I recently decided to give the GNOME Evolution email client a new chance to handle both my personal and work email accounts. This means that, for work, I had to configure it for the Microsoft 365 service. In the end, this document from the GNOME Wiki worked just fine. It does both email and calendar without a problem. Also, while I haven't been able to configure the contacts app to work as expected, the thing is that the Evolution email client "remembers" the identity of people I have already exchanged emails with. So, for the most part, I don't truly need to use the contacts functionality anyways. All in all, it works very nicely. {link to this entry}

Since I'm using GNOME 3 once again, I had to create a new GNOME desktop entry for Salesforce running on Google Chrome that I can clearly identify as such when moving around the desktop. It's quite easy. Simply create a ~/.local/share/applications/salesforce.desktop file with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Salesforce
GenericName=Salesforce
Comment=Salesforce
Category=Internet
Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --app=https://hp.lightning.force.com --class=Salesforce 2>/dev/null
StartupWMClass=Salesforce
Icon=/home/jortega/.local/share/icons/salesforce.svg
Keywords=salesforce;
NoDisplay=false
Type=Application

There is a trend that, while barely perceived, must be sort of clear to anyone who, like me, has been using Linux for the past two decades. About two decades ago, most discussions on Linux and open source software took place on mailing lists. By contrast, today, the discussions occur, for the most part, on web forums. As for internal discussions in most American corporations, at least in the technology sector, they also used to occur in mailing lists, but have now migrated to either proprietary web-based tools or things like Slack. Now, I understand most people will see this as a normal (and positive) evolution. You know, from "old technologies" to "modern technologies". From simple SMTP to "rich media". And yet, I get the feeling there are a few things that we are missing. Here are a couple. Firstly, web forums and proprietary tools can easily disappear and, with them, the content also goes away. Not only that but, if the tool is commercial and proprietary (e.g., reddit), its legitimate owner can decide at any moment to move it behind a paywall, and there is absolutely nothing we can do. We, the users, provide the content. But we don't get to decide how it will be distributed. Second, and this applies not only to Slack but also to the old IRC, if I have a question or an issue that I expect to discuss right now, instant messeging tools are fine. But, on the other h and, if I expect to ask a question, move on to do some other work, and then return to check what people may have suggested about my question, Slack and IRC are simply not the best tool for the job. Quite the contrary, our question will get lost in a morass of data, and it will be quite difficult to find whenever we decide to return to it. In general, as with so many other things in life, I'd say that we should be using different tools for different jobs. And yet, because humans are the way we are, the reality is that we leave "old tools" behind, and move onto the new fad without ever stopping to consider its correct use scenario. {link to this entry}