Category: Revelation

Help me lazyweb!

Update: See my next post for what I think is a solution.

(I’ve noticed a bunch of people using the term “lazyweb” to mean throwing your question out to a web based audience who might know the answer off the top of their heads either instead of or as well as attempting to research the answer yourself. Works for me.)

I bought two new external drives – one to use as a TimeMachine drive for our laptops, and one to act as a Linux backup disk. I’ve had terrible luck with external USB drives – I’d say fewer than 50% have actually worked right for what I want them for, which is sitting idle 20 hours a day and then doing a nightly backup using rsync. And it’s always the fault of the enclosure, not the drive – ripping the drive out and using the drive as an internal drive and/or putting a new drive in the enclosure has proven that beyond a doubt. So this time I bought Seagate “FreeAgent”s – I figured if Seagate made the drive and the enclosure, there could be no doubt whose fault it was if it didn’t work.
Continue reading “Help me lazyweb!”

Joel on Software

The more I read Joel on Software, the more I’m convinced that if there software jobs in heaven, they’ll look an awful lot like this. Today’s post, called Evidence Based Scheduling, is just one example of the sort of nirvana that I’m hoping awaits me after death if I’ve been sufficiently good, because I sure as hell haven’t seen anything like it in this life.

I’ve certainly seen my share of the ones he gives as bad examples. The schedules passed down from above. The “I’ll give them 30% less time than they said it would take, and then creep the feature list” managers who think it’s motivating to put you under stress, the managers who do the same and then put the blame on you when the project is late, the projects with no schedules and no clear deliverables, but which still manage to make you feel like you’re not producing enough, the “fire 30% of the team but don’t change the schedule” managers, the “if you guys were any good you wouldn’t need so much time for debugging” managers (who not coincidentally are the ones who didn’t give you any time for designing up front), the ones who are as fickle as the wind when it comes to deciding what features are absolutely 100% necessary to win this customer (who turns out to have already decided to go with your competitor), and the “compile it, run it once, deliver it to the customer and if they complain, roll them back to yesterday’s build” ones.

Yes, that’s what life is like down here on earth.

Gmail on my Treo

Now that Gmail supports IMAP, I got it working on my Treo. W00t! It’s pretty simple, but you have to use SnapperMail (the expensive version that supports IMAP rather than the cheap version that doesn’t). I created a new account. Obvious stuff under “Your Name” and “Email Address”. Under Server:

  • Incoming Mail:
    • IMAP4 Server: imap.gmail.com
    • Username: yyyyy@gmail.com
    • Password: zzzzzzz
  • Outgoing Mail:
    • SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
    • Username: yyyyy@gmail.com
    • Password: zzzzzz

Then click the “More…” button. Change the IMAP port to 993, and the SSL option to “Always Secure (wrapped port)”. Change the SMTP SSL option to “Always Secure (STARTTLS)”. I made a couple of other changes but they didn’t stick, and it’s still working.

The best thing is that if like me you’ve got filter options that label things and skip the inbox, IMAP treats those labels like folders so you can sync them as well. And if you delete something on your Treo, it gets archived but not deleted on GMail.

I can’t wait to see how well this work with the new Leopard Mail.app. I hated the way Mail.app worked with multiple accounts and multiple folders in Tiger, but I’m told that’s all fixed now.