* [[http://www.digikam.org/|digikam]]: From the website //digiKam is a simple digital photo management application for KDE, which makes importing and organizing digital photos a “snap”. The photos can be organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by directory layout or by custom collections. An easy to use interface is provided that enables you to connect to your camera and preview, download and/or delete your images.// Digikam also includes its own photo viewer.
* [[http://www.jalix.org/projects/showimg/|ShowImg]]: From the website //ShowImg is a feature-rich image viewer for KDE including an image management system. It is highly configurable and supports numerous image formats.//
* [[http://ktown.kde.org/kphotoalbum/|KPhotoAlbum]]: This is basically a tool to help you tag your page (people, places, events, dates) and later, find them.
* [[http://gwenview.sourceforge.net/|Gwenview]]: From the website — //Gwenview is a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE.//
* [[http://kde-apps.org/index.php?xcontentmode=222x223x224|Several other]] [[http://kde-apps.org/index.php?xcontentmode=224|editors]], [[http://kde-apps.org/index.php?xcontentmode=222|viewers]] and [[http://kde-apps.org/index.php?xcontentmode=223|tools]]

So, what should I use? Digikam seems to be a one stop shop — capture, tag, search — all in one package. But why does it have its own viewer? Why can’t it just use ShowImg or Gwenview? Why doesn’t KPhotoAlbum integrate with Digikam? Why do they all have to use different backends? Why don’t //any// of them have built in support for flickr? [[http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kipi/|Kipi]] is great, but lets make it a strength and not a weakness. Don’t reinvent the wheel for routine tasks — instead, fill in the niches.

I actually feel bad about ranting like this, in case someone is about to suggest that “this is open source, if its your itch, you should scratch it”. I would, except that I don’t have the time/skill/experience to get into image management/editing at this point. Even the GNOME world is not much better. There is F-Spot, GPhoto, GQview, GThumb and plethora of others.

So KDE folks, try to streamline KDE’s image mangement offerings in time for KDE4 — it will go a long way in making it the best desktop ever!

* **[[http://del.icio.us]] integration**: Bookmark management in Konqueror is great (I specially love the Kopete bookmark plugin that integrates with Konqueror), but come on, a modern browser **without** social bookmarking support? You gotta be kidding me!
* **Extending Konqueror**: Make Konqueror scriptable, or extendible. Keeping the binary tight and bundling the best features with the core are great ideas, but you can’t please all the people all the time right? So let people extend Konqueror — write plugins, extensions and so on. You know what, just support XUL and Firefox plugins — that way you reduce the barrier to entry for noobs significantly :-)
* **Better multimedia support**: KDE has always been great at doing multimedia stuff. I routinely use kaffeine over mplayer. KDE has also been great at re-using components, and embedding applications. The entire KParts framework is awesome. So why, oh why, is it so hard to view multimedia in Konqueror? Why does it try to use my Firefox Mplayer plugin when it can just potentially embed a Kaffeine part? I want Apple Trailers, Google Video, You Tube, Raaga.com — everything to work **out of the box**.
* Talk to Google: I’m not sure if this is a problem at Konqueror’s end or Google’s, but Konqueror still has a really hard time handling GMail. It just doesn’t look and feel as nice as it does in Firefox. And Maps? My disk starts thrashing, the memory hits the swap and everything just crawls to a grinding halt. Please, Google, KDE folks, talk to each other. Lets see some synergy! :-)

I’ll add more as I think of them.

I guess I didn’t communicate well. Perhaps, the [[http://onotech.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_onotech_archive.html#113200904055483341|this story]] from [[http://zevents.com|Zevents]] will help — its a good example of what has happened to many Urchin customers. And this was just for Urchin 6. The older, Urchin 5 customers have had to deal with even worse customer support.

Here’s one quote from a Mr. Scott Crosby, supposedly at Urchin in response to [[http://simplicio.com/index.php?id=4|this post]]:

>Urchin certainly isn’t “killed” a la Keylime, quite the opposite – it’s going absolutely gangbusters. Perhaps the best analogy is that being part of Google is like trying to drink water from a fire hose – not easy to keep up with the volume. We are rapidly ramping up staff and resellers to accommodate the flood of inquiries, have massively expanded our infrastructure, and have cut the price in half (on demand). Not sure how that’s evil, but I can appreciate customer frustration. We’re doing our best to keep up, but there are only so many hours in the day. That said, please try sales@urchin.com or http://www.urchin.com/support/ – many improvements have been made and response times are much better.

To which, Nathan said:

> There’s one thing that continually surprises me, and what I think Mr. Crosby missed:

> Not only is TextDrive itself upset at Urchin’s poor response and customer service, TextDrive’s customers are taking the company to task for how Google has handled their acquisition!

> Pissing off your customers is one thing. But pissing off your customer’s customers? How many other hosting companies have been left in this kind of situation, and what do their users think about Urchin now?

I think that sums up the situation quite nicely. While everyone is going gaga over Google Analytics, clearly a lot of people are not very happy with how the entire transition has been dealt with.

* [[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1294023.cms|Bollywood Stars: all Don's girls]]
* [[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1294108.cms|In secular Paris saree is scary]]
* [[http://movies.indiatimes.com/quickies/msid-1292128.cms|Rani the sex kitten]]

and many more.

The interested reader might want to take a look at [[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mahim/|Mahim's]] ToI [[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mahim/toi/|rant page]].

I typically use my laptop at home and my lab machine at work. Naturally, I like to keep my working environment similar on both my machines. In the same spirit, I would like to be able to access my contact list, my todo’s, my notes, my calendars etc from wherever I am. Now the straight forward way of doing is this the way I do it currently — just shove all shared data under a directory, and then synchronize that directory across machines (I use [[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/|unison]] currently, but if James cracks it, I might eventually move to something like [[http://tsyncd.sourceforge.net/|Tsync]])

Anyways, this works pretty well actually. But there are a number of small little gripes:

* this method works best if you only work from one machine at a time. At times I forget to shut down my calendar at one place and later when I open my calendar at another place, the subsequent synchronization may get messy (since there might have been pending updates on both ends)

* Infact, for things like events, todos, contact updates — I want them to happen in **real time**. If I have my addressbook open on both machines and I change the contact on one machine, the addressbook on the other machine should automatically update itself

* similar issues with notes, browser bookmarks

Clearly, some kind of server based solution seems necessary (since I’m looking at small user bases, umm that is a //single// user, centralized servers are ok. Enterprises already have distributed systems). Now part of the problem is that parts of the problem are being solved by different people: we have IMAP for email, del.icio.us for bookmarks, tadalist for TODO lists and so on.

However, I want everything in //one// place. Further, I want full control over it — so I need to be able to download and run it as a server on any machine. In 5 years perhaps I’ll be ready for “all my data on the web somewhere”, but not yet. So I went ahead and tried a lot of different groupware solutions out there. My main resource was the [[http://kontact.kde.org|Kontact]] [[http://kontact.org/groupwareservers.php|support groupware servers]] page. I’ll briefly mention the two I tried:

* [[http://www.opengroupware.org/|OpenGroupware.org]] — this one looked promising but turned out to be overly complicated to install and manage, even for me. The Kontact connector was not working at the time I tried. I don’t know the current status, but it was just //so// hard to even get started with.
* [[http://www.egroupware.org/|eGroupware]] — this was one that actually worked for me. I could synchronize my addressbook, notes and calendars with ease. However, one **big** problem: it uses XML-RPC for communication, and not something designed with groupware in mind (such as [[http://www.groupdav.org/|GroupDAV]]). So basically what happens is that everytime I make a change, a //HUGE// XML file is fetched from the server, updated locally and then sent back remotely. I found it to be extremely time consuming, and waste of resources. There were other minor quirks — since the data model used by Kontact (vCards and ICS etc) is different from the datamodel in eGroupware (some database schemas), a lot of information is lost/can not be maintained. For instance, all of KAddressbook’s nice integration with Kopete will break down because I can’t store photographs or IM screen names in eGroupware.

There are a couple of more interesting options out there: one is the [[http://www.hula-project.org/Hula_Project|Hula Project]] and the other is the [[http://citadel.org/|Citadel]] project. Hoola is interesting because its a mature product, backed by Novell, and a very nice web frontend. Citadel is interesting because it stores data natively in vCard and ICS formats, thus avoiding the data model mismatch problem faced by other groupware suites. However, Hoola uses its own IMAP server and doesn’t support [[http://groupdav.org|GroupDAV]] yet. Citadel has the concept of “rooms” and is really meant for community use.

So, basically I’m back to using Unison to keep my files in sync. In some ways I think its actually a good solution, since it works for all kinds of files. But still, I don’t like having to quit all my applications before I leave for school just so that the applications can start in a clean state when I get back. If the files get updated when the apps are running, apart from email, everything else (calendar, todo, contacts) behaves in a weird manner.