Those of you that use gmail will find sup’s way of  organising your e-mail familiar because sup uses the same ideas to do this. Instead of sorting mail into folders like you do in conventional mail clients you tag e-mails with labels enabling you to quickly find mails. Actually the idea is more to tag mail threads rather than single mails. There is also a powerful search function to search your mail that does not have specific labels. As in mutt you get through reading and sorting your mail really quickly.

I tried out sup and found that it worked very well although it takes a bit of getting used to. It reads mbox,  maildir and IMAP mailboxes.

Sup does have its drawbacks, the major one being that it does not syncronise with your IMAP server which means that if you read a mail using sup it does not get marked as read on the IMAP server and vice versa. In fact if you did read mail on your IMAP server using another mail client you have to re-sync sup’s indexes before you can read your mail with it again.

I also found sup’s mail source configuration a bit painful because it does not read all the folders on an IMAP server automagically, you have to type them in one by one. This is somewhat of a chore if you have lots of folders and want to switch. This is however only a once of task.

Sup also does not download any messages from a mail source which can be a show stopper if you are on a slow connection as I often am.

I think sup has great potential and if you like the way gmail organises mail it is definitely  for you. I am seriously considering switching to sup but the non-syncronisation with IMAP is holding me back because I often have to read my mail that is stored on an IMAP server from someone else’s computer using a web based mail client.

O yes, sup is written in Ruby and therefore should run on any platform that Ruby runs on. I tried it on Mac OS X because OS X Leopard conveniently has Ruby pre-installed.

During the years I kept my iLife up to date and even did a website or two with iWeb. IWeb had one drawback in that it really was geared towards publishing websites on .Mac or MobileMe its new name.

Apple released iLife9 in the beginning of this year and last week I finally spent the money to upgrade. It definitely does not disappoint. iPhoto has two great new features, faces and places. Faces uses facial recognition to search for people in your photographs. With a bit of training it actually works great and it took me about an hour to tag the recognized faces in my photos with names.

Places is a bit more mundane and allows you to tag your photos with GPS co-ordinates. It helps of course if you have a camera or phone with built in GPS but you can tag you photos with places without owning a GPS. iPhoto will show you a map with pins stuck into it indicating places you (or your GPS) has marked. If you click on a pin iPhoto will show you the photographs taken in that place.

iWeb now also has the possibility to directly publish to a site using ftp. For me this is quite useful because I don’t own a MobileMe account and for simple websites iWeb works really well. It is also a lot easier to add your own code to a website.

Garageband is a music creation program that comes with iLife. Not being a musician I always played around with it a bit and used it for simple mixing tasks but not much more. It now comes with a Learn to play feature. You get a set of free lessons (that you have to download) to learn playing the piano or guitar. I tried out the first two piano lessons and found them very easy to follow. I’m sure that someone that wants to learn to play seriously will find these lessons very useful. After you did the free course there is the possibility to download lessons created by successful artists teaching you their music.

All things considered I think iLife09 is worth the money.

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…