called for a crisis-meeting.

In the meeting there were reports of working hours of the programmers, there were affronting comments on peoples’ work ethics – there even was a printout of an emergency escalation e-mail of a client. Reverse engineering of the misleading rants brought light into the programmers’ darkness. It seemed that the client was waiting for a major software roll-out. Now, while the company seemed to desperately need this client, it forgot to tell the programmers about the roll-out.

Well, what could we say? I’d call it: Software Engineering Fail.

It seems this company lacks basic release management – all they now is hotfixes. Also, there are no reviews, there is no transparent project planning, there’s no testing framework or regression testing. There is no procedure model which in combination with no apparent quality management is certain proof for failure in engineering larger scale software for a living.

What is left to do? I have heard the programmers had a meeting of their own. They talked for hours about basic and pragmatic needs for succeeding in what they are paid for: writing serious software. Seemingly they believe there is still an off-chance for the company to turn around from being solely a solutions provider for its clients while raping its own employees.

We’ll see, time will tell the truth. My personal attitude in this matter: If things won’t change quickly and those guys are not only searching for a job just to pay their rents, but also to bring joy and knowledge to their life: run for it, guys!
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