Monthly Archives: March 2010

Software wishlist

I’d really like a decent vocabulary trainer for my phone. It would be great if I could use the 30 minutes I spent on the tram to work for a quick training session. And it should be able to synchronize  its data and learning statistics with my desktop app. I like and use I GNU it (though it’s management of the boxes is not quite clear to me) for my desktop. I couldn’t find a proper app for the phone, the closest one was a java app which had massive problems with umlauts – really problematic if finnish is the language you want to train yourself in.
Seems what is missing is some sort of VIF – a vocabulary interchange format. Some common ground might be the XML format chosen by the KDE guys for KVocTrain. But honestly, single-char XML tag names?!

A plea agains tofu

No, not the stuff made from soy beans. Tofu is the the german term for a behaviour most likely found in corporate email. It means “Quote full, add your text on the top”. That’s sort of reversed “AOL” behaviour.
When I started email, I came from a FIDO background (anyone remembers this? BBS and stuff?). Connection time was precious and expensive. Quoting rules existed like don’t quote too many levels, answer inline etc. When moving on to the internet, I mostly kept this.
I dropped writing emails like this like five years ago, when I entered the magical world of business emails. Noone understood inline replys and most people were complaining that the communication history was missing. So I adapted, at least at work. And Outlook 2007 even has support for navigating in mails like those. I also understand why a certain kind of people like it. When you print the mail, you only need to print one mail and have the whole conversation at hand.
But honestly. I’m doing a lot of mail on my mobile phone currently. Fetching mails is not too fast on there. I don’t want to download 200k for a simple “Me too”. I don’t want to scroll through all of the shit. I don’t event want to download the same shit again and again. I already have the communication history available.