Capsule summaries of the companies presenting at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert. 76 reviews continue past the break (click to expand):
Friday, February 1, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
I really love my Kensington 120 Watt Universal Power Adapter. It runs all my computers and charges just about anything everywhere in the world and on planes and in cars too. Work assigned me a new Lenovo T60 which has a wacky new power plug. I couldn’t find one for sale on-line, wrote Kensington, and a few days later had my N29 - even before the laptop arrived.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
I’m migrating to a fresh install of XP, hoping to fix persistent problems like bluetooth not working and other fun stuff. Of course this means reinstalling everything and trying to get prefs files back. Firefox gets a lot of customization, so it sucks…
I got:
“Alert Could not initialize browser’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your browser’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the browser and fix the problem. If you continue to use this browser session, you might see incorrect browser behavior when accessing security features.”
It was a profile migration problem and the offending file was “cert8.db” deleting the old version and reinstalling firefox, which recreates the file solved it. .
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Or why I hate bar phones.
Ass Dialing is when you have a bar phone in your pocket, bend over, and accidentally dial either the last call or something out of your phone book.
My two best ass dialing stories:
1) I had an old qualcomm spoonphone - the early bar phone with the round end with the speaker in it. Very flat and strong. I carried it in my back pocket. I had lunch with this bodybuilder woman I flirted with and she was sitting with her panties exposed. They became a topic of conversation… a conversation my then girlfriend overhead after I ass dialed her. I wasn’t even doing anything with the woman, just flirting, but boy was that embarrassing.
2) Carolyn’s best high school friend is a gay playwright. He wrote most of the plays she did for a long time, and loves to blow straight guys. Before he moved next to the Marine base and had an infinite supply of buff “straight” guys looking for a BJ he had to search for straight guys to blow at porn theaters. One time Carolyn went to pick him up at some porn theater after he was done and ass dialed me. It’s her phone number on the caller ID but all I hear is uh uh uh oh yes oh yesss uh uh uh.
Certainly the best ass-dial I’ve ever gotten. I hate it when someone ass dials me over and over. They’re running through an airport and every time they shift their bag they ass dial again. Another friend kept ass dialing 911.
Me, I don’t ass dial any more. I stick to flip phones.
.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Not too long ago I got on a plane with Thunderbird, having transitioned to IMAP, woke my laptop in flight and found my imap mail cache had gotten borked. Five useful work hours wasted. So in my searches for “Thunderbird Disconnected Problems” I found mention of this program called “Mulberry” that didn’t have these problems. I had looked at Mulberry years ago and it was cool, but fee and Eudora was then current and free so I didn’t try it out. I am so glad I found it again. Mulberry handles disconnected IMAP perfectly, has a fast powerful search, and is well-organized. I’ve had no problems and I’m using it to write this now on an 11 hour flight.
At the outset, it is clear this is the vision of a single programmer not the work of committee and as such it is quirky and has some unique solutions. I wouldn’t say it is more quirky than Eudora but at first one will definitely spend time searching for functions and consulting the somewhat thin documentation. The basics are easy enough, but some advanced features are non-obvious.
Further, Mulberry is Correct. That is it is a fairly precise implementation of just about every mail standard, including some that are still emerging. Not surprising as the author, Cyrus Daboo, has also written some of the key server-side programs that run the web, including some of the really hard bits like the SASL authentication engine I use on my server and one of the most popular IMAP servers. If something doesn’t connect it is because the other program (the server or whatnot) is making a mistake. This is great as far as it goes, but some non-RFC compliant usages have become commonplace and sticking to the RFC can cause problems. An example I found quickly was that the Message-ID: header Mulberry generates is constructed as unique-message-string@[client.dotted.quad] (something like 3499345954.0253243@[192.168.15.101]). This is correct, but the standard is to use @my.smtpserver.com, and using a non-fully qualified extension (the dotted quad, not a valid domain name). The dotted quad looks spammy to spam filters, and in particular when the client is on NATed DHCP, the private IP (192.168.etc) it looks bad. So Mulberry sourced mail might get a slightly higher SpamAssassin score (it is not a fatal test, but it can’t help) and my procmail spam filter looks for disagreement as a test so I can’t email myself notes to my own account - I have to send them to my MIT account. Cyrus says he is going to fix this.
Which brings me to another wonderful feature of Mulberry: it has great support from the mailing list and author. You won’t go more than 24 hours without an answer to the most technical questions. And as it is in active development, any bugs are going to be fixed. Compare this to a MS product where that is not going to happen.
Mulberry’s mail interface took me a little getting used to. For example the mailbox list is organized a little differently and single clicks open new mailboxes in the next pane and the message in the pane below it, but this behavior can all be customized in the Window->Options… menu including, critically for me: do not mark previewed message as read.
Another good trick is automatically moving read messages out of the inbox. I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the sort options: the unread messages always seem to sort in the reverse order of what I want, putting the messages I need at the interface between the read and unread messages, rather than at the top or bottom. But the auto move mechanism works well for my inbox and lets me sort the inbox by date, it being all unread mail, the read mail automatically being moved to an archive.
I spent some time figuring out two wonderful features: Mulberry (along with GCalDaemon) supports off-line calendar sync with Google Calendar (YAY! I can answer email about my calendar while I’m on a plane and even schedule a meeting!) and I can sync to ScheduleWorld’s LDAP server (which syncs to my phone address book and my work Outlook address book). And since I use ScheduleWorld to sync my work Outlook calendar to Google calendar, I’ve got all my important information at hand, even in the air. I wrote up the steps to make these tricks work on the Mulberry Wiki.
Even the search function is fast - entirely tolerable though perhaps not quite real-time like Google Desktop, but then again you don’t need to open inane stupid brain dead IE to perform the search like Google Desktop forces you to.
Mulberry is great. It works really well, it is stable, it works offline (disconnected), it syncs right, it has a very good offline calendar client, IMAP support seems flawless, it has great keyboard shortcuts, and fast advanced search. It does everything I need and it is now free, open source, and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Monday, October 22, 2007
http://forum.maxmind.com/viewtopic.php?t=27 helped, but the real key was hardcoding the database location in geoip.pm line 63: if (! $datafile) { $datafile=”GeoIP.dat”; } to if (! $datafile) { $datafile=”/path/to/GeoIP.dat”; } .
Thursday, October 18, 2007
For years I’ve fought spam with all sorts of techniques, some limited server side tricks in setting my postfix rules to very strict adherence and using RBLs, but ultimately settling on whitelist filtering on my Trusty Eudora client, POPping all that spam over whatever airport international dialup I happened to be on and cursing it even as it disappeared into the UBC folder for bulk deletion.
And I dreamed of the day when I would switch to IMAP and set up all those cool anti-spam server-side techniques I’d been reading about, primarily SpamAssassin. The problem with spam filtering is that it often catches your friends.
So I found this great procmail filter that whitelisted on the server side and sent confirmation requests to unlisted addresses. So I installed Procmail on my server, then SpamAssassin, and rewrote the filter below to do just what I wanted:
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Updating to Courier IMAP 4.2.0_1 broke authentication with SSL on 993 for roundcube (and perhaps others) but not for Thunderbird. The following worked for me:
Change:
TLS_PROTOCOL=SSL3
to:
TLS_PROTOCOL=SSL23
in /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd-ssl
(from this fine site)
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Google desktop search works in IE only? It doesn’t work in firefox? I thought their corporate mantra was “do no evil.” Could they be any more evil than that? HOW LAME! I’d buy X1 if it wasn’t having problems with it’s Thunderbird indexing. Why oh why can’t I just have OnLocation back?
Monday, October 8, 2007
So once, long ago, I moved to IMAP on my server. I wanted to move there with my trusty Eudora client that I’ve been using since about 1993. Sure, I flirted with other mail systems, but they screwed me and what I care about most was:
- Never Lose Data (early versions of Thunderbird were not so good about this for me)
- Search my several gigabyte database of mail fast enough to be useful.
Now outlook is absolutely intolerable about this last point. Search in all Microsoft products, indexed or not, is so painfully slow one might as well go on vacation. It is incomprehensible to me how it can suck so bad. I remember in 1990 using OnLocation and searching my entire computer (all 20MB of it) in a fraction of a second. Sure it was less data, but it was also doing it on a 33Mhz 68030.
Eudora lets me find my mail. Eudora lets me get my job done. Unfortunately Eudora can’t search an IMAP mailbox unless it is connected. WTF?
OK, time for Thunderbird. But Thunderbird is so not ready for prime time. There’s the massive delays to open any of my larger mailboxes, even to show titles (14,000 messages in a mailbox is NOT too many, who uses this? Kids?) Second it gets confused easily communicating with the IMAP server which tends to lock it up indefinitely. Still, it does cache locally and the built-in search, while interminably slow is faster than Microsoft Search (but doesn’t search across accounts! Hello!). I’m hoping Google Desktop Search will help. Initial results are promising. And Penelope could be very cool. Especially if they add indexed search.
One little change I had to make for Thunderbird was given at this fine site:
perl -p -i -e 's/^MAXDAEMONS=40/MAXDAEMONS=80/g' /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd perl -p -i -e 's/^MAXPERIP=4/MAXPERIP=40/g' /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd
