Evolution: Least of many evils?
18 Oct 2005No, this isn’t a creationism/evolution post. But, if you care, I think that whole debate is kinda stupid because it’s hardly as though the two are necessarily exclusive.
Now that that’s out of the way (to self: must stop choosing obscure titles), I thought I’d announce I’ve decided that Evolution really isn’t so bad as it’s cracked up to be (by me, in previous posts. Yeah, so I’m contradicting myself in the space of 24 hours. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes me to contradict myself, because anyone capable of using the search tool on this site proficiently can juxtapose the two contradicting pieces quite anachronistically. Yeah! English buzzwords! C’mooonnnnn, Thursday!). I spent part of today (more than I should have) checking out other clients, and I’ve decided that, unless I want to go with mutt or something (I’m not going to say how tempting that was lest I be pushed into a big geek hole and buried with free software), I’m actually doing okay.
Which is kind of a depressing thought, truth be told. Not that Evolution is acutally that bad, but it’s fairly far from perfect. It’s more stable now I’ve re-installed Ubuntu (gosh that sounds like Another Operating System), and little interface quirks are becoming slowly less significant, but I’m… rather annoyed that it ate my contacts list. Or, that GAIM ate my contacts list and Evolution let it.
Actually, I just remembered that I haven’t tried Opera’s mail client in several years… so I might do that. It doesn’t integrate particularly well (I’m currently trying to figure out some arcane command to make the damn thing print, because it’s not reading from my printcap file or something, and I use it to print in preference to Firefox because Firefox’s print rendering is second to none in the bad-quality stakes), but I’d rather a standalone app that worked really well over a vaguely-integrated app that often crashed and allowed other applications to steal its data, as well as making backup in open formats impossible.
Speaking of open formats, I’ve discovered that OpenOffice.org 2 is storing its documents in OpenDocument format. This means that the SXW extension is now ODT. I’m a little disappointed that this seems to be binary data rather than something like XML… although it seems there are elements of that to it, but they’re scattered amongst binary junk. The XML part might just be OO.o’s implementation rather than a core part of the spec, I don’t really know. There appears to be some kind of XSLT going on, judging from references to styles.xml in the test document I created. Another possibility is that there are several pieces of data contained in some kind of compressed format, but I don’t know exactly what and don’t have the skills to find out! Or, at least, don’t know where to start and hence efforts are frustrated. It’s probable all this information is on the OpenOffice or Oasis websites, but I can’t be bothered looking. I care, but not that much.
My main motive in discovering what’s going on here is the potential integration of OpenOffice with web frameworks, and how open formats (particularly SGML/XML based ones) simplify parsing by an order of magnitude.