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what year is it? let me check the calendar. [Thu, 13-Apr-2006 1:50 PM]
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[music |Severed Heads -- Harold and Cindy Hospital]

Great news everybody! The new Mozilla Calendar stores its calendar files in a local SQL database instead of ICS files, ensuring that the only way to actually get your data back out will be to use some Mozilla tool that understands their private database schema, instead of just copying the file! Why? Because, much like mbox files, ICS files have...

wait for it...
wait for it...

poor performance characteristics! Bwaaahahaha!

It's like watching an infant totter toward a porcupine. Again.

You may recall that my inability to get any of the three disjoint, out-of-sync, perma-alpha Mozilla Calendar codebases ("Calendar Mozilla plugin", "Calendar Firefox plugin", and "Sunbird") to function at all was one of the primary reasons I finally gave up and bought a Mac. I must say, even with all the hardware trouble I've been having, this news made me so very glad I made that decision, because it means that their fourth attempt to reconstruct the calendar and finally get it out of alpha is something I'll never have to even think about the possibility of ever trying to run.

Shame about the Google Hegemon eating their lunch, too.

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Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]fo0bar
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:03 PM (UTC)

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I believe Firefox 2.omg will be storing bookmarks in the SQL dealie too. Because 10 years of a consistent, easily-parsable file format was WAY too long.
[User Picture]From: [info]zimzat
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:47 PM (UTC)

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I've read about that.
They're going to keep it stored in an html file as well but it will only be updated when the program is opened/close.

Go away.

By the way, "easily-parsable" doesn't beat the raw power of a database. DB>TXT any day.
[User Picture]From: [info]kalimdor_wilson
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 10:17 PM (UTC)

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I believe Firefox 2.omg will be storing bookmarks in the SQL dealie too.

.omg files?

Firefox 2.omg.ponies!!

(I just got myself banned from this blog, didn't I...)
[User Picture]From: [info]ladykalessia
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:07 PM (UTC)

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I'm just glad to have an alternative to evite finally. Good lord is that place irritating.
From: [info]kfringe
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:11 PM (UTC)

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There are a number of very good reasons to ignore the ics files. I can't think of one good reason to delete them.

Speaking of the database worms, have you been wondering why Mail.app's indices were so bloated and slow? SQLite, baby! Woo!

Do you have a link to the mozilla spec for this?
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:13 PM (UTC)

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I do not. But one of the developers admitted/defended it, and the resulting conversation made both of us unhappy.
[User Picture]From: [info]phenyx
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:26 PM (UTC)

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1. New online magical calendar system is announced.

2. Does it sync with my Palm? No? Okay then.

3. Go to #1.

If Google would put a Palm-sync conduit into their Google Desktop, I'd be on that in a second. They could even sync my address book with my Gmail contacts and do something interesting with the todo list.
[User Picture]From: [info]down8
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 9:30 PM (UTC)

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Y!Calendar syncs w/Palm/PocketPC.

I honestly expect Google will have an app soon, if not by their own design, via a 3rd party - probably free.

-bZj
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 10:47 PM (UTC)

Palm

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Google seems to have something against PalmOS in general. Note how their entire "mobile" line ignores PalmOS and only works on phones built around a Java VM. (Anyone who says "but you can do Java on Palm" hasn't tried.)
[User Picture]From: [info]loic
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 10:00 PM (UTC)

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And of course MoCo operates almost exclusivly on sponsorship from Google... Conspiracy? Almost certainly not.

This move to sqlite disturbs me. Everyone is doing it. It looks like it was a disaster on the mac and it looks pretty scary in the mozilla codebase.

I'm personally concerned by the database schemas being inside the C++ code: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.8/source/browser/components/places/src/nsNavBookmarks.cpp#254
From: [info]kfringe
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 10:12 PM (UTC)

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Oooh. I hadn't seen that. I'm pretty sure that's Not the Right Way.
[User Picture]From: [info]pnendick
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:00 PM (UTC)

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Since adding features has never been part of the wheel-reinvention ethos it makes perfect sense that the moz developers now pursue weight, cost and complexity instead. As much as I recoil at the nerd culture around it, I'm so happy google is systematically replacing the bloated pigs that are modern-day desktop applications (some Apple software aside). I look forward to the day when most my data is on google's hardware and all I need to personally support is a moz-like browser and a community wi-fi connection.
[User Picture]From: [info]technotronic
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:07 PM (UTC)

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I really hope you're joking or being sarcastic, mostly about the google part.
[User Picture]From: [info]kalimdor_wilson
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:51 PM (UTC)

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"I look forward to the day when most my data is on google's hardware"

There's something about this whole "I'll just store all of my data on the internet!" idea that makes me very, very uneasy.

If I don't have local copies on my own system, it's not something I will use.

*uses gmail as a pop3 server*
From: [info]wilecoyote
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 1:51 AM (UTC)

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So, when do you think that the NSA will demand to build a "secret room" at Google's datacenters?

[User Picture]From: [info]ralesk
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:31 PM (UTC)

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I’m endlessly amused by how they can’t make up their minds about the bloody version numbers.

And a bunch of other things.

Sunbird… man, that’s so gonna be like Duke Nukem Forever for quite a while, if they keep on being so aimless and indecisive.
From: [info]dasht_brk
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:44 PM (UTC)

yeah.

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It's just the general dumbing down of the "FOSS community". Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM 360 or choosing SQL or DBM.

It blows that you are (realistically) comparing Google's service-based calendar to something that runs locally. That's another bit of confusion that has swept the industry.

I say: sell the nightclub and put all yr money into trying to take over the software industry. You have the good taste for it and not enough angst, adreneline, and bitterness in yr life -- this would surely be the best cure.

-t
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Thu, 13-Apr-2006 11:46 PM (UTC)

Re: yeah.

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That whole "software world domination" thing didn't work out so well -- the nightclub was the consolation prize.
From: [info]davidmccabe
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 1:17 AM (UTC)

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Google calendar is REALLY awesome, too. It solves the single biggest problem with computer calendars, which is that you have to push ten buttons to put any information into them. With Google calendar, you can just type, "lunch with steve at 1pm on friday at the pub", and it will parse it and put it into the calendar!
[User Picture]From: [info]otterley
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 1:36 AM (UTC)

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And if you want to see an even better parser and far fewer bugs, try 30boxes.
[User Picture]From: [info]jesus_x
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 3:34 AM (UTC)

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Rather than reinventing the wheel (over and over, because the last time we reinvented it, it wasn't good enough!) they're bashing ants with sledgehammers. Now, see, this is progress! Yes, the performance hit of text/iCal/sanity is untenable, and nothing when compared to implementing a database engine inside the app. It's SUCH a good idea, it's being brought in to handle... BOOKMARKS in Firefox 2. Yes, never again will you have to worry about your bookmarks being relatively easy to read in a text file, portable, etc. And yeah, we'll write it out to the bookmarks.html file when we shut down, because it never crashes, and in 2006 it's not like people leave their browsers open for days or anything anymore.

Sorry, preaching to the choir.

Fri Jun 18 2004 23:16EDT
jesus_X: you sound like a traitor to the cause

You either drink the kool-aid or leave. I left too.
[User Picture]From: [info]zonereyrie
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 4:39 AM (UTC)

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Meanwhile they never got around to incorporating one of the best features of Netscape 4.x - Roaming - into the core browser. Despite a developer submitting the patches back around the SeaMonkey 1.6 days, maybe earlier.

Instead we're getting a local database. Yay.

I suppose there is also del.icio.us and the like.
[User Picture]From: [info]flipzagging
Fri, 14-Apr-2006 6:27 AM (UTC)

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I met an ex-Netscaper recently, and he's still using Netscape 3.0 as his mail client. Very efficiently. He's got a lot of filters in javascript -- apparently this was an undocumented feature?

But the first thing we talked about was the insanity of Mork.
From: [info]treptoplax
Sat, 15-Apr-2006 12:25 AM (UTC)

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I've discovered at work that anybody who even uses the phrase 'poor performance characteristics' is, by-and-large, terminally clueless.

If they knew something, they'd be more specific. If they knew nothing, they'd ask a question. But using that specific phrase means they think they know what they're doing but are operating totally on superstition.

I avoid such people where feasible.
From: [info]ianbicking
Sat, 15-Apr-2006 1:40 AM (UTC)

This makes sense

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This makes total sense. They have a bunch of data. They need to query that data. Do they use some flat file data source with their own indexes and querying system? No, they use a query system that already exists, is well supported, is as transparent as a database can be (it's not like they *wrote* a SQL database, they are just using the most popular embedded database available).

This criticism is just that they aren't rolling their own index+query for every kind of data they store. That's not a very good criticism. Flat ICS files aren't an index, and they aren't something that supports queries, they are just a data storage format; the database implements entirely different functionality.
From: [info]chrislightfoot
Sat, 15-Apr-2006 7:33 PM (UTC)

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I'm just waiting for them to put the browser preferences into some kind of file that allows more than one process to access them at once. Then they can make every window a separate process, so that when one crashes it won't take down the whole app. If a database is the price to pay for that, so be it....

Apparently this is likely to take a while to fix.