Niklas | 
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01 22nd, 2008| 
It’s the unexpected unexpecteds, not the expected unexpecteds, that kill you.
Joel Spolsky hits the nail as usual in his piece on achieving many-nines and why the usual SLAs are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Jan
22
Jan
8
A while back, I complained on Google Docs new Powerpoint-wannabe not having any support for creating a custom theme. Seems like they quite promptly fixed that. Goodie. Now I just need to find a reason to do a presentation.
Oct
13
As I’ve mentioned before, as part of switching job, I also moved all my email usage to GMail. Since I had some 2 Gb of Outlook .pst files sitting around since before, I thought I should attempt to move these over to GMail. Having them available for searching would be most valuable.
With the help of Scott Hanselman’s guide to moving to Google Apps , I found gMove. gMove is a clever hack that works around GMails import limitation by moving your emails to a special purpose POP server that gMove runs. It also uses the GMail API to automatically set up an POP account and the necessary filters to label your imported emails. It then scans your Outlook folders using the Outlook API and starts moving mail over. Once I got going, the import to gMove took a weekend. My emails then started dripping into GMail. The POP import in GMail has a throttle of about two mails per minute. As I was moving some 35000 emails, I had to sit down and wait for a while. 12 days to be more exact. Lucky I’m not this guy .
But they got over and are now available for all my searching needs. And backed up using the GMail POP server of course.
Turns out this put me very close to filling the available 2911 Mb of space that GMail offered. So, this announcement could not have been more timely.
Now I’m looking into getting my very first emails from my account at Linköping University. The account looks like its still around, hopefully the emails are as well.
Picture by Brian Scott under a CC license
Oct
12
As part of switching employer, I had to turn in my old phone and get a new one from the new job. It turned out to be a Sony Ericsson P1i which so far seems pretty decent. On my former job, we use an Exchange infrastructure which meant using Outlook. On the new job, we don’t, which means using GMail and GCal. By the way, its been wonderful. Only, there is the issue of syncing the calendar and contacts to the phone (I don’t care for syncing email or tasks). Calendar sync was quickly in place with Goosync, an excellent service that I’ve used previously.
Contacts on the other hand was a completely different story. I have previously used Plaxo, which seems like the major player in this area before. However, they stubbornly refuse to support SyncML, the protocol used by Sony Ericsson and instead focuses on syncing with Outlook and then pointing to the mobile manufacturers support for getting contacts from Outlook to the phone. No good. Besides, I really don’t like the new Plaxo beta, trying to be a address book, GCal, Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Do one thing, and do it good.
A bunch of other ways was tried, including Scheduleworld and a Funambol plugin for Thunderbird. None turned out to be anywhere near satisfactory, or even working. Then I out of the blue remembered Mårten twittering on zyb, a site in beta which claims to do phone syncs. After creating an account and setting up SyncML on the phones, it took less than 5 minutes for me to transfer all contacts between the phones. A few minutes I had cleaned out some old contacts I no longer need and resynced. Perfect.
Now, two weeks later I keep adding contacts in both locations (the zyb site and my phone) and occasionally sync to keep them both updated. So far works flawlessly.
Update: Chris comments that GooSync as adding contact sync. Hopefully they will get it right and could then be a one-stop solution for my needs. I’ll post an update here.
Sep
18
As widely reported, Google today launched their PowerPoint/Impress equivalent over at GDocs. I’m a happy user of GDocs, so this is something I’m quite interested in. Not that I’m creating that many presentations, but when I do, this could be a useful tool.
One thing, that I find odd that they don’t seem to have implemented, is a way of creating your own themes. Conventional wisdom seems to say that presentations should be heavily sprinkled with your company logos (although some that actually knows this stuff seems to disagree). Not being able to create your own theme would put a lot of users of. Of course, Google offers some pre-defined themes, much like the useless templates you will find on Powerpoint or Impress. And, if you import a PPT file, it will actually use the theme from the PPT as the theme in GDocs, however, there seems to be no way of editing or reusing it. Odd.
Technorati Tags: google, presentation, gdocs
Jun
30
This has got to be one of the cutest tricks I’ve seen. A few years ago I wrote a simple Flash script that solved any similar (two openings on the outer wall) maze using an A* algorithm, probably got it laying around somewhere. Doing it in Gimp beats it tough.
Jan
30
At the Swedish Grammys currently running on TV, I saw one of the most clever uses of product placement I’ve seen. Mostly, these are very in your face and annoying, like a SonyEricson phone for remote controlling your car or all good guys use Macs, all evil PCs. At the Grammys, the nomination presentation graphics is the Alt+Tab interface in Vista, you know the one with stacked windows. No logo, the only thing besides the actual stacked effect that reveal the product are the title bar buttons (minimize, maximize and close), however they are quite nicely blended into the frame.
Clever.
Jan
9
“This is because humans have an error-generating mechanism called stupidity.”
Dec
14
What’s up with all the worlds marketing people simultaneously deciding that parkour should the theme for their new campaign? Right now there are three music videos and four commericials all using parkour. Now, parkour is cool and all, but come on. Do the marketing guys all meat up in a convention somewhere to decide on what’s the latest hot thing and then all go home to film it?