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I have been using Eudora as my mail client since 1995, except for a couple of years when I used Claris Emailer. This week I made the switch to GyazMail.

In 2006 Qualcomm announced that there would be no more development of the original Eudora client. I have on and off been looking for a replacement ever since. It is not easy to find a good replacement for Eudora.

Eudora does so many small things just right, has really fast search, can handle any amount of mail with ease and have settings for everything.

The AirTel GPRS (EDGE) service on my iPhone that I wrote about earlier is working well but a little slow. Something like 60 Kbit/s down and 40 Kbit/s up at best. For Twitter and some e-mail on the iPhone it’s ok but when connecting a MacBook via tethering it’s to slow.

I checked out some of the 3G offers like Reliance NetConnect and Tata Photon+ and they are about the same price as similar services in Europe. People tell me they work great, when you have coverage. Here in Kerala, only Trivandrum and Cochin has the service at all from what I can tell and even there the coverage is not stellar.

The shop staff recommended Idea NetSetter instead. Slower that the 3G options but very good coverage. Idea GPRS (EDGE) has higher capacity than AirTel I was told, and that is indeed the case.

At BarCamp Kerala 7 in Kottayam I gave a Drupal session about how to build complex web sites the Drupal way.

Below you find the slides as a PDF file and the blog system “feature” I demonstrated.

It was real pleasure to be a part of this BarCamp Kerala! There are some seriously smart people here, many interesting start ups and most of all, really nice and friendly fellow geeks.

Earlier BarCamps included some Drupal sessions so many knew about it already and a handful of the participants use Drupal for there own web sites.

After a short background on Drupal I described the Drupal way, less coding and more configuration. I mentioned some example web sites and talked about the advantages of building web sites this way.

Airtel in India has a nice offer with unlimited GPRS (actually EDGE in cities) for 474 Rs. (€7) per month for pre paid accounts. Perfekt when you like me are traveling for some time in the country and want to have a mobil Internet connection. GPRS is not the most speedy connection when you used to 3G but it’s surprisingly ok I find.

You can of course also get 3G connections in India, but only in the bigger cities and they cost more.

In Drupal 7 InnoDB will replace MyISAM as the default storage engine for increased scalability and data integrity. Most big sites are already using InnoDB, drupal.org does since some time.

InnoDB is generally a better choice for Drupal so why wait for Drupal 7. Lets go ahead and convert our Drupal 6 tables to InnoDB.

In my blog post Running Lighttpd as a static file server for Drupal 6 on a Debian GNU/Linux server I describe how I set up a static file server here on xdeb.org. I mentioned there that I have not done any benchmarking on the improvements. I still haven’t, but I found some interesting information on Google webmaster tools.

I use Google webmaster tools to submit my sitemaps. One or two times a year I go there to see if everything is in order. They have done some updates since I was there last and this time I found “Crawl stats” under “Diagnostics” (they may very well have been there for a long time but i found them now).

The image show the chart for “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)”. Notice the big drop in late July. That’s when I implemented Lighttpd as static file server.

The average time Google spent on downloading a page went from well over 1000 ms to around 600 ms. I’m very pleased with that result.

During the summer I have worked out a Bazaar based workflow for Drupal sites that I think will work well for me. I have moved most of my sites in to this workflow and worked on them for some weeks and it feels good.

I will also mention Drush, the Drupal shell, in this blog. I use it to update modules and database as well as dump and load sql files. If you are not yet using Drush it time to start now. It’s very nice indeed!

This workflow is for when you have a number of small/medium sites that you need to maintain on a continues basis. Big sites with many developers have different needs.

I will assumes that you are familiar with version control systems and at home on the command line.

A total eclipse occerd in the south of Japan yesterday. I live in Fukui, the middle of Japan, and we saw a partial eclipse. It was so cloudy that we were able to see the sun by the naked eye. (It’s dangerous…)

This was my first time to see the eclipse, not on TV or a picuture. I was excited!

This photo was taken through a colored glass filter by my freind. AM 11:00

There are several assistant language teachers (ALT) in my city. A english ALT backed to her country 2 days ago. Before the farewell party for her, she lost her wallet (or most likely it was stolen). The contents were 110000yen, 300 dollars and cards. She put the wallet on her desk, and went her friend’s house. She didn’t lock the door. She backed to her house 30 minutes later, and it was lost. She’s crying several hours, we looked for it, but we couldn’t find it.

My family and I don’t lock the doors and windows of our house, because we live really country side.

As a result of the Treaty of Lisbon EU may soon have a president. Some believe that Tony Blair has a good chance of getting the job.

In my opinion that would be a bad choice, really bad. I believe this because it was Tony Blair and George Bush that was responsible for the Iraq war. Apparently Blair prayed to God and God told him it was OK to invade Iraq.

Iraq Body Count uses a survey of online news reports to produce its running tally, 100 000 civilian dead since the start of the war. A Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties from 2006 indicates that the number can be far, far higher.

I would much rather see Tony Blair in front of the International Criminal Court charged with Crime against humanity then becoming EU President.