So the author of one of the best books written for Perl has been writing a series of articles for IBM developerWorks about the greatest text editor ever invented. I've always been a little embarrassed about my lack of knowledge (ignorance) regarding Vim. Occasionally I pick up new tidbits about it but if you compared my vimrc today to my vimrc seven or eight years ago it would look about the same. I have even bought a book about Vim that I continually put off reading.

I am announcing now that I fully intend on reading and comprehending these articles (this is not a complete list of the articles in the series, only the articles that had been published at the time I wrote this blog entry. If you click here you will get a listing of all articles published for this series): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Read a rant today about Yahoo! Mail. Since Yahoo is a former employer of mine I took a keener interest in the rant than I normally would (nota bene: I did not work on the e-mail product). If this rant is representative of a lot of folks experience then it would be pretty bad for Yahoo!.

It's interesting that I read this today since my current employer uses the GMail Enterprise service. I don't know what other people's experience with this service is, but apparently ours is not all that great (ironically we had a really good experience with the free version of GMail).

This is all to show why I don't use a web-based e-mail service. I maintain my own server running postfix, maildrop and a number of other programs. I use mutt to read my e-mail. In the end I've simply never been able to adapt to a GUI-based e-mail interface. There was a time where, at least once a year, I would attempt to use the Evolution mail program (think of it as Outlook for Linux machines) and it never took. I'd use it for a week and then go back to my old setup. Various attempts at using GMail or Yahoo! Mail have been just as fruitless.

PLAYED A BIT WITH Picasa 3 and its companion PicasaWeb today. I was a bit disappointed, but overall it was not a complete loss.

Why was I disappointed? The PicasaWeb integration seems a bit flimsy and it appears to be mostly one way (or at least the docs say so; but there is the Refresh Online Status button). Also, in an attempt to see just how smart Picasa is I did the following: 1) using Picasa I created an on-line album containing a number of pictures, 2) deleted my local copy of the album, 3) attempted to import the album from PicasaWeb to Picasa. I had hoped that Picasa would be smart enough to realize that the photos I was downloading were already in my collection, but, no, it needlessly downloaded every photo and I then had two copies of each of those photos. Oh well.

I am also not crazy about the left hand side bar for Picasa. It shows folders and albums (and probably other things) but there appears to be no way to make it show the albums first. Sometimes they show up at the top of the list and sometimes they are at the end. I can't figure out why this is, but I know that I always want my albums to be first and the folders to come second.

Picasa is still great at simple image manipulation and at categorizing the photos. I hope that someday the web integration is much better than it is now.

I've been using Blosxom for a few weeks now. It seems to be exactly what I wanted. Specifically I wanted a very simple blogging solution that required no database server, such as mysql, (a possible exception would be given for something like sqlite) and, preferrably, allowed me to use vim to type up the blog entries. I also hoped for tag support, reasonable indexing, and the ability to customize the theme. Blosxom is all of this.

It took me awhile to find the tagging support, but I found it (along with lots of other plugins).

If you don't like the theme then don't blame Blosxom. Blame my crazy taste in color and my love of simplicity.

If the sourceforge site is any indication it doesn't seem that Blosxom is under active development anymore. I'm not sure that's a huge problem since the most recent version of Blosxom seems fine to me. The only real problem I had was finding active links to plugins (see the links above for good links). The Blosxom homepage has links to a number of webpages that are dead.

So far I have to say I like Blosxom a lot. It has met all my requirements and fits well into the way I work. The only real question is whether I want to continue blogging.

I realized today that I have been a Linux user for a little over 15 years. I was first introduced to the Linux operating system in 1994 during the first semester of my junior year at Texas A&M. At that time I was running two other operating systems: MS-DOS 5.0 and OS/2 Warp. After seeing a friend use some programs on his Linux box to connect to the campus modem pool and surf the net (using a program called lynx!) I decided I had to try it. This was amazing to me because, at that time, A&M didn't even offer PPP or SLIP accounts (it was several months later that A&M started to offer such accounts to students). So I borrowed another friend's set of several dozen 1.44MB floppy disks, containing Slackware Linux, and installed Linux as a third operating system.

Since 1997 I have been using Linux exclusively. The last Microsoft operating system I used was Windows 95. OS/2 was around for awhile but I stopped using it before I even graduated from college. I know a number of people who use and love Apple's OS X. It looks very nice but I've never been tempted to use it.