Dan Weinreb’s blog

I just upgraded from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 on my Vista machine, and I like it a lot. If you haven’t heard about version 3, I recommend that you upgrade. I have not yet tried it on my work machine, running the old version 8 (“Intrepid”) of Ubuntu; if you have experience with this, I’d appreciate hearing about it.

Some cool things:

Search is much faster, due to indexing. (When I first brought up version 3, it spend a long time indexing, but that’s because I have a huge number of saved messages. I was able to use it while it indexed.)

When you select several messages, it displays extended summaries of all of them: whom it’s from, date, and the first few lines.

If you double-click on a message in the summary line, instead of creating a new window, it creates a “tab” in the main Thunderbird window, a lot like Firefox tabs.

The operations on a message being read are now down where the message is, to the right of the header display. This seems a bit more intuitive, although I don’t think it matters much.

Archive: The new “Archive” command moves the message into a folder. The folder is the subfolder of a new top-level folder called “Archive”. The subfolder’s name is the year from the date of the message.

If you use the word “attach” in a message you’re composing, it brings up a fairly unobtrusive bar a the bottom saying “Found an attachment keyword: attached” or whatever word you used (you can control the set of keywords), followed by buttons for “Add Attachment…” or “Remind me later”. When I used Thunderbird 2, I had an addon called “Attachment Reminder” that would pop up a menu when you clicked “Send”, asking you if it was OK. That’s more obtrusive, which you might or might not like.

One bad thing:

There’s no more “Forward all as attachments”, which let you send a message that contained many attachments, namely everything you had selected in the summary pane. I have used that many times.

My favorite add-on is “Expression Search”, which provides a powerful and concise way to search. The best thing is that it saves you from having to use the mouse to select the type of search to do (the “magnifying glass” dropdown in the upper-right search bar).

I also like ConfirmFolderMove (helps prevent accidental “move folder” operations.

(I’m just starting to try MailClassfier, which would be very helpful if it turns out to work. But the first time I tried it, it was analyzing all of my mail, and at the end of this slow process, Thunderbird crashed. And when I restarted it asked again to analyze all mail, so apparently the results were not saved before the crash. I’ll keep trying to make it work.)

This summer, my family went to Ecuador.  On the Galapogos cruise, you have a very tight budget for luggage.  Normally we bring lots of books on vacation, but this time there was no way.  The Kindle was the obvious solution.  I bought one, we tried it, and we got a second one.  There were three of us including my son, Adam (age 17), so there was some contention; fortunately we did bring a few print books.

My wife, Cheryl, although she uses PC’s all the time, generally hates gadgets.  But she loves the Kindle and uses it very heavily, even now that we’re back.  I like it a lot too, and if I had time to read more books (argh!) I’d use it a lot too.

The eInk technology is amazing.  It’s far easier to read a book on a Kindle than on a computer screen.  You can control the font size.  Those of us old enough to need reading glasses, and to forget where we put them (sigh), can read fine with the large type size.  You can’t change the font, but I don’t care. You can plug in earphones, and there’s also a tiny speaker.

About half of the new or new-ish books that I go to buy are available for the Kindle.  When they are, that’s what I buy.  Kindle books from Amazon are also less expensive.  I typically pay $10.  You can get a rather extensive free sample of the book, to see if you like it.

You can get quite a few out-of-copyright books in Kindle format from various sources on the web.  I have the complete works of Herman Melville.  Cheryl, who is an English major specializing in 19th century fiction, has quite a lot more.  It’s all entirely free.

There’s plenty of memory, and I put in an SD card so there’s now vast amounts of memory, in effect, since an eBook is pretty small.  You can also download audio (Cheryl sometimes uses this), which takes a bit more space, but with the SD card, there’s no space limit in practice.

It can go for a long time without charging.  We only had to recharge every five days or so; obviously this depends on how much you use it.  The user interface is good, although not perfect: the buttons for moving forward and back are nice and big, but they are so big that you can’t always grasp the device the way you’d like to.  But it’s not a big problem.  If you’re eating at a table, the Kindle takes a lot less space than a hardcover or trade paperback book, and you don’t need to hold the pages open.  After the vacation, We both got nice third-party cases (Tuff-luv) that let you stand up the Kindle like a desktop photograph frame, but that’s not necessary.

You can annotate text; the keyboard is small and there isn’t any word processing (much like the Notes application in the iPhone), but for its purpose it’s OK.  You buy books from the Kindle Store over the “Whispernet”, which is actually the Sprint cell phone network, but you do not pay anything for this (no “data plan”, no subscription charges at all).  It works very well.  There’s a dictionary so you can look up words you don’t know.  There’s a “search” function, although unfortunately is searches all your books; there’s no option to just search one of them.

There are three “experimental” feature:

1. Basic web browser. It’s pretty basic, all right, but you can do some useful things in it, if you really don’t have any other way to get to the web.
2. Ask Kindle NowNow. Itlets you send any question to Amazon, where someone will do their best to answer it and send you back an answer.  Their operators just do web searches, and are supposed to get back to you in ten minutes.  I have not tried it.
3. Play music while you read. Copy MP3 files to the Kindle.  I haven’t tried this either, since I don’t listen to music while I read, but I’m confident that it works.

To transfer files to the Kindle (if you’re not just using the store), you plug a cable into it.  The other end is a normal USB. The Kindle appears as a device with three directories: books, audio books, and MP3′s. You just copy in the usual way. It’s very simple.

The Kindle does not support PDF directly.  However, there are ways to read PDF files:

1. You can send email with attachments to <yourself>*free.kindle.com to be converted and emailed back to your computer at the email address associated with your Amazon account.  Then you can do a USB transfer.  Or, they’ll send it straight to your Kindle for ten cents.
2. MobiSoft’s “MobiPocket Creator” converts PDF, Word, HTML, and plain ASCII to Kindle format, and does all sorts of other cool things.  It’s free. I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.  See .  You need Windows, and Internet Explorer 7 beta 3.  When you install it, click on “publisher edition (for advanced users)”.  It’s not clear how well it works for very complex PostScript, or for PDF files with things like scanned pages.  Google “Kindle PDF” for even more on this topic.  There’s an application called “Stanza” for the Mac.

Objections I’ve Heard
Here are some objections I’ve heard raised about the Kindle, and my opinions.

• It’s not “open”; that is, you can’t program it. The Kindle is not a computer.  It’s an appliance.  I can’t reprogram my digital watch either.  This just does not bother me.
• eInk can’t be backlit, so it’s hard to read in dim light or the dark. That’s true, although it’s also true of ordinary books.  It would be nice if they could improve this somehow.
• It’s hard to share a copy of a book, other than by sharing the reader. Actually you can move a book to the SD card, and move that to another Kindle.  It’s not hard.
• Pictures do not render well. That’s true.  What’s more, at least one book we read was supposed to have a map that would have helped the reader understand the book, and the map was entirely missing.
• You might lose your Kindle, and it’s not cheap to replace, although you do get all your data (books, your own annotations) back from Amazon.  That’s true, just as it is of my notebook computer.  This complaint really has to do with the whole concept of ebooks versus print books, not the Kindle specifically.

And Also

I am not a real Kindle expert; I don’t read the blogs or anything.  There’s a great deal more information available at Amazon and many web sites.  One good one is “Top 25 Kindle Tips“.

I have not tried the Sony reader or any other book reader.  There are rumors about a second-generation Kindle coming out, but I don’t know anything about it.

Summary: It’s excellent.

Helpful friends and acquaintences often let me know about exciting new software technologies that I absolutely must know about.  I like learning about exciting new technologies.  Unfortunately, the software world is generating them faster than I can learn them.  Here’s my list of things I really must learn.

Programming languges

Dylan: A Lisp-family language developed by my friends.

ML: How can I be a “Lisp expert” and not know ML??

Haskell: Functional programming.  Alan Bawden says this is fundamentally different and I must know it.

Ruby: Up-and-coming popular language.

Subtext: Programming in trees instead of text.  (By Jonathan Edwards, MIT CSAIL.)

Hygenic Macros: A languages feature for doing macros (in the Lisp sense) cleanly.

Groovy: A dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine.

Ron Garret’s paper on a module system for Lisp.

F#: Microsoft’s new function programming language.

LSharp:

Rlisp: A Lisp embedded in Ruby.

Programming tools and libraries

OProfile: The profiling tool for the Lisp implementation that I use.

Krugle:

LispBuilder: Access to SDL from Lisp for game development.

clbuild: An alternative to Lisp’s asdf-install: helps with download, compilation, and invocation of Lisp apps.

Networking

TRILL: New network protocol designed to solve the problems of the spanning tree.

Databases and Caches

Freebase: “Open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.”  From Metaweb, my old friend Danny Hillis.

CouchDB: Highly scalable document-oriented free DBMS written in Erlang.

Chubby: Google’s distributed lock system.

Google Sites: Web page design tool

Kompozer: Web page design tool

GORM:  Grails’s object-relatinal mapping tool, using Hibernate 3.

Terracotta: Clustering/caching tool for Java, making many JVM’s look like one.

Drizzle: Stripped-down MySQL, useful for caching too.

Whirlycache: A very fast cache

cl-prevalance:

Mongo: A grid-aware object-oriented DBMS from 10gen

Cloud computing

RightSize

Elastra

10gen

Web tools

Rails: (Ruby on Rails) Very popular, highly recommended by many people.

Grails: Rails for Groovy.  Built on GORM and Spring.

Google AppEngine:

Other

VMWare: Can I run Linux on my Windows box?

Software repositories: CPAN, http://planet.plt-scheme.org/, etc.

Jango: A Pandora alternative

I’ll get to them, really, I promise…

As soon as I got my new PC, I bought an external disk as large as the provided internal disk, and told Vista to turn on automatic backup to the external disk. That works fine, but what happens if some event causes failure in both the PC and the external drive? Power spikes, fire, and theft are all real possibilities.

Carbonite provides automatic offset backup at a reasonable charge. It’s really automatic; you just turn it on and forget it. The documentation is very good and simple. It runs in the background and I don’t notice it at all. It only costs $4.16/month, or $3.75/month if you sign up for two years. You can get a free 15-day trial.

It’s so easy to put off doing backup; I procrastinated for years. Luckily, I didn’t lose my data, but I’ve had friends who have lost their computer’s disk and it cost them plenty of time to recover, and they lost some data permanently. I recommed both the external disk and Carbonite.

(Full disclosure: Carbonite is funded in part by Common Angels, though I am not an investor. I also like that the CEO is David Friend, who used to run ARP Instruments — I was a music synthesizer hobbyist in the early 70′s and Friend was quite famous in that area.)