Pablo Averbuj

I *heart* Outlook

In my quest to further degrade myself in the eyes of other technical people, I’ve decided to come clean: I love Outlook. Feel better? I don’t. As we proceeded into pregnancy, our schedules became less possible to handle by memory alone. Leigha kept a schedule on her desk but it wasn’t always complete and not very accessible when we weren’t home. A similar thing was occurring with our contact information. What we needed was a shared calendar, and Outlook seemed like the easiest way to go.

I definately didn’t want to be running an Exchange server at home, so first I looked at some synchronization options. There’s a good resource list at slipstick.com. I initially went with a free trial of OfficeCalendar. To be honest, it worked relatively well. It just wasn’t *great*. And there were some glitches and it required my desktop to be on. It just felt like a dirty hack (which it was).

The last resort (before actually running Exchange) was to look for Exchange-compatible servers. It turns out there are a couple. Zimbra had a lot of potential. It was very pretty, but the Outlook plugin was vaporware. I also tried some other solution (Samsumg Contact?) that was a really bad hackjob on HP Openmail. Finally I ended up with Scalix. Pros: Free Outlook plugin, runs on Linux, came with RPMs. Cons: Only supports RHEL 3/4, Fedora Core 4. These weren’t awful cons.

First I setup an RHEL AS4 box to play around with it, and it worked REALLY nicely. Eventually I got tired of having a whole computer just for Scalix so I managed to move it onto the Debian box with a lot of imaginative symlinking. That’s pretty much it: We run Outlook on the desktops; we have a shared calendar and contact folder; the permissions all work nicely; it has offline synchronization; we have web access remotely; it all runs on the Debian server.

Myth-buster

Leigha went home for over a week which left me with a lot of time on my hands (although it didn’t feel like much). I had big plans for my time alone. I was going to set up asterisk, set up MythTV, work on a new website project. Alas it’s Sunday, fully 9 days since Leigha left and I only accomplished setting up MythTV. I used KnoppMyth for the installation, and most of the problems I had were hardware problems that weren’t KnoppMyth fault. Others were understanding what exactly MythTV was trying to do as it flailed about. In all I probably reinstalled MythTV about 4 times on the box before all was said and done.
The three hardware issues I had:

• Bad harddrive caused PAINFULLY slow install – much time wasted this way
• Crashing due to bizarre SMP/SCSI driver problem – I wasn’t using a SCSI drive so disabling the controller was good enough
• Swapping video cards – Once I was sure it would work, I had to install a video card that had TV-out

I spent a lot of time trying to get the TV display to look right (nvtv, nvidia-settings, X modelines, the works) with no satisfactory resolution. I finally gave up because I temporarily connected it to the bedroom TV, if all goes well, it would more likely live in the living room.

I’m fairly impressed with it. Somethings work better than others, that’s for sure, but so far the core functionality looks really good. I haven’t had much luck with the commercial detection/skipping. And I had some problems with guide data during the 3rd install. One feature I like (or will like, once the screen is large enough to read) is the NetFlix integration. That is really smart and not something I would have thought of on my own.

Here are some additional things I’d like try if MythTV works out:

• Adding additional tuners to MythTV
• Putting the backend in the basement, building thinner/quieter frontends for the viewing areas
• Taping over-the-air content in the hopes of ditching cable entirely
• iTunes integration like I have with TiVo