And with that, I've uploaded all my slides for the Utah Open Source Conference. My goal was to have them ready by last night, so I'm a bit late. Still better than last year where I only had one presentation and I was still updating my notes the night before. If you're looking for me make sure to check the schedule as there have been some changes, and there may well be more to come. Also look for my late addition where I'll be joining Gabe Gunderson of izeni to talk about VoIP (specifically FreeSWITCH and Asterisk).

Lately I've been feeling rather disappointed by Evolution. I've been a long time user (7 years I think) and for the most part it works great. But it's that "most part" bit that really is starting to grind. The last few iterations that I've tried (whatever is bundled with Ubuntu Feisty, Gutsy, Intrepid and Jaunty) have all had a a few quirks, none of them the same of course, For instance, The Intrepid version had an annoying habit of leaving messages marked as unread, even after I, you know, read them. Made for an annoyance when filing messages away. Worse, many of the messages that Evolution said were read, weren't really marked as such on the server so sometimes messages would magically unread themselves.

So I decided to give KMail another shot. I tried it last year sometime I think it was and decided it just didn't cut the mustard. But I'm a few revs forward on KDE now so it was worth a try. Over the last few days I have found it to be less annoying and much snappier than Evolution so I am considering a permanent switch, but it too does have issues. One major oddity is that when I open up a new folder, the unread messages count will reset while the folder is rescanned. That's just crazy. I can see why in a way, but there's just no need for it. A second complaint is that there's no way to move to the next message without closing the currently open message and opening a new window (I turn off the preview pane).

On the other hand, KMail excels in a quite a few ways. Contact auto completion is much much (much!) faster. I like the idea of the "favorite folders", although to date I haven't made much use of it. I like the way it integrates with my Spam Assassin. It handles multiple identities perfectly (although the configuration is kind of spread out).

Of course the elephant in the room is Exchange support. It's a necessary evil at least at my company (better than Groupwise!). Evolution has an Exchange plugin which works via Outlook Web Access to give you all the features of Exchange in Linux. In theory anyway. While many features do work, not all are flawless. The address book doesn't work for me. My calendar doesn't seem to sync with the server calendar. I've had previous problems with server-side calendar reminders not working, although the version in Jaunty seems to work fine.

Is there anything better out there that I should take a look at? Exchange support would be great, but frankly I don't use all the extra features all that often and if I have to fire up Outlook (via terminal services) once a week, that's not a deal breaker. I would like it to be rock solid, though.

My boss surprised me the other day with a new phone. Nothing was particularly wrong with my old phone, but we had a bunch of these new Samsung phones due to some staffing changes so I got nominated for one. Ostensibly it's to make on-call easier since I'll be able to read and respond to emails without having to run home. Hopefully that will work out.

So far I think the phone will work out alright. It's fairly bulky, but so was my LG enV, so no big change there. The screen seems big enough to be functional, although it certainly has its limitations. Can't say I can see much solution there short of packing around a netbook though. I love finally being able to synchronize my calendar, something that in theory the enV can do but which Verizon (curse their souls) forcibly disabled. Mobile email also cool. I've installed some applications such as Facebook, Twitter, IRC, that may or may not be really useful in the long run but are fun to have around.

But of course there's bad news too. The battery life is not what I'd like it to be. I'm not sure how it compares to other smart phones since this is my first, but with any reasonably heavy usage I'm looking at charging it a few times a day, and that's going to be my usage pattern during on-call, so I'm a bit disappointed.

It also runs Windows Mobile. I was rather apprehensive about it, but so far it's doing better than I thought. I'd give it a solid mediocre (which is high praise from me).

The application support is disappointing, although not really unexpected. See, with a Free/Open Source background I expect high quality software to just be available for free. With Windows Mobile, yeah not so much. There are a few but they're somewhat hard to find. I could really use an apt-get if you know what I mean. This is an area where Linux users get pampered and it's tough to go without.

Those are the major drawbacks. The one other minor glitch I would mention is that whenever I'm connected to my wifi it constantly tries to bring up a data connection. Well what's the point of that? To get the thing (I named it Aristotle) to knock it off I set up a dummy ISP connection using the irDA port. Hee, hee.

It's a keeper so far. We'll see how I feel after I go on-call this weekend. If you see this blog full of Brittany Spears posts you'll know it's driven me off the deep end. Your pity is all I ask.

Great article here about poorly chosen passwords. I tend to stay away from simply relinking URLs that I find, but I think this one merits some attention. I recall when I was studying my tail off in college trying to learn everything about computers, especially security, that passwords were a rather common topic. The recommendation then was to use as a password difficult enough to not be guessed but still simple enough to be remembered. I'm pretty sure that advice fell on deaf ears as frankly it's pretty tough to do.

Any more I recommend using as long a string of random characters as possible. Mash on your keyboard if you have to, but also consider a random password generator. How will I remember that, you might ask. Don't. Use a password safe. Then all you have to do is remember one password. The rest are kept in a vault for easy access. And if you can't remember your master password, write it down and keep it in your wallet. Somebody steals that, well you've got bigger problems.

Once you adopt this new technique, you'll use passwords differently. Instead of reusing the same one, possibly with variations, you'll generate a completely different one for every website. Remember the old saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket? Once in a while at work we'll have accounts compromised because the user had the exact same password everywhere and some spammer nabbed it and then hijacked their email account to send spam. Sounds crazy, but you definitely do not want that to be you.

And while you're at it, stop using 6 letter passwords. It's all random and you'll just copy and paste it anyway, so why not go for broke? I routinely use 24 character passwords. It actually makes me smile to think of how ridiculous my password would seem to a snooper.

It appears that Qwest is adding some actual features to their phone service. The new service "allows users to see who’s calling their home phone, listen to voicemail, forward messages, manage their contacts and place a phone call." Actually sounds pretty cool. It's nice to see that a 800lb gorilla out there isn't just resting on its laurels. Still isn't enough to convince me to switch back though.