Monday, August 13, 2007
Upgrading Internet Connectivity
I finally did what I had been thinking for at least two years: I got myself a cable modem and gave up on pay-per-minute dial-up. Yes, it seems kind of weird that a computer geek uses dial-up, but it has worked pretty well so far (and would still have, I just got off my lazy ass and did something now).
I figure the main restriction from using dial-up was that I haven't been able to participate in Web forums. But even that's not so bad, Web forums suck anyway, Usenet is so much better technology-wise. I'll have to watch myself now to avoid picking up new time sinks with the new opportunities.
The major pain came with reconfiguring my mail and news program. I use Gnus, which I have configured to work perfectly for me, and this of course means that changing servers is a chore I'd prefer to do without. Surprisingly, this time things went just fine from the Gnus end (I guess it helped that the mail server also changed its name in addition to everything else). For news I decided to look further ahead and went with NIN, also in part because all of their customers seem very happy with it, and a well-administered news server is important to me.
Mailing lists are still insane, though. I'm subscribed to a dozen Debian lists, and even though they have a handy Web form for subscribing and unsubscribing, each list still generates one confirmation email for unsubscription and another for subscription, which all have to be replied to.
This did bring me to a decision: If I ever write a mail program, I'm going to include support for mailing lists and to make it easy to switch addresses and servers. This is an interesting point: a complex operation of a program that is rarely used but needs to be perfect when used, must have a single button to do it, but it's really hard to test such functionality.
And of course there's still the main reason for switching to a faster always-on connectivity: now I can upgrade my Debian system every day and don't have to use my weekly sneakernet connection.
I figure the main restriction from using dial-up was that I haven't been able to participate in Web forums. But even that's not so bad, Web forums suck anyway, Usenet is so much better technology-wise. I'll have to watch myself now to avoid picking up new time sinks with the new opportunities.
The major pain came with reconfiguring my mail and news program. I use Gnus, which I have configured to work perfectly for me, and this of course means that changing servers is a chore I'd prefer to do without. Surprisingly, this time things went just fine from the Gnus end (I guess it helped that the mail server also changed its name in addition to everything else). For news I decided to look further ahead and went with NIN, also in part because all of their customers seem very happy with it, and a well-administered news server is important to me.
Mailing lists are still insane, though. I'm subscribed to a dozen Debian lists, and even though they have a handy Web form for subscribing and unsubscribing, each list still generates one confirmation email for unsubscription and another for subscription, which all have to be replied to.
This did bring me to a decision: If I ever write a mail program, I'm going to include support for mailing lists and to make it easy to switch addresses and servers. This is an interesting point: a complex operation of a program that is rarely used but needs to be perfect when used, must have a single button to do it, but it's really hard to test such functionality.
And of course there's still the main reason for switching to a faster always-on connectivity: now I can upgrade my Debian system every day and don't have to use my weekly sneakernet connection.
Labels: 21st century, fresh packages, obstacle course, yeah baby
