Cope With It

Well its been about a month and a half since I posted about my attempt to migrate my email, and I have to say that I’m pretty much done at this point. There is really only SPAM going to the old address, and the occasional notification from some software company where I asked to be notified of new releases, and never bothered to un-subscribe.

I’ve taken advantage of Gmail’s accounts, filters and labels to track all of this. Gmail is currently set to POP the old accounts and then it filters them, assigning distinct labels to email from each of these accounts. Making it easy for me to search using the different advanced search keywords: “label: is:unread” is a good one, it lets me grab all the new items that have been filtered into a given label, making the tracking very easy. It even tells me if matching items in SPAM are there without actually bringing them up on the results listing.

I’m pretty confident that I will be able to allow my old email address to slip into the digital netherworld later this year when my subscription expires, and not worry about missing anything important or, even worse, having anything show up in someone-else’s inbox if they register the same name on that service. Definitely a concern, and one that needs more attention when it comes to Identity Theft discussions.

I’ve said it before, "I need to blog more!".  I’ll say it again.  The biggest issue I have it seems is that no matter how simple the blog framework is, it still poses a barrier to entry for getting the post made.  I have yet to find a web based editor that feels natural to me for creating or editing a post.  I’ve tried a couple of client based editors, and was not ever really impressed.  I know Word 2007 has the ability to publish to a blog, but it seems to be overkill.  I don’t need a full up word processing package to write a post.

Right now I am giving Windows Live Writer a try.  Its a lighter package than word, while having more features than many of the other packages I have tried.

Lets see if this works, only time will tell.

Wow, I’ve been having some fun for the last couple of days. I decided, as a cost saving measure, to not renew a paid email hosting service that I’ve been using for 7 years. I set it up before leaving the military so that I would have a professional looking email address for doing my job hunt. (I always cringe when I see someone’s resume and it has cuddly_bear97226236@hotmail.com or some such on it.)

Well, it just kinda stuck, I paid it up for three years initially, and have just been renewing it since. All my email went there, and it was a great service. All my friends and family used it to contact me. Recruiters still use it to send me job offers.

When Google started trumpeting their 1GB Gmail service, I was laughing because I had 10GB, plus file storage. Not a bad deal.

Lately though, I’ve started running into issues where my email was being blocked due to the service being on some spam black-lists. Not good, and even worse, I submitted the information to the service so that they could address the problem, and got nothing. No response, and the email is still blocked. Thankfully I have a few email addresses floating around, so I would just use another one to get around it.

Thinking about how to save some money I was looking over my bank statements and realized, that not only do I pay for my email service, but I also pay for my hosting and as part of that I can have unlimited email addresses, also my host (Dreamhost) has a fairly automated system to push your email hosting from them over to the Google Apps for Domains systems.

The light went on, and well now I am in the process of switching over, and I have to day that I am glad that I have started this early. I keep finding new and unusual places where I need to update my email address. I’ve started collecting a short list of things to think about in order to do this cleanly without interruption in your email.

1. Give yourself plenty of time, dont expect to be able to do this in a day, or even a week. I’m looking at having 6 months of transitional time.
2. Make a list of all mailing lists and commonly used accounts that are linked to your email. Go through each of these and change your address.
3. If you use a desktop client such as Outlook or Thunderbird to grab email from your old account, stop. Most email services have a forwarding option, set this up to forward all email to your new address.
4. In your new email service, set up a filter/rule to highlight/label/tag/sort all email that is being forwarded from your old account. This way you can see when you’ve missed something. When you find something labeled as such, deal with it right away, update the account, unsubscribe or whatever, just solve the problem. You should see fewer and fewer of these as time goes on, the eventual goal is to only have the spam going there.
5. Using the old address, send out emails to your contacts telling them of the switch, and ask them to update your information in their address books.
6. For handling the stubborn, use your new email address to reply to and initiate conversations that are forwarded in from your old account. This should at least get your new address on their radar and in their message history for when the old account goes dead eventually.

So far these are the base rules I am following and things are happening smoothly. I haven’t had any lost messages, and people are getting the point to move over. All of my mailing lists are still coming in, and any subscriptions from various websites are being transferred or unsubscribed as they forward from the old address.

Okay, I’ve been out there, Twittering away. I thought it was a great idea. I’ve got it going to my IM client, my cell phone and have even played around with a couple of dedicated Twitter client programs for the desktop. But lately, I’m not so sure.

I’ve experienced a couple of problems over the last few weeks that have cooled my enthusiasm, and I’m not talking about the recent outages. The first was a situation where I texted in to follow someone, and then in the next 8 hours (while I was sleeping) received no less than 450, yes four hundred fifty, text message updates to my phone from this individual’s incessant twittering. I’m glad I have a very high texting plan on my cellphone. The majority of this person’s twittering was, well to call it inane would be giving it far too much credit. It was pointless. All this to waste a large percentage of my monthly quota of text messages.

I found that the track keywords function was handy, I wanted to keep up on information on a couple of different topics, and found that tapping into the power of the crowd I was able to do so. But lately, the crowd is letting me down. The signal to noise ratio is dropping like a rock. I received yesterday no fewer than 10 messages containing TinyURL links that all pointed me to the same story, one that had been front paged on Digg, and well, not even that useful at any level in my opinion.

I’ve also come to think that some of the people raving on about twitter are caught up in the shiny new toy aspects of it. I keep hearing about how its “the virtual water cooler”. That may be true, but if so, its the water cooler in the psychiatric ward. Where when you walk up to it, all you hear is half of every conversation going on. People talking to empty space. I see it more as the “meet and greet” session that usually happens at conferences. Where everyone gets together in a huge space and you try to find someone to talk to with similar interests and expectations. You can hear bits and pieces of conversation around you, but you tend to lose the context because you can’t hear the whole thing.

I wonder if Twitter switched to a paid service if the signal to noise ratio would go back up. I think having a barrier for entry like that would keep much of the inane noise down. Another option would be for the Twitter developers to add a rules based spam filter of sorts to the site. Such that the users could have a much finer grained set of controls over what gets through to them. Maybe even set it up such that based on the scores coming out of the filters the message can be routed to different locations. Something that barely passes, and might still be questionable would be routed only to the web interface. Something more solid would go out the IM client or dedicated client. And finally something scoring very well could be routed via SMS as well.

As things currently stand, I’m going to be backing off on it some, there are a few people I follow who i will still allow updates through from, but for the most part, I will stop all the tracking and such. I’m just tired of the noise.

I’ve seen enough of these out there and I think its time for me to put in my two cents on this topic.  Firefox plugins are the main reason I do all my development using FF first and IE second.  Well, let’s dive right in shall we?

1.  Firebug – There are very few truly excellent development tools out there, but this one tops the chart for me.  Useful for doing heavy troubleshooting of the most complicated websites, allows you to monitor everything from the DOM tree to the load times and even track the XMLHttpRequest traffic in your favorite Web 2.0 site.  Tweak CSS on the fly to tweak it until its right, then cut and paste the tests back to your source without having to constantly reload the page.  This one is a web developer’s dream come true.
2. Web Developer Toolbar – If there is something that complements Firebug, this is the toolkit.   A little bit of everything you need, and few things that you don’t.  Its almost overwhelming when you first look at the list of actions you can take with this.  I mostly use it to play with cookies and cache settings on the fly, not to mention the built in screen resize options allow you to preview the site on all the standard resolutions at the click of the mouse.
3. Tab Mix Plus – Tabs are where it’s at, and as good as Firefox tabs are, they just aren’t customizable enough for me.  Tab Mix Plus to the rescue.  It adds more options than you can shake a stick at, and to top it off, comes with an integrated session manager.
4. IE View Lite – Face it, the bulk of the world views the web through the rose colored glasses of IE.  IE View Lite adds a context menu link to “View This Page in IE”.  Right click, left click and BANG!  Watch IE Blow up your beautiful standards compliant design.
5. Screen Grab – Screenshots are always a useful tool.  For troubleshooting, or just recording a funny bug for posterity.  The biggest issue with using most screen shot tools is that they are limited to the visible screen.  Not this little toy, it has options to either Save to disk or Copy to clipboard a selected region, the visible portion of the page or the entire page as a single continuous file.  Nice for sending that preview to a client.
6. FEBE and CLEO – A pair of tools that make backing up and copying your Firefox Profile a snap.  FEBE is the backup utility, highly configurable, allowing you back up just about any part of your profile.  It has a scheduler as well, allowing you to do it on a regular basis.  CLEO compliments FEBE, you can select some or all of the backed up Plugins and Themes and it will create a single XPI file that you can then install into another copy of Firefox, giving you all your usual tools and themes on any number of installations.
7. Colorzilla -A color picker, use the eydropper just like Photoshop, click on a part of the page and you can select the color of that pixel, very handy when you are told “Just make it match the color of the frob in the corner”.
8. LiveHTTPHeaders – Useful in tracking the actual requests being made to the webserver and the responses being returned.  Very handy in tracking problems with redirections and other fun header hi-jinks.
9. LittleFox – Okay, before you complain, yes, this is a theme, and not a plugin, but I’m the type who wants the maximum real-estate to be available for the page, while still having access to all my tools.  This minimalist theme works great for doing just that.

This is my primary toolkit, I do have a couple of other items I use regularly like Zend Toolbar, and Selenium IDE as well, but these are more specialized tools that I think have a less general audience than those above.

Yes I know, yet another list….but I hope my not so humble opinion will help someone out who might be looking for a solid set of tools for use in developing websites.

I love this.  The folks over at The Blogging Wikia have come up with a great idea.  A Code of Conduct for Blogging, this idea is something that I think can help blogging in general become more “respectable” in the eyes of the general population.  As well as provide a basis for legal defense of bloggers who adhere to it.  It shows that bloggers as a community are concerned with their art/hobby/job and are willing to self-regulate it.  Go ahead over to the wikia, and contribute your thoughts on the topic to the discussion.  Lets make this work.

Well, this is definitely a new experience for me. I think that I have never become an avid blogger solely because I couldn’t stand the web interfaces to any of the major blog systems out there. Cumbersome, slow, limited. But things might be a-changing. I just installed Microsoft Office 2007. And Word can use XMLRPC to communicate with my blog. This could encourage me to write more, as well as post more to the blog. Maybe keep up with current events more. OneNote also will allow me to blog, by sending the page over to Word for editing. Enough for now, let us see what the future brings.

Well, I installed the Vista RC-1 release today.  Started out bad, something messed up and it overwrote the partition that XP was installed on, instead of installing to the other drive.  Then I re-installed XP to the other drive.  And then it was about 2 hours of dicking around with the bootloaders to get it to be able to dual boot.  Now it does.  Then I fired up IE 7 to take a look at my site, and found out that the theme I was using was hideously mangled.  Hence the new theme, just simple and quick until I come up with something better.  But here is the result of all my pain:

Click the image for a full size (1280×1024) Screenshot

What is there to say, it sucks.  I didnt log in for a couple of days and had hundreds of comments, all of them just massive lists of links.  I’m sorry but who actually clicks on those links and buys anything.  My god people.  Stop being such big suckers.  I am also sure that many of these people are the same ones that get taken time and again for Identity Theft.  Frankly, I have no sympathy.  If you are fool enough to buy your v14gr4 from some place that uses a botnet for an advertising service.  Well….lets just say Darwin was on the right track.

I have one thing to say about this….why are they only now doing this. I was using disk encryption to protect sensitive documents 5 years ago in the Military. But they are finally doing the right thing, after having two computers containing sensitive data stolen. Too late folks, building a gate after the horses get out. Not enough for those of us who were put at risk by one or both thefts.

VA to Encrypt All Computers
The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced a plan to encrypt critical data on every laptop computer in the agency within the next month.

According to a release provided to eWEEK by spokesperson Matthew Burns, VA Secretary James Nicholson is announcing a new data security program that will begin immediately.

see also this and this