Professional Geekism

I’m actually unbelievably shocked. Uncontrollable, crazy laughter gripped the inner space of my mind when I was faced with the news that Microsoft are planning to support Firefox 3.x and Safari 3 from the Exchange 2010 ‘Outlook Web Access’ web page.

Further still, they’re touting the fact that the OWA now has all of the features the regular Outlook desktop does!

Does this not strike anyone else as a move that would make Windows (and Office, particularly since itself and OpenOffice will by then both have full ODF compatibility) completely obsolete? Why would you pay for a Windows 7 site license, when you can upgrade your Exchange server to 2010, replace all of the Windows machines with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Firefox 3.1 and OpenOffice, and save your company thousands of pounds?

On top of this, they’ve supposedly tuned 2010 to be ‘less bursty’ in the way that it accesses the disk, as well as adding JBOD concatenation support. Does anyone else see that as ‘Please virtualise your Exchange servers’? Yep, so did I.

I suppose you could be running HyperV, but with Microsoft supporting iterations of Windows Server under RedHat Xen virtulisation, I really don’t see how they’re going to convince people to pay for their the majority of their bread-and-butter products, once Exchange 2010 débuts.

What’s next? Windows 7 released under the Microsoft Public License? Perhaps they’ll just call it ‘Windows Azure Client’ when they give it away for free…

I’ve had a re-occurring issue with pidgin randomly screwing with my CPU usage; actually maxing out a single core for no apparent reason and/or crashing thereafter. In actual fact, I think I can even attribute a few recent gnome-panel crashes to this behaviour, as well.

Today I’ve been informed (by my darling girlfriend) that her buddy icon was out of date: she’d changed it a while back, yet my client was appeared to be stubbornly displaying the old icon, even weeks later. As I couldn’t find a method for forcing the buddy icon to update within the program itself, I navigated to ~/.purple/icons (finding approximately 1,660 cached icons!) and deleted the lot.

Since restarting pidgin it’s taken a while for the buddy icons to repopulate for some reason, but after a few tests, it does appear that they’re updating properly when changed by the other party. As a side effect, I believe I’ve found (and fixed) the cause of pidgin’s leak/loop/error! Hopefully someone else will find my serendipitous bug-squashing useful.

I may even launch a bug report, given that I couldn’t find one. Now all I need is time to do so…