With the start of college, I had to start using a calendar in order to keep track of the times of my classes, and what days each class was on. To do this, I simply used to Google Calendar, and then setup my phone to pull in that calendar. Now, in the second week, I want to be able to keep track of various assignments and essential dates, but my phone’s interface is hardly a convient way to enter the neccessary information, nor can I simply use the web interface for Google Calendar because not every class has wireless access.

My solution was to install Sunbird, the Mozillia offering for calendars. Unfortunately, it turns out that Sunbird is on the way out, with the developers recommending that the Lightning extension for Thunderbird be used instead.

Despite not feeling the need to have an email client on my laptop, I went ahead and installed Thunderbird 3, then downloaded the Lightning extension. Unfortunately, when I went to install the XPI file for Lightning, I discovered that it was incompatible - because I use the 64 bit edition of Ubuntu.

So the question I pose to the developers of Lightning and Sunbird, and anyone else who has every developed exclusively for 32 bit operating systems in the past five years, is why not take the extra time to develop for 64 bit? Is it that much harder, or is it really just the gigantic momentum that exists behind 32 bit operating systems?

Now I’m using Evolution, the mail client that I decided I liked less than Thunderbird 3, rather than my application of choice.