I have been running this blog on a slicehost VPS with excellent results so far. However, I am at the point where I need a bit more flexibility and I can’t justify the $20 monthly fee to my home CFO. So, I did setup myself to move the server back home this weekend, where funny enough, I used to host this blog.

The first choice came down to choice of OS. I had been running Gentoo, but I have found this distribution bad for very low spec hardware.…

It seems like it’s open source buying season, with now Nokia buying Trolltech. I feel very happy for the Trolltech folks. We already talked about it, that Trolltech needed some fresh funding to change its business model.

Since my first EPOC apps on a then Nokia Communicator prototype phone back in 2000, I have never been a Symbian fan (Symbian’s SDK custom half-baked toolchain, the libraries solving C++ problems that should be left to the compiler, and most importantly, not running on Linux have always put me back from Symbian).…

After my move away from Gnome and Evolution, I have now been running KDE for three weeks straight and still going. I have found KDE to be a surprisingly stable and reliable platform. It’s hard to find something to criticize in KDE. It’s a really nice desktop setup: well oiled machinery where everything seems to run smoothly. Inter-application communication and integration of all the KDE applications is simply superb, and I don’t think there is any other desktop out there, proprietary or open source, where you can see such tight integration of its parts.…

After moving to KDE three weeks ago now, I am staying. At least for now. If I had to pick on something, my main point for feedback would be that the graphical user interface feels crowded, and its usage metaphors, albeit consistent, are rather complicated.

In KDE, configuration options are scattered all around the place. KDE is a great platform for the power user, familiar with tweaking and working with plenty of configuration options, but for the rest of us who just want to get on using the applications and not waste our time fighting with configuration options, a simpler paradigm for desktop and programs alike would be more useful.…

See, I can live with Evolution crashing once in a while. Hell, it’s software, it’s meant to fail. But another thing is when the whole damn thing fails silently and in consequence kills your productivity. Evolution has managed to randomly delete part of my calendars, appointments here and there, and multiple appointments moved in time. End result, missing meetings and looking like a complete idiot. The top of the iceberg happened on Monday when Evolution corrupted one of IMAP folders. Ouch!…

I spent this weekend testing and installing nginx and I have said Adios to Apache! Let me tell you why I have done that.

I am running this blog on a slicehost.com 256Mb Xen VPS, using WordPress. I have been using Apache 2.2 for almost a year now without any problems. But recently I deployed a little Ruby on Rails application using mongrel for my wife’s business, and then suddenly I ran out of memory. Each Apache worker was easily taking 15 to 20Mb, even with a really cut-down configuration and built on Gentoo.…

I take notes in meetings using FreeMind. Every time I identify a task I mark the node down using an icon and after the meeting I follow up creating the necessary tasks in Evolution. I would like to be able to link my mindmaps to tasks in Evolution. Hopefully it can be done using FreeMind, or perhaps we need to invest in Psycho or something similar tighter to the Gnome desktop. If we decide not to use FreeMind, the tool of choice should use FreeMind’s XML schema to ensure interoperability with folks running other desktops.…