kate's infrastructure

I certainly have a tendency to stick to software I know when it comes to the basics.  If I’m not right in amongst it every day, I tend to stick to what works.  This is how I’m still using FTP clients from earlier in the decade.  But sometimes you had the break the rut and look for something a little better.

This is how I happened upon uTorrent:

I was using Azureus Vuze for years and years prior to that – it worked.  But it also deviated from my core use which was simple one-off downloads now and then.  Where vuze finally failed for me was the combination of the inevitable patch and restart cycle coupled with the bloated home screen with content promotion. 

uTorrent by comparison is an absolute pleasure to use.  It’s visually simple, yet covers all functions I’d expect in a very straight-forward manner.  Basically, the notion of a single function tool providing a single function extremely well, and doing nothing else, is quite outstanding.

The final feature I really like about uTorrent is also one of the simplest – the system tray notifications of a completed download are a really nice, simple touch.  uTorrent seems to understand the users who see bittorrent as a background process, rather than a point of focus.

I’m going to choose to completely overlook why you might like a bittorrent client, and accept simply that you do.  You should probably check out the (very tiny!) and useful uTorrent.

As a compulsive domain buyer, I never felt that compelled to actually move off my old GMail account as my primary email.  It worked well enough, and I got to avoid making any big decisions about which domain would be my favourite.

Still, it seemed like I was missing out a tad.   Gmail is no longer invite only for the tech elite, and prior to that distraction I was using my own domain for email over 10 years ago. 

The irritating thing also was that even though I was using my domain via GMail, it looked bad:

In short, it was time.

I wanted to document the wonderfully simple process I used to make the move, in the hope that someone else might find it useful.

To get started, I assume that you’re already using Google apps for your domain and that you’re up and running at the new location.  If not, you’ll need to do that now.

If you’re like me, you’re primarily using GMail from the website, and even if your mail is downloaded to a few computers, it’s all in cloud.

Now let’s get get GMail ready for the exit:

• Log on to http://gmail.google.com/ with your existing gmail account;
• Go To Settings;
• Click on the tab called Forwarding and POP/IMAP;
• Under the section called POP Download, select the following:
  1. 1. Ensure that Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) is checked;
  2. 2. When messages are accessed with POP archive Gmail’s copy;
  3. 3. [Nothing required here – we’ll use Google Apps as the mail client]
• Click Save Changes 

This means that we’ve made all of your GMail messages available for download from someplace else.  It also means that anything downloaded will be Archived by GMail – so you’ll know what’s been transferred.

And the next step is to tell your domain to transfer your mail over from GMail:

• Log on to your new google apps mail account at https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com or similar;
• Go To Settings;
• Click on the tab called Accounts;
• Under the section called Get mail from other accounts, select the following:
1. Click Add a mail account you own;
2. A popup window will appear;
3. Enter your GMail address at the prompt, Click Next;
4. Enter your GMail credentials;
5. The POP server should default to smtp.gmail.com – this doesn’t need to change;
6. Check the box marked Always use a secure connection…;
7. Check the box marked Label incoming messages (this will make things MUCH easier later);
8. I didn’t check the box for archiving incoming messages, but you might prefer to;
9. Click Add Account; 
• Click Save Changes;
• Your mail in your Gmail account should begin downloading (oldest first) immediately – the rate doesn’t exceed 200 mails an hour, so expect the transfer to take a while.  Mine took over a week;
• Remember we chose to archive mail in Gmail as it’s transferred, meaning you should start to see the quantity of mail in that account reduce;

You can choose to remove this link later,  but I found it easiest just to leave it as is.

Other stuff I learned:

• Importing and Exporting mail filters was easy and totally worthwhile;
• Contacts were perfectly exported, imported and useful;
• GTalk chat logs aren’t transferred;
• I really should have cleaned up my gmail inbox a bit first – preferably by more frequently deleting or archiving the mail I no longer need;

My dreams of the vanity domain and google apps have successfully been realised.

If the Australian filter goes ahead, this isn’t a bad option:

http://www.kinfrastructure.com/doughboyisland/

Setup a proxy on a US server as described on lifehacker, also a useful workaround for unproductive corporate proxies.

I must admit that while I immediately loved my HTC Dream, there were a few things that took me a little while to work out.  I thought I’d document them here so that others may benefit.  Please excuse the quality of the screenshots, I didn’t want to install the SDK just to get proper screenshots (sorry).

Closing applications

I’m still not sure if I like this or hate this about Android, but it is what it is.  The short answer, YOU DONT.  As Android is a bit of a multi-tasking machine (unlike the iPhone), when you’re done with an application you can just switch to whatever you want to do next.  Sometimes this feels perfectly ok, and sometimes it is annoying.

An example would be the browser, which seems to behave inconsistently. 

If I launch a browser window, and I want it to go away, I can press the “back” button on the keypad and the browser window will disappear as though I’ve closed it. 

If I launch the browser window, then visit a few pages, then press the same “back” button on the keypad, it will act as though I’ve pressed a back button within the browser and take me to the last page I visited. 

Anyway, generally, just press the “HOME” button and choose the next application you want to work with.  Disturbing but true.

Where’s my stuff?

I’ll admit that for my first few hours minutes using Android, I couldn’t work out why it kept just casually warning me about stuff and not letting me take action.  It felt a bit like a string of hints like “Hey maybe you’re supposed to be someplace, maybe you should check your calendar or something.  But maybe you’re already late”.  Annoying.

That’s of course until I realised that the alerts were hugely useful, accessible and functional.  The top ‘status’ bar is a place for alert icons and basic info.  If you touch and drag it down you can get much more detailed alert info, and direct links to whatever event/calendar entry/sms or other item that caused the alert.  Simple and genius.

Heaps of apps use this feature too which can be pretty brilliant.

Within this drag-down status ‘blind’ there’s a clear notifications button.  Also critical, as Android seems keen on reminding you of stuff and then constantly mentioning it until you’ve explicitly cleared the alert.  Yes, I see the irony in complaining about missed alerts earlier.

Changing layout

After a no time at all with Android you will notice that all your installed applications get thrown into a giant bucket you can drag up from the bottom of the screen.  All well, until you install a bit too much and it makes things hard to track down.

You can move icons to any one of the three home screens by:

• Dragging up your applications screen;
• Touch and hold an application icon;
• As soon as you’ve held the icon long enough, your phone will vibrate and the home screen will appear;
• Drag the icon where ever you want on the home screen;
• You can use the same process to move icons around on the home screen.

To remove an application from your android home screen, just drag it back to your applications folder.  It will magically disappear from your homescreen.

You can also create folders on your home screens by:

• Touch and hold an area of the home screen
• A context menu called add to home will appear
• Select shortcut
• Select folder
• You will then drag icons into the new folder as needed
• To rename the folder, touch and hold the folder title.

In case it isn’t blatantly obvious, no I never read any manual that probably contained all of this info, I just searched the internet like regular people!

A few points of reference that may be of interest to those setting up a G1 for an Australian network, and people seem to reach this blog searching for it, so I may as well provide the info.

The phone also comes with settings for Optus MMS, Virgin (an optus reseller) and Ideas.

To setup a connection to a wireless access point (e.g. your home internet connection), do the following:

• Launch Settings > Wireless controls
• Does the checkbox at the top of the screen have a tick in it?  If not, touch it now.  This will enable wi-fi on your phone;
• Touch the Wi-Fi settings sub-menu  – this allows you to setup a connection;
• Touch the Add a WiFi Network option at the bottom of the screen – You will be prompted for the SSID of the network.

Alternative store of the same info appears on an android site here.

UPDATE (15/06/2009):

See Optus MMS settings below

Frustrated by my inability to get Microsoft Word to do some pretty simple formatting I wanted, I turned to the internet for help.  Turns out what I wanted was pretty hard to devise a sensible search string for*, so I eventually worked it out on my own.

This is as much for my future reference as yours, but:

Stop a pagebreak occurring in a table row

• Table > Select > Table
• Table > Table Properties… [a table properties dialog is launched]
• Select the tab called Row
• Check the box next to Allow row to break across pages
• Click OK

Stop a table running over a pagebreak

• Table > Select > Table
• Format > Paragraph… [a paragraph properties dialog is launched]
• Select the tab called Line and Page Breaks
• Check the box marked Keep with Next
• Click OK

It’s worth also noting that this isn’t table specific, so you can avoid oddly placed pagebreaks by selecting any passage of text this way.

Create multiple references to a single footnote

• Create a footnote as usual (Insert > Reference > Footnote…);
• Then Insert > Reference > Cross-Reference;
• From the dropdown called Reference Type, select Footnote;
• From the dropdown called Insert Reference to, select Footnote Number;
• From the textarea called For which footnote, select whichever note you’d like to reference;
• Click Insert;

This was useful as I didn’t want the footer of every page to be flooded by repeating the same disclaimer.  This way I can place the original footnote reference in one prominent location in the document and refer to it again throughout.

*Actually I had the perfect search result, but it was a link to experts-exchange.com, so as I non-member I fail.

Ignoring the smarts that may exist in off-the-shelf backup software these days, I’ve decided to include some info on how I backup my laptops*.  I’m also without a fancy one-touch hardware based backup solution, but I was equipped with:

• 1 x 320gb drive
• 1 x Vista Laptop, 80gb total drive space
• 1 x XP laptop, 80gb total drive space
• A general desire to make things as easy, painless and low-tech as possible.

Step 1 – Pre-requisites

To begin, I downloaded Robocopy from the Microsoft website, note that this is a part of the Windows 2003 resource kit and is required on the XP machine only.  Vista is already that smart.  Robocopy is a Robust File Copy utility which we’ll use to do all the hard work for us via batch files.  Watch out for rogue copies of software pretending to be robocopy, downloading from the Microsoft website is the best bet here. 

Next, I need to plug in my Backup drive to my computer.  If your computer has USB 2.0 as well as 1.1 ports, be sure to choose the 2.0 one to ensure the fastest transfers.  Windows should let you know if you’ve made the wrong choice.  When you’ve plugged in the drive, open Windows explorer and take a note of the drive letter.

Step 2 – Scripting magic

Here’s a simplified version of what I run:

echo “Starting backup process \n”

ROBOCOPY c:\ g:\firstLaptop /e /zb /R:3 /MIR

echo “Completed backup process.”

I told you Robocopy was worth the 11mb download. 

In pseudocode that would look like this:

[Run Robocopy.exe] [Copy from] [Copy to] [use these options/flags for Robocopy] 

Let’s look at the flags in use:

• /e  = Copy subdirectories, including empty ones
• /zb = Use restartable mode
• /R:3  = Number of retries if a file copy fails (default is 1 million!)
• /MIR = Mirror a complete directory tree 

You’ll see that these options are all about maintaining a mirror of my laptops and taking the intelligence out of the process.  The first time I run it, it takes forever.  The next few times its appreciably faster as it performs a file compare. 

Step 3 – Room for improvement

This pretty much meets my needs as neither of my computers have anything mission critical aside from photos or mp3s.  Everything else is either online or recreatable.  Primarily I’d put in a timestamp at the start/stop of the job and use some of the additional features of robocopy to make it prettier and easier.

* This in now way addresses the need for multiple off-site copies etc of your data.  I may address this at a later time.

Formerly being an aspiring (and sometimes practicing) web designer, I should probably be disappointed by the existence of seemingly souless online services which will generate a logo and brand for you online for less that $100 and less than 24hrs.  I remember reading about it in disbelief a few years ago in WIRED and I’ve only just tracked down the article again.  Seems most of the services are still running, and as much as I hate to admit it, they look ok.  They certainly look better than anyone with a few IT skills trying to hack together a professional image without the requisite skills.

I know this ground has been well and truly covered, so a few links worth reading:

• Mike Davidson has a great summary on logo design, which covers the principles, and more importantly addresses the difference between simply having a logo and having a brand.
• A great blog BRAND NEW, which assesses new corporate identities.  It’s reassuring that sometimes the big kids don’t make all the right decisions.  More importantly, this blog identifies where they go right and wrong, so it can provide an interesting perspective.  Anything that can avoid the amateur looking Fosters’ group logo of a few years back is gold.

I’m not all tech all the time, but I do think the above is relevant to tech folks.  Know what you do well, if you’re not a designer, don’t dabble.  Your customer may be happy, but they may not realise you’re doing them a disservice.

I wanted to report a weird issue with a website I was visiting.  I thought it would be useful to include info about my platform, but really there’s a heap of different values that might be of interest to someone who’s trying to debug an issue.  I figured the most useful and most “user-trying-not-to-interpret-it-themselves” version was to send the HTTP user-agent header value. 

Overcome with laziness, naturally the internet has the answer to finding this this: http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html

It’s fact that xkcd is a damn fine web comic.  I’d be happy to have just linked to that.  Because I also need to be entertained to learn, I choose to present you with xkcd’s map of the internet in all it’s comicy goodness.

MetaFilter just also sent me in the direction of a much more sensible version, which is an interesting reference.