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On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 11:25:30PM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Agreed 100% with this -- when I used to travel heavily, I could  
> easily keep up with mail lists.  Web-based systems require that you  
> be online to use them, and back when I started traveling, (I've since  
> quit doing that) seeing a laptop on during a flight was a rarity.  I  
> could sync all the mail and read and catch up on things that  
> interested me whenever I had "down time" on a flight.

I also find that when I'm disconnected I can get so much more done and
really focus on my work without the distraction of the internet.

Unfortunately right now my disconnected setup is working a little too
well...


In all seriousness there is a real conceptual shift between systems that
rely on central websites and stuff like email and usenet. Notice how the
former are relatively recent inventions, after proprietary systems and
massive complexity took over the internet. The latter, email and usenet,
were created when it was feasible to propose a open standard and have
everyone follow it.

For instance, if wikipedia was like usenet everyone would have a local
wikipedia cache constantly updating with new articles. If you got some
smart guys with distributed systems experience to do it right now, it'd
be all crazy hashcash and reputation schemes.

But that's never going to happen because it is far more effective to
throw money at the problem and have a (relatively) simple set of the
couple hundred servers wikipedia has scattered around the world.

Other than filesharing, which is distributed for legal reasons, can you
name a single distributed consumer-visible internet app that has come
into fashion in the past 10 years? And by distributed, I mean with the
architecture of email.

Skype? Nope, it's dependent on the central skype servers for setting up
calls.

Online games? Central servers, and even simple death match stuff tends
to rely on the gaming companies servers to advertise games.

Chat? Jabber hasn't caught on yet, it's all MSN, Yahoo, AIM etc. At
least GTalk has jabber support, but no-one has written important stuff
like video messaging or file transfers, so it's crap for most people.

Bittorrent? Relies on central servers, though at least the servers are
under the control of anyone who wants to set one up, it's really just an
extension of websites from a users perspective. Notice how all the tools
to *search* for bittorrents are centralized websites.



Centralized stuff is just flashier and easier to implement. I mean, the
only exception I can think of is distributed revision control systems,
and that's not exactly consumer visible.

> > Speaking of email management, take a look at mairix. It's a pretty
> > decent program to search your Maildir and mbox mail archives. I've
> > stopped worrying so much about carefully sorting my mail into folders
> > now that I can rely on efficiently searching for it. I've got about
> > 15,000 emails indexed by it, and searches return pretty much  
> > instantly.
> 
> Interesting - I'll have to look for this.  I spend at least a couple  
> of days a year cleaning the Inbox of cruft that didn't end up getting  
> filed into the appropriate folder on the IMAP server, or deleted.

Personally the one feature I think it needs is tags. For instance, I
have a folder called utf8 that's filled with all manner of interesting
unicode email, spam etc. It's a good way to show off how well unicode
works on the Linux terminal. Point being though, that's impossible to
search for *except* by a user added tag. The "tag" in this case is the
Maildir folder I've saved it to, but really, why shouldn't I be able to
add a whole pile of tags to something?

I think it'd be ideal if I could simply save *all* my mail to one
gigantic database, and then rely on good searching to find it when I
need it. I'm almost there, but I need tags for it to really work.


It'd actually kinda like my bookmarks list. I keep a file called
urls.otl that's a vimoutliner file with a big hiearchy of stuff. But
really, I don't think of my bookmarks as a hiearchy, they should have
tags, just like del.icio.us does it. But that's an app I need to write
someday... 

- -- 
http://petertodd.ca
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