Pig Loves Cow

I have been using Lotus Notes for 11 months by now, and I can’t say I like it that much, and here are the reasons why:

1. I find it hard to search through my mail.
   • Ctrl+F (Find) only searches the current folder, and it searches for a substring that matches your keyword on the subject and sender only (there may be other fields but it certainly doesn’t search the content or body of the email). It also just goes to the email of the first email found that matches your search, and all the other emails still show up. If the subject is long, it’s hard to find where your keyword is found. Also, you have to click on “Find Next” to go to the next email found that matches your search.
   • To be able to search the body/content of your emails, you need to go to “View”>”Search This View” (also I didn’t find a keyword shortcut next to the menu, so I assume you need to really hover over that menu and click that to be able to get there). Fortunately, “Search This View” sticks to your page like a toolbar so if you like it, just don’t close it. Sucks if you want flexibility on your UI though since you can’t just hide and show it with one (or two) keys. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s amazingly slow? It takes me ten years to pull up if I have plenty of emails containing my keyword. It’s nice that it just pulls up all the emails matching my search though, and removes the other emails away from my view. But again, you’re going to have a hard time finding where the search found your keyword, as it’s not highlighted or anything. Notes uses the concept of a little check symbol next to your emails to indicate selected documents. It also uses this feature to “select” the results of your search. The bad thing is that once you click on the check symbol, your email gets unselected, and it’s automatically removed from your search results view. Boo notes!
   • I can’t use regular expressions to search. The only options located in the “More” section of “Search This View” are: Save Search, Load Search, and Search in results. Notepad++’s search functionality is way more advanced than Lotus Notes, and this makes me feel that Notes was based on the same concept as Windows’ Notepad.
2. The mail filter just doesn’t do it for me
   • Filters in Lotus Notes is pretty basic. You can create “Rules”. Rules consists of 1) Conditions/Exceptions – “AND”, “OR”, field (ie sender, subject, etc), contains/does not contain, is/is not…and the keyword. You can add or remove as many conditions as you want (or so I think). 2) Actions – move, delete, copy, forward, etc…and another field that satisfies the action selected. Again, you can add or remove as many conditions as you want (or so I think). And finally…AGAIN, you have no option to use regular expressions for filtering. But you have the option to never delete your rules…if you need them to work, just enable them.
   • The filters doesn’t work that well. I’ve had many instances wherein one day, my mail rules just stop working. I don’t know why or how, but it just stops. I had to create another mail rule to replace the old one, and sometimes that works, yet most times it doesn’t.
3. The IMAP/POP feature is disabled by default
   • I know that Lotus Notes isn’t specifically designed to handle just email, and that it is probably a great tool for collaboration for non-IT users, but I find it disappointing that to be able to access my mail using another software, ie Thunderbird, I would need the IMAP or POP option to be enabled. Since I’m not a Domino (the notes server) admin, I have no access to the configuration. And our domino server has disabled IMAP/POP, which leaves me no choice but to deal with Lotus Notes for my email.

The GUI is WTF, OMG, and BBQ

• I don’t know if it would do me any good to explain this. Too many buttons located in different menus? Too many toolbars scattered everywhere? Unconventional icons/images? Usually I don’t read manuals for software when I need to find something since the GUI is user-friendly and easy to navigate. For lotus notes? I’m a developer myself and have trouble locating features. I feel that the user-unfriendliness of the GUI is causing my productivity to be slow. It’s easier if I can locate everything without thinking about it, than being baffled, staring at the screen and trying to find something for 10 minutes.

So today’s motto is…’The geekier you get…the heavier you become’?

This is not taken by me. I found it somewhere in the internet, I forget where.

Linux Symposium T-Shirt Sizes

Wow, what a cool way to propose. This makes me wish I was a guy (and Mark was a girl). Then I’d have an excuse to hack a game and propose. I sooo wanna do this. This pwns the 3d animation proposal “Love Letters” bigtime.

Uncontrollable lag? Sucky ISP? Blocked by firewalls? A solution to these annoyances…TUNNEL!

Okay, so my boyfriend Mark has been having ridiculous pings on his WoW client. We decided to try tunneling it through my PC (which would serve as the socks server) and check if he gets less latency/lag.

All we needed was the following:

1. My server: A PC that runs ubuntu
   • Socks Server 5 (will discuss later how to install this)
   • A Tunnel Manager (gSTM)
2. The Client: Mark’s PC
   • WoW client installed (of course!)
   • SockscapV2
   • PuTTY

I used this guide to install Socks Server 5 (SS5) on my Ubuntu machine. gSTM can be installed using Synaptic or Add/Remove Applications. I then had to make sure that my socks port can be accessed from the internet, so I set up the Port Forwarding on my router to direct all 1080 and 1890 ports (1080 is the default port for socks server, but the guide uses 1890 to prevent malicious people for taking advantage of your open port) to my internal IP.

On Mark’s side (client side), he installed SockscapV2to act as a wrapper for Wow’s proxy/socks server, and PuTTY to tunnel the socks requests to my computer via SSH.

PuTTY SSH

Putty Tunnel