SF State is currently in the midst of moving to a Lotus Notes (IBM) based e-mail and calendaring system. Why? That's out of the scope of this post. An interesting side effect of this move is that we get to test the native Lotus Notes client on different platforms. I plan on testing it on Ubuntu shortly. We also get to see if their Domino Web Access (DWA) system works on different browsers. My Firefox install works on Windows, but tends to freeze on Ubuntu Linux. Both use Sun Java to perform tasks. If I switch to IE7 on Windows it loads ActiveX and does similar magic.

Yesterday, while trying to troubleshoot a quota problem on my account, one of the admins jokingly mentioned "I wonder if it will load on the OLPC laptop..." 

Well, will it?

Looks like it will! In fact, it seems to default to the simplest subset of technologies that it can run. I haven't fully looked into it, but the little green machine actually loads DWA faster than my Ubuntu or Windows machines!

Now, I'm sure that I have violated some law somewhere by attempting to run Lotus Notes on the OLPC laptop, but there is something to be said for beauty in simplicity. No Java junk, no ActiveX antics. Just plain hardworking HTML.