Disappointment with 2004
I was thinking last night about all the things in the software development that disappointed me in 2004. Don’t get me wrong, 2004 was a great year in some areas, such as the one dot oh releases of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, but there other things that I was sure would have been available by now; and sure would be nice to have.
APM/ACPI: no solid support on Linux-based laptops
At one point I had APM somewhat working on my laptop, though it only worked about 85% of the time trying to recover from suspend. And now, with 2.6.9 and 1.0-6629 of the NVIDIA driver it doesn’t seem to work at all. So I have my laptop for portability only; when it’s time to move somewhere I carry it with the screen open for short distances (say from my office to the boardroom) or shut it down completely for anything longer than that.
Encrypted email: available to the masses
It’s been 14 years now since Phil Zimmermann developed PGP and made it available to the world. And yet, I still cannot send an encrypted email to anyone I want; as it stands now of the 800 people in my address book (yes, okay, so 581 of those are Thunderbird’s “Collected Addresses”, still the point is the same), I can only send encrypted email to four of them; Mike, Charles, James and myself. All of us are developers by trade and one of the people is me. So really it’s 3 people out of 220 or so. That’s less than 1 percent. And only James really counts since he was the only one who had it set up already. That’s totally rediculous. More so since the software is readily available for the most part. Plus no one seems to know about it. Yesterday I sent an email requesting that my subscription to a magazine be renewed and the reply was for me to call since “email isn’t secure for sending credit card numbers”. Sigh. Hopefully Thunderbird will make an impact on Outlooks dominance and the percentance of email addresses that accept encryption will increase.
Gabber 2: development ceases
Gabber is a client for the Jabber Instant Messenger protocol. For the past couple of years up until the middle of 2004 I had been running the latest CVS tree version of Gabber, helping out Julian and Thomas debug it. And then when they started Gabber2, I helped out with that; again, all I was really doing was building daily from CVS and helping to track down bugs and such. Unfortunately gtkmm 2.4 broke some serious architechture constraints in G2. And given that the public use of G2 seemed to be dwindling, the guys basically packed it in.
Home computers: no steering wheel
Finally, I’m disappointed that home computers didn’t “live up” to the predictions. *g*
Wed, 05 Jan 2005 16:03 Posted in Technology
