This week I checked out The radical plan to destroy timezones, which proposes to adopt UTC worldwide. It goes even further in proposing a change in our calendar for adopting the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. It’s not the first time people propose change in our western gregorian calendar system (which is almost 500 yearsold), but it’s quite not easy to get anything adopted. Still, we developers consider Timezones as one of our nightmares. When we get to our senses we put everything we can in UTC, but there is always the need to get time ‘local’ at some point. I have honestly little hope that UTC become the worldwide standard, but, hey, we always can dream, right?

This week-end they changed time in France. As I work with those guys to cover the watching of servers, then I need to change time too. This is totally lame. In the context of largely distributed teams, DST is heresy. It happens in the US too, but not even at the same time. Man I hate DST. I’m happy we don’t have that in Taiwan.

Thunderbird sucks too

Despite the respect I have for mozilla products and for their efforts toward the community, I have to say that I have been using thunderbird for a while and I don’t like it. There is some lack of customability in there, it eats a whole lot of memory and it’s kinda slow sometimes. I have been considering getting back to mutt, which is a totally different category of mail client.

But I found claws, and trying it for a few days on my various mailboxes with hundreds of thousands of mails, and it is a very good feeling. It’s much more transparent and hackable and stays in the same category of the clickable mail client as thunderbird. I’m not sure I will stick to claws, maybe I will get back to mutt that I have been used so many years before. But I sure will give that ‘email client that bites’ a try for a while.

Gmail sucks more

I still can’t figure out why people use gmail for reading their mail. I mean, you leave management of your mail to google, you know what they do with it. You also want to give them information about how you read your mail? I mean, using a webmail, first, should be a fallback. But it’s mystery for nobody that google business is in profiling people. It blasts me how people can trust them blindly.