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Last year I was foolish enough to embark on a migration of several mailboxes (several gigs of 10k+ emails each) from Gmail to my self-hosted Dovecot IMAP storage server. I was shocked at the shoddy state of Gmail's IMAP implementation which was (and probably still is) riddled with bugs including bugs where certain actions (like deleting an email) might randomly just not work without throwing an error.

http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-imap-implementation
http://www.playingwithwire.com/2009/02/some-frustrating-gmail-imap-gimap-bugs/

These bugs made the migration quite difficult since I had to figure out Gmail's quirks and implement some workarounds to faciliate the migration. Prior to this experience I thought all the issues I had with Google's IMAP was due to poor client-side software but after my experience I have realised Google only follows the standards when it suits them and breaks the standards when it suits them. Sounds just like Microsoft doesn't it?

In fact they're no better than Microsoft, Apple, et al when it comes to standands complaince -- and in this case I know Google actually has, by far, the worst IMAP implementation I have ever seen from any leading Mail provider. I'm thankful I no longer use Google (or indeed any propiriety solutions) for anything important -- all important data is now stored on a standards-compliant server running open-source software.

That just gets you a cached version of a page with a link to the actual article. The actual article is more useful.

Usability is certainly undervalued within most Open Source project teams. In fact, its generally hard to find any projects which actually have a dedicated team of members just looking at usability issues.

There's a bunch of reasons for this oversight - yes, they may be related to the core development teams of projects like Joomla coming from a pretty hardcore coding background... of course rapid development cycles don't help developers feel they have the time to themselves think about usability for too long (or better).

However, what I think is exciting is how this is all changing from a more grassroots level - as projects like Joomla grow in userbase and functional ability, more people from more diverse backgrounds are twigging onto shortcomings of the software. Those people are also more able than ever before to alter the code in sustainable ways to affect its usability.

The cited article @ http://www.playingwithwire.com/ pits Joomla and Wordpress together assuming that Joomla's admin side cannot be changed - from an interface standpoint. This isn't true and I think we'll see some re-workings of the Joomla administrative login become available, perhaps not from the core Joomla team though, soon.

In fact, with the aim of making using Joomla simpler, we've recently launched 'Seeding' (http://www.plantseedling.com) - a distribution label which has released a pre-packaged and configured Joomla distro that comes loaded with a slightly simpler admin interface.

Our first release of the Seedling distribution of Joomla wasn't aimed at redesigning the admin work-flow of Joomla but we've laid some groundwork for the next release which will see a complete re-organisation of the control panel and some admin features of Joomla! Stay tuned to our blog @ http://www.plantseedling.com/blog

Cheers,

Qasim
(Principal @designguru.org)

As has been discussed before, Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.

The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.

Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.

Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.

Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.

Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.

I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the .tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.

Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.

Here's what "tabbed desktops" look like on a Mac: video of Virtue Desktops. So it's not exactly tabs but it sure saves you from stacking windows.

I think human input will definitely come into play in the future of search. Ultimately you can make machines very good at recognizing spam content, but how can you possibly identify what people really want to see without asking them?

The way forward is to allow people to reorder their results and to delete spam results. This way we'll have a search engine that actually learns what people want and acts appropriately. Sites like Digg and Reddit are on to something in this sense. They use 'swarm' technologies to determine what is most relevant in a certain narrow category at a certain time.

Just like another commenter mentioned there is already something like this: Yoople. A couple of months back I wrote that Google's Searshmash secretly was playing around with something like that too.

At least for my major, Computer Science, I agree that dropping out might be the best solution to learning anything. I am convinced that most people would be able to self teach themselves every important part of a four year college education in a few months, simply because colleges spend so much time wasting the time of the students. Wrong level, wrong information, wrong teacher - just one of these is enough for a class to be a pointless. And all of them happen more often than not. What is the statistical chance that you end up in class where all of these factors align? It doesn't help that it's hard to fire teachers and that nobody bothered to define university lecture content on a national level.

I blogged about the problem with universities a while back, here.

For a while you could also rearrange the search results by drag and drop. Last month I wrote a little conspiracy theory about the true purpose of all this dragging. Seems like they removed that feature now though, so I guess that's a sign I was wrong. Or maybe they saw my blog and realized the secret was getting out and hid the feature... :)