Recently in Tech Category

Now that Gmail, including Apps, supports the Exchange sync protocol, the iPhone native email client allows a rather nice way of using Gmail. After a few days of really flaky performance when it was launched, and little filter surgery so that all my list traffic doesn't hit the iPhone inbox, I have a really slick almost-Blackberry experience going on. The Calendar and Contacts sync just works, and the email integration is very nicely implemented.

For example, the Gmail way of doing things is to put mail into the 'archive', not to delete stuff. This works especially well with paid-for Apps, where one gets 25GB of storage per user! So, the trash icon on the iPhone archives the mail. Actual deletion works differently. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps, but it's absolutely the right choice and it works really well.

That's something that happens a lot with Google applications. They may not always be the prettiest, but someone's really sweated details like that. It would have been trivial to make the trashcan delete stuff, and force users to (say) move to a special folder in order to archive. Instead, they chose to deviate from the canonical function and do the thing most likely to work properly with Gmail, risking the wrath of the legions of Apple UI fascists.

It's a bit arrogant to change the way the trashcan works, sure, but Google are still the industry's rockstars so to my mind that's the kind of thing they should be doing. When they stop doing 'fuck you' stuff like this, we'll know it's all over and start looking for the next big thing.

Last time I tried to install VMware Server, when it was in beta, it was a disaster. I had to do stacks of manual configuration, and in the end it was flaky and unstable. I know it's unfair to judge a program by its beta, but in my mind VMware Server 2 was a 'problem' upgrade.

So it was with great trepidation that I tried again, now the product is out of beta. I'm glad I did. Everything works smoothly out of the box, and it's running just great. It's not VMware ESX, that's for sure, but it's free (as in beer) and it's cool.

...and yet it fails to be a reliable way of getting legitimate copies of music.

I shall explain.

Every time I've gone to buy a single track from the iTunes store, it's been marked as 'album only'. For non-iTunes users, that means that whilst you can download most individual songs, the most popular ones - i.e. those you'd most want to download individually - can only be obtained by purchasing the entire album.

Traditionally, this is the point in the blog post where a big rhetorical 'why' would be deployed. That's not necessary here; it's perfectly obvious why that do this - money. At least, I'm sure that's the reasoning used to justify giving the user an annoying experience. Trouble is, I doubt that it actually works.

I'm one of those that believes that musicians, filmakers, actors and so forth should be paid for their work. So, whilst I frequently torrent stuff, if I watch it and like it, I make a sanctimonious prick of a point of buying it. Battlestar Galactica is the best example, but there are many others. I've spent a fortune on DVDs based on an initial torrent download.

Unortunately, the reverse also applies. If I've tried to do the right thing and buy legitimately, only to be frustrated by shitty DRM or brainless album-only restrictions, I really don't have a problem with torrenting the tracks I want, and paying noone. I tried it their way, and failed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Those nice folks at LivingDot just upgraded me to Movable Type 4.3. I was having huge problems with the automatic database upgrade, it was taking forever and failing randomly.

Then the penny dropped. Before the upgrade I was desperately trying to make publishing faster, and I put in a default fastcgi handler for .cgi files. Turning it off in my cPanel fixed the problem completely.

Silly me.

Anyway, the upgrade seems to have helped publish speed enormously. It takes about half the time it used to. Yay. Not really tried out any other new stuff yet.

I stopped using Google Chrome as my primary browser. I missed Xmarks. I missed Adblock. I didn't use it in anger enough to really miss FoxyProxy, but I'm sure I would have got there.

Sorry guys, those addictive li'l plugins just pulled me back to Firefox.

It's a shame, really. Chrome is a lovely browser. Process-per-tab just feels right to this raddled old UNIX guy. And it's so very fast. I miss the good bits of it. I know plugins are coming, let's see if the devs follow. I may just have to be one of them.

When I eventually got logged into my work VPN this morning, I happened to look at the IP settings because, predictably, it wasn't working properly.

There are 23 domains in the DNS search list. That's at least 19 too many.

At what point does a company stop trying to consolidate and centralise, and start separating systems again so that they can be maintained? I think my company has gone a long, long way past that point. In an attempt to have one single desktop for everyone, that single desktop is so completely overburdened with configuration that it ceases to work properly.

It's more than just the domains. The login scripts rarely work properly. The systems for installing applications are cumbersome. The systems for security exceptions are impossibly bureacratic and stupid. I need to get a newer version of an application installed so I can actually use it for its designed purpose. I need the security officer's personal approval so I can upgrade a licensed, approved application on my own comporate-standard laptop. I've been waiting nearly two weeks for a reply.

Even with 100,000 fewer employees, the systems are still sized for a few years ago, and for the budgets from a few years ago. Someone needs to take a big decision. I just know that noone is willing to stick their neck out that far.

According to my ISP, I now have real, genuine IPv6 being routed down my ADSL line. Not tunnelled, cheat IPv6. The real thing.

Let's see if that makes it a bit less of a curiosity then the last time I tried IPv6. Then, it was tunnelled; it was clunky; it was unbearably slow. In other words, it was a complete joke.

Here's hoping.

For years I've only done development work on Unix machines. It's just easier - everything is there, and for the most part it works. Compilers, debuggers, parser generators, they're all there, they're all free and standard.

My memory of Windows development is rather different. You used to need Visual C++ (better yet, full-on Visual Studio), and that meant either a cash layout or a trip to dodgy software land. I have a rule with my new development machine, that there will be absolutely nothing on here that's not 100% legit. That means no Visual Studio, because I refuse to pay that much money for a toolchain and an IDE, however good they might be.

Now I'm trying something different. I have Eclipse, for my sins. I have installed the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) feature, and now I'm going with MinGW. I have Cygwin as well, but that ties me to the GPL and to having the Cygwin DLL present. I have no problem with the GPL, but it's annoying to not have a choice. So: MinGW it is.

Eclipse is a fine IDE, but it's a complete monster - Visual Studio was a lot easier to grasp at first. I've been using Eclipse for a little while now, and it still feels like I'm barely in control of it. Luckily we spent big on my dev machine, because a lesser laptop would struggle.

To my amazement, the instructions that ship with the CDT are right, the toolchain installed as documented, and the sample application built and ran first time. I almost feel cheated - I was ready for a fight.

After a couple of months of transition from hyphen address (previously moaned about here and here) I have turned off the default address for my Google Apps account. No more having to check another account and fixing up web accounts, most of which I never, ever use. It gets really boring, really quickly.

This has another nice side effect: I've had Google Chrome set up to look at the 'spare' account, whilst leaving Firefox to handle my main account. Oddly enough, Chrome is really, really good for Gmail, so I think I would like to start using it in anger. I still miss Adblock Plus and the awesome FoxyProxy too much to have Chrome as my general-purpose browser, but for my Googleverse it's perfect.

 A while ago, I wrote about having to work around the way I used my old email system. In short, I had a lot of email coming to myname-<something> @ ae-35.com delivered to  the mailbox myname @ ae-35.com, using the 'hyphen address' feature that's a function of how Qmail works, and is supported only by Qmail. I've used quite a lot of these hyphen addresses over the years, and the only way I could move to Google Apps whilst still getting those mails was to have everything, regardless of address, delivered to my mail inbox. It's cool that Gmail (and Postini, a service you can have with Google Apps when you pay money) support this 'default address' feature, but it comes at a price as I'll demonstrate shortly.

The solution, as documented, was to set up another mailbox that got the big chunk of everything, and thus keep my own mailbox reasonably pristine. I'd log into the other mailbox periodically and remove the hyphen addresses where I cared, and unsubscribe where I didn't. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer volume of spam addressed to nonexistent mailboxes.

In Gmail, mail placed in the Spam label (for our purposes a label works kinda like an IMAP folder) is cleared down after 30 days. For the whole time I've been using Gmail, the Spam label on my account (whilst it was the default address) contained between ten and twenty thousand items. That's a lot of spam. This doesn't count the great many mails that Postini blocked or quarantines before Gmail even saw it.

Now that I've removed the default address from my primary account, I have 477 mails in the Spam label.

Of course, the other account now has 20,000 mails in the Spam label. I can only conclude that spammers, in addition to being extremely rude and annoying, are also stupid. The only reason any of it gets through is because I have this legacy migration feature enabled; and that's hardly something most people would ever do. I understand that spammers use other people's resources for their nefarious purposes, but that's no excuse for sloppiness! :-)