July 26, 2009
I enjoy watching sports. Pro Football, College Basketball, and all types of Soccer. I also enjoy my DVR (not technically a TiVo anymore). Unlike many people, I enjoy watching sports on my DVR. I’m not hung up on ’live’, and I really dislike commercials. I don’t particularly care for halftime either.
When I watch Pro Football, I have to watch the game on the same day. I don’t really ever watch it live, but usually I watch it within a few hours of ’live’. It is pretty difficult to avoid finding out the end result of the game for more than a few hours, and especially on Monday mornings in an office environment. College Basketball is better, but still tough to delay more than few hours.
Soccer on the other hand, is a niche market. Last weekend I recorded 4 games. The Chicago Fire, Chicago Red Stars, and the Men’s and Women’s national teams. I watched the fire game and the men’s national team game over the weekend. The Red Stars and Women’s game I watched during the week. I never heard the scores on the radio, no one twittered about it, and there was no water cooler talk. I am free to delay the games as long as I want. In fact, I’ve only heard scores from a Red Stars game once on the radio, on a really slow sports day. Even the WNBA gets more time than women’s soccer. Does anyone really care about the WNBA?
I don’t watch ANY television live. What’s the point? I let my life be my life, and television provides entertainment when I’m ready. I’m glad the sport I enjoy most supports it.
July 23, 2009
I have a reasonable amount of archived email on my local hard drive, that I’d really prefer to store in Gmail. Since I use Google Apps for my domain I created a new account to store the archive email.
The next step was figuring out how I could get the email into the account. I started looking around for applications to export to Gmail or import from archive formats. Then I came across the simple approach.
I added the newly created GMail account to my email client that contained the archived email. Then I dragged the email from the archive folders into the new account. The email client dutifully copied it to the Gmail account, preserving the date and all other meta-data.
No tools needed. Simple, easy, and effective.
July 12, 2009
After a two week vacation, I’m back home.
It was a great trip, and very relaxing. My family and I spent the time in Colorado exploring the Rockies and enjoying the peace and quiet. We hiked to the top of Flat Top, Twin Sisters, and Estes Cone, along with a few other great non-summit hikes. Here are some of my favorite shots from the trip…
In Golden we watched kayaks doing jumps in the river.
Calypso Cascades
An HDR image of Estes Park from Little Valley.
The coming storm, taken from the top of Twin Sisters.
Fireworks over Estes. This was the pre-game show.
Fireworks over Estes. This was the official show.
The hummingbird feader was popular. We refilled it 3 times while we were there.
June 27, 2009
I went for a walk with the family tonight in Golden, CO and came across some kayakers doing jumps in the river. My shutter speeds are a bit slow, but still some cool moves…
June 24, 2009
In tools like Outlook, there are an impossible number of ways users can interact with the tool. This creates lots of ’edge cases’ that don’t get tested or developed for.
Here is one:
- Use the default setting that does not have the BCC line shown.
- Send an email with BCCs by clicking on the To: button and adding entries to the BCC line in the dialog box.
- Send the message
- Realize you want to reuse the body in a new message.
- Open the sent message and click resend.
- Type in a new To: address
- Send it to everyone you previously BCC’ed because Outlook doesn’t show you the BCC line, even though it has entries.
Oops.
This is an edge case where adding a user to the BCC line causes it to be displayed, but opening/resending an email with users in the BCC line DOES NOT cause it to be displayed. The trigger logic is flawed, but you don’t realize it is flawed unless you are aware of other ways that a specific state can occur. In this case, the logic to display the BCC line should be triggered by the ‘state’ of having entries in the BCC line, not the event of adding an address to the BCC line.
June 20, 2009
I was surprised to get an email from Netflix today notifying me that a new disc shipped out. Netflix does not normally process movies on Saturday, so mailing a movie back on Friday means you have to wait until Tuesday to get the replacement.
June 15, 2009
Google recently announced a new collaboration platform, and I finally got around to watching the video.
Wow.
I started watching it as a small video in the background and kept finding myself switching to full screen so I could really watch and follow what they were doing. I’m not going to attempt to summarize the 80 minute video introduction, nothing I could say would really cover it. You should spend the time and go check this out.
I will talk about some of my reactions:
First, wow. This is a solution to the fragmentation of communication. Email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc. There are too many channels we use to communicate, many of which are dated.
Open Platform, Open Source (mostly).
Build on GWT. HTML 5 seems to be a big focus.
RIAs - Sun, Adobe, and Microsoft are pushing their rich client platforms. Apple and Google are focused on HTML 5. This app makes a pretty strong case that HTML 5 is sufficient for nearly every app.
Playback - a cool concept that provides context that may be lost along the way. Integrates with the plugins, etc. Cool.
Convergence - Google has launched quite a few apps of varying success. Mail, Maps, Apps, Social Networking, News, Translation, etc. Wave takes these and combine them in a way that far exceeds their individual value.
Extensions - This is an extensible platform of course. Wave is cool today, but will be much more tomorrow.
Federation - This is what makes the entire concept feasible. You can have corporate wave servers but still interact with the various vendors, consultants, etc when necessary, and everything that is private never leaves your server.
Wow.
June 13, 2009
My wife just bought a new 13" MacBook Pro, and as longtime windows users, we’re both working through learning a new system. Overall she’s pretty happy, but we just spent 15 minutes today figuring out an issue with windowing…
It started when I migrated over her iTunes library from her Windows box. The great thing was that not only did it work great (binary compatibility), but that it also auto-found the music (I had it on the M: drive on Windows and I moved it into her iTunes Music folder on the Mac as she has plenty of disk space).
However, the window defaulted to a size larger than her screen, and this is where the frustration started. On windows, this would be fine, as you can resize a window from any edge. However, on the Mac you can ONLY resize from the bottom right corner. You also can’t move a window off the top of the screen. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the bottom right corner on the screen to allow us to resize.
In most apps, this would probably be fine, as the green key would resize the window. However, in iTunes this button switches to the mimized player view.
After some Google searching, I figured out I could use the Option key with the green button, which finally worked. Not intuative or flexible.
Overall, she’s still happy, and some learning curve is expected.
June 12, 2009
My company upgraded/migrated our Windows Domain last weekend, and as a result, my Treo 755p’s ActiveSync Support stopped working. When I entered the setup information and tried to run the initial Sync, I got the error codes: 1913 4828.
Once I had that working (I did have to change the server name to match our certificate) I was still having issues, and I came across this post:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/579009962631/m/417009683931 that suggested the issue was the ActiveSync security policy. I tracked down our IT guy and cajoled him into testing out removing the policy, since ours didn’t really do anything anyway. It worked! The odd thing is that the old domain seemed to have a policy as well but something must be different.
So apparently the Treo (Versamail 3.5.5) doesn’t support ActiveSync with security policies. Ya, ya, time to upgrade to a real phone…
June 8, 2009
There have been multiple efforts started over time to create a modernized version of JES (It is an 8 year old fork of an even older project) that would incorporate features more or less expected from a up-to-date MTA/MDA. I’m happy to announce that Andreas Kyrmegalos has stepped forward and developed a heavily revised and augmented version of Java Email Server that will be released as 2.0 Beta 1. Staying true to a gui-less configuration approach hasn’t prevented a host of new features to be introduced.
While the changes are too numerous to cover in this announcement, I wanted to highlight a few of the more important changes:
- TLS/SSL Support
- Configurable sandboxing
- Support for white/blacklisting
- Support for spam filtering/virus checking via amavisd-new using a dual MTA approach
- Data directories are now configurable (incoming/outgoing email storage)
- New Service Wrapper (Tanuki Java Service Wrapper)
- More efficient mail dispatching to multiple users at a single domain
- Cleaner shutdown process
- Mail transactions with mail servers employing reverseDNS checks (useful for JES instances on a dynamic IP)
- More efficient memory handling
- On the fly POP3/SMTP port listening switching
- Interfaces to enable extension modules
- Migration tool for JES 1.6.1
- Introduction of an automated testing framework
- Improved MIME header parsing support
- 8BITMIME, SIZE extensions support
- SASL MD5-DIGEST, GSS-API support
- and MUCH MUCH more.
JES is now dependent on JDK 1.5. The existing 1.6.x branch will continue to be available to support JDK 1.4.
Project management is being carried out using Maven.
JES is also getting a new license. The existing GPL license was due to the original GPL license of CRSMail. CRSMail has now been released into the public domain, allowing JES to be re-licensed under a BSD Style license.
I am also launching a new
Google Group to facilitate a more open support structure. Please post all questions about JES to
this group.
The 2.0 Beta 1 release is available to download from the JES Home Page and a version 2 branch resides at sourceforge’s subversion repository. Give it a spin and post your comments in the Google Group.
