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Back from the Edge

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Last week, I was lucky enough to be involved with the 2009 Edge of the Web conference, which was organised by AWIA and Red Horizon Events here in Perth. We had speakers from around the world, around Australia and from Perth, who all gave great talks to an eager and attentive audience.

My role at the conference was basically to be the room monitor for the main auditorium, which meant that I only really got to see those speaking in that room. As a result, I didn’t really get to see all that I wanted to see, but I can’t complain in the slightest, because there were some fantastic presentations. And I got to see them for free. Which was nice.

So, here’s a brief run-down of who I saw, and what I remember. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to take notes, so some of this is going to be hazy.

Anil Dash (@anildash)

For a few days it looked as though Anil wasn’t going to be able to make it to Perth at all. Some last minute flight shuffling, and some program jiggling saw our opening and closing keynotes swapping. This meant that Anil would be able to come, and I’m fairly sure everyone was glad that he did. It was the perfect opening for the conference: an inspirational call to arms, urging us to embrace the open web and build the apps and sites that people will be talking about. Perth can be isolated, both mentally and physically, and it was great to hear someone talk about breaking the myth of Silicon Valley.

Just a quick time out to thank Anil for his superhuman efforts in coming to speak. He ended up only being in Perth for about 35 hours, and spent 45 hours travelling to do that. I can’t imagine how he felt at the end of the trip. Thanks heaps Anil.

Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy)

Having received the perfect lead in from Anil, Lachlan spoke in depth about the open web, the technologies available and the ethos behind keeping information free from copyright and the patent-lock. A great talk that hopefully encouraged attendees to challenge themselves to use open technologies.

View on slideshare

Dmitry Baranovskiy (@DmitryBaranovsk)

Always entertaining, Dmitry has the knack of making a detailed and technical journey into the world of JavaScript highly entertaining. Quote of the day: “The public scope in JavaScript is like a public toilet. You don’t know who’s done what in there, but if you have to use it, touch it as little as possible”

View on slideshare

Nick Cowie (@nickobec)

Local web legend Nick Cowie gave an informative talk on some of the upcoming features of CSS3, and how well they are supported in local browsers. He had a surprising example of some features that are supported by even the venerable IE6. One for the code monkeys.

View on slideshare

Alex Payne (@al3x)

Alex gave the opening keynote on day 2, and it was a great start to the day (ok, the coffee was the real start to the day). He spoke about how the languages and tools that we use shape the way that we approach our work. Watching Alex’s talk, I was reminded of his tweet from when he was researching the talk:

“Researching tech history is a good reminder not to get too worked up about the tech of today. It mostly looks ridiculous in ten years.” – http://twitter.com/al3x/status/5327550871

While we all love a good language fight every now and then, seeing a laundry list of forgotten languages, specs and companies certainly showed that it’s not worth getting too worked up over.

Quote of the day: “Throw the wallaby over the bush fire.”

View on slideshare

Kevin Yank (@sentience)

Being entirely in love with HAML and SASS I had only paid the slightest of attention towards CSS frameworks. Kevin gave a good run through of what they are, when they’re a good idea, and how they work. I suppose it made an impact, because I actually started using aspects of the 960 Grid on a project at work.

View on slideshare

Ash Donaldson (@ashdonaldson)

Unfortunately, I only got to catch the last part of Ash’s talk, so I can’t really say a great deal about it, except that he has introduced me to an insanely addictive iPhone game: Doodle Jump

View on slideshare

Malcolm Day

After two days of talking about the benefits of various development methodologies and discussions on W3C standards and the like, it was refreshing to hear a talk about money, and to earn it. Malcolm, CEO of Adult Shop (NSFW!), gave an entertaining (and potentially libellous) talk on his journey from being an engineer for a mining exploration company to the CEO of a publicly traded ecommerce company.

Derek Powazek (@fraying)

Wow, what a close! Derek was an exceptional presenter, taking us through the types of “crazy” that we encounter while building communities on the web, and how to deal with each of those crazies. Highly entertaining and hilarious, it was a brilliant end to the conference.

View on Slideshare

I’d like to thank everyone involved in the conference, particularly the AWIA events committee (Myles, Miles, Kay and Helen) for their tireless efforts in putting on a wonderful show. I’d also like to give props to our international speakers, for taking time out of their lives to travel to the other side of the world to give a little something to the Australian Web community.

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Relationships with Random Strangers

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

While it’s difficult coming up with a term for the relationships that we have with people that we interact with online, but not in “meatspace”, it’s harder still coming up with how to describe your relationship with people that A) you’ve never met, and B) you’ve never really even interacted with.

Around a year or so ago, someone posted a link to this photo on Flickr:

duty

Uploaded by Godiex { … } on 20 Dec 06, 1.20PM WST.

Certainly an interesting photo, and one that deserved further investigation. So, I started looking at Godiex’s photostream, and noticed there were a few photos of this girl, who turned out to be his girlfriend. I found her photostream, and then saw this photo

home town

Uploaded by randompanda on 6 Jun 05, 10.41AM WST.

which is a shot of the hill I grew up on (our old house is just around the corner). I thought that was pretty intriguing, and so I added both randompanda and Godiex as contacts.

It turns out that Godiex is an artist from Argentina, and that he and randompanda began a long distance relationship in the comments on a photo on flickr. So, all of a sudden, I’m watching the relationship of two people I don’t know, who met through a photo sharing site. Their photos showed them being apart, randompanda going to live in Buenos Aires, and then the pain of separation when randompanda had to return back to Australia (I presume caused by visa-expiry). I’m guessing I felt an affinity for their situation, as Caren and I spent 10 months of our first 2 years together in different countries.

Through my virtual stalking, it appeared to me that they were waiting for the opportunity to be back together and that all would be well again. Then Godiex posted this photo:

this moon is over

Uploaded by Godiex { … } on 28 May 09, 5.10PM WST.

In the description for the photo he basically said that their relationship was over, effectively being ended by the distance apart. It was weird. Here were two people that I had never met, and only shared the random fact that I grew up in the same town as one of them, and I followed their relationship through the photos they posted. And I was sad that they had made the decision to break up. And it’s clear from the comments on the last photo that there’s a large number of other people feeling the same way.

Well, I hope that these people are still together at least (read the comments on that photo for an amazing story).

Posted in Personal, Web | View Comments

Online backups: How much should you back up?

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Over the past few months, I have been slowly putting together a backup system that uses both local and online storage systems to provide a level of security and peace of mind.

Backup Overview

Using a combination of Super Duper, a couple of backup external HDD’s, Dropbox, Jungle Disk and Amazon S3 I have built up what I think is a relatively comprehensive and reliable backup system.

Local Backups

SuperDuper is a wonderful program that creates bootable mirrors of a hard drive. Effectively what this means is that if a hard drive fails, you can just replace it with the backup copy. You can schedule the backups to run as often as you want, which ensures that your backup copy is fresh and useable in case of a disaster.

And what am I backing up? I have two main drives that I use: The system disk (the built in drive in my iMac which contains all of my work files, personal documents, applications and the Operating System), and an external FireWire800 drive that stores photographs, videos, movies and TV shows.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is basically an online storage system that can be accessed via an API to upload, manage and retrieve data. Amazon charges for both the uploading of data (US$0.10 per Gb), and then for the actual storage of that data. The uploading charge is a one off cost, and the storage costs are charged monthly (US$0.15 per Gb per month).

Jungle Disk

One downfall of S3 is that it’s not actually setup to be used without additional software to manage the mechanics of the backups. Step up Jungle Disk. It’s pretty simple software: you give it your S3 account details, tell it what to backup, when to back it up and it will go ahead and take care of it for you. Simple. And then you get your monthly bill from S3. Nothing else to do.

One big downside of the whole online backup setup is the time it takes to actually backup any large amount of data, and that’s a limitation of my internet connection more than anything else. When you’re uploading 100+Gb, be prepared for a bit of a wait :)

The cost of Amazon S3

While the monthly cost of the Amazon S3 service makes it a perfect online backup solution for data that you would class as priceless (photos, videos of the kids, work files, personal documents), when it comes to backing up stuff that can be easily replaced at a relatively low cost, such as iTunes TV shows and Movies, there soon comes a point where it’s not actually economically feasible to use online storage.

iTunes TV Shows

The average 1 hour (42 minutes of network TV) HD episode of a TV show on iTunes is about 1.4Gb. In addition to this, you also get an iPod/iPhone compatible SD version which is generally 600Mb. So, a single TV show is effectively 2Gb of data that needs to be backed up.

What is the cost of backing this file(s) up? Well, there’s a US$0.20 charge for uploading it to Amazon S3 initially, and then a US$0.30 charge per month. At that rate, it only takes 10 months of storing the data online until you’ve actually paid for the file twice. This means that if you lost the original file 12 months after you first bought it, you’d actually be better off buying the file again.

This effectively renders online backups for iTunes TV Shows pointless, considering how often you’re actually likely to watch a TV show, and also how cheap the cost of having a local HDD mirror is.

iTunes Movies

Currently iTunes Movies are only available in SD (boo to the movie studios and Apple for this one) so the files aren’t as large as they could be, but they’re still pretty sizable, weighing in at 1.67Gb for the recent “The Dark Knight”, which cost US$14.99. And how long until it’s not feasible to store this on Amazon S3?

At the purchase price, it would take 4.99 years until you’ve paid twice. However, Apple drops the price of new release films to $9.99 after about 4-6 months, so the replacement cost is greatly reduced. At this price the cut-off becomes 3.33 years. Obviously this timeframe requires a judgement call as to whether or not it’s worth it. Personally, I’d rather just trust my local HDD backups.

iTunes/Amazon Music

Music files are obviously considerably smaller than video files, and as such are going to incur a greatly reduced monthly fee for storage. Your average iTunes album costs approximately US$9.99 and is generally around 110Mb. This small size means that it will actually take about 49.95 years until it’s been paid for twice, buy which point you’ll either be A) dead, or B) listening to music on your personal bone implant that plays whatever music you want that’s being broadcast by SkyNet.

So, music is one area where it’s probably economical to maintain an online backup of your files, particularly considering how annoying it would be to go and re-purchase the 800+ albums you’ve got in your library in the first place.

Other possible solutions and problems.

Whenever you’re talking about local HDD backups, it’s always worth considering a Drobo, which is a redundant array of HDD’s that theoretically keeps your data happy and safe. I don’t have a Drobo, but I know that users who have one swear by them.

The one problem with local backups is that, of course, they are susceptible to local threats, e.g. fire and theft. There’s no point in having duplicate hard drives that slavishly mirror each other if some reprobate comes along and pilfers them both. Which means you need a third mirror, that you store off-site. Which in turn means you need a fourth drive that you store off-site in rotation with the third one. An endless cycle.

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Posted in Development, Tech, Web | View Comments

Edge of the Web: Ben Buchanan

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Although it only seems like yesterday that I got back from Sydney and the wonderful Web Directions South, things are rapidly heating up for Perth’s own Web Conference: Edge of the Web, taking place at the UWA Club on November 6 and 7, 2008 – tickets available now!.

There is a huge list of international and national speakers on the program, one of whom is Ben Buchanan. I recently conducted a short email interview with Ben, talking about some of the subjects that he’ll touch upon in his talk Hacking Humans: Advocating for a better web

Q: Is there a disconnect between how our clients see what we do, and how we actually work?

A: I think there is. For example I think as a group web developers are diverse, interesting and definitely creative thinkers; but many clients are dismissive of developers.

Professionally, we use lateral thinking and creative problem solving on a daily basis. Building a system also requires a solid understanding of the business it supports – so developers often have a well informed and fresh perspective about a business. The potential benefits can easily go beyond the boundaries of web systems.

But the view of web developers as boring functionaries means many bosses or clients don’t really listen to their web geeks, and their business suffers as a result. In projects, geeks should be involved from strategy onwards and not just brought in at the end to grind out some code.

Q: What can we do to help bridge that divide?

A: Well I think the problem does stem from a grain of truth – and geeks can be pretty dismissive of people who are less technically competent, which isn’t helpful. We need to take a look at the way we present our achievements and ideas; and what role we step up to play in our professional dealings. Are we coming across as roadblocks or problem solvers? If we can adjust that then it might open up better working relationships.

Q: Do you think that the way that web professionals can approach the “process” can dehumanise the people we’re building the site for – the end users?

A: There’s a danger of letting technical or resourcing issues distract from the humans who need to use the final product. We can be a bit too clinical and detached from the real, live people and what they’re trying to do.

People don’t go looking for a school location database, they go looking for a great school for their kids. They don’t look for an online store, they look for a cool gift their partner will love. We should think and build accordingly.

I think it shows when a system was built for the human stuff, as opposed to sites and systems built because “we have to have a website”.

Q: Managing expectations is obviously an important part of the job. Have you got any advice for new players?

A: This is a bit of a “depends” question, because it’s driven by the culture and people you’re dealing with. But when people ask if something can be done, I am a believer in speaking the truth and explaining the options available. Because ultimately anything is “possible”, it’s just a matter of having enough time, people and money!

What people really need to know is what’s possible in the current scenario and what they can do to achieve their goals. That might mean guiding them through a prioritisation process – if they’re asking for fifty things, they probably don’t need fifty things, at least to start with.

It’s not about being negative, it’s about being realistic and focussed.

Ben is just one of a range of awesome speakers who are going to be presenting at Edge of the Web on the 6th November. On the following day, there are 4 half-day workshops on a diverse range of topics.

And then, to cap the two days off in style, Friday night sees the WA Web Awards, where, in a burst of glorious self congratulation, the best of the WA Web industry are recognised for their efforts. Get your tickets here.

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Web Directions South 08

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

So, thanks to the fine people at 5 Senses Coffee, I trundled over to Sydney for Web Directions South 08.

Thursday, 25th September 2008

Opening Keynote – Lynne Johnson

Boo. So mismatched to the audience it wasn’t amusing in the slightest. If we were a bunch of magazine publishers from 2003, then it might have been interesting, but we weren’t, and so it wasn’t.

Derek Featherstone

Nubbins. Yay!!

I’ll just pretend that the opening keynote didn’t happen, and that this was the start. It’s always good to see someone who A) has command of their field and B) is a great presenter. Totally comfortable on stage, and thoroughly knowledgeable about his topic, which he managed to make seem almost exciting, which is pretty hard for what is essentially a dry topic.

iPhone Development

Tim Lucas and Pete Ottery worked on the iPhone Site and did a good presentation on some of their experiences. Perhaps because I had already started on the iPhone site for 5 Senses and I had already encountered most of those problems, I didn’t really come away with much. But that’s cool, because it was an intro level talk, not for an iPhone Dev Conference or anything.

JavaScript Libraries/Frameworks

Yeah, good times, much laughter, fun, and frivolity, and then when Cameron rolled out the Drum Machine – FUCKING BRILLIANT.

I’m not sure if I actually learned anything, except that just about everyone is using jQuery, and those of us still on Prototype are mocked mercilessly.

August de la Rejos

Hmmm, ok, but hold the ads.

An interesting talk about the progress of user interaction with computers, as well as the psychology behind it, that had some wonderful videos outlining potential future developments, but was undermined by the fact that they were MicroSoft corporate videos. Oh well.

WebJam8

Bucketloads of awesome, mixed in with tasty beverages, fine companies that sponsored the tasty beverages, fine talks, and conversation. Mad times. Cannot wait until WebJam 9 as part of Edge of the Web

Friday, 26th September 2008

Jeffrey Veen

Hot. Wired.

Awesome talk about visualising data, and what good design can achieve. Memorable, and featuring the entirely wonderful Gapminder World

Gina Bolton

No. Not good. I don’t know if Gina has a ninja like mastery of CSS (I’m guessing she does since she consults/designs for companies like Apple and has written a book), but statements like “from what I’ve heard when talking to developers, computers start counting at 0” doesn’t make code-monkey happy.

A thorough understanding of your topic, and avoiding statements like “I haven’t checked the blogs for a month or so, so I don’t know if the CSS3 Working Recommendation has been ratified or not.” Seriously!

Michael™ Smith

Not too bad. Bit of a laundry list. Of course, any recitation of the trials and tribulations of HTML 5 isn’t really going to be anything but dry. Still, good to hear for the most part. However, the take away from this, Gina’s and Douglas Crockford’s talk is that it’s been 10 years since any successful revision to HTML, CSS or ECMAScript, which just instills wonderful amounts of trust and faith in committees.

And really? Michael™ What is this – Burning Man?

Myles Eftos.

Huzzah! The madpilot flew like a crazy bastard over the top of the dangerous territories of OpenID and OAuth. And if that isn’t enough, he launched incursions into HTTP 1.1 as well as REST and SOAP. Lucky for all he came back unharmed.

Douglas Crockford

Good. Real code. Real ideas.

And scary. (We are so totally screwed if even half of what he was saying comes to fruition.)

Mark Pesce

Oversold. A fishing basket full of “ok, but meh”. One of the apparent pitfalls of giving what, from all accounts, was an amazing presentation at WDS07 that inspired everyone who went, is that the next year expectations are particularly high. When those expectations aren’t met (probably through no fault of Marks) it leaves people underwhelmed. I didn’t necessarily agree with the central theme of the presentation (that twitter and the like are going to transform society and its’ institutions), so that didn’t help.

One thing I will say is that if you need to make a point that you aren’t going to do next year’s closing keynote, you probably shouldn’t be doing this years.

A slight down to end on.

DRINKS!!!!!

Wheee! All that needs to be said can be summed up in these two tweets that I, um, twitted.

Salad is what food eats

09:19 PM September 26, 2008 from twitterrific

Has teh drunk on. Hi meat lady!

12:18 AM September 27, 2008 from twitterrific

Would I go again?

Totally. As we are no doubt about to find out, running a conference is a tricky thing. Getting a mix of the right speakers, hoping they are all in top form, and cultivating the vibe is no doubt a difficult thing. I had a great time in Sydney: I met some great people, learned lots, felt inadequate (I mean, you’re talking to Douglas Crockford over a beer … what do you say?), and saw a Europe video on a large screen.

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The Slow Decline of Internet Explorer and Slower Rise of Firefox

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

For the past 8 years or so, 5 Senses Coffee has been both a client of mine, and for the last 15 months, my employer. The public face of that work is the main website, which sells coffee, teas and other wonderful items. I’d like to think that the visitors to the website are a pretty good spread of the general population of the internet, not necessarily too technical/web based, and not too “Hey, what’s this internet thing all about?”

Every now and then a story will appear in my feed reader about the use of one browser being higher than another, and more often than not, that site has a skewed audience, which means that it’s users are more likely to have the latest and greatest than other, less browser obsessed users.

So, bearing in mind that this probably has no relationship to the wider world than any other site, here is the browser share of visitors to the 5 Senses Website over the past 21 months.

Q1 2007 Q2 2007 Q3 2007 Q4 2007 Q1 2008 Q2 2008 Q3 2008
Internet Explorer 77.16 67.15 64.63 64.76 65.26 60.81 59.72
Firefox 16.93 25.33 28.25 25.98 25.62 29.29 29.79
Safari 4.36 5.63 5.87 7.9 7.46 8.35 9.05
Opera 0.74 0.82 0.58 0.74 0.98 0.89 0.94
Other 0.81 1.07 0.67 0.61 0.67 0.66 0.50
Browser share as a per centage for visitors to www.fivesensescoffee.com.au

And the breakdowns for the various versions of Internet Explorer, where “IE x” is all versions other than IE 6 and IE 7.

Q1 2007 Q2 2007 Q3 2007 Q4 2007 Q1 2008 Q2 2008 Q3 2008
IE 6.x 72.85 56.87 53.43 50.93 40.88 32.79 31.08
IE 7.x 26.4 42.5 46.2 48.83 58.93 67.02 68.82
IE x 0.75 0.62 0.37 0.24 0.18 0.18 0.10
Versions of Internet Explorer as a per centage for visitors to www.fivesensescoffee.com.au

and FireFox.

Q1 2007 Q2 2007 Q3 2007 Q4 2007 Q1 2008 Q2 2008 Q3 2008
FF 1.x 6.38 3.96 3.49 2.33 1.61 1.19 1.18
FF 1.5.x 34.37 4.95 4.95 3.04 2.49 1.21 0.79
FF 2.x 59.25 91.56 91.56 94.52 94.73 89.47 51.28
FF 3.x 0 0 0 0.11 1.17 8.13 46.75
Versions of Firefox as a per centage for visitors to www.fivesensescoffee.com.au

What is evident from these numbers is that while IE is still the dominant browser, with almost 2/3rds of market share, Firefox has been slowly and steadily increasing. But not necessarily at the same rate that IE is losing share. Firefox seems to be losing a bit of ground to other browsers, namely Safari.

The interesting number is that Safari has doubled over the sample period. True, it’s still third by more than a few lengths, but it seems to be taking some of those gains from IE. I’m guessing this is mainly due to the increased market share of Apple in general, and not some massive use of Safari on MS Windows.

Other, possibly unrelated points that can be extracted is that FireFox users are more likely to upgrade their browser than IE users. This can be seen by the almost complete drop off in FF 1.5x users at the beginning of the timeframe, and the rapid rise of FF 3.x in the last 3 months, to the point that it almost equals FF 2.x. That said, there certainly appears to be some die-hard holdouts for FF 1.x, who are disappearing at a slower rate than those still using FF 1.5.x

So, not a scientific sample and/or analysis by any stretch, but still interesting. The surprising item here is the doubling in share of Safari (which, in the authors less than humble opinion is the best browser there is.) True, it didn’t have far to go to double that share, but it still had to be done.

The upshot of all of this is that, unfortunately, there is still a large portion of the internet population still using IE 6 (approximately 20% of all visitors it seems), so it still needs to be supported, or those people need to be encouraged to migrate upwards. How do we do that? Well, your guess is as good as mine.

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Yahoo! Maps – Fully Suck

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

Flickr has long had geotagging support, which is a great way of being able to browse photos for a particular town/region/whatever. However, if you’re in Australia, geotagging your photos with the Flickr map service boils down to blind luck. The maps are so bad as to be beyond useless, and in fact are laughable. Here is the highest resolution map for the western suburbs of Perth, Western Australia:

Great huh? I mean, that light grey blob really helps you work out where you are, as well as that thing that might be a road.

So, way to compete with Google there Yahoo!

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Lolcat Sandman

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

I happened across a screendump of a 4Chan thread today that had lolcat pictures that matched up with the lyrics of Enter Sandman. Someone posted a comment saying that they’d love to see it with the soundtrack. So, I fired up iMovie and bingo: Lolcat Sandman.

Of course, the music copyright is owned by Metallica, but I actually had to go and buy it from iTunes because I’d deleted my “unofficially obtained” copy a while back.

UPDATE

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I got a takedown notice from Warner Music Group, via YouTube. I used the YouTube tools to remove the soundtrack. Sorry.

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Posted in Funny, Music, Web | View Comments

Gmail and MobileMe – Living Together in Perfect Harmony

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

I’ve been using Gmail for about 4 years now, and it’s pretty much become the centre of my email life, with my various email accounts being funneled into Gmail. I’ve used it with both the web client, and Mail.app on my Mac via IMAP, and have been pretty happy with both.

With the release of MobileMe and the iPhone 3G I made the decision to move to MobileMe (an Apple fanboi at heart, I wanted to keep it all within the one happy family – particularly seeing as work just bought me a MacBook Air.) But I was really reluctant to stop using Gmail as the repository of all of my email, both received and sent (awesome search, archiving and just to have a backup on another server).

It’s relatively easy to setup forwarding from Gmail through to MobileMe, which you then add to your mail client (Mail.app on the Mac) and the mail will come in as per normal. But this would mean that any sent items won’t appear in Gmail, which in turn means that Gmail is only storing half of the picture. But with adrianlynch doing most of the legwork, we were able to work out a solution.

There are quite a few little things that need to be done in order to fine tune the setup, particularly if you want to use multiple email addresses. I’ll cover those, and then get to the meat of the setup.

Multiple email addresses in Gmail.

Gmail has had the ability to support multiple email accounts for quite a while, and it all works quite well. First of all, sign into gmail, then go to the settings -> Accounts tab. The bet we’re interested in is the “Send Mail As” bit. You can add all of the email addresses you want to have gmail send email for in here. Gmail will send a confirmation email to the address you enter (just to make sure that you are in fact billg@microsoft.com).

Setting up the email forwarding

There are two ways to forward email in Gmail. One is in the Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, which will forward every message to the address you specify. The other way is via a Filter (Settings -> Filters). I prefer to use the filter, because it allows me to get rid of some of the cruft mail that I don’t really ever want to see again (eg, one of my mail accounts flags spam as *SPAM* … if I didn’t setup a filter to not forward this, I’d receive all of those emails in MobileMe, which is sub-obptimal to say the least).

Setting up your computer

Of course, this assumes you’re using a Mac. If not, I’m sure you’re a smart enough person to work it out :)

MobileMe setup

First up, add your MobileMe account. It’s pretty simple. Just enter your MobileMe account details (same as your old .Mac account), and it should all be jake.

If you’ve setup gmail to handle multiple email addresses, enter them all in the “Email Address” field, separated by commas.

Gmail setup

Now, you need to add your gmail account to the system, as an IMAP account. Follow the instructions on the Google Help Center

Once you have added the account Mail.app will probably start downloading all of your mail from Gmail, which could take a fair while. This may or may not be something you want: your choice.

After the mail has all downloaded, go into the Advanced tab for the Gmail account in Mail.app, and uncheck “Enable this account.”

Then, go back into your MobileMe account and set the outgoing SMTP server to smtp.google.com. All of your sent mail will now go through Gmail, which is great for archiving purposes. Because MobileMe is an IMAP server, it will automatically be copied up to the MobileMe server (because it’s storing a copy in your Sent Items folder on your Mac), which means it’s then available on all the computers you use MobileMe with, including your iPhone / iPod Touch.

Why did I enter the multiple email addresses?

If you have multiple email addresses, and you entered them all in the “Email Address” box earlier, you will now have the option to choose which address to send your mail as when you create a new message.

There’s one little gotcha here, and it’s why I mentioned setting up the addresses from within gmail before. If you try to send a message from an email address that Gmail doesn’t “know” about, it will replace the sender email with your Gmail address. This is obviously to stop you spoofing your address, but it took me a little while to work that bit out. So, just make sure that you’ve defined all the addresses that you want to “Send As”

Setting up your iPhone / iPod Touch.

Once you have the above system up and working, you can basically mirror that setup on your iPhone. You need to create both accounts under “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” in the Settings application. Then disable the Gmail account, and set the outgoing SMTP server to gmail in the MobileMe setup.

Push Goodness.

If everything has gone according to plan, you should now have your Gmail “pushing” to your iPhone, and also appearing on your computer. And if you have multiple macs, and have sync turned on for “Mail Accounts” and “Mail Rules and Smart Folders”, then you will shortly have those settings on both of your computers.

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Freezing Rails with Git

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Now that the Ruby On Rails team has moved the codebase over to github, some of the standard rake tasks aren’t working the way that they used to. When it was on SVN, it was possible to type

rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-1

and the appropriate version would be copied into your vendor/rails directory.

Now if you do that, rake downloads a zip of the edge release. Which is fine and all, but sometimes you don’t want to be on edge … like in any production site.

So, I found a screencast that goes through the process, but I thought I’d actually put the text into a post, mainly for my own reference more than anything else.

$ rails path_to_app


$ cd path_to_app


$ git init


$ git submodule add git://github.com/rails/rails.git vendor/rails

At this point, git will effectively clone the repository, so that you can then choose one of the branches to “freeze” to. Type “git tag” to get a list of all the available tagged branches. Choose the one you want and type

$ git checkout v2.1.0

And that’s it. Slightly more involved than the old way, but still none too shabby.

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