Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Moving to Linux would be very easy were it not for the hassles of getting your emails transferred over. However, at least it’s not the showstopper that it was just a few years ago.

Your first issue is finding your .PST files which you can do by clicking on properties. To copy those over, go out of Outlook and copy them onto a USB stick. Likewise for contacts, calendars, etc. if you want those too though I’ve never used them so won’t be talking about them here. Evolution has a PST import limit of around 500MB so if your PST file(s) are bigger than that you’ll need to create some more and move your email into them until you’ve the PST files below the limit. At this point, it’s best to disable Outlook which you can so simply by changing the POP server that it uses to pick up your email; note down the settings as you’ll need those to set up Evolution.

Next you will need to install Evolution if you’ve not done so already and also ReadPST.

Evolution can take quite a while to import PST files (hours in my case) so you’ll need some patience for this step. Once that’s done you’ll discover one limitation of its import facility: it doesn’t import email in top level folders. Thus you’ll find that various folders which it has created are empty. This is where ReadPST comes in because it will read those PST files and separate them out into the various folders with mbox files in each of them. For the folders which Evolution has left empty, you need to import the contents from the appropriate spot in the folder hierarchy which ReadPST has created for you.

Finally, there’s the business of getting new mail  into Evolution. Go into Edit, Preferences and create the email accounts that you had in Outlook. As always, the settings here aren’t quite the same as those in Outlook (why that’s so is a mystery as the mail servers obviously work with all mail clients). In my case, I found that 1and1 needed a bit of tweaking to get outgoing mail to work, the settings being server: auth.1and1.co.uk (as per Outlook), server requires authentication, no encryption, authentication type: login. Once you’ve those set up, it’s best to send yourself a message to check that it’s all working.

What about email rules? I took the chance to do a little rationalisation of my email folder structure so didn’t bother trying to import those but that seems the best approach anyway as Evolution doesn’t seem to have nearly so much complexity as Outlook did. I say complexity rather than flexibility as there are just so many options in there that if you’re not careful email can seem to go into random folders sometimes.

And that’s it. Sadly, importing the messages isn’t as automated as it could be and, in my case, took quite a while but then that’s down to me having email back to 1996 and a far too complicated folder structure.

For me Vista was the final straw that decided me upon dumping Windows at the earliest opportunity. Never before had I seen such a poorly tested system.

That was a couple of years ago but moving out of Windows wasn’t possible for me then as I’d heaps of mail in Outlook which I wanted to take with me. Now it’s different though as the mail import facilities available in the Ubuntu mail programs have come on considerably so at the moment I’m in the process of cutting down the size of the PST below the 1GB import limit which seems the final barrier. Still, it’s on the home run so later today I should have everything moved into Ubuntu.

Aside from the email the move has been incredibly easy to do. Backing up everything in Vista and restoring it all in Ubuntu worked just fine. The only preparation required for that was making sure not to use the Office 2007 file formats though even that’s not really a requirement these days as OpenOffice can read those just fine.

What’s the benefit of the move though? Well, the Vista computer was quite simply becoming unuseably slow thanks to all the junk that’s associated with Vista. One notable improvement that I did make on Vista was disabling the “indexing” facility. That’s there simply to speed up searching for text within the files on your computer. Sounds like a useful facility, doesn’t it? How many times have you ever used it? For me, it’s at best once every couple of years yet enabling indexing has a major impact on the day to day speed of your computer (it’s the reason why your disk is in almost constant use even when you’re not doing anything). Even disabling it takes hours though as it needs to switch off indexing on every file on your computer which probably means hundreds of thousands of files these days for almost everyone.

The other major benefit is that Ubuntu is smaller. A lot smaller. It runs just fine on the netbook computer with 512MB which isn’t an option for Vista. That smaller size means that it runs a whole lot faster. Running SkyPE works great on the Acer 751 in Ubuntu; the same computer can’t deal with video when running Vista. It takes a lot less discspace too. The basic Windows 7 installation needs about 25GB, the basic Ubuntu installation needs less than 10GB. That’s not comparing like with like either as the Ubuntu install includes a fully working Office installation.

Of course, for the pedants, the new decade actually starts on January 1st 2011 but, as with the millennium, I guess we may as well take the opportunity to celebrate twice.

What a decade we’ve had, eh?

Financially, the first one of the 21st century has been very much a rollercoaster  ride for the world and many of the people within it. The 21st century didn’t start overly well and the last decade finished on the worst downer for many a year. The last time it was so serious was way back in the 1930s and that took the 2nd world war to pull the world out in the end. This time, supposedly, we know better and have had loads of time to develop economic theories which’ll pull us out. Sounds good, but the minor fly in that ointment is that we went into this depression with those theories in place and they obviously didn’t work too well, did they?

Technologically the 21st century has been a major disappointment. Not only do we not have the promised flying cars predicted (well, not yet) but we’ve lost supersonic commercial travel, almost lost the hovercraft, lost the amphibious cars that we had in the 1960s and still don’t have a moon base. On the plus side we do have a space station, the beginnings of commercial space travel and the Mars mission is back in the frame. Electonics-wise the computers are lots faster, the storage lots bigger and we think nothing of “image processing” these days because even the cheapest digital camera does much more of it than the NASA computers ever did for the moon shots. From the science fiction world we can buy the Star Trek communicators for virtually nothing and the PAD (ebook reader) sales are finally taking off. Yet to come are things like warp drive (several theories postulate potential ways of doing it but it’s on the distant horizon) and the transporter (one that seems to have all kinds of theoretical and ethical problems at present).

Socially, we have all the tools in place from 1984 and have only the totalitarian state remaining to complete the picture. That’s perhaps the most worrying development in many ways as the technology making the 1984 scenario possible seems much more effective than the version sketched out in the novel would ever have been. On more positive fronts, the derogatory “self-publishing” of yesteryear is now everywhere and so widespread that we don’t even have a collective term for it these days.

So what’s likely to come up during the coming decade? All being well financially things will get back on an even keel though somehow I suspect that it’s likely to be past the mid-point of the decade before we can truly say we’re getting through to the promised land. We still won’t have a base on Mars but at least we should be seeing the first stages of serious design for the mission well before 2019. Computers will, as always, be a whole lot faster and the storage will fill up just as quickly. Somehow I can’t see us going for the 300 megapixel cameras that would be doable by 2019 but I imagine that 3D ones will be the order of the day by then. Books may well have bitten the dust by then as the ebook readers should be in full colour and probably 3D capable by 2019 with a price close to that of a single hard back book. Time travel seems to be gaining a growing interest so perhaps we’ll even see the earliest developments on that front during the decade which is the one thing I reckon would spur on the first contact with aliens (sorry guys, but warp capable civilisations would present virtually no danger compared to those that could travel in time).

What about moi? Well, James will have gone through primary school and be close to starting university by 2019 which is a whole heap of changes to think about. Assuming that I continue on my present rambling journey through the OU I will have clocked up at least one more degree and perhaps getting around to settling down to do a doctorate by then. Dear knows where we’ll be living by then. I’d be betting that it won’t be France but aside from that who knows? Work-wise, it’s hard to believe but I should be within spitting distance of retirement by that point.

So Happy New Decade! Here’s hoping that the new one will at least finish much better than the last one did.

It hardly seems any time at all since we were packing up last January and making a start to moving back to the UK and now Christmas is only a matter of weeks away.

As usual, we’ve not yet really gotten going on our Christmas letter that goes along with the cards that we send out to far flung relatives. Also, as per normal the first of theirs has just turned up and, of course, it’s from Faye in Canada.

In previous years we needed to be a whole lot more organised with the Christmas presents in that we needed to get them on one of our relatively infrequent trips back to the UK if we wanted them to be in English. This time around we’re back to our old habits and have barely a present bought or even thought about for anyone. Still, if nothing else, the prices and availability of stuff is much improved from what it was in France. Even more noticeable is the difference in the Christmas cards: instead of really naff and expensive ones, we’ve a sensible selection at half-decent prices in all the shops.

And, of course, there’s the Christmas markets which ironically have more French stalls than there were in France!

You probably associate binoculars almost exclusively with birdwatching and indeed there are loads of people running around with “bird watching binoculars”.

What you probably don’t consider is that binoculars are ideal for a whole lot of different types of astronomy too. In fact, if you’re starting out with night sky observing, chances are that you’d be better off getting a decent pair of binoculars than a telescope. Every year, without fail, I get a little e-mail from the chief publicist in our astronomy club pointing out some massive saving to be had on Meade binoculars (that pair at the left is what I bought).

With the long nights, this is pretty much the ideal time to make your purchase, buy a nice warm coat and enjoy the night sky.