I enjoy talking to young companies (or proto-companies) about their projects. I do that with a few incubators and the like, and I consistently find it rewarding. I find myself always trying to tweak people’s product vision a bit, looking for a way to turn a “business idea” into something that will have deeper, human [...]
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Outlook PST importer anyone?
26 May 2010 at 11:11
david
Mozilla, MozillaMessaging, Open Source, Software, Thunderbird
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This week, Microsoft published an open source (Apache 2) SDK to read PST files. From what I heard, it works with Unicode PST files as generated by Outlook 2003 or later. It’s a healthy move on Microsoft’s part, as it releases their users from feeling like their data is locked in to their relationship with [...]
Support job with Mozilla Messaging
One of my first jobs in IT was as a “computer consultant” for my university. I got to learn a lot about computers of various kinds (including currently useless but still formative bits like writing REXX programs on a CP/CMS IBM 3090 mainframe), and, more importantly, I learned a lot about what it takes to [...]
Getting insight into one's own email
Thunderbird knows a lot about your email. After all, it’s got access to large amounts of data, and builds sophisticated databases so that it can be very responsive, even when dealing with large folders containing thousands of messages. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use this information to extract either faster workflow, or even [...]
Getting insight into one’s own email
Thunderbird knows a lot about your email. After all, it’s got access to large amounts of data, and builds sophisticated databases so that it can be very responsive, even when dealing with large folders containing thousands of messages. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use this information to extract either faster workflow, or even [...]
Thunderbird 3 beta 2
On the road to Thunderbird 3, another milestone — this time, Thunderbird 3 beta 2. Why do beta releases? Beta releases are funny things. They serve a few purposes. The first is to make sure that we periodically stabilize the code base, as without periodic ‘cooling’, it’s hard to get a handle on the quality [...]
Progress Update
I just realized that I forgot to blog about some of the exciting things going on in Thunderbird land these days. First, I’m very happy to announce that another engineer has signed up to work full time on Thunderbird — Mark Banner, aka Standard8 on IRC. Mark is well known to the Mozilla community, as [...]
JSON vs. XML for configuration files?
One of the topics we’re discussing in Thunderbird dev land involves how to distribute configuration files for Thunderbird, so that if you’re part of a group (users of large ISPs, enterprise users, gmail users, whatever), that the “right” default configuration can be picked up as automagically as possible. There’s lots behind that effort, but there’s [...]
Lily: JavaScript, visual programming, fun
I’ve been following the private beta of Lily for a while, but now it’s public and everyone can play. Bill Orcutt seems to be a man with a weird, playful mind, and some serious technical chops.
Philippe Starck on TED
Watching (and listening) to Philippe Starck is fun, and surprisingly easy to map onto my own beliefs about software and product design. A good way to end the week: I particularly like the section in the middle about walking, and the difference between looking down, looking ahead, looking up, looking straight up, and looking inwards. [...]
