A Gmail Devotee Experiments With Apple Mail and iPhone Mail App

Posted on July 19, 2008 by

I’ve been using Gmail since its inception and I’ve used it (the web interface) as pretty much my sole email interface for the past 18 months. During that same time I’ve been pretty much solely a Mac user and when I recently bought an iPhone 3G I thought it would be an opportune time to revisit the possibility of Apple Mail, Address Book, iCal since those integrate with their iPhone counterparts and synchronize with MobileMe (née .Mac).

Punchline is: a few days into the process I have decided not to use Mail App nor the iPhone counterpart. I am using Apple’s Address Book (with MobileMe synching). As for Calendar App vs. Google Calendar I’d say the jury is still out. Here’s what I’ve found…
Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone, OS X | 8 Comments

Rails Vendor Branch Limbo

Posted on June 20, 2008 by
Stick Figure (6)I’m upgrading a project from Rails 2.0.2 to Rails 2.1.

This thing uses Comatose 0.8.1. Unfortunately, Comatose 0.8.1 isn’t compatible with Rails 2.1. Fine, I’ll just upgrade to Comatose 2.0 (uber-alpha) and that’ll work. Oops, Comatose 2.0 uber-alpha breaks Rails migrations. Fixing that breakage requires a patch to Rails itself.

Oh and did I mention that this project of mine also requires a patch to Comatose proper (adds before_filters to the Comatose configuration object).

So I need a patched version of Comatose and a patched version of Rails. “OK” you say, just use Piston to manage those vendor branches. Not so fast. Piston only works with Subversion and the Rails project is no longer hosted on a Subversion repository. The old repository was deprecated after Rails 2.0.2. Rails is now hosted on Github. Oh and so is Comatose.

Never fear, Github support for Piston is coming Real Soon Now™. Until then I’m stuck in limbo. I suppose I’ll do the manual vendor branch thing—essentially manage my own private Subversion repositories for Rails and Comatose.

The fact that François Beausoleil is implementing Piston support for all-Git projects leads me to believe that there is no convenient alternative (to Piston) for vendor branches in Git. Hum, that’s hard to believe. Anyhow, I can’t migrate this project to Git yet so all-Git alternatives are sort of moot.

Posted in One Step Forward, Ruby on Rails | 3 Comments

Usable Gmail Thread URL Arrives

Posted on June 6, 2008 by

I was optimistic that the Quick Links feature just released with the new Gmail Labs would scratch my itch for the ability to link to Gmail threads. Well Quick Links itself is pretty raw but I was able to use it to figure out the URL format for a thread to wit:https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=mca2fxr2r24c#inbox/11a5bb2474f4842dI hadn’t seen that ‘zx’ query parameter before and it appears to be not strictly necessary (may be a proxy cache defeater—I removed it and found the URL still worked fine).What is new to me is that whereas last time I tried to revisit such an URL I was taken not to the thread, but to my Inbox, now when I replay this URL I am taken to the thread (as expected!)Now if Gmail would only provide a “Link to this page” control à la Google Maps my life would be complete.

Posted in usability | Leave a comment

Processing with Squirrelfish

Posted on June 3, 2008 by

SquirrelFish MascotIf you’re looking for some worthy code to run under your shiny new fast JavaScript register-based bytecode interpreter you might want to go play processing.js. Smoove.

Posted in JavaScript | Leave a comment

OS X Quality Problems

Posted on February 29, 2008 by

Roman Empire
by Enzo D. (Zoen)

I love my Macs. But dang it, I’ve encountered a couple annoying Leopard problems that have significantly impacted their value.

First, my old iMac won’t connect via WPA2 to my Airport Extreme since upgrading to Leopard. What am I gonna do—run an ethernet cable across my living room floor. Or should I say: across my wife’s living room floor?!?

Second, this week, my MacBook Pro stopped waking from sleep mode. The solution is simple but devastating – simply turn off Bluetooth…um, and then you don’t have Bluetooth.

What is going on here? I’ve had years of happiness with my OS X Macs. And now I’ve got two men down (out of three). Only the trusty PowerBook is unaffected by any of this.

‘sup Apple? Did you get ahead of yourselves with the sheer pace of coolness?

update June 6, 2008: The good guys at MacForce helped me out w/ the sleep/wake problem on the MBP. The fix was simple: reset the PMU. A no-brainer (but only if you think of it). WPA still broken on the iMac as of OS X 10.5.3.

Posted in OS X, usability | 1 Comment

Xerox, The Re-Branding

Posted on January 9, 2008 by

200801090903thumbnailChris Griego got it right when he said:

Before, I would hear Xerox and think of copiers. Now, I hear Xerox and think of copiers and awful logos.

Posted in marketing | Leave a comment

WordPress 2.3 Messes Up Your OpenID Delegation

Posted on January 7, 2008 by

No way home
by akashgoyal

If you use your WordPress blog as an OpenID (as I do) via a link rel=’openid.delegate’ tag (that delegates to an external OpenID service) then you may be locked out of your accounts after upgrading to WordPress 2.3.x.

WordPress 2.3 introduced a new feature called URL canonicalization that turns requests to foo.com into www.foo.com. The justification is that it helps normalize statistics gathering in some cases (though in my experience, Google Analytics needed no such help).

But what happens if you were using an OpenID like foo.com on a (OpenID ‘consumer’) site like pibb.com is that after the WP 2.3.2 upgrade you actually end up authenticating the id www.foo.com (not foo.com). So you can never get back into your foo.com account at pibb.com. Got that?

Update 4:49pm:

My initial solution was this nifty one-line disable canonical redirects plugin from Mark Jaquith. Simply drop that in your WP plugins and enable it and you’ll no longer suffer URL canonicalization. But a simpler approach was to simply set the blog URL to http://meme-rocket.com in general options. Now I’m redirecting www.meme-rocket.com to meme-rocket.com and all’s well.

Posted in identity, OpenID | 1 Comment

Portland On Fire

Posted on January 3, 2008 by

Raven Zachary, über-connector, has launched a nifty new site: portlandonfire.com that is profiling one Portlander a day. I’d like to know what his secret energy source is.

If you’d like to know my secret foibles, check it out — I’m featured today.

Posted in diversion, Portland community | 2 Comments

NYT Multimedia Presentation Viewer

Posted on January 2, 2008 by

The New York Times’ multimedia presentation viewer is a thing of beauty. The example below is taken from a story on Benazir Bhutto.

NYT Multimedia Presentation Viewer

Flash wins again. Notice how hovering over the thumb yields a time-indexed image popup. Very fluid, very useful.

Posted in design, usability | Leave a comment

Flickr Attributions in WordPress

Posted on December 31, 2007 by

I’m tired of creating HTML attribution markup and style by hand every time I drop a Flickr photo into a post. I noticed the Yahoo Shortcut Plugin purports to address this issue. So I ended my procrastination and upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 and installed the plugin. And here we are (see the image to the left)

Convincing the Yahoo Shortcuts Plugin to fetch the actual image of interest wasn’t as easy as I’d like but it’s clearly doable. I found the image using colrpickr, then navigated to the image and then entered the title of the image in the Yahoo Shortcut Plugin’s “Review This Post” view. The plugin found the image and allowed me to then add the image to my post.

Now wouldn’t it be the bomb if krazydad could integrate his colrpickr directly with the Yahoo thingie and save us all the steps?

Posted in diversion, tool, usability | Leave a comment