If you had to pick one app to take to a desert island, it would be email. As probably the most used app on the planet, and due to it’s long lineage, it is based on some very old protocols, POP3, IMAP and to some extent MAPI.

For me, it can be a good example of the inherent trade-off in all software between what developers have designed and what you as a user, would like it to do. This is an implicit, but not much discussed “contract”. In general, a user does not have much control over how their apps are designed and barring moaning about features or bugs, we are forced to accept what we are given. The social and psychological implications of this would make an interesting study. Software has only recently, within a generation, exploded on the world and the long-term implications are unknown.

In my case, I (or rather we), use email in a way for which it was not designed but I think makes complete sense.

Because we have only one mailbox supplied by our ISP, we share it with some forwarding addresses so that we can use address like dad@duncanthuy.com, mum@duncanthuy.com, daughter@duncanthuy.com and son@duncanthuy.com. My wifes’ name is Thuy BTW. Our individual mail clients can filter on the to: address and a copy of the email is left on the server so that multiple people can check email on multiple devices. One slight problem is that the mailbox does have to be manually maintained periodically in case it fills up. Another is that sent mail is only kept on the client. I can live with both of those. IMAP is not attractive because I have email going back to the 80s and that isn’t going to go on one server and if one of us deletes an email it will prevent the others from seeing it. Maybe a separate mailbox is possible for each person under the same domain but I am not sure, will have to check. Even if it is possible it would be more expense, which is certainly not attractive.

The point is I can’t use IMAP and that means I can’t use Windows 8 because it turns out that the email client on Windows 8 does not support POP3.

As so often with software products it is my way or the highway and since this is not a case of features or bugs but basic functionality, it’s the highway for me. Microsoft have decided that the rule is one mailbox per person and that’s that. I daresay other email clients are available for Windows 8 so that is another line of investigation. In the meantime I’ll try not to get annoyed about it!

I thought I should log in to my blog so I don’t forget the password at least!

At the moment I am engaged in a major Windows 7 desktop upgrade project, driven by the deadlines of XP end of support so not much time to blog.

One thing to say though is that from day-to-day observation, there is a *lot* of business still running on XP, at least in the retail and service sector which is where my observations are made. Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing any retail or service systems running on Windows 7. Maybe they’re just harder to spot.

Or maybe these systems are running on embedded, and support for that doesn’t run out until 2016 according to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?alpha=windows+xp. Somehow I doubt it. It all points to a general view of IT being a pesky inconvenience, best pushed to the bottom of the priorities. And who can blame IT consumers? As I’ve blogged before, the IT industry doesn’t do itself any favours by producing complicated, bug-ridden, expensive products.

Quality, simplicity and flexibility should be the goals of the IT industry in the decades ahead. Cloud based apps are the best prospect, provided you can avoid being locked in to one of the big vendors platforms.

I.T. is a fast changing discipline. One of the attractions for me. In general, that is a good thing but I do think the industry needs to pay more attention to backward compatability whilst forging ahead.

For example, my iMac being 5 years old would no longer receive update for the O/S or key programs, like browsers. I have blogged before that I do not like to upgrade any O/S because that is risky and in my experience rarely an improvement. Vendors bring out new O/Ss to support new hardware, in general. If the hardware isn’t changing, it is not worth the risk.

Given the software, the fact that the disk was getting full and that it was starting to run like a dog, I decided a new iMac was required. Very nice: fast, runs Maverick, copied (most of) my files over simply. However…Mavericks is so new that it is hard to find all the software I had on the old one: printer drivers being a case in point. Pages 08 file format will not load into Pages version 5, telling me I have to save in Pages 09. I mean, come on Apple, that’s only 5 years!

So I’ve concluded there is “functional zone” of systems that are newer than four years and older than one. Someone could probably draw a nice bell shaped graph which plotted functionality against years.

I would like to turn off the old system in favour of the new but it looks like I’ll have to wait until it is a bit more mature.

P.S. This blog should really be renamed. There’s not much P2V going on these days, especially for me in my current role. It’s all become kinda commodity now.

Last year, on holiday I wrote how impressive and pervasive internet coverage had become. I am even more impressed this year being even more off the beaten track, or maybe not as the case may be:

https://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces?ll=21.448595,105.761261&spn=0.400709,0.657806&ctz=-60&t=m&z=11

Not only IS there internet, it’s fast too. All this from a Tam Đảo hotel wifi! They seemed to have prioritised this over light bulbs. Hurrah!

“Wow!! Is that Windows 8?”, said my daughter (13). “That’s really cool! It looks so modern! Can I have an account?”

I had just installed it following my latest VMware workstation upgrade.

“My friends would love it too”, she said. Which just goes to show that my theory about crusty old IT types not liking Windows 8 because they took away their start menu and the next generation not giving a hoot is proven.

I decided the best solution was a strategic retreat to Ubuntu 11.04, which is the latest version which is a supported host for VMware workstation 8.06. VMware have a good compatability matrix tool for this kind of thing.

I had no strong like of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (see earlier post) but I must confess I had more respect for it after using Windows 8. Nevertheless I originally installed it without knowing the VMware requirements for Workstation and ended up having to build a special kernel to support it. Something I don’t have time for now.

Since there was no data in the host layer itself, it was a relatively easy task to install 11.04 over the top of 12.04 although I did fall foul of the error:

(initramfs) Can not mount /dev/loop0 (/cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs) on //filesystem.squashfs

for which there are many online references but no clear solution. On a second attempt the install worked so I put it down to flakiness of Ubuntu.

Happily, the installation of Workstation 8 worked fine and I was able to bring up the original VMs. Not so happily, my daughter’s French homework wasn’t there after all. And I thought I had taught them to always make two copies. Well there’s another useful lesson.