Today on my feed of application releases from Freshmeat, was an application that might be of interest to any story writers — StorYBook:
StorYBook is a free, open source story writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors that helps to keep the overview over the strands when writing a book, a novel or a story. StorYBook assists you in structuring your book.
Have all your data in one place. With StorYBook you can manage summaries, characters and locations and assign them to the related chapters.
It seems like it might be very useful organizing a multi-threaded story, but it is disappointing that there isn’t built in capacity to actually write your chapters. I was able to get it running under OS-X even without an installer so I can help any Mac users (Adam) that want to give it a try.
So today at work, on the Techsupport list there was a long drawn out discussion about Calendars and MS Exchange (largely complaints about cost). Near the end of the thread, the MSCA team’s comparison of the features available to the various clients was included. I haven’t done any confirmation of their findings (largely because I have no access to do so and they are theoretically the local experts), but one of the identified differences with the (non IE) Web Client that jumped out at me as noteworthy:
No weekly or monthly calendar view
WHAT!?!?! How do you have a web-calendar product that can’t produce weekly or monthly views of your calendar? There are hundreds of free web calendaring projects and ALL of them have weekly and monthly views.
The entire Outlook Web Access team should hang their heads in shame for being unable to provide the most basic of features that twelve year olds with no development experience are capable of producing.
Currently, we use Oracle Calendar which is a mediocre product, but it does have Windows, Mac, and Linux clients in addition to a web client — and that web client (which pretty much blows) seems to be vastly superior to OWA. Originally, I didn’t care too much that I was going to be forced to use Exchange for calendaring because Oracle Calendar was not too useful, but facing a massive downgrade in functionality I’m none to happy.
I don’t have to use the product (yet) but its inferior vacation messaging is extremely annoying. Today I send a planned outage notice to our internal notice maillist and received two vacation emails from Exchange users that are out of the office — ARGH. Vacation mailers should not notify the sender when the on vacation person is not in the list of recipients. The University of Washington’s Email Delivery Manager (EDM) has had this feature for YEARS. In addition, EDM adds a unique header that signifies that the vacation notice was sent by the vacation program. And one more thing: Why the hell are the vacation notices sent as base64 encoded text/plain and text/html! How about saving everyone the trouble and just send the text without the encoding? Stupid bloated annoying crap. These are small trivial issues that should be able to be resolved with about 2 hours of development time — including unit tests and documentation.
I’ve been trying to get a bit more organized and one element of that is an organized calendar so I can track the things I am supposed to be doing, but can never seem to remember. At work we have an implementation of Oracle Calendar (which I’ve never been very impressed with, though it does work) and I don’t want to have to reference two different calendars.
Google Calendar to the rescue. Your calendar is composed of several sub-calendars, each of which represents a different individual context or group. With this framework you can assign different permission sets to each calendar. Additionally you can subscribe to group or general calendars or outside resources. Currently I have 6 calendars:
1) my personal calendar
2) my friend’s birthdays (that I can share with all of them, so we don’t have to maintain separate lists)
3) my family birthdays (again sharable)
4) my work calendar (subscribed via the Oracle Calendar iCAL feed)
5) US Holidays (a public calendar provided by Google — there are holidays for numerous nations)
6) Phases of the Moon (another Google public calendar)
The Google Calendar interface is pretty slick, but you can now use Thunderbird as a rich calendar client by using Lightning. So I decided to give it a try. After upgrading to the current alpha version of Thunderbird (which finally has a visual notification popup for Linux) and installing the necessary extensions, I was able to easily work with my Google Calendar calendars (1-3 above) though some quick tests easily demonstrated that this is still early alpha technology.
When I tried to subscribe to my work calendar, I had significantly less success. First, only meetings that I scheduled would show up — and those are the meetings that I generally don’t need reminders for. Second, having the work calendar active seemed to greatly affect the stability of the application — other calendars would regularly disappear only to reappear by deactivating all the calendars and then reactivating them.
Despite my disappointment with using Thunderbird, I am very impressed with Google Calendar and will continue to expand my use of the application. Thanks, Google!
Word 2007 crashing is a feature not a bug/DOS:
According to Microsoft developer David LeBlanc, crashes aren’t necessarily DoS situations: ‘You may rightfully say that crashing is always bad, and having a server-class app background, I agree. Crashing means you made a mistake, bad programmer, no biscuit. However, crashing may be the lesser of the evils in many places. In the event that our apps crash, we have recovery mechanisms, ways to report the crash so we know what function had the problem, and so on. I really take issue with those who would characterize a client-side crash as a denial of service.’
You can always count on Microsoft to provide a humorous bizarro-world view of software design. I don’t write to many documents with a word processor, I prefer to use wikis or some other web presentation application. But when I do use a word processor, I use OpenOffice. Every once in a while it renders a document oddly, but overall I am quite happy.
Linux 2.6.2 has been released. Hit your local mirror.