Sylpheed: Nice Email Client for Linux

I use email clients mainly to read mails on my local server mailbox (fedora 8). I had used evolution for a long time. Contrary to the normal conception, I found evolution to be very buggy. I had to deal with segmentation faults so often that I got fed up and finally made up my mind to discard it. Apart from being buggy, Evolution is very bulky and has too many features which I do not require.

I tried Balsa next. It was light with very minimal features, but unfortunately it was also buggy. Every time I had to kill an already running balsa before I could open it to read my mails!

Seeking solution I googled and found good things about a light and featureful client SYLPHEED. I installed it through yum, setup my local mail box, and my first impressions were "thats nice". I have been using it for the past few weeks and to say the least it is the best email client I have used so far. I has all the required features, nice interface, menus, fonts, colors, etc. Best of all, it is faster than Balsa or Evolution.

If you are not happy with your email client and want to try something different I would recommend Sylpheed.

Simple Statistics

A small bash script (with awk) to find out simple statistics on data. The data should be in a single column in a file. The file can contain any number of columns.

simple_stat - download
simple_stat - view

example usage: ./simple_stat [filename] [column number] [column separator]

The script outputs:

Column number,
Sum,
Average,
Standard Deviation,
Number of lines in the file,
Maximum value,
Minimum Value.

the output, for example, could be something like:

column= 1 Sum= -5.914206 Avg= -0.029571 SD= 0.760153 Num_of_lines= 200 max= 1.427456 min= -1.305308

Very often we end up with block files having data in each column. This script will be very useful to get some simple statistics on those data.