Bellicose Bumpkin

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Reminder – I’m playing Friday Oct 21 at the Flat Iron Cafe

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Steve Jobs had great vision and a knack for taking existing technology and re-imagining it in a way that appealed to the masses. His products had an undeniable panache and quality. He was the face of Apple and known the world over – he was a rock star.

Lesser known was Dennis Ritchie who died about a week after Jobs. I would argue that Ritchie’s impact on computing was far greater than Jobs and deserves recognition. Ritchie created the C programming language which is still widely used and heavily influenced all modern languages – C++, Java, C# – you name it. He was co-inventor of Unix the most influential operating system of our time. Yes Windows is way more common, but the concepts underlying Unix are ubiquitous in the computing world.

Greats like Ritchie should get the same credit given to the rock stars. And more.

This is my response to an email I got from a friend

> Hi Mark,
>
> I am a faithful reader of your Gazette articles. Thank you for sharing
> your insight on many different subjects.
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Thanks. I apologize for the length of this email. I’m probably over explaining things but want to err on the side of clarity
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> Several months ago, your article focused on PC setups. I recall one
> specific point about those of us using “Comcast.net” or “Verizon.net”
> email addresses, and the need to change when/if we changed provider. So…
> here we are preparing for a switch from Comcast to Verizon and I would
> like to set up an email box that is not hosted by the provider. I was
> wondering if you could give your thoughts on the best service to use for
> email; gmail, yahoo, hotmail…? I note that you have gmail; did you find
> that to be the best choice?

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I think they’re all pretty good. I prefer Google for a couple of reasons. First of all I’m already using a lot of Google services such as the calendar, picasa(online photos), blogger, Google docs, etc. Now let me say you can still use all these things without using Gmail as your primary email simply by having a Google account.
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Using Gmail as your primary email makes Android/Google smartphones such as the ‘Droid more seamless. But my favorite feature of Gmail is that it provides an IMAP interface. This is getting into the realm of geekness but it’s important so I’ll explain it – whether you want to hear it or not. Last time I looked, the only free email provider that supported IMAP was Google. You can check but I don’t think Yahoo or Hotmail supports it.
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There are essentially three ways to access your email. Email providers such as Google, Yahoo, or your work may provide 1 or all of them.

1. Web mail – where you read email with your web browser. Handy in a pinch but limited by the constraints of what a web page is capable of.
2. POP – A protocol for accessing mail via a mail client such as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. POP downloads all messages locally and depending on how it’s configured may remove them from the server. The problem with that is you might read email on multiple computers with each one having a subset of the emails. Plus since emails are on your computer, they’re gone if your computer dies.
3. IMAP – Like POP a protocol for accessing mail with a dedicated mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. The big difference is that mail is stored on the server. It also supports creating mail folders on the server (which POP can’t do). When you connect to your mail server via POP – it downloads the ENTIRE mail including attachments. With IMAP it only downloads the headers (subject, from, date, to, cc). It’s only when you read the mail message that the entire thing is downloaded. This makes IMAP more responsive on startup. Since IMAP keeps the mail on the server (Google), you see the same thing no matter what computer you read mail from, or even if you read sometimes from the web interface. IMAP(unlike POP) will also keep track of what emails you’ve read – so that you don’t have to go through them all multiple times – again if you read email from multiple computers. With things like smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, it is very likely that you WILL be reading email from multiple devices if you aren’t already.

All that said – any of the free email providers will probably work well for you. The big thing, and I’m glad you saw the value of it – is having an email address that won’t change when you change internet providers.
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Whatever you go with, I can help you set it up if you need assistance. The free providers generally have good instructions on setting up mail clients.
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Once you get assimilated into the Google collective, you might check out stuff like Google Calendar. I got everyone in the family to get Google accounts(jake and zach too). I set everybody up with access to each others calendars. Mere mortals might need a little help with this but it is well worth it. The upshot is that Marese and I can add appointments for ourselves and the kids and we can both see it. Very helpful for keeping track of all the sports and junk we have going on. We both use Thunderbird for email which can be wired into the Google calendar. Same with Marese’s new Droid smartphone:
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http://nemasket.net/family-scheduling/
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Sorry for being so verbose but I wanted to be thorough. By the way, I’m turning this email into a blog post – maybe some readers will have different thoughts than mine:
http://nemasket.net/why-gmail/
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-Mark

Warning: The following post may contain techno-babble
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Since moving my blog from blogger to hosting it myself using wordpress, I’ve done a fair bit of monkeying around with the format and features. The goal of course is to have an attractive site, that’s easy to maintain, and has a lot of readers. One thing I’ve tried is sidebars on the right hand side to attract attention to events or significant changes to the site. There are numerous “widgets” that can be plugged into the site in various places depending on the theme. The widget I’ve been using is a text widget for the “What’s new” sidebar. In English that means I can put anything in there but if I want a link, image, etc, I have to manually put it in there myself writing raw html(the language web pages are written in). This is not a problem – I often write in raw html. It does however get tedious even with my super Internet mojo powers. One of my flaws is that I hate to do repetitive tasks and invariably write a program or otherwise automate something once I get bored doing it.
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WP List Cal
So I came across a nifty little plugin called WPListCal. Once installed the WordPress control panel contains a new section for adding and editing events and a new entry for configuring WPListCAl it in the “Settings” section. It shows up after “Posts”, “Media”, “Links”, “Comments” and “Pages”. Basically you enter the event name, link if you have one, date/time and any text you want. That’s it. WPListCal takes care of creating the hypertext link and formats the entry in a consistent way. In the “Settings” section there is a page for customizing the format of a calendar/event entry.

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If you’ve used WordPress, you know that there are two main constructs – Pages and Posts. Each can have attributes to aid in navigation and searching(Categories and Tags). WPListCal creates what looks like a third construct – Events. You create and edit them exactly like Posts or Pages. They have a special field for links, and date/time in addition to the normal text/images you might put into a post. The widget appears along with all the other widgets and can be placed anywhere on the page your theme supports. My “event” widget is named “Notables” and is on the right side of the page.
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So why am I writing about this? I know of at least 4 other web sites in town that use WordPress and I’m just sharing the wealth.

Being a bit of a tech guy, I’m always looking for ways to apply technology to make life easier or to automate mundane jobs. One of my bugaboos has been keeping track of the family schedule. Mrs. Nemasket runs her own Middleboro based business, I’ve got lots of things going on, and the kids have sports and other activities. My wife was generally tracking all this stuff in a weekly planner or on pieces of paper posted in the kitchen – which didn’t do me any good when I was out of the house.

I’m trying Google Calendar as the solution to this problem. All of us have google accounts – which I enabled to use calendaring. There is a pretty usable web interface though usually I view the schedule with Thunderbird – my email client. Out of the box, Thunderbird has no calendaring functionality – it requires the Lightning and Provider plugins. Google Calendar can be configured to send various notifications including text messages to your phone. So – everyone in the family has their own calendar, which is shared with every other member of the family.

This Google-centric solution is working well with my wife’s new smartphone – a Motorola Droid – which runs Google’s Android operating system. The phone hooks into Gmail, gmail contacts, and google calendar pretty effortlessly. Here’s a screenshot of the family schedule as seen from Thunderbird. I’d be interested in how others handle scheduling with their family or small business.

Geek alert
Of course you know by now that Internet Explorer – the default web browser on Microsoft Windows computers – is a horrible, insecure, virus magnet. For those of you who have made the switch to Firefox, I came across a very cool extension today – foxmarks.

One of the design goals of Firefox was that it should be a fast and simple web browser and not be bloated with all sorts of nonsense. To allow for optional functionality, Firefox supports the notion of “extensions”. These are add-on programs that extend – or add functionality to the web browser. There are zillions of extensions.

Now back to the point.

I run Firefox on multiple computers, my laptop, my home computer, my work computer, and others. Keeping the bookmarks(or favorites in IE parlance) synchronized was a chore. Then came Google browser sync – which automatically kept your bookmarks the same on all computers. Add a bookmark at work, go home, start up Firefox and poof – the bookmark is there. Recently I upgraded to Firefox 3 only to find that google browser sync didn’t work and even worse looked like it never would be supported. Oh the pain – it was like being back in the computing stone age – like back when I ran Windows on my computer. Luckily there is a replacement in foxmarks. I installed it today on my laptop and at work – ahhh – there are those bookmarks I’ve been missing.

Firefox is a great web browser and is opposed to the Mashpee Wampanoag casino bingo hall being planned for Middleboro, Massachuetts. Firefox would work extremely well – even for people with too many google alerts looking for things like CasinoFacts.org.