Fabian Kösters Blog

Electronic Mail has become one of the most important ways to communicate nowadays. Many people depend on it for their everyday life. But what If you are suddenly affected by a data-loss?

Happened to me, recently. I accidentally configured my new mobile phone to get E-Mail via POP3 – and by that instantly deleting it from the server. I did not notice this immediately and later that day wanted to try a newer firmware for the phone. By flashing this update all my emails on the phone were lost.

I detected my misfortune when I updated my IMAP-account on the laptop. Of course I made backups but they were a few days old when this happened – so serveral emails were not covered by this. Some of them with a certain importance.
Fortunately my account is hosted by the german provider GMX (United Internet) and I wrote an mail to the support, if they can restore my data.

They answered fast (less than one day) and told me, that my data loss was cased by a POP3 fetch. Then they said me what to do (check if another email program is getting the mail – what was the fact in my case) and asked me to give them the permission to look into my mailbox for fixing my problem and restoring my mail.
After doing so they copied all mail from the backup to a Restore folder and every single email was there again! Really great!

So if you want a professional E-Mail account with IMAP and stuff (and which is not hostet by Google) I can really recommend GMX ProMail! It is not expensive (€ 2,99 per month) and you also get a reliable 5GiB storage for your stuff which can be accessed via webdavs. Really nice!

There is currently only one problem with GMX: I cannot fetch the Mailbox with my Nokia Internet Tablet, because of Bug #3387.

Kaliko versions 0.5.5 and earlier do not display the time of events in daylight saving time periods correctly. This release targets this problem and also fixes some minor bugs:

• [#36] Missing support for Daylight Saving Times
• [#96] Today is displayed as tomorrow and ‘next month’
• [#43] Occurence of existing event cannot be updated
• [#74] events with long title appear in the delete event box without line breaks
• [#17] Time-grid is not correct

You are strongly encouraged to use Sun Java 6 on clients because some Java5-specific issues were detected while testing.

I recently had the ungrateful task to setup a friend’s Windows-machine. Compared to modern computers the performance of this early VAIO-laptop is really bad, powered by a 650MHz Pentium 3, 128MB Ram and a slow hard disk.

First I spend several hours on installing all available Updates for WinXP since SP2, rebooting a lot. Next I installed my favorite Open Source Windows-Software Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, 7-Zip, VLC, various SSH-tools like WinSCP, putty.

The big-problem was PDF. As Windows does not have a built-in PDF-viewer I had to install Adobe Reader – a big fat monster. Installation takes long on this old PC and every few weeks security-updates have to be installed. Really annoying.

So I searched for alternatives – and found: Sumatra PDF. It uses libpoppler as backend, wich is also used by popular Linux-/UNIX-Tools as Okular (KDE) or Evince (GNOME). It is lightweight (starts on this old machine in a few seconds), Open Source (GPL2) and can display most PDFs (Same as on Linux using Okular or Evince).

kaliko 0.5.5 adds support for several platforms:

• Windows 2000 / XP / Vista
• Mac OS X
• RPM-based distributions
• Other Linux / UNIX distributions

The new release also fixes a bug which prevented the client from starting on systems that do not use the german locale.

Also, storing passwords in KDE4’s password manager is now possible.

You do not need to update if you already run kaliko-client 0.5.4!

Some Screenshots:

Windows XP

Mac OS X

SUSE Linux Enterpise 10

Development of kaliko 0.6 is making progress

We decided to drop the currently used Swing-GUI and use SWT instead. There are several reasons for this:

• A native look-and-feel on several platforms including Gtk-based Desktops (GNOME, XFce), OpenMoko, Maemo, Windows, Mac OS X, Win CE…
• Only one code-base to maintain.
  We do not have to handle the (at least) two separate Swing and SWT branches.

Because we do not want to have too long delays between the releases 0.5 and 0.6 we will start with a mixture of SWT and Swing components.

Further upcoming features which you can already see on the screenshot:

• List-View for events.
• Advanced handling of many categories. (Favorites-list, (un-)subscribing)