Infrequently Noted

In addition to my various other *NIXes, the Unix I spend the most time with is Apple's Mach/BSD hybrid, OS X. But I'm also an email pack rat and an ornery cus in general. These freakish traits, collectively, are keeping me from installing OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on my laptop, despite having bought it less than an hour after it was released yesterday.

Were I a "normal" user, I'd probably be using Thunderbird or Apple's built-in Mail.app application (a true POS), but alas, I'm much more finicky about my email. Firstly, I don't take well to losing messages. Perhaps that's a side-effect of being a mail administrator for at least one domain, but nothing gets my goat like a mail application that doesn't take the appropriate level of care with my email. I also don't take well to my mail being stuffed into proprietary formats. Mbox files (the venerable Unix way of storing messages) are pretty open but they just don't cut it when you've got 100 thousand items in your mail that you actually care about; or in my case, don't want to lose. I'm also a heavy GPG user, and I exhibit an extreme aversion to HTML-formatted mail. At the same time, I also think that email is a natural fit for a GUI and not a command line. In short, I'm the worst kind of crusty, opinionated bastard imaginable when it comes to my email.

All of this has driven me to KMail as my preferred email reader. But using KMail on OS X requires running it under X11 since the native KDE project has stalled and wasn't ever stable enough for heavy day-to-day usage. The way one gets KMail under X11 on OS X? Fink. Fink is great. It works, gives me the tools that OS X doesn't include or haven't been ported natively (which is thankfully a decreasing number), and in generally makes my life better. But alas, I don't think I can upgrade to 10.4 because there's no binary set of Fink packages available for 10.4 yet.

So I'm stuck waiting for Fink to update so I can upgrade. And until then, this Tiger DVD is just going to keep on taunting me.