Guneet's Web Log

September 23, 2009

Must Have Thunderbird Add-ons for MS Outlook Users

Filed under: software, ubuntu — Tags: — guneetsahai @ 1:11 am

I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client for quite some time now on my Ubuntu box & have been more than happy with it.  This post talks about a few add-ons that made my experience with Thunderbird all the more enjoyable. Read on……

Lightning

Lightning screenshot

Lightning screenshot

The first thing that you miss with a plain Thunderbird installation is when somebody sends you a meeting invite. With Outlook it was pretty straight forward – you hit the accept button & you get the entry in your calendar which shows up a pop up at the right time to remind you of the event. Lightning adds just that functionality to Thunderbird. Once installed you get a calender & tasks interface which are pretty easy to use.

To download Lightning or to know more, please visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Buttons!

I remember when I started using Thunderbird, one functionality that I used to hate was that it used to open a Response or Forward in a new window leaving the original email message still open. After sending a response I was required to close the original message window as well. Now this was pretty annoying to me. However a simple add-on called Buttons! came to my rescue. It allowed creating new set of buttons (Reply!   Reply All!    Forward!) to my email message windows and using these instead of the regular ones gave me the desired effect of automatically closing the email message on hitting the Reply/Forward button.

To download or learn more about this add-on, please visit – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/106

Screenshot-userAgent - ThunderbirdDisplay Mail User Agent

Besides the above two add-ons, I have also been using a simple add-on called “Display Mail User Agent” that I like. This one simply displays the user Agent (email client) used by the email sender. This neat add-on displays a nice logo in the header of the email message depicting the client used. To download or know more about this add-on, please visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/562.

What has your experience been with Thunderbird? Any interesting add-ons that you would want to share?

September 22, 2009

Joined Xebia

Filed under: freelancing, xebia — guneetsahai @ 4:40 pm

Beginning this month I joined a company called Xebia (http://www.xebia.com).

Xebia is an IT consultancy and project organization focusing on Enterprise Java technology, Agile development methods and outsourcing services. The India office is based out of Gurgaon on NH-8 (pretty close to where I live) & consists of a small team that is growing rapidly. Xebia also has presence in The Netherlands and France & I believe the biggest chunk in terms of work-force is in The Netherlands. So far I have  spent around two weeks in office and I think I made a good choice to join them. Some good points about Xebia that I could notice in this short duration are

  1. Everybody at Xebia (irrespective of the no of years of experience) writes code & people are pretty passionate about it.
  2. These guys practice Agile by the book which ensures daily progress & high productivity even with distributed teams (sometimes across 3 locations)
  3. A great work environment that is very developer focussed.
  4. There are a plenty of senior people around who have spent years in programming Enterprise Java. Working closely with them is definitely a good learning experience.
  5. My learning curve (Enterprise java) is already started to move North.

This also obviously means that I would no longer be working as a freelancer. I enjoyed my freelancing stint a lot (here’s why) , but it was a conscious decision to move away from it. Though Freelancing offers a lot of freedom in terms of work, but it also comes at a cost – There are times when you have more work than you can handle & similarly there are also times when you don’t have work & I’m not prepared enough to be sitting idle.

To summarize – Though I enjoyed freelancing but I’m equally happy & excited to move to Xebia & am really looking forward to have a good time at there.

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