Pintmaster

After my last article: Why I cant switch to a Mac, there were a lot of great responses. As a disclaimer, I wrote it in frustration, but I was not looking to bitch, I was looking for some answers. The biggest frustration I had was with email. After reading through your responses, I had a couple of new solutions to try to solve my email dilemma: Mozilla Thunderbird and Novell Evolution.

Novell Evolution
Novell Evolution, originally Ximian Evolution is the fullest featured email / calendaring app in the linux / unix world. It is currently at version 2 and is a testament to the strength of the open source model. Recently, Novell released to the open source community, the Ximian Connector - the plugin for Evolution that allows the most complete operability with Exchange servers outside of Microsoft Outlook. Evolution can work on Mac OS X also, but it is not a native app and must be compiled and use elements in the Gnome Tool Kit. The Mac port also lags behind in its version. Fink lists it at 1.4.6 as of this writing and the Ximian Connector has not been ported to Mac yet.
Hopefully Apple is working to include the Ximian Connector or elements of it in future versions of Mail / iCal and Address Book. It would be a shame not to!

Mozilla Thunderbird
Now, with Mozilla Thunderbird, do I have a solution? Lets take a look. I downloaded the latest release of thunderbird and fired it up. I put in all my information and it started catching up on about 300 mb of messages. Thunderbird was noticably faster at downloading messages than both Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage 2003. One of the complaints I had with all previous mail clients I had tried on the Mac is the lack of fully functional HTML. A lot of users had a great deal of criticism about my need for HTML. I agree. HTML is a waste for simple text messages which is the majority of normal communication over email. However, I would much rather have a full-featured HTML option rather than just the basics. Tables help with formatting, especially when you are sending multiple lines of similar data. Now I am happy with the email sending, receiving and formatting. What about addresses. One of the weaknesses with Thunderbird is the inability to connect to the built in Address book. Not a big deal. Thunderbird was not designed to integrate in with the native address book on each system. I have not yet figured out a good way to synchronize my contacts to the Mac. Once I do that, Thunderbird will be a pretty great email solution for any platform.

What works:

• Fastest IMAP support I have seen on the Mac (nice job Mozilla!)
• Nice interface and easy to use

What Doesnt:

• No built in address import from Exchange server - limited ability to import other address book typess
• Not integrated well into the OS (but it works on all platforms!)
• Cannot synchronize with a palm/blackberry on the mac (yet)

Where to go from here
Mozilla Thunderbird fills my needs pretty well. My colleagues and I share an address book that is in an outlook public folder. If I were able to synchronize this or use LDAP to access it (dont think you can with public folders, only the global address list), then I would be well on my way to replacing my Windows PC. I am looking forward to companies integrating the Ximian Connector into their software, or others porting Evolution to Cocoa. I think the future is bright. Look out for the next installment of my trials switching to the Mac.

My friend sold something on Ebay to Dawn Wingate of A1 Computer repair and Networking in Seaford Delaware. The auction went alright and she paid her money - less than 70 bucks. My buddy sent her the item by USPS parcel post. Since there is no tracking with that, he never received confirmation that it arrived. She put a claim in with Paypal before she ever spoke with him about any problems. Paypal settled in her favor during her dispute resolution without getting his side of the story. When contacted by email, she refuses to respond. When contacted by phone, she first claimed to not know who my friend was. He provided her the full information for the item in question, but she said she was not at work and did not know off-hand. He requested that she verify either way if she had received the item he sent. She never got back to him. Currently, he has a negative balance on Paypal (they have not responded to his email on the subject) and Dawn Wingate of A1 Computer repair and Networking in Seaford Delaware has not answered her phone again when he has called. If you live in Seaford, DE, or have ebay dealings with Dawn Wingate of A1 Computer repair and Networking in Seaford Delaware, sellers and buyers alike might be advised to beware! Sources saw that the Better Business Bureau might want a word with Dawn Wingate of A1 Computer repair and Networking in Seaford Delaware. It might not be prudent to cross to the other side of the street if one were to see Dawn Wingate of A1 Computer repair and Networking in Seaford Delaware.

I am currently looking for an apartment close to downtown Houston and I stumbled upon this article in the Houston Press about the poor quality of Perry Homes. The article has a very negative slant about how Perry & other suburban developers are bringing their crap into the city. I have to say, that from a price point of view, these townhomes and new blocks of apartments look appealing, but this article just reassures me that as good a price as they may seem, they will have problems and older is better.

The Dead Zone
Houston buries its Inner Loop past under bright new shiny Perry Homes town houses
BY JOSH HARKINSON
feedback@houstonpress.com

He called them “the little houses.” They were the shotgun shacks and decomposing Victorians, the flophouses where the panhandlers crashed and the drug dealers weighed rock. Along the crabgrass yards of the Fourth Ward slum, they bred the kind of crime and poverty unheard of in Rich Agnew’s Clear Lake subdivision. Yet walking the narrow streets with a realtor, Agnew could hardly see them.

Instead, he saw uniform brick facades reminiscent of new row houses in old London. Sidewalks striated to resemble cobblestones led him past young shrubs planted with cookie-cutter precision. The realtor ushered Agnew through the door of a new model town house, one among hundreds sporting vanity rooms, granite countertops and shiny wood floors.

An uppermost window gave Agnew and his wife a glimpse of the downtown skyline. The middle-aged couple imagined an exciting life of freedom from their commute, lawn mower and energy bills. But they wanted this lifestyle without the chaos of inner Houston’s urban hodgepodge; they feared losing the programmed, suburban feel of the Perry Homes neighborhood where they had raised kids.

And that’s why Sutton Square, one of Perry’s new urban versions of the suburbs, was almost perfect.

…Continued

http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050217.html

Over the past year, I have advised readers who are fed up with the plague of viruses and spyware on Windows PCs that one way out of the mess is to switch to Apple Computer’s Macintosh. There has yet to be a report of a successful, real-world virus for the Mac’s current operating system, and there is little or no known spyware for the Mac.

I stand by that advice, and also by my positive reviews of recent Mac models, especially the impressive iMac G5. But, as I have noted in the past, switching to the Mac has downsides, and it isn’t the best course for some groups of Windows users. So here’s a brief guide to which types of users might find switching inadvisable.

…Continued

Congratulations Firefox. This is a great achievement. I now use firefox as the default browser on both apple os x and windows. There is no other browser that comes close.

Just over a year ago, I purchased a beautiful new Powerbook G4 1.25 Ghz computer from my campus computer store. After starting work, my great computer was collecting dust and I was frustrated. So, I asked my boss if I could use it as a replacement for my work computer. He agreed. We have an all-Microsoft office. When I say all, I mean ALL. We run Exchange 2003 and Windows file sharing with large repository for our shared files. Most people in the office have IBM laptops running Windows XP to connect in. I use an IBM desktop. All our computers are under 2 years old.

Email
The first task and unfortunately the ultimate deciding factor was Email support. In my business we send a lot of documents to people so Microsoft Office is a must whether you are on Mac or PC. So, I fired up Microsoft Entourage 2004, the Mac equivalent of Outlook. I put in my account information and hit ok. The first thing I noticed, is that Entourage tells you that it uses Outlook Web Access, and not the regular exchange protocol. My question to Microsoft is: Why would you do this!?!??!?. The impact of this decision is well documented online in the message boards. It makes your outlook access very SLLOOOOOOWWWW. How slow is it? If Entourage is not in the foreground, it wont download new messages. When entourage is in the foreground, it can take up to 5 minutes to start downloading new mail. It seems to go through every folder and subfolder I have synchronizing even when there are no changes. It gives no precedence to the inbox which, in my first day of work probably took me 40 minutes to see a new message after it had arrived. As a speed comparison, it ended up being faster for me to run Outlook 2003 in a Windows XP virtual PC.

Calendar, Tasks and Address Book
This was not the only issue. The calendars synchronize but not perfectly. It seems as though they overlap days. Tasks DO NOT synchronize and there is no way to make this work. Contacts are also less than perfect. In our setup, we have a large repository of contacts in a public folder. I am able to make this my default address book when composing email. I cant even see this address book in Entourage.

Composing Email
Outlook offers an option to use Word to compose email. I started using this option to make our correspondence look more professional. One feature which is extremely useful is the ability to put in an HTML table. Entourage allows composition in HTMl, but not inserting tables. What the heck were they thinking? Well, after some research, I stumbled upon other Entourage users asking about this. The solution is, compose it in Word and then click send as HTML email from the file menu. Well, this solution is not that great. It is a pain! Not only this, I saved one of my templates from Outlook as a word document opened it in Word on the Mac. It looked fine. Then I made my changes and clicked send as HTML email, and it made everything look green. I was unable to find a good solution to this except for redoing the entire document which seemed to work, however, there were some other irregularities when viewing the sent message. This was a huge annoyance and a big deal.

Word, Excel, Powerpoint
All of these programs worked acceptably. I have no major problems, and output on my Mac looked the same on other people’s PCs. The one big annoyange is with powerpoint. Microsoft decided not to implement the Windows version of Powerpoint’s default view with the small preview of the slides. This is a pretty useful view of your slides and is implemented in Apple’s Keynote, which in my opinion is a better presentation tool than powerpoint on both windows and the Mac.

Windows File Sharing
Samba on the mac has gotten much better, but it still does not do several important things as easily as windows.

1. Automounting - I understand that this can probably be done using some sort of startup script, but with a laptop, I didnt want to deal with tons of error messages
2. Synchronizing - I use a free tool to backup my documents to the network drive at the end of the day. I didnt find an easy replacement in my short time with my Mac
3. Finding computers - This has never worked well. OS X does not adequately find all the computers on the network

Database
I recently set up a database for tracking some information in the company. I used Microsoft Access 2003. There is no Microsoft equivalent to Access on OS X. I evaluated using Filemaker to do this and wanted to use it as a frontend for MySQL. This didnt go well in two areas. Since I hadnt already set up my database in Filemaker, I would have to find some way to get my access database ported to Filemaker. There was no tool built into filemaker to convert the access database. Then, I would have to try and figure out how to connect filemaker to MySQL. I understand that this can be done using MyODBC and had this tool set up to log on to the MySQL database. However, I was never able to get Filemaker to recognize the MyODBC connection. So, I decided to just do my database work on my old computer. With access I had the benefit of easy import and export with Excel as well as Pivot tables built in - quite possibly the most useful feature in the office suite.

Conclusions
After my trials and tribulations, I came to the following conclusions:

Entourage is not ready for use in an Exchange 2003 environment.
Composing email on the Mac is not as sophisticated yet as it is in Windows
Word, Excel and Powerpoint interoperate acceptably
Operating on a Mac in an all-Windows office takes more time than it is worth.

As many flaws as Windows has, it has a death grip on the businesses of the world. In my business, it is almost guaranteed that everyone uses the Microsoft suite of business products. It makes it easier when you have to talk to each other. The way microsoft works, there is an almost certainty that a document created in a Microsoft product will not work the same in a non-microsoft product. This works the other way too and was most frustrating in trying to get my email working. After four days of trying to make it work, I found myself less productive because I couldnt do things the way I had been. I ended up booting into my virtual pc and using remote desktop to use my old computer (the native remote desktop is too slow). The lacking features made me slower and less productive.

I still look forward to a time when I can use my Mac at work. I think if we werent running Exchange 2003 and used IMAP and an LDAP directory it would be. Maybe the next version of Entourage will work. I sure hope so.