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Starting to abandon Google's Gmail I made my first tentative steps towards stopping my reliance on Google's Gmail for all my mail sending and receiving. I expect to keep my edward.vielmetti@gmail.com account for the duration, and it looks like it will continue to be a handy place to archive stuff, but it's not cutting it as a mailer anymore. The system has gotten noticably slower over time, and the latest froufrou addition of chat hasn't helped at all. My poor iBook G4 has a spinny ball of one sort or another too often when I use it, and it's really hard to get through more than a message every few minutes. That's just too slow especially now that I'm faced with a week of catchup. The funny thing is that I'm mostly not behind on actually reading and replying to mail; my Blackberry has taken care of that. What I'm behind on is deleting and filing it. A fresh start seems like the only way to really get going. I decided to give Apple Mail a try. The UI is simple enough. I'm going to be using a folder structure that's purely geographical - all messages to/from/about Marquette, MI go into that folder - which means that there will always be a place to put a message. If I really need to search, I'll use Google or Spotlight. Catching up after a week away I have a zillion things rattling through my head, and some things to attend to that happened when I was gone. I'm not going to try to do a full recap of ideas as a full brain dump, but I will be going over a bunch of connections that happened during last week and trying to do at least a reasonable followup on each. OPML Editor notes How does "view in browser" work? It looks like it takes the OPML and runs it through some sort of filter and renders it as HTML, leaving behind a file in the OPML directory. Do I have any control over that filter? On relying on public access wifi I can count on the Ann Arbor District Library as a wifi spot, it's always working whenever I am here. I'm going to have to reconsider Panera as a reasonable lunch spot, after too many experiences at too many locations where their free wifi is down. The network at the local Whole Foods is really not all that much better - it's slow, and it looks at first glance that a bunch of ports are blocked. What an irritation. There are lots of things that you can do when your network is down, as long as you have a sufficiently self-contained environment and your email isn't that important. Or, your email is stored locally - I'm really considering porting some set of mail from Google Mail to Apple Mail just so I have a better offline environment. Lessons learned from standards development You would think that everyone would have heard of these by now, but the apparent willingness of people to mess with things they don't understand very well is enormous. So I'll spell them out, with examples. "Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you expect." So, in the case of RSS enclosures, you should send only one enclosure per item (because that handles the worst case reader nicely) but if you have a reader that gets multiple enclosures in an item you should have a sensible way to deal with them all. Simple, straightforward, reliable rules of thumb that go all the way back to Postel's 1981 "Robustness Principle" from RFC 793. "We believe in rough consensus and running code." David Clark 1992 IETF plenary speech. More on this speech and the politics of Internet standards in a paper by Andrew Russell. |
Last modified: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 at 3:00 AM.
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