HACkers blog

Blame Unathi. He was the one who forbade blogging about Gropewise over the suicide season. Or more specifically, he forbade blogging about hating Gropewise... But either way, blogging being the anarchic medium it is, forbidding anything is simply a sure way to provoke it.

Since I don't hate Gropewise, I can't blog about hating it personally, though there are, of course, many colleagues who do. They hate what happened to them during the migration, they hate that it's not what they had before, and they hate that all the hype on which it was sold to them, has turned out to be mere hype and not substance. They hate that a user requirements document drawn up several years ago at the start of the project has bound them for life, despite requirements - and technology - having moved on considerably in the interim.

They hate nameless, faceless feeback email addresses rather than flesh-and-blood people to scream their frustration at. And they hate the sympathetic looks colleagues elsewhere give them when they splutter about Gropewise. "Gropewise?", these colleagues say. "Oh, we've just dumped that! Didn't work for us - we're a university, not a government department. We've gone to Outlook."

I don't hate Gropewise. In fact, the fact that it's not Microsoft is a distinct advantage to me, though the one thing that I do dislike about it is its habit, these last few days, of reducing us Macsters to the gutter level of Microsoft slaves. By bombing out. Not quite an "illegal operation", or a "general protection fault", and it doesn't scramble the entire OS... but on an inherently stable system, to get an error message saying that Gropewise has lost contact with the Post Office and will now terminate... is a sick reminder of how flakey the Microsoft world is, and how everyone who inhabits it just has to put up with that. Sad, sad, sad.

But given the strength of feeling against Gropewise in some quarters, it does raise the question: is Gropewise a good or a bad thing? And, as with any debate, the best possible arbiter is... Googlefight!

A Googlefight between "love groupwise" and "hate groupwise" delivers the loving option the winner by 253 000 to 94 600. A Googlefight between "groupwise rocks" and "groupwise sucks" likewise has the rocking option ahead by 119 000 to 29 200.

So that's that then - the product itself bears the approval of the Universe. Of course, the local installation and configuration of it might be something else, entirely....

Having blogged recently about the migration to GropeWise, I'm now in a position to reflect on matter more sagely.

Is GropeWise A Good Thing or A Bad Thing? Well... the Apple client is very like the webmail interface, so I can't comment on all the wonderful features it offers to Microsoft slaves, but it does have one particular feature which I really appreciate:

a sense of humour.

On my first day of using it, I was informed by a colleague that his fridge had died on the weekend. Sad as it was, it chose nowhere near as auspicious an occasion for its demise as mine did, two years ago - in fact, my first blog was occasioned by the simultaneous demise of my fridge and Susan Sontag. (That blog followed soon thereafter. Blogging about dead appliances has limited appeal).

But being the friendly, helpful type, I mailed said colleague with the contact details of the fridge paramedic who attempted resuscitation on my fridge, in a message headed "your deceased fridge". Now, unlike the receipt, or delivery, confirmations of Pegasus of yore, GropeWise offers notification of both opening and deletion of mail - entertaining for those who enjoy their mailboxes fill up rapidly. Suffice to say that - in order to assure myself that the system was indeed working - I'd requested confirmation of opening.

I was thus the delighted recipient of a message headed "Joe Soap has opened your deceased fridge". So delighted, in fact, that I forwarded him the message to share the macabre humour. Instant paranoia. This was Big Brother at its worst!

And then, just when I'd gotten bored of it and thought I could trust the fates and switch the notification off, it did its little trick again. Having sent a mail to another colleague headed rather boringly "a couple of things", my curiosity was piqued to receive the notification that "Joe Bloggs has opened a couple of things". I'm dying to know what, and what he found inside...

The time has come, the Walrus said... and so it was that GropeWise struck, silently and in the night, unbeknownst to the oblivious mailbox owner who continued IMAPping obliviously.

In all fairness, I had been sent an email more than a month back, when - on discovering via a groupmail announcing the migration schedule's presence on the ICTS website that I was to be migrated imminently and without warning - I notified the Helpdesk that the timing was most inopportune as I'd be out of Cape Town, requiring ongoing access to my email via WAP. But much had happened in the month, and the exact date was lost among the 8090 other mails in my email inbox, unrecorded on a Netscape Calendar more down than up.

And so, on Saturday morning when I noticed that regular refreshes of my IMAP mailbox revealed no new mail - despite mail having been sent - I became a little bemused. It did finally occur to me that the problem was not with the mail system, but with my presence on it, and I set out to find out whether perhaps I'd been migrated without my knowing.

First stop, I checked the schedule of later-daters, but my name wasn't listed, nor were any dates given. Ah well, not that, then... But some niggling suspicion made me venture to the list of those migrated, to see if, just, maybe... And then the fun started.

To keep the spambots at bay, there is an image that pops up which you have to enter, to gain access to the page. Only... the image changes every 50 seconds. Which is about half the time required for the image to download via dial-up. It felt a bit like those early computer games, when quick fingers were everything. In the end, after about 743 tries, I finally succeeded. The page loaded, and I consulted the list, and yes, I'd been migrated.

I discovered that there is a list of things one is supposed to have done prior to migration - needless to say, I'd not done any - and a list of things to do afterward. Including checking that your IMAP mail is all accounted for... which is a little difficult as the IMAP_inbox, once discovered hiding in something ministerial called "Cabinet", does not report how many messages it contains, displays a max of 200 at a time, and reports all dates as the date of migration written backward (12/8/06 instead of 8/12/06). For 8091 messages? Forget!

This, of course, assumes that one translates your "username you log into the network with" to mean your staff number, with leading zeroes. As a Mac user, I don't log into the UCT network as a rule, and when I do, it's with the FQN... which is not going to get you far with GropeWise. Still, anyone with half a brain cell will eventually get in, and once in, the bliss of seeing an inbox with only 6 real messages (and heaps of spam....) makes it - briefly - worthwhile.

"Why do men have nipples?" - more locally preceded by "do men have nipples?" - is one of those recurring questions people seem to obsess about as yet another bottle empties and the music slows down.

Which - considering that no one older than five dwells on why Auntie Fatima at the fish&chips shop has a beard - is one of the *truly* puzzling questions in life.

The answer to the male nipples question brings to mind the origin of the Y chromosome, and the mantra instilled in all first year Zoology students: Ontogenie Herhaal Filogenie (ontogeny repeats philogeny) - the development of the individual follows the development of the phylum. The 70s feminists were wrong - it's not the future that's female, it's the past.

Which brings us back to Auntie Fatima and her beard. At some point female hormones go into relative retreat, allowing their male counterparts to assert themselves more - bring Auntie Fatima her beard, and many other women the rampant libidos of their later years. Sadly, no accompanying increased proficiency in parallel parking has been observed.

But if ontogenic, and phylogenic, trends suggest that female is where we begin, not end, what does this predict for social trends which suggest that masculinity is under threat?