Phone calls from Internet companies

Bizarre.

I just got a phone call from godaddy.com. It was a courtesy call just to welcome me to godaddy and to see if everything was ok and if I had any questions. I joined within the past week and transferred one of my domain names to them.

I don't expect phone calls from Internet companies unless something is really wrong, so I was really shocked when they called. I bet their call centre gets a lot of deer in the headlight responses. I suppose they are making an effort to show that they have good service, but from a domain name registrar, it's kinda weird...

RIP Geocities

The plug has been pulled on Geocities.

I found the files for my old Geocities site on my computer and I uploaded it to my website:
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/geocities/

I made that site back in 1997 and it's pretty hilarious!

Things I love about it:

1. "You have come to the Best Web Page on the Internet. With great background music and hundreds of links to the best web pages throughout the World Wide Web, how can you go wrong?"


2. MIDI background music! (You can even change the background music and there's a great selection of 90's music!)


3. JavaScript pop-up on the homepage


4. Frames!


5. Ghetto logo


6. Link and banner exchange galore


7. Most of the links don't work anymore because the websites have been closed down


8. The instructions for adding the site to your bookmarks and setting it to your homepage is for Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95


9. "Page me by ICQ"


10. Google is not listed under "Search Engines"


11. Beakman's World in the TV section


12. The website predates Starcraft as it's not listed under "Video and Computer Games"


13. The selection of "Free 'Must-Have' Programs" is rather amusing

Shape Collage Around The World

Think of a language.... got it? Well, it's probably in the list below.

Shape Collage has been written about in at least 22 languages! Here's a small sampling of sites from around the world talking about Shape Collage. I arbitrarily chose sites that either had nice collages or gave me a lot of traffic and they are ordered under each language approximately as to when the page appeared, with the oldest first.

English

• gHacks


• Apple


• Chris Pirillo (YouTube video)


• Cameratown (YouTube video)


• Idenzine


• Softonic


• MacReviewCast (Podcast)


• AddictiveTips


• Techblissonline


• PhotographyBlog


• Rj Dollen (Cool art using Shape Collage)


• Digital Inspiration


• Lifehacker


• TWIP


• MacHeist (Where's Waldo)


• Macbreak Weekly (Podcast @ 1:33:45)

Spanish

• chickageek


• GeeksRoom


• Geek.ms


• Softonic


• UpToDown


• Visual Beta


• TechnoBITA


• Entrebits


• Nivmar


• Sebalorenzo


• TecnoBITA


• Jorge Serrano


• arturogoga (YouTube)

Portuguese

• Baixaki (Screencast)


• Misto Quente


• bernabauer.com


• WinAjuda

Italian

• maestroalberto


• ManuIdea


• Pucciom


• Gekissimo


• Click|blog.it


• guidami


• ilarialab.com


• Tutto Volume


• polycoke


• Il Bloggatore

Chinese

• Pobby-dog Blog


• Jinn's Blog


• Lawrence's Coffee Shop


• unkb.com


• UIUI


• Hong Kong Yahoo Blogs (wedding photos in the shape of a heart)
  
  
  
  • jw
  
  
  • p4pinky_yip
  
  
  • mobe_yuen
  
  
  • Katherine FanFan
  
  
  • fatpofatpo
  
  
  • mscaca1202
  
  
  • tracy_007hk

Japanese

• Oshiete-Kun


• Gigafree


• yknakamimi


• hatena


• Nutspress


• Lifehacker.jp


• Moongift


• National Creators Conference

Korean

• SimFilePC


• Krang


• Drchoi Blog


• WalkPC

French

• fdoun


• Cyrille Borne


• Vincent Dutrait


• Glandouillage


• MaxiApple


• Guppytrucs Freeware


• ZDNet.fr

German

• Roman bloggt


• Gif-Bilder


• drweb.de


• Apfel


• Ehrensenf (Video)


• Blogwiese

Russian

• Lexi_Ru


• Russian Apple Community


• Deep Apple


• Fotokolo


• baboker (Video)


• catode

Polish

• PC blog


• Programosy


• Fotomaniak


• Fotopolis


• Skrzypol

Romanian

• Catholica NETwork


• Topo's Page


• efoto

Hungarian

• beszeljukmac


• Techline


• kepszerkesztok


• szoftverbazis


• Sablonos Blog

Turkish

• TurkMac


• pdfdergi

Dutch

• PhotoPlace.nl


• Clickx


• fotoplezier


• Kindje op Komst

Finnish

• DigiCamera

Malay

• Syamsu


• Agusbagus

Serbian

• Serbain Macintosh User Group

Swedish

• dahlstroms


• stationsvakt


• Veronicas Foto

Arabic

• Rehla Online


• SUAE

Icelandic

• sfjalar

Latvian

• Bedre


• LatFoto

Google Chrome

I've converted to Google Chrome. If you didn't know, Google Chrome is Google's fairly newly released web browser. I was previously using Firefox, but I like Chrome for a few reasons. The most important is memory management. Without getting into too much technological detail, it basically spawns a new process for each tab instead of just a new thread, this makes it easier to free memory when you close a tab. I tend to keep a lot of tabs open (I currently have 34 open), which are mostly pages that I opened and will go back to soon (too lazy to bookmark and then delete the bookmark later) or some like Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar that I always keep open. While Firefox 3 has improved on memory management a lot, it still gets really bloated and I would have to close the whole browser and reload it every day or two. Chrome does a much better job and I like that it has it's own task manager (shift-esc) that shows how much memory and cpu usage each tab is using.

Another is cpu usage. I noticed that Firefox would sometimes use up a lot of cpu usage even when I wasn't doing anything (it was just sitting in the background). It happened on just some sites and I think most of the time it was related to flash ads. Chrome doesn't have this issue, or at least I can easily find out which tab is causing the problem and kill it. Also, if flash is having an issue, which it sometimes does, again, I can just kill the flash plug-in and reload the pages that I need flash, all without reloading the whole browser. With each tab in a separate process, one website won't cause the whole browser to crash, it'll just crash the one tab. I find Chrome to be a bit snappier than Firefox as well, especially when first starting the browser. I found the combined location bar and search box confusing at first, but now that I'm used to it, I really like it. I really like that I can customize the search, so for example, if I want to search google, I just type in the keywords, if I want to search google maps, I just precede the keywords with "map" (I added that one). I can also search mininova and isohunt (for bittorrents) by just typing in "mininova heroes" or something like that and it'll send me right to the search results from mininova. It saves me from first going to the site and then searching.

It's not all positive for Chrome though. It doesn't have extensions (though I don't use any that I can't live without) and it doesn't support the google toolbar (which I like for the keyword highlighting and autofill). The bookmarking in Chrome sucks, fortunately I don't bookmark much, but I'd like to be able to periodically bookmark all the opened tabs just to make sure that I don't lose them. Chrome also crashes on me every day or two (though I'm a pretty heavy user). It's not that big of a deal b/c it remembers all my tabs and reopens so fast, but still, it's annoying. It's pretty awesome though considering that this is it's first release. Way more stable than the first release of any other browser.

One other interesting feature that at first I thought was dumb, but turned out to be pretty cool is the page you get when you open a new tab. It shows you your most visited sites (screenshot above). This makes it really quick to open a new tab and go to one of these pages. It's kinda amusing to see what are my most visited sites:

1. Statcounter - checking how many people visited my sites (blog, school, vincentcheung.ca, etc)


2. Adsense - checking how much money I've gotten from ads on vincentcheung.ca ($57 since January, most of which is from the last few months)


3. Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.


4. The Star - Toronto's newspaper (get local, national, and global news all in one place)


5. Facebook - No explanation needed


6. Real Clear Politics - Checking the latest American election polls


7. Digg - Procrastination


8. Google News - More news (I also have a special "Volleyball" news section that has news articles with the word "volleyball" in them)


9. TD - Watching my mutual funds portfolio drop in value

How non-Americans can influence the elections

As a bit of a political news junkie, it frustrated me a little bit that no matter how inspired and moved I am by a candidate, my vote doesn't count.

I have, however, found a way that the world can influence American politics: (illegal) donations.

I'm not saying that I, as a non-American, went to Obama's donation page and made an individual contribution, which required me to lie about being "a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident". I'm just saying that people can do that...

Money counts. Obama and Clinton raised over $100 million each in 2007 and there were reports of Obama getting over $30 million in January and $7 million since Super Tuesday (2 days ago). With Obama's coffers, he was able to run TV ads in most of the Super Tuesday states, while Clinton was only able to do so in about half of them. Obama was even able to run ads during Superbowl, which usually costs a stupid amount. The money is used for all aspects of the campaign from hiring people, getting the word out, traveling costs, nomination fees, etc.

Obama has a big grassroots (netroots?) campaign and apparently a lot of his hundreds of thousands of donations are small contributions made online and by individuals, compared to other candidates that get most of their money from big donations from large corporations.

If I was "a United States citizen or a lawfully-admitted permanent resident", I would totally make a legal donation to Obama's campaign, but as it stands, I can't :). If you want to watch a good video of Obama, this is the one that really impressed and inspired me. It's a video of him giving a talk and Q&A at Google:

e-mail or email?

I've been using the spelling "e-mail" since I started using the word. I thought that was the proper spelling and that using "email" was just being lazy. So, it irked me anytime my google searches included the term "e-mail" and google suggested a corrected spelling of "email". I found it strange, but thought maybe it was just b/c of the statistical nature of the spell checker that google uses and the plethora of abuses to the English language on the web.

Today, I decided to settle this once and for all and looked it up. Apparently "e-mail" is anachronistic and "email" is widely accepted now. They compare it to words like "web-site", "non-zero", "on-line", "soft-ware", etc., which have since lost the hyphens. Typically new words start with hyphens and then lose them after they become common place. Reportedly over 16,000 words have lost the hyphen in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

The final tipping point in my decision to drop the hyphen and adopt the new and cooler "email" was a comparison between companies that used the form "e-mail" vs "email". A very strong pattern emerges. The companies commonly viewed as behind the times on the web, such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Dell, and CNET, all use "e-mail", while the "hot" companies that are more in tune with the younger generation, such as Google, Apple, Yahoo!, and eBay, use "email". I don't think you have to look any farther than this. What do you want to be associated with, a stuffy old company or a hip cooler one?

Also, it's "internet" now, not "Internet".

Cat play dates and Catbook

Tiki had her first cat play date today! It was with Stella, a big brown tabby, owned by my friend Anne on the 2nd floor. I want to expose Tiki to other people and cats so that she's comfortable around them and it's important to do so at a young age. Plus, if it works out well, then she'll have another cat to play with :). The play date didn't go so well. Stella was scared, much bigger than Tiki, but scared, which is understandable b/c she was in a new place with new smells, and there was another cat here. Tiki was pretty scared as well, but managed to calm down. There was hissing from both cats and Stella growled a bit, but at least no claws were thrown. Next time, Tiki and I will go down to visit her place, and Stella should be more comfortable.

I discovered Catbook today and it's the best thing since well, facebook :). Catbook is an application in facebook that lets cats make their own profiles. They post their own profile picture, information, and they get their own friends, wall, mini-feed, etc., just like facebook! I made... err... I mean Tiki, Mittens, and Tigger made their own profiles on Catbook today :).

The question of existence, stalking, and reverse stalking

You don't exist to me unless you fall into at least one of these categories and the more of them you fall under, the more you exist:

• You're on my MSN Messenger or GTalk list


• You blog (and it has an rss feed that I read)


• You comment on my blog


• You're on my Facebook and appear in my news feed

The following constitutes life, but you're under the knife in Seattle Grace's OR and Dr. Burke's tremor is back:

• Friendster / Hi5 / MySpace / Orkut / LinkedIn


• I have your e-mail address


• You're on ICQ or AIM (damn Americans)


• I have your phone number


• I sometimes run into you in person

Existence requires you to actively push your presence upon me and constantly remind me of your existence and your doings and provides me with an easy and non-intrusive way to contact you. Maybe you cause a little pop-up on my screen when you come online in IM and you say something about what's going on in your name or status message, or your new blog post shows up in my Google Reader, or I get an e-mail saying that someone commented on my blog, or I see that you have had activity in Facebook.

On a related note, stalking people is very important. Everyone spies and stalks people online. No need to hide it. Everybody does it. And I don't mean "Googling" people and checking out their "homepages". That's so 2003. No. The epitome of stalking in 2006 is finding someone on Facebook when all you have to go off of is their first name, and you can't even spell it properly. Once you found them on Facebook, you have an immense amount of info at your disposal - contact info, life ambitions, interests, baby pictures, drunken pictures to bribe them with, and their popularity factor (how many "friends" they have :p). You can also try and find their blog (no one has a homepage anymore) or look for them on other social networking sites. Apparently Winnipeggers love Hi5. If a Winnipegger is on just 1 social networking site, it's Hi5 for some reason, despite the fact that it's garbage. This is all "innocent" stalking.... people just wanna know more about other people.

I had like 50 people at fellowship today comment about things on my Facebook and blog: "I didn't know you were doing a PhD!", "I read your post about 'Bible Study'", "Oh right, you were the guy with the flower in your hair", "You worked at Google and Microsoft?". I don't mind people spying / stalking me. I wouldn't put that info out there otherwise. Go ahead, stalk me!

Just know that I reverse stalk you. You stalk me, I stalk you back. Rostecki, you can stop with the silly "the-cloak.com", it doesn't work, and upgrade to Firefox 2.0 already.

Effectively using Gmail

What I'm saying here isn't new, but it will be to most of my readers. I've been wanting to post about this for a while to educate you guys b/c it's painful to see your inboxes (when I hack into your Gmail accounts to read your e-mail), but I've been too lazy. Here's what I'm talking about:

• Labels


• Archiving


• Filters to automatically label your e-mails


• Dot and plus addressing (eg. fakeaddress@gmail.com, fake.address@gmail.com, fa.kea.ddr.ess@gmail.com, and fakeaddress+shop@gmail.com are all the same)

I've seen how you use Gmail, and you're not using it properly. Gmail is pretty slick and if you set a few settings, you can make it even better.

Ok, so e-mail threading is amazing, as is spam filtering. Gtalk integration is cool and seeing peoples' pictures when you hover over their name in e-mails is nice as well.

Labels

Most people however, don't make use of labels enough. Organizing e-mail is a pain, but you can make your life much easier if you use filters. Here's the Gmail tutorial on labels and filters, if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Labels are useful in certain instances. E-mail is one of them. For example, I get an e-mail from a friend in Winnipeg containing a picture of us at a party. I would logically put it in a folder called "Winnipeg", but I would also want to put it in a folder called "Pictures" for quick reference. But, with folders I can't put it in both, so I have to choose one or the other. With labels, I can label it as both "Winnipeg" and "Pictures"! Another example, I can an e-mail from my family containing a picture of my cats from a recent trip that is funny, so I can label it as "Family", "Trip", "Pictures", and "Funny". Organizing things this way makes it much easier to find things later.

Archiving

So now you have all these e-mails in your inbox nicely labelled. Now what? You "archive" them. Huh? Archive. What this means is that it disappears from your inbox, but it's not deleted. It's still in "All Mail", and you can still search for it. Best of all, it's labelled, so you can just click the label on the left and see the e-mail there. What I do is that once I'm done with that e-mail and I no longer need to respond to it, but want to keep it for reference, I archive it. No need to delete. You never know what you may need in the future, eg. to settle bets. Archiving clears your inbox while keeping your e-mails.

Filters

Ok, so maybe I've convinced you about labels and you'd like to have your e-mail all nicely organized and sorted, but there's no way in hell that you're gonna manually label each e-mail. I feel your pain and you would be dumb to do that.

So, use filters. Filters are rules that you set-up that will do things with e-mails as they arrive in your inbox. For example, if I get an e-mail from someone from my family, it is automatically labelled as "Family". If I get an e-mail from someone from Winnipeg, it is labelled as "Winnipeg"; from Toronto, "Toronto"; from my research group, "PSI" (my research group's abbreviation), etc. If the e-mail contains a picture, it is labelled as "Picture". If the e-mail contains the word volleyball or vball, it is labelled as "Volleyball". E-mails from banks are labelled with "Bank". E-mails from online shopping purchases are labelled as "Shop".

Most of my e-mail has at least 1 label automatically put on it when it arrives. So, my e-mail is basically automatically organized for me. It's amazing. Finding e-mails is really easy. If you don't know how to set-up a filter, check this out.

The simple filters are easy, but it's really the more advanced ones that make the difference for me. Note the use of "|" means "or" (you can also use the word "OR"). The dot and plus addressing is mentioned in the next section.

• Pictures
  • Has the words: .jpg
    Has attachment: *check*


• Volleyball
  • Subject: volleyball | vball | gsu


• Family
  • From: Cheung | Mom's maiden name | Other family names -Vincent -Sonia (exclude my name and friends with the same last name using the minus sign)


• Family
  • To: Cheung | Mom's maiden name | Other family names -Vincent -Sonia (exclude my name and friends with the same last name using the minus sign)


• Winnipeg
  • Has the words: RobEmail@gmail.com | JillAddress@hotmail.com | Nusraat@mailblocks.com | Chris@mts.net | Rob2@soontobetoronto.com | Bb@shampoo.net | Justin@me.ca | etc.


• Toronto
  • Has the words: @utoronto.ca | Sarah@SarahA.ca | Kevin@winnipegtoronto.ca | Mimi@korea.kr | Jamie@GreysAnatomyLover.com | John@mac.com | Josh@ecf.com | Tony@666.com | etc.


• Bay Area
  • Has the words: Janna@windsor.ca | Michele@boston.us | Adam@montreal.ca | Brian@northcarolina.us | Mike@switzerland.ch | Mark@annarbor.us | Ducky@vancouver.ca | Liz@pittsburgh.us | Heidi@vancouver.ca | Natalia@mountainview.us | Jenny@sanjose.us | Amy@paloalto.us | @google.com | etc.


• PSI
  • Has the words: @psi.toronto.edu | @psi.utoronto.ca | mailinglist@comm.toronto.edu | mailinglist@cs.utoronto.ca | etc.


• Blog
  • To: myemail+blog@gmail.com


• Bank
  • To: "myemail+bank@gmail.com" | my.email@gmail.com (need the quotes or Gmail thinks the "+" means "and")


• Shop
  • To: "myemail+shop@gmail.com" | m.yemail@gmail.com


• MailingList
  • To: "myemail+list@gmail.com" | mye.mail@gmail.com
    *Skip inbox*


• PotentialSpam
  • To: "myemail+spam@gmail.com" | myemai.l@gmail.com
    *Skip inbox*

The biggest pain is the ones listing all the e-mail addresses. I did it by typing the names into a new e-mail so I could get the addresses in one place, but I still needed to delete a lot of extra text and format it right (find and replace in notepad or some text editor is handy here). It takes a bit to set-up, but for me it has really been worth it. Half hour of tinkering has saved me hours of organizing e-mails and frustration over finding stuff.

Once you set-up your new filter, you can have it applied to all existing e-mails as well, which is a convenient way to label all your existing, unlabelled e-mails.

Dot and plus addressing

What's with the dots and plus signs in the e-mail addresses in the filters?

Dots don't matter. Gmail doesn't recognize dots, so you can put them anywhere you want and it still goes to your inbox.

myname@gmail.com is my "official" e-mail address, but e-mails sent to any of these e-mail addresses also go to my inbox:

• my.name@gmail.com


• m.yname@gmail.com


• myn.ame@gmail.com


• m.y.n.a.m.e@gmail.com


• myname+shop@gmail.com


• myname+bank@gmail.com


• myname+mailinglist@gmail.com


• myname+porn@gmail.com


• my.n.a.me+anythingyouwant@gmail.com

So, why would anyone want to do this? Simple, for filtering to automatically sort e-mails.

I tell the bank to send me e-mails to myname+bank@gmail.com and set-up a filter to label e-mails sent to this address as "bank". Shopping sites get myname+shop@gmail.com, mailing lists get myname+list@gmail.com, etc. I have Blogger send me a notification every time a comment is made on my blog to myemail+blog@gmail.com, and it is automatically labelled as "blog". That last one combined with archiving, is the best thing ever. Otherwise, I would have a billion short e-mails about blog comments (esp. with the alarm clocks post) in my inbox mixed-in with my real e-mail, but now, I get the notification, I read it, and then I archive it. No need to label it because it was automatically labelled for me!

The problem is that some sites don't accept "+" in e-mail addresses, so I use dots. So depending on where the dot is, I can sort based on that, b/c no one is going to send me e-mail at m.yname@gmail.com, but that's what I give to say, banks, and then I give shopping sites myn.ame@gmail.com.

Further, if you give a spammy site myname+spam@gmail.com and you start getting mail at that address, then you can just set up a filter to automatically delete all mail sent to that address.

Call to action

Go. Organize your e-mails. Clean up your inbox. Make me proud.

You can do similar things with other e-mail clients (filters to sort e-mail, e-mail aliases, etc.). I know I used to use "-" addressing with Mailblocks, which was way better than "+", b/c pretty much all websites accept "-" in e-mail addresses. I use Gmail as an example here b/c that's what I use.

Putting more trust into Gmail

I've been having problems with my school e-mail. It's periodically not letting me get new mail. It's a bit of a problem with Thunderbird and my school server. I used to use Outlook Express, but it didn't do IMAP well, so I switched to Thunderbird, which also lets me check my Hotmail (not that I use that anymore). Anyways. Thunderbird is being dumb now. It tells me I have new mail when I don't. It's also causing some locking problems on my school's server causing me to not get my mail, which was very stressful the deadline of the MSR Fellowship when I was waiting for reference letters through e-mail. This might have been caused from me running Thunderbird on my school desktop, home desktop, and my laptop at the same time. Further, I've been getting a lot of spam (like maybe 10-15 a day, mostly to mailing lists to groups to which I belong; this isn't a lot of spam, but before the summer, I got ZERO), and Thunderbird's not doing a good job of detecting spam. So, I set-up e-mail forwarding on the unix e-mail server to forward mail to my gmail (by creating a ".forward" file on the e-mail server with my gmail address in it). There are some advantages and disadvantages for this:

Advantages:

1. Reliability
   • School e-mail server is flaky sometimes, the worst example was a little more than a year ago when we went a few days without e-mail service. Gmail has been very reliable for me, though some people (*cough* S) have reported having problems, at least before.


2. Spam filtering
   • Gmail's spam filtering is quite good


3. Consolidation of e-mail
   • Everything's in one place and I only need to check one place for all my mail now.


4. Still appear as if I'm sending from my school's address
   • The "From" address in my e-mails can still be from my school address by setting it up in the settings. I like this because I want to maintain the separability between school and personal. Plus, it's more professional to send e-mail from my school account than Gmail.


5. Ubiquitous access
   • I can get access to my mail from anywhere. I had the squirrel mail crap for web access of my school e-mail, and that's pretty flaky and doesn't really work for me. Alternatively, ssh is not convenient when I'm on a stranger's computer.


6. Threading
   • I love Gmail's e-mail threading (putting replies to e-mails in the same place as the original e-mail). It makes it much easier to track conversations and e-mails. You go to one place to see everything that was said about one topic rather than having to go through 20 different e-mails spread across 10 different people and over the course of a week (some people delete the quoted text). Plus you can tag the whole bundle once as opposed to having to move each message as they come into a folder. Thunderbird's message threading doesn't work as well.


7. Integration with Google Calendar
   • I can create events in Gmail, which will add events to my calendar and Gmail will parse the e-mail to figure out when the event, eg. meeting or talk, will be and where it is.


8. Searching
   • Easier and faster to search in Gmail. Plus I can use desktop search.


9. Starred e-mails
   • Starring e-mails is better than leaving e-mails "unread" to highlight them.


10. Saved drafts
    • I can start an e-mail and finish it in a different location.


11. Accurate and instant new mail notifications
    • Gmail notifications from the GTalk client and the OS X Gmail notifier work well and I don't have to have it poll the e-mail server every 5 or 10 min. When I get new mail, I know right away.


12. System admins can stop bitching to me about the size of my inbox
    • I have more than enough space on Gmail, as I'm only using 13% of my space (374 MB), though I get a lot of attachments to my school account, so my free space will be reducing at a much faster pace now. Hopefully I'm not here much longer though :p

Disadvantages:

1. Consolidation of e-mail
   • Everything's in one place and I don't have that separation between personal and school. I have labels set-up, but then my labels get all junked up. Right now I'm using "PSI", "PSI-Talk", "PSI-Vision", "PSI-CompBio", etc., which is kinda messy. I need tag bundles, like in delicious.


2. E-mails in multiple places
   • Some e-mails are on the server, accessible through Thunderbird, and all new e-mails are in Gmail. I didn't import all my old mail, so if I need old mail, I have to switch back and forth. Finding e-mails isn't too much of a problem thanks to desktop search though.


3. Putting all my eggs in one basket
   • Kinda stuck with Gmail now. It would be difficult to just get my school e-mail off of Gmail to back-up for offline access, eg. in case Gmail goes the way of Mailblocks. I can use POP to get it all, but only in one place and it's just a mess then (no labels).


4. Attachments
   • Being able to send using my school's smtp server has advantages when sending attachments b/c I think it has a higher limit than Gmail, though I shouldn't be sending attachments that large through e-mail anyways. For filtering reasons this may be important as well.


5. Ads
   • I don't see them, but they are there.

So, in general things are better with this switch, but not perfect. The big problem is separation. Labels help, but my mail is still all mixed together, so school is a constant presence now (bad). I think there's a Firefox plug-in to color code tags, which could help. I guess I could have my mail sent to a different Gmail account, but it'd be inconvenient to have to check two places as I can't be logged into both simultaneously unless I use two different browsers (though I'm guessing there's a Firefox plugin for that).

Encrypted blog posts

This is the old version. Go here for the newer code.

Key (ordinarily kept secret, but shown here for the demos):

the-not-so-secret-key

Demo 1: Encrypted text shown

Decrypt text

bF6Y96p1Ledj+Dj8RuFX+95qSJoIiJTaVmfNG50p8oLI6gyA
kSRGDF8vtTi7ZHeniTVXuZfjqqIdjfKm5zBiiev+bDnTh7aV
QFxxHLr1wjGPmEj3S3v6Ugx+kN7Q/Az7

Demo 2: Encrypted text hidden

Show encrypted text

Javascript must be enabled for this encryption/decryption demo

I use my blog as literally an online journal to record my activities and thoughts so I can look back at them later. Writing things down can also be therapeutic. As a side benefit, it serves as a form of communication with my friends and randoms (it helped me get my apartment).

The problem is that I have to constantly censor myself as I do not want other people reading some of my more personal thoughts, especially ones about people that read my blog. I want my blog to be public, but I want to also add some private text.

My solution is to use cryptography. I will encrypt text I don't want people to read, this way the text is not available anywhere (not even on the server). The difficulty is in making it easy to do both encryption and decryption and doing so in a secure manner, i.e. do everything locally.

I turned to Javascript, as it is ubiquitous and it would allow me to do client side decryption. I found this site that uses Javascript to do 256-bit AES encryption and decryption. This encryption was more than enough for my purposes.

I then modded the code to do dynamic text with CSS. The result is the little demo at the top. When you enter the key into the prompt box, it decrypts the scrambled text on the fly without reloading the page! Better yet, it's all done locally, so not even the server ever sees the plain text.


Here's how you can use it for your site:

1. Encrypt your text (be sure to remember the key!)


2. Download the decryption Javascript code and include it in the header of your blog/site


3. Use one of the two following code templates to put the encrypted text and decryption link on your page, depending on whether or not you want the encrypted text to show by default.
   
   
   • Show the encrypted text on the page along with a link to decrypt it
     
     
     <a href="javascript:Decrypt_text('unique_name');">Decrypt text</a>

<div id="unique_name">Encrypted text from step 1</div>
     
   
   
   • Hide the encrypted text and only show the decryption link
     
     
     <a href="javascript:Decrypt_text('unique_name', 'Encrypted text from step 1');">Show encrypted text</a>

<div id="unique_name"></div>
     
   
   Note 1: "unique_name" is the ID of the div (it appears in both lines of code) and ID's, have to be unique. In other words, if you use this code multiple times for multiple blocks of encrypted text, you have to change "unique_name" to "encrypted", "encrypted2", "encrypted_text_about_bob", etc. because the same name cannot be used twice.

The encrypted text is secure as long as you keep the key secret. The key is like a super-ultra secure password. You can use the same key over and over for multiple encryptions (so you don't have to remember/store multiple keys). If you want select people to see the encrypted text, you can give them the key. You may want to use a set of keys, one for super private, one for the gf, one for close friends, etc.

FAQ

1. Is this secure?
   • Yes, the encryption used is very secure.


2. Is there a back door? Can you read my encrypted text?
   • No. No one without the key can read the encrypted text and I don't know how to make a good back door.


3. Is this going to install bad stuff on my computer or break stuff? Is this adware crap? Is this a virus?
   • No. I don't know how to do that.


4. I lost the key, can you help me decrypt the text?
   • No. You lose the key and there's pretty much no way to decrypt the text, that is, until we get quantum computers.


5. Do you have a quantum computer?
   • Yes, but I don't know how to use it.

Disclaimer: Not to be used if encryption is illegal in your country or used for illegal purposes.


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Picasa Web Albums (Test)

My Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums (by Google) was released today in "Test" mode, rather than "Beta". I think they called it that b/c they were sick of all their products in "Beta". It's nothing particularly ground breaking, but it's pretty slick and gets the job done. I resisted using other sites (eg. Flickr and its variants) because it was a pain in the ass to upload lots of images, flipping through images was slow, and storage space was limited.

Picasa Web Albums is nice because:

1. While it says that you're only supposed to have 250 MB, my account has 1 GB :)


2. Uploading from Picasa is a cinch and that's the most important thing - making it easy to put the pictures up. The best part is that it resizes the images before uploading because there's no reason I need to have pictures 1 MB in size just for viewing on the web. This not only makes it faster to upload, but also saves on storage space.


3. Viewing images is fast and easy. You can flip through the images by using the left and right cursor keys, it prefetches the images to make this fast, and since it uses AJAX, it doesn't need to reload the page for each image, which is really nice.

But it would be nice to have:

1. Growing storage space like Gmail


2. Tags/labels like Facebook, where you can label people/things in the picture by drawing a box around them


3. Ability to SEARCH the photos


4. Ability to upload in batch from Mac OS X and Linux

Here are my albums. Just random photos I had lying around. Pictures from my ATV camping weekend at Oceano Sand Dunes are up there. And of course there are photos of my grass and pet pictures.

Who knew that spreadsheets could be fun!

Put a couple people together online, give them something to modify in real-time, and chaos and hilarity ensues.

Get your own @vincentcheung.ca e-mail address!

Sign-ups for "vincentcheung.ca" e-mail addresses has begun!

Let me know if you would like one. Sorry, vincent (a) vincentcheung.ca has already been taken.

Google Calendar

Ya, I know I'm slow about blogging about it. In short, it's pretty good and if you don't have a Mac, it's probably the best thing you'll find in terms of electronic calendars. Support for multiple calendars, nice interface, interoperability with other programs (you can do round-about ways of getting your calendar on your pda or iPod), sharing calendars, viewable and editable (not edible) from any computer on the Internet, electronic invites, reminders, the list goes on.

I started using Apple's iCal calendar program about a year and a half ago and now I can't live without it. It's absolutely crucial for keeping track of all my meetings, deadlines, social activities, birthdays, daylight savings, etc. You just have to add things as they come up and then it's not much maintenance. Plus, it serves as a record of my life. Like an abbreviated journal - where I was, what I did, etc.

I imported all my calendars from iCal like early on the 13th. Pretty easy process because Google Calendar uses the open calendar standard (ics files). The only hiccup is repeating events and exceptions to repeating events which iCal and Google Calendar handle slightly differently (b/c it doesn't look right in Google) and Google Calendar doesn't do time zones as well as iCal.

Google Calendar is basically a rip-off of iCal. The look of it is very similar. It does a pretty good job on the interface. I love iCal and I think it does the job very well. My only beef is that I can only update my calendar from my laptop and viewing it online is a bit of a hassle (I eventually managed to do it with spymac, which won't be updated anymore if I stick with Google Calendar) and sharing and collaborative calendars are not possible. Google Calendar is great in this respect - editing and viewing from any computer on the Internet, sharing calendars, reminders through e-mail (I don't use Apple's mail program), and the ability to invite people (say goodbye to stupid Evite).

If you want offline access to your calendar (only for viewing when not connected to the Internet, you cannot update it when you're offline), you can subscribe to the private or public webdav calendar link in iCal (or Sunbird for Windows and Linux). The private link is really nice. It uses a hash to make it nearly impossible for anyone to find your calendar unless you tell them about it and if they do, you can just get a new hash and the old link will be dead.

So, go to it. Get organized.

The new Google Desktop is amazing!

Finally, I have functionality on Windows that I have on my Mac! You can now use Google Desktop as a program launcher!

• Hit Ctrl twice


• A floating search bar pops up


• Type in something (maybe the name of a program)


• Use arrow keys to select and press enter


• Program/file/etc. opens up!

AMAZING! No more having to look for programs in the start menu or in folders! OS X (Mac) has had this functionality for a while now and in the equivalent of the start menu (the dock).

Best thing ever! I've been wanting this functionality for Windows for a while now. Now I finally have it!

Seems all I do is webpage design...

Hot off the redesign of my webpage, I have just finished redesigning my research group's webpage, as it was in desperate need of a makeover.

Before
A horribly ugly webpage...



After
Now without the tackiness, eye straining background colour, etc. using CSS, Photoshop, and colour scheme tools.


A valuable lesson was learnt here: the colour blind member of the group should not be responsible for the design of the website.

Perhaps the nerdiest thing I've ever done

So, it all started with Sarah. I blame her. She convinced me to get the VincentCheung.ca domain. I would have gotten VincentCheung.com, if it wasn't for my mortal enemy, Vincent Cheung the religious minister, who has that domain and beats me on Google searches. As a result of having a ".ca" domain, I became a member of the CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority). I got an e-mail about an upcoming meeting here in Toronto where the members could vote on proposed changes to stuff related to the CIRA. The incentives being that it was at the Fairmont Royal York (fancy hotel), free food, free drinks, and a free 128 MB USB memory key. Hey, I'm all about the free stuff.

I convinced Sarah to come as she also owns a ".ca" domain. She was quite hesitant at first, but I managed to convince her based on an "open mind" argument, but it was really the Royal York and memory key that sealed the deal.

So we get there just past 5:30 pm, which was when they started the actual meeting part. There were shit loads of people waiting in line to register, obviously because of the memory key. The trick being that you don't get it until after the vote. So we waited in line, unable to see the beginning of it, meanwhile the talks have already begun, whatever, we didn't know what the changes were proposed and we didn't really care. The line was moving really slowly and for some reason we were still last in line. Then, some volunteer randomly comes up to Sarah and asks to confirm that she's on the list. She finds her domain name and he tells her that she can go to this other line. 5 min. of walking later (past the obscenely long line), we're like 2 people from the front of a second line! No idea how to managed to pull that off!!!! Makes absolutely no sense what so ever. The sensible thing to do would have been to just let the next people in the regular long line go to the short line. Whatever, we didn't have to wait, so we were happy.

We also managed to skip the line to get name tags. It was kinda scary at first, small table with massive number of name tags. Just stacks and stacks. But like instantly both of us were like, WHOA, my name's right here at the top of the stack!!!! AMAZING!!! They couldn't find hers (the piles were only slightly sorted) so they just wrote one out.

I'm really amused at the highly sophisticated mechanism for adjusting the length of the name tag. Yet, it's just string!!! Incredible!!! The inventor of that deserves some sort of knot tying nobel prize or something!!! Best thing that ever happened to name tags since names!!!!

The main room was full apparently, so we had to go into the overflow area. We later found out that there were 400+ people at this meeting!!! They really pulled in the crowd b/c of the free memory key :). The overflow area was just a room with a big screen showing a live feed from the main room. The demographics were not exactly what I thought it was going to be. More business type people than obvious nerds. Mostly like 30's - 40's. And actually some feminine looking females! Similar guy-to-girl ratio as in ECE, which is basically one girl for every 10 guys. I was disappointed at the lack of porn stars representing their sites. There were however, more people with purple and green hair than I had anticipated.

I thought the meeting part was just gonna be boring and suck, but actually it was kinda interesting...at least for the first 2 hours. The people going up to ask questions, make comments, and requesting addendums were quite entertaining and brought up good issues, at least for the first 2 hours. Like one part in the by-law said that there would be equality for "both genders" on the board, but he wanted it to read "all genders", a change which should be made to be politically correct. The ass in front of us was cracking up at the explaination that there are not everyone identifies themselves as one or the other. The way they counted the votes was kinda retarded and the motion was defeated, but later, an equivalent change was made in another motion.

We voted by raising these yellow stiff pieces of paper into the air. Ironic how this was a meeting about the ".ca" domain names on the Internet, yet there was NO INTERNET VOTING!!! HILARIOUS!!! THE IRONY!!! THE IRONY!!!! Kinda dumb actually b/c the only people that would go to the meeting were those in Toronto, but what about the people in Alert, NWT??!!??!?! This is hardly fair for them!!!!

Anyways, they needed 2/3 "for" vote for the motion to pass, with "abstains" essentially counting as "against", which is pretty dumb. They should've counted all the "for" and all the "against", with the "abstains" as neutral.

There were lots of arguments about wording and changes in the by-law about powers of the board, etc. I see why people would be concerned, but the board members and others have also interally argued the points for the past year or two. It was at this point that things got stupid and just tedious. People just kept asking questions and being retarded. I think these people just don't have any friends and desperately wanted to talk to people. That and they advertised their domain name everytime they went up. The same like 5 people went up to the podium like 10 times each. They definitely needed to enforce limits on the number of podium appearances.

There were however, some entertaining characters at the front table where the "important" people were. I don't know their names, but we made up our own. There was the "seedy guy who doesn't look like he could be trusted", the lawyer, the asian lawyer, the "ex-board director" (who was actually in my room and just in the audience), and the "angry guy". The angry guy was hilarious. He was like the main guy too. When the lawyer was talking and clarifying things, he would stand right behind with his mouth half open and looking as if he was gonna kill someone. Sarah took a video of him on the screen with her phone, but unfortunately it didn't turn out...

The by-law eventually passed. Then there was the "Letter Patent". What the hell is a letter patent????!?!??!!?!? Whatever it is, it was argued about for a long time. One particular thing about the CIRA potentially going into other Internet things. I totally see why people had problems with that and I did too until some of the board directors cleared things up. Sigh. That eventually passed as well, though only about 230 people remained as the meeting went for 3.5 hours instead of ONE hour.

The meeting finally adjourned at 9 pm. We jetted out of there pretty quick and grabbed our memory key. They took our voting cards in exchange for the memory key, otherwise it would have appeared in the picture at the top of the post.

When we got to the subway, a train was just about to leave and Sarah ran on, but her massive bag got stuck in the door!!! Thinking that she was also going up the University-Spadina line, I shoved her bag in, pushed open the doors, and jumped on. As we were pulling away, I was like shit, I'm on the wrong line.... I switched over at the King stop.

Worst of all, I think I crunched my balls a bit while sitting in those chairs for 3.5 hours. Stomach didn't feel so well after that and I'm still not feeling all that comfortable down there...

Was it worth it? Probably not. The experience was kinda interesting with the whole addendum and voting procedure, but it was WAY too long and you can't store anything on a 128 MB memory key...

New banner!

I finally replaced that obscenely overused banner that came with my template and now I have a spiffy new banner! Let it bring you strength and inspiration and come back tomorrow to see it again!

RIP Mailblocks

The reign of Mailblocks has ended.

Mailblocks was created by Phil Goldman (also the creator of WebTV) and went live on March 24, 2003 and I’ve been a devout worshipper of Mailblocks since April 5, 2003. After Phil Goldman’s death at the age of 39 on Christmas 2003, Mailblocks sold out to AOL Aug. 4, 2004. I hate AOL.

I got an e-mail today saying that AOL is shutting down Mailblocks on Nov. 16, 2005 and this is my 30 days notice. Apparently, I can signup for a free AOL e-mail, but I’d never sell my soul to devil. They say I can get a refund (I paid something like $10 or $15 for 3 years as it was some sort of sign on bonus), but I’ll believe it when I see the money.

Mailblocks, although having a rather cheesy name which “Princess” has been pestering me about for the past little while, wasn’t just another webmail account. It was very innovative for its time and unfortunately, things went downhill (read: sold out to AOL and stopped innovating) after Phil Goldman’s death.

The key to Mailblocks was its ability to completely eliminate spam. To date, Mailblocks has stopped 13,695 spam from entering my inbox. Its challenge/response system requires the sender to verify that it’s not a computer by having the sender type in alphanumeric characters from an image, which, right now, computers cannot effectively do. Until this verification is performed, the e-mail stays in the “Pending” folder for up to 2 weeks. Some smarts were built-in in that this verification only needed to be done once, people I send e-mails to were automatically put on the “white-list”, and I could also authorize people manually.

Mailblocks was also able to fetch e-mails directly from Hotmail and put them through the challenge/response process, effectively eliminating spam from my Hotmail account (which back then before all this spam filtering stuff, I was getting close to 30 spams a day). Further, it consolidated all my e-mail into one account (I like getting all my e-mail in one place). Mailblocks also offered IMAP so that e-mail programs such as Thunderbird, could be used.

Another one of Mailblocks’ innovations was trackers. This was another spam / filtering system. I could for example, create a “tracker” with the e-mail address, vincentcheung-shop1@mailblocks.com and any e-mail to this address would go into my “shop” folder. I would use this e-mail address for online shopping, which then did two things. One, it sorted out my e-mails automatically for me as all shopping related e-mails went into my “shop” folder. Two, if a seedy online retailer sold my e-mail address and I started getting spam at this e-mail address, I could just remove this tracker and create a new one, say vincentcheung-shop2@mailblocks.com and delete the old one so I don’t get the spam at the old tracker. Gmail does support something like this now. You can say, use vincentcheung+shop@gmail.com and those e-mails will get into my Gmail account and I can filter based on who the e-mail is sent to. The problem is that the “+” symbol is incorrectly determined by many sites to be an invalid symbol in an e-mail address. Gmail does let you put a “.” anywhere you want, so for example, vincent.cheung@gmail.com is the same as vincentcheung@gmail.com and you can then filter based on this.

Lastly, I got 15 megs of space with Mailblocks at a time when Hotmail and the other webmail providers were only giving 1 or 2 megs.

I had known for some time that Mailblocks was eventually going to be killed off b/c AOL bought it to build its own webmail system. A few copycats started up after Mailblocks and I signed up for a “Fusemail” account a while ago. It has many of the same features as Mailblocks, but an even cheesier name…..

2.5 computer years is a long time and things have changed. I’ve effectively transitioned from my Hotmail account and get much less spam (maybe 5 / day at most) because of better spam filtering. Folders are outdated. 15 megs can be the size of a single e-mail.

I have been using my Gmail account more and more lately. One of the things that helped me transition was Gmail’s secure SMTP. I have Bell Sympatico DSL back in Toronto and they don’t let you use SMTP, except their server, but when I’m at say, school, I cannot use Bell’s SMTP server. Gmail’s SMTP server, being “secure”, doesn’t use the regular port 25 and thus, I can use Gmail’s SMTP server in Thunderbird to send all my e-mails from where ever I am. What then happens is that it looks like all my e-mails are sent from Gmail.

Gmail gives me 2+ gigs, has labels, tracker like things, and good spam filtering. Gmail doesn’t however, have IMAP support, which makes using multiple computers to check my e-mail with Thunderbird difficult. Gmail does support POP, which is a half assed solution. I use Thunderbird on my laptop to check my Gmail using POP, and for my desktop computer at home and school, I have to use the web page, though Gmail’s web interface is pretty slick. Plus, I’ve been using labels more effectively now, which is not supported in Thunderbird. Gmail also cannot fetch my Hotmail e-mail, but Thunderbird has a webmail plug-in that’ll somewhat do the trick. I rarely get any e-mail from my hotmail account, so this isn’t much of an issue now.

So, in the end, while I was quite surprised with the e-mail I got this morning and Mailblocks’ sudden demise, I’m not too upset, as I was already transitioning to Gmail anyways.

Let the reign of Google begin...