"Cheap" Microsoft software

With yearly subscriptions for Microsoft Technet Plus you can evaluate full feature, non time limited Microsoft software, which is good if you are a home user. There is a promotion if you register before Jun 30, "just" $279. Use promo code TWEB08A. 

VirtualBox (VMWare)

VMWare is free (well player is free for non-commercial use) but you still have to pay for VMWare Fusion if you run Mac OS X. VirtualBox runs on OS X, as well as other platforms and is currently free.

Q/QEMU is not in question since it is appalling performer.

Mail client mumbo-jumbo (Evolution mumbo-jumbo part 2)

Probably everyone uses email these days. And probably everyone has a large volume of emails, like some GB, and uses his computer alone, or has a private account on the shared computer he uses.

Well, in a previous post I've told about my favourite email client Novell Evolution (previously Ximian evolution). Pity they broke it so much. However what I'm going to say is true for most if not every email client out there (even Outlook). With time and with large volumes of email messages their perfomance suffers, and by that suffers the performance of the whole computer system.
To overcome that i was using maildir/mailhash local storage, at the expense of disk space overhead. Storing all the mail in one single file is disk space effective to some extend but never cpu effective or time effective. When certain ammount ot email messages is accumulated every operation like move or delete becomes nerve breaker.
And they need twice as much free space on the hardrive as the whole volume of your messages. Filesystems vere not designed to easily traverse and eject randim number of bytes from  file, nor the appications are using smart ways to do it.( just a note - webmail is slow as it is, and you actually don't have any control over it).

Usualy I use my system for myself, but there are various other accounts also. I'm running Ubuntu now, but it doesn't matter. What I basicly did was install an imap server on the system - the choice was dovecot (small, light, has suport for maildir). After some  very basic setup with the text file in /etc it was up and running. I instructed it that users mailbxes will be within their home folder in subdirectory  - explained in the dovecot documentations. Then configure a new , imap account to 127.0.0.1 (you local server). Set a filter to the old account, the one pooling the mail via pop, to move every incoming message, to the inbox or whatever of the imap account. Woola, you  are ready. Moving messages, deleting, even searching and so on would be juct a blink away.
I also installed a webmail interface on the machine (Roundcube in my  case). It connects to the imap server and can display your inbox and oher folders. I can see whats in my email from every computer in the office, yet everthing remains on my computer.
The price was just about 30 mb more accupied memory for a mailbox of more than 10G with milion of messages and more than 100 subfolders. However disk I/O is greatly reduced and there is no wait.

5 Юли 2006 Evolution mumbo-jumbo

I’m finaly fed up with Evolution 2.x.
The most wonderful feature of the 1.x series - local storage in MH or Maildir, now is no longer supported. All local mail is stored in that shit mbox format. 1.x series allowed the local folders to have whatever type you like - I used MH/Maildir for the folders with most intensive operations - new messages/moving/deleting and so on. I mbox for my archive, no point in wasting a whole inode just to have 1kb mail. Mbox is shit. Wait 5-6 minuted just to delete a single message, not to mention the time it consumes for moving between different folders.

So, those wretched Ximian/ Novell developers decided all local folders to be in mbox, and you can’t chahge this. What an incompetence. Ah okay, okay, you could have a MH/Maildir but you had to have some MTA with local delivery. What, whait a minute there! I must install fetchmail/procmail/qmail/mh/movemail and set up all that just to have a lightspeed mail. You developers are idiots.

Well luckily if you create the directory structure for MH dir, you could point Evolution to it. But you don’t have pop. No way get your mail into the inbox. Now, create a second account with a pop server, and set some filters in place - such as to move every received message in the inbox of the MH (and stop processing after that). Now there is a pop and the folders are in MH format. Now set up some more filters with higher priority then the above to the folders in the MH and wola.

Now I don’t have to wait forever for my mail, and even the downloading of the usual 1000+ fast.

Some may ask why all the trouble. Well I don’t like Kmail, never did, never did like kde at all. I don’t like thunderbird either, never liked anything netscape related, and thunderbird is all about stupid netscape legacy.