Thursday, July 28, 2005

Request for Comment Posters

I occasionally get some comments on my blog despite my rather poor frequency in blogging. Thank you folks :-). Some times people ask a question and I have no way of responding because there is no E-mail address. If you want a direct answer do send a mail to rganesan at gmail dot com. Otherwise, I'll try to respond with another blog. At least, this does increase my blogging frequency ;-).

Aaditya comments if I have tried evolution. Yes, I have. It occupies too much screen real estate and consumes too much resources for my taste (just check the number of background processes it needs). However, I'd probably give it another shot because my office has already moved to Exchange and will probably move to Exchange calendaring pretty soon. I've checked that Evolution exchange connector does work as advertised.

I must say it's quite galling for a guy like me who runs a lean and mean desktop with fluxbox (earlier WindowMaker) and screen) inside a plain rxvt without background images to see so much bloat in modern GUI apps. I mean, I remember having a tough time reconciling with Emacs memory bloat. Oh well, I am getting old I guess.

Leena Dasnurkar wants to know which programming language I am using with SQLite and BerkeleyDB. For this particular test I was obviously using C because the internal Btree API of SQLite is not exposed through any scripting language. However, for my applications I use SQLite with Python. As to which is better, I am biased towards SQLite. Despite the extensive documentation, I find BerkeleyDB's APIs pretty painful to use if you want transaction support. The big advantage with using an SQL engine like SQLite and Python is that if you really need to scale bigger it's easier to migrate to PostgreSQL.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Testing E-mail posting again

E-mail posting was busted the last time I checked. If you see this in the blog, then it works :-).

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Back to Thunderbird

It's ages since I blogged but I thought I'd at least update that I have switched back to Thunderbird for mail. In fact I switched quite a while back. I got tired of Sylpheed blocking to fetch mails. Thunderbird continues to eat up memory like crazy ("top" output broken into two lines to fit blog column):
10428 rganesan  15   0  221m  48m  21m S  0.0  
9.7   1:28.20 mozilla-thunderbird
However, the resident size seems to keep relatively low (in fact lower than firefox), the UI is responsive and spam checking is pretty good.