Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

My inbox gets lots of press releases every day. Over the years that's built up to just around 40 thousand messages, totalling to just under 2GB of space. I keep an eye out for interesting or unusual releases, and today's most unusual was for a set of iPod speakers shaped like a Lego brick.

Exhibit 1.



Now they may well play music (I'm assuming that's what the wavy blue lines mean, as opposed to a rotting piece of garlic carefully included for your olfactory pleasure) and will probably sound terrible, like most teeny tiny speakers hooked up to an MP3/AAC player (even if it does have Active Bass System, so maybe the wavy lines are rotting fish, not garlic), but the press release missed one vital piece of information:

"Can I build them into a Lego model?"

I don't think there's anything else that really matters.

Want encrypted mail but don't want to get tangled in the Thawte web o'trust?

I've found an alternate supplier of free digital IDs for email encryption, which let you use your own name in the certificate rather than Thawte's impersonal "Freemail User". The certificates get delivered quickly, and they install just as easily.

Check out the certificate service at Comodo, which works just fine.

Well worth doing for the day you want to send that encrypted mail...

I've finally got Exchange's new push email set up on my phone (and on the house mail server). I have to say, it rocks. It works really well and I'm getting mail on my phone before it pops up on my desktop PC.

That's not to say there weren't some rocks along the way.

Everything began smoothly enough. Downloading and installing the AKU2 Windows Mobile 5.0 update working on my SPV C600 was fairly straightforward. I still need to reinstall some favourite applications, as the ROM install wipes the phone's memory, but that's pretty much par for the course.

Unfortunately for those of us who self sign our server certificates Orange has kept the ROM update tightly locked down, and the old certificate unlocking methods have stopped working. I ended up using the automated certificate installation tools that Orange have set up for registered developers to create a signed copy of my server certificate in a CAB file. It's easy enough to sign up for the service, but I really shouldn't have to be delving into the heart of my PKI to get this working...

I'm still waiting for AKU2 updates for the MDA Vario and the MDA Pro...

Next, on the mobile home email front, is getting our own Blackberry Enterprise Server up and running...

SNARF looks interesting - a socially-driven mail reading tool that gets its metadata from your mailboxes.

The argument is that most of your day-to-day social interactions are already on your computer - in the shape of address books, in your email and in the documents you create - even in your blogrolls. Why create an expressive XML language like FOAF, when all you need to do is use ambient metadata? Especially when it's already expressed in a semi-structured form.

Hence SNARF, or the Social Network and Relationship Finder, a tool to help triage your mail.

The SNARF UI is designed to provide a quick overview of unread mail, organized by its importance. The UI shows a series of different panes with unread mail in them; each pane shows a list of authors of messages. Clicking on a name shows all messages involving that person.

[...]

SNARF gives the user the freedom to build their own ordering. Each person in their inbox is assigned a set of meta-information: "number of emails sent in the last month," for example. These metrics can, in turn, be combined to create an ordering across all contacts.

Worth looking at - and reading the papers.

I wonder how it will cope with my several tens of thousands of email messages.

There are email mailing lists that dare not speak their name. Or at least not unless you know that the person you're talking to knows about it.

One in particular is full of alumni from a certain Silicon Valley company, and it's interesting how many people we meet are on that list. I've even heard stories of people only realising who the other was when they when a list thread came up in conversation. "Oh, you're X! Ah..."

Is it something about companies that their employees believed in that lends itself to coherent post-employment communities?

Only one of my ex-employers has built such a community - and it's something to say that the mailing lists are soon about to rival the now-defunct company for longevity! It was a company that prided itself on its employee community, with Chief Morale Officers in each office, and regular social events (then, again the way we worked there, our fellow employees were our only social life!).

Just noodling...

Our router crashed hard while we were in the US after BT did something odd to the DSLAMs at our local exchange. This meant we couldn't get to our mail - and we were eight time zones away in San Francisco. Our Shuttle-based server sat in the Ikea shelving was happily running Exchange 2003, but mail was stacking up at our secondary host.

Thankfully those nice folks at Wizards (who look after the DNS and hold the secondary MX for sandm.co.uk) were able to quickly move our mail to their rather excellent tidymail web mail service. We could then download mail to Outlook running on our laptops. This came in handy as we had to handle trip logistics while we were out in the US. Gmail was an option, but most folk don't know our gmail addresses.

Getting mail back into the Exchange server here wasn't a problem. We use Outlook 2003 on our laptops in "cached Exchange mode", which keeps a local copy of your entire Exchange message store. Regular readers will know that it's got us out of a tight spot after more than one server disk failure. As this rather useful Microsoft support article shows, a cached Exchange folder replicates client changes as well as server changes. So we could copy back several hundred email messages simply by running Outlook here on our home network, leaving it and Exchange to sync up.

Less than 5 minutes later and everything is in the right place.

Even the spam.

I like it when a plan comes together.

And thanks again to Wizards.