Dev::Blog

I’ve been using Google Reader pretty successfully for the past while now, but up until a few days ago I was just putting my “daily” feeds into it, because, well, mostly because I didn’t know that I could put things into folders.  My PC newsreader app is organized into 5 or so folders, roughly sorted by theme - there’s the “daily” one for feeds that I like to review each day, a “dev” one, a “biz” one, a “veg” one, etc.  Once I knew I could have folders in Google Reader (so the whole “river of news” thing would still follow a theme), I moved my dev folder over, and then things got even better.

You can assign a feed to more than one folder.

Oh sweet malloc(), how nice that is.  I haven’t actually done it yet (the above screenshot is just for demonstration purposes), but I feel better knowing that I could, at any time, read a development blog every day if I so chose to do so.

Thanks, Google!  Now, about sorting news by date with the newest at the bottom…

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, RSS

I got an SMS from Nakama the other day inviting me to fill out a survey. I hardly use the mobile web anymore, since I’m almost always at a computer these days, but I’d been meaning to try something other than just reading news on my phone, so the timing was nice.

The experience wasn’t too bad, but it would have sucked if it was a year ago and I didn’t know that I could easily flip from an SMS with a URL to a browser by hitting Menu -> Go To (in the past I’d type the whole URL, parameters and all, with my keypad). The layout of the survey was well suited to mobile phones and didn’t use up my entire monthly bandwidth allocation, which was also appreciated.

If you’d like to see what it’s like to surf via mobile, I uploaded a video of the first few screens (thus fulfilling my “I’ve been meaning to try YouTube” goal as well). You can check it out here. It’s a little fuzzy - I had a hard time focusing on the phone screen with my camera for some reason - but you should get the idea. This is on Rogers EDGE with a V551. Note the delay between display of the text and the application of the styles…

Technorati Tags: Nakama, mobile

If you’re going to be doing any kind of demonstration from your laptop, in the name of all that’s holy, create a demo user account.  This will accomplish two things:

1. It’ll ensure that you didn’t leave an IM client logged in, and
2. It’ll hide your desktop icons and browser bookmarks (which hopefully aren’t as revealing as this desktop, but will still likely distract from your presentation).

I personally enjoy these kinds of diversions, but I was just reminded of the rules as I IM’d someone who, it turns out, was teaching at the time, and who will no doubt make it my fault when I get home.  Convincing everyone to follow the “make a demo account” rule is the only way I can think of to keep myself out of trouble - changing everyone on the planet is preferable to stopping myself from starting conversations with dirty words… :)

Two changes to my news feed reading style lately - switching from (I can’t remember the name of the desktop app, it’s at home) to Google Reader, and switching to the “river of news” style of reading.  I’ve been trying it out with my “daily” folder (about 30 feeds) for a week or so now, and it’s working pretty well.  Why?  A centralized service means no synchronization problems.  If I ever need to read news offline (which is like maybe three times a year), the stuff’s still getting pulled down to the laptop.
I tried one of the web based aggregators quite some time ago, but didn’t care for the interface, lag, etc.  Google Reader seems to be “good enough” for now, but man, why oh why can’t you sort your news by date so the newest stuff is at the bottom?  Apparently I’m not the only one who’s whined about this, so hopefully that’ll be fixed soon.

I’m still using the desktop app for  my other feed folders (biz, dev, some internal administrative feeds for VP, etc.), but I’m finding I’m checking them much less with the daily stuff taken out, which means I’m still checking feeds too often for my own good, but the overall time I take is much less since when checking out the daily news I don’t feel compelled to read every one of the items in every feed in every other folder.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, RSS

This is kinda funny - Kate Gregory discovered that the system icon in a window’s top left corner isn’t as missing as it first appears to be in Vista.  I wonder if this was a plan to help “legacy” users or if it’s a remnant from the old system that didn’t get cleaned up?

Technorati Tags: Vista

Steven Levy has a piece up in Wired about the birth of the iPod.  It’s really weird to think that the thing’s only existed since late 2001 - about as weird as it is to think that 2001 was 5 years ago.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod

Global Nerdy has a post about extended warranties and why you should avoid them.  I learned a variant of this lesson recently - my mobile phone broke, which should have been good news, since I actually bought the extended warranty.  I don’t usually buy those things, but my purchase at the time was due to my previous phone going through the laundry, which meant there was a chance that the “bathtub curve” (follow the link)  would be too literal at some point.

So yeah, my phone broke, I took it in, and they’re fixing it for free.  I win, right? Heh…

I’m picking the phone up tonight.  I dropped it off for repair a month ago, to the day.  The loaner they gave me (after I begged them) didn’t work.  I’ve been without phone service for the number that’s on my business cards for a month (at least it’s forwarded).  So, take the $75 or so for the warranty, the $50 or so for the monthly bill that I didn’t get to enjoy, and an incalculable sum for the aggravation, and then compare that to the cost of a replacement phone.  eBay suggests that Motorola V551s are going for around $70.

In other words, don’t be like me!  Remember to account for depreciation and the cost of an outage before going for an extended warranty!

…Now what are the odds they fixed BOTH problems I reported?

AJAX, SCHMAJAX… The “Does it run Doom?” test is surely on the way… Link. (via Simon Willison)

I check my mail on at least three computers now (work, home. laptop), so IMAP is really useful for me - centralized access eliminates most synchronization problems, and Thunderbird’s available for most platforms, so my experience is pretty consistent. Consistently crappy, that is - everything worked great, but deleting messages over IMAP took forever. With the amount of spam I get these days, email triage was really sucking.
This morning I noticed things were moving a lot quicker. I was about to email my host’s support team to find out what they did when I realized I’d emptied my trash the day before for the first time since moving to IMAP. There were around 30,000 emails in there. Now things work faster. Go figure.

So there you go - for faster IMAP performance in Thunderbird, empty your trash early and often.

Technorati Tags: IMAP, Thunderbird