Old School Computer

I just read an article on Slashdot about Old School Programming Techniques.


I'm ashamed to say that I nearly practiced every single one of these at one point in my programming history!


How many have you done yourself?

Thunderbird 3, Beta 2.

At home and at work, I use Thunderbird. I like the having a nice, lightweight, open-source mail client that doesn't try to do everything (like Outlook tries).


However, over the last year, I have become extremely frustrated with Thunderbird for two major reasons:

1. There is a bug that causes the password to be forgotten for IMAP accounts. The end-result is that you have to needlessly type in your password.
2. IMAP mailbox performance just sucks.

Since I use IMAP for both my home and work e-mail, this was getting a bit unbearable (as well as my wife complaining about these two issues also... and rightfully so - this was just getting miserable).


I normally do not go out of my way to try beta software (since I run my computer at home like a production system... it's all about productivity and not having applications crash all of the time). However, I decided to download and try out Thunderbird 3, Beta 2.


And it is fantastic.


The password bug is fixed; I originally downloaded the beta because I saw in Mozilla's bug tracker that the issue had been resolved in the beta. Even, better the IMAP mailbox performance is much better. Thunderbird now locally caches mail in the background. Even better you can enable/disable this feature at a folder level. Since disk space is cheap, I take the default options which cache everything.


I have not had any stability issues or crashes since downloading it last week. If you are a Thunderbird user who uses IMAP a lot, download the beta now!

How quickly they grow!

I always forget how quickly babies grow!

Here is a picture of Colin from New Years Day (he was about 2 weeks old when this picture was taken):



Here is a picture in the same swing, three months later:

Technical Links moving to Twitter.

I've had a twitter account for a while. I usually squat on my name when a new service is available.

To that end, I couldn't really come to terms how I wanted to use FaceBook, SmugMug, this blog, or twitter.

For those of you out there who like reading technical links... I will now be publishing them on twitter. (the 140 character limit seems perfect for this!).

Follow on me twitter @ http://twitter.com/billkratzer

There are RSS feeds available so that you can follow me in Google Reader (or any other RSS tool).

I will continue to use this blog to post longer pieces of thought.

A Very Nice 37th Birthday.

Today I turned 37.


Overall... I had a very nice day. I only spent two hours in the office, and then two hours at a client site (I am helping out an old-coworker and friend of mine). I then left early so that I could spend the day with my family. I got some cool Lego sets for my Birthday. Jenn's parents gave me some money (which will also go towards my Lego projects!).


The best part of the day was being able to just take a break from the insanity of life. My work life is very busy right now, and I am working on 5-6 projects at any given time. My side-project outside of work demands a lot of time. Factor in all of the other stuff that just needs to get done around the house, and sometimes it feels like you never have time to breathe!


Today's best gift was to ditch the co-workers, ignore the customers, delay the side-projects and just spend time with the family and enjoying the time I have with them.


Tomorrow.... the full steam ahead again!