Reveal is an extension for Firefox which does a thumbnailed timeline view of your open tabs or browser history. It works well and is useful.
But hidden in the extension is also this fantastic little zoom utility. All you do is triple-click anywhere in a page and a mangified box area appears. You can then move it around and use the scroll wheel on your mouse to control the level of zoom. Handy for images and small text.
A good deal of buzz going around on how feeds (aka RSS) are hard to subscribe to. I am working on a feed project and I agree that feeds are hard. The only way I subscribe to feeds at present is via the convoluted process of setting Firefox up with LiveLines and pointing it at my Bloglines account. Not a chance my mom will be bothered to do that.
So what will make it easier?
How about using your email address? Most internet users have one now, most who do also understand how to use email. Email is more complicated than feeds if you get right into it but thanks to its penetration and prevalence in everyday conversations and business it has become easy(ish). Plus it is based on snail mail which goes back awhile.
I haven’t thought it through yet (I want you to trample on the idea and kick the bad bits in it) but it would be lovely if my mom could subscribe to a feed via her email address. Not have the feed items delivered via email like some systems do, no. Just make the email address the feed subscribtion enabler (”subscribe feedX to joe@schmoe.com”.) So really it is an ID associated with you that your feed reader can use as well.
Technically on first glance whoever captures your email for feed subscription would have to forward onto some central feed system that knows to send it to your Bloglines/Feeddemon/Attensa/Newsgator/Windows/Apple/Google feed account.
The first major objection I see to this idea is spam. As soon as you hand out the ability to send subscriptions there is going to be spam involved. Still, we are dealing with spam in email well enough and I don’t see the lack of spam as such a huge benefit to feeds (froth and yell at me all you like on that one.) And as feeds get more commercial even without sending feed subscriptions you are going to see more and more spam in your subscribed feeds. Sure, you can unsubscribe but that feed might have items you want.
The idea has problems but we have to get talking on this issue. How does my mom subscribe to feeds?
I have taken the plunge and started using GMail as my main email client. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything different on your end, there is no change to my email address. I simply set my email hosting to forward all email sent to paulmwatson.com to my GMail account. Emails from me will still be from paul@paulmwatson.com too, not a GMail address.
For my personal email I was previously using Thunderbird on a laptop that stayed at home. I could access my personal email from work through the bare-bones Iloha webmail interface that TextDrive provides but it really isn’t very good. Plus when I got home and fired up Thunderbird all the emails I had read that day in Iloha would be downloaded and marked as unread. A generally unsatisfying solution.
I will probably run Thunderbird every few days to sync with GMail so that I have an offline store of my email.
So GMail it is for all personal email. Wish me good fortune!
InfoWorld: Other companies are providing ALM tools, such as Rational and Borland. What are you going to be doing that they’re not providing? Would you say you have more of a Windows focus than they have?
Somasegar: I think the big value proposition that we bring to the table, much more than anybody else, is integration. Our tools work together well against one single integrated [store].
from Q&A: Microsoft’s Somasegar touts value of ALM platform at Infoworld.
Frankly that is exactly what stopped us from using Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server from Microsoft; its single, focused, no-other-providers model. It is a monolothic tool chain and while it has an API of sorts it doesn’t work with the rest of TSSG’s development environment. Our central code repository is Subversion, which is excellent, and VSTS won’t work with it. I imagine add-ins will be made over the coming months and years but right now TFS is too closed for us and VSTS only understands one language, the Microsoft one. Such a pity.
It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
A wonderful passage from Atonement by Ian McEwan. Relevant to these past few days, weeks, months and years of cultural turmoil. The guy in the other trench is as real as you.
My uncle died today; Steven Cooper.
He is the last of my relatives that I thought would die young. He died aged 63 from cardiac-arrest after triple-bypass surgery. While running the Comrades Marathon 15 years ago he had a heart-attack. He had bypass surgery then but has been fine ever since. The doctors today said that they simply couldn’t repair the damage, arteries too gone to salvage. They did their best but we just don’t know enough.
Uncle Steve was a wonderful man, an uncle a boy is fortunate to have. I’ll remember him well. From our fishing trips on Kariba dam to the time he took me up to 60kph in his motor-boat on the Zambezi river, just the two of us. The times at his his home in Bulawayo, beers by the swimming pool and G&Ts next to the tennis court.
My aunt, Aunty Gwen, must be distraught and my dad is pretty wrecked over it too. My love to all of them and I hope I can make it down for the funeral. It’s tough being on the other end of the world.
Google keep rolling out GTalk and GMail features that make sense. They aren’t fun but useless features like the Winks of MSN Messenger but rather core ideas that make communications better. Today’s is GMail Chat.
For a long while I have wanted my email and instant-messaging conversations to be integrated. Why they are separate in the first place is simply down to technological factors, not conceptual.
GMail Chat firstly does the simple but critical recording of all your GTalk chats. So you can always view your GTalk IM conversations through your GMail interface. Currently IM logging is poorly supported in every other IM app. MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, like most, simply records to XML files on the local computer. So if you use your IM client from multiple clients then your logs are spread out across several computers. Daft.
The next feature GMail Chat aims to roll out is IM in your GMail interface. So you won’t even need GTalk, you just chat to your mates within GMail. Obviously this isn’t ideal for some chats but for chatting from any location without installing anything it is a great idea.
And all integrated. Your email, your IM, your contacts for both, one big happy family.
Now if only more people used GTalk. Get me on paulmwatson@gmail.com.
Toyota, Apple, Blackberry, Sprint, HP, Ford. These are the brands of the good guys in 24.
On the flip side are the brands of the bad guys. BMW and Mercedes being the two main ones. It is cute seeing a Toyota* out maneuver a 5 series BMW.
All this brand placement reminds me of cowboy hats. White and black, good and bad. You never had any doubt.
* I own and drive a Toyota. Best damned cars on the planet. They just can’t out drive BMWs.
For my sins I thank thee, for they have kept me from death,
while my virtues, they have brought me closer.
(Not how I feel but just a thought I had about some peoples’ lives.)
There are moments when I truly love programming. Those moments of slip sliding through code and getting results.
And then there are those programming moments when I place my forehead on the cool wood of my desk and begin to sob. I normally am found muttering “Why is it so obscure! So opaque! So unhuman!”
This is one of those moments which started as a former moment.
How do you get the description of a book through the Amazon Web Services? I can get the title, ISBN, authors, ASIN and even the publisher but nowhere can I find out how to get the description. All I want is the description. It should be right after title, nestled lovingly between it and authors. It is essential data. Without it there is no book. But for the life of me I cannot find the property, method, array or interface to get the description.
Why is programming so obscure at times?
Daily bits...