Year: 2012

WordPress + P2 = Company Intranet in 5 minutes

I’ve mentioned a few times already that I became a big fan of P2 theme for WordPress.  I currently maintain multiple installations of it, just because it is so easy to setup and start using.  I have it as company Intranet or as a project collaboration tool.  It’s like a blog, a wiki, and a chat room combined together.  And since I’ve installed it so many times, I thought I should publish what exactly I am doing, in case someone else will want to try it.

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Proper email client

I had a brief discussion with a colleague at work today about email clients.  Once again I had to say that I do miss Mutt.  Gmail is pretty good, but it still lacking a lot of Mutt’s functionality.  And that thing that Outlook and Web Outlook thing that they force us to use at work, is horrible, no matter what you compare it to.

As I was going through the things that I love in Mutt, I mentioned the threaded discussions and quoting.  It was a bit difficult to describe the details, so I quickly searched for a screenshot.  Here’s one.

Unlike grouped replies in MS Outlook and Gmail conversations, here you can clearly see which email is a reply to which email.  Once you get into group discussions, with multiple participants dragging the conversation into different directions, this kind of discussion view becomes extremely useful.

And one other thing is about quoting.  Gmail at least tries to be useful.  MS Outlook is completely horrible in this department.  It quotes full messages UNDER the replies.  So if someone forwarded you an email with quotes from a long discussion, you’ll spend a day reading it.  You’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the message, then scroll up a bit to read the first message in the discussion.  Then scroll up to the second message, and scroll down while reading it.  Then scroll up again to the third message, and scroll down while reading it, and so forth.  I get dizzy just by thinking of that.

Mutt users are from a different culture though.  (Truth be told, not only Mutt users – this culture comes from many years ago, from the times when bandwidth was expensive, rules were strict, and people respected each other’s time.)  In the image above you can clearly see the part of the original email to which the reply was done, and all the other bits of the conversation necessary to understand the current state of discussion.  In fact, the message above includes relevant details from four messages (!!!).  And one look at it is enough to tell who wrote what and when.

Just that screenshot alone makes me want to go back.  And, in fact, given how things have changes since my last thoughts on that, maybe I will.  I won’t get rid of Gmail, since it is mighty convenient to have access from everywhere and good integration with even my mobile phone.  I also can’t imagine the life without Gmail’s SPAM filter.  But, maybe I can find some middle ground and configure Mutt on my hosting server to access Gmail via IMAP.  I’ve done it before, I think it might be time to do it again.

Atmospheric electricity

Last night, I stepped out on the balcony to enjoy the thunderstorm.  It wasn’t too windy or too rainy, but the lightnings and thunders were rather violent.  In the middle of the night, long strikes across the whole sky were lighting the city as bright as midday.  That was something!

And that also got me thinking.  There is so much energy up in the sky, is there any way to extract it and use it?  I’ve heard that there was some work done on the issue.  And, given that I wasn’t the best student at school, but I still remember the fact that most of the lightning energy is spent on the actual light and on warming up the air.  But, I thought, one day we’ll find a way to catch lightnings before they happen, and collect all that energy.  That would be very useful, even though it would probably destroy the magnificence of the thunderstorm.

This morning I went online to see if I can find anything interesting on the subject.  There are plenty of resources out there, but nothing special has caught my attention yet.  Here’s the obligatory Wikipedia page:

There is always free electricity in the air and in the clouds, which acts by induction on the earth and electromagnetic devices. Experiments have shown that there is always free electricity in the atmosphere and that it is the quickest electricity connection, which is sometimes negative and sometimes positive, but most generally positive, and the intensity of this free electricity is greater in the middle of the day than at morning or night and is greater in winter than in summer. In fine weather, the potential increases with altitude at about 30 volts per foot (100 V/m).

The atmospheric medium, by which we are surrounded, contains not only combined electricity, like every other form of matter, but also a considerable quantity in a free and uncombined state; sometimes of one kind, sometimes of the other; but as a general rule it is always of an opposite kind to that of the Earth. Different layers, or strata, of the atmosphere, located at only small distances from each other, are frequently found to be in different electric states. The phenomena of atmospheric electricity are of three kinds. There are the electrical phenomena of thunderstorms and there are the phenomena of continual electrification in the air. The phenomena of the polar auroras constitute a third branch of the subject.