Evolution

My new company has a fairly strict IT policy, including no POP/IMAP access to their MS Exchange email servers, and not even Exchange access unless it's over a VPN!.

So my earlier all-Linux strategy of using Thunderbird with IMAP has fallen by the wayside. I really love Thunderbird and miss it, but it's just a tool.

Luckily the Linux email client Evolution has a plug-in for MS Exchange. The good news is that is basically works, even without a VPN. The bad news is that it uses the http interface to do so, and it's not terribly stable.

At work Evolution is fairly usable. At home, over a poorer network connection (and a slower machine) it's pretty much unusable and I've fallen back to good old webmail for Exchange. The MS Exchange webmail client is actually the best webmail I've seen. Very responsive and usable. But at home both Barb and I both use Thunderbird/IMAP for our personal mail, she on her Mac Mini and me on my Linux box.

On the plus side, my company is using the standard MS PPTP VPN, which is available on most every platform, including Linux and my iPhone!. So I can actually get onto the company intranet via my iPhone from anywhere in the country. Not bad.
Jim on 02.29.08 @ 08:34 PM ET [link]

HP Redux

My venerable HP-15C calculator recently started flaking out, and my slightly newer HP-48G lost function in some of its keys about two years ago, so it was time to buy a new calculator.

As luck would have it, HP recently released the HP-35s, which is a bit of an homage to the original HP-35 scientific calculator released in 1972 at a price of $395. (The new model is a mere $60!). The original HP-35 was a breakthrough product. It was the first calculator to provide transcendental functions and introduced HP's RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) entry system.

The new HP-35s vaguely resembles the original, but far exceeds it in every way. The display is two lines of LCD instead of one line of LED. It offers many, many more functions, can be user-programmed, offers both RPN and algebraic entry, and is about half as thick. I actually prefer this traditional vertical format to the cramped horizontal format of the HP-15C. The HP-35s uses two thin lithium disk batteries, lifetime unknown at this point.

As is usual for HP, the hexadecimal entry is a bit clunky, but I can live with that.

As an every-day calculator the HP-35s is great. It's a bit large to stick in one's pocket, but that's not something I ever need to do. It mainly sits on my desk. And it's been years since I've actually needed to program a calculator. There's usually a computer at arm's reach for that sort of thing.

An engineering magazine recently did a "tear down" of this calculator to see what was inside. Basically it was just two IC's - an 8-bit 8502 microprocessor (relative of the old 6502) and a flash memory chip. That's it.

So I would highly recommend this calculator, and for the price of $60 you can't really go wrong. But if you're a student looking for graphing functions, then look elsewhere, since there are no graphics on the HP-35s.

Jim on 02.26.08 @ 10:08 AM ET [link]

Tutli-Putli

While walking down Rue St. Denis in Montreal last week, I noticed a very strange video playing in the window of a museum. It turned out to be the Canadian-made animated short Madame Tutli-Putli, nominated for an Academy Award. I found the actual movie posted on YouTube, though I suspect it may be pulled down due to copyright restrictions. So get it while you can. The stop-motion animation is stunning, though I can't say I really understand the movie. Here is Part 1 and Part 2. Total running time is about 18 minutes.

Watch the main character's eyes during this movie. Very innovative. You can also find several "making of" videos for this short on YouTube if you browse around a little.

Jim on 02.10.08 @ 12:04 PM ET [link]

Skinner

This is a priceless speech from Principal Skinner from an old episode of The Simpsons that I saw recently:

The year was 1968. We were on recon in a steaming Mekong delta. An overheated private removed his flack jacket, revealing a T-shirt with an iron-on sporting the MAD slogan "Up with Mini-skirts!". Well, we all had a good laugh, even though I didn't quite understand it. But our momentary lapse of concentration allowed "Charlie" to get the drop on us. I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right!

Jim on 02.03.08 @ 01:04 PM ET [link]