Monthly Archives: November 2007

HTML Mail Revisted

November 29, 2007 – 10:12 pm

So I just read (thanks to a link from Jason’s del.icio.us feed) an interesting reversal of position on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog on the subject of HTML e-mail. It references the Email Standards Project.

It’s an interesting approach, and probably the best way to handle the issue, but I still would recommend avoiding it at all costs, if it’s at all up to you.

The reason (primarily) is that at this time most e-mail clients are still very lacking in “real” support for standards-compliant HTML and CSS. If you stick within the limited scope of the common ground, it’s OK, I guess, but the problem inevitably becomes maintaining that stand, once you’ve agreed to do HTML main in the first place.

This stems from the fact that it’s usually the marketing geniuses who insist on the fancy presentation that requires HTML in the first place. The problem is that once you’re doing HTML at all, they know that you can make it look more like they want it to look, and they don’t care that you would need to resort to all kinds of non-standards-compliant table-based hackery in order to achieve that look consistently, due to the lack of consistent support in the various clients.

Yes, this is the slippery slope argument, and I guess you could just as easily argue that the only realistic way to tackle this problem is to work towards compliance in the major e-mail clients and embrace the ones that do offer it.

I just can’t help but not like the idea of HTML e-mail in the first place. We already have a perfectly good delivery platform for HTML: it’s called a web page. Last time I checked, almost all e-mail clients will convert a plain-text URL into a click-able link, so I say keep the e-mails themselves plain text, short and sweet, with a link to a web page for the full HTML content of what you’re trying to present.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged | Comments (8)

Gillmor Group / The Gang

November 29, 2007 – 12:19 am

I just got around to listening to a couple of episodes from the recently restarted podcast formerly known as “The Gillmor Gang” (now just called “The Gang”, I believe, due to some hassles with Podshow which I don’t have all the details on). I haven’t caught up to the latest batch yet, but the first couple were very entertaining.

It just reminded me how great this show, and podcasts in general, can be. I say podcasts in general because this is the kind of show that no commercial network would ever carry (for long, anyway). The lack of “polish” is a huge plus in my book, despite what some people (even some participants on the show) might think.

Speaking of that, although listening to Jason Calacanis and even Mike Arrington for any amount of time can be extremely annoying, it’s even worth sitting through that because of all the other good content balancing it out. You might even say it’s because of that, because you get to hear people who strongly disagree with each other do so without pulling any punches but also without crossing the line of disrespect.

You can catch the show at the Gillmor Group on Facebook, or via the RSS feed directly.

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FacebookSpace

November 28, 2007 – 2:39 pm

Wow, I just checked out Facebook on a computer without the AdBlock Firefox extension and Greasemonkey ad-stripping scripts I usually use on my own computers, and it was shockingly non-clean (cluttered looking).

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged | Comments (4)

Hoax Viruses 101

November 22, 2007 – 12:48 am

Tonight I heard a report from Dan about an e-mail alert he received from a mutual friend of ours regarding the dreaded “Invitation” virus.

As he read the mail out loud, I knew even before looking at it myself that it was a hoax, and as he read on it only confirmed it further.

This particular letter did try a couple clever tactics to try and add a bit of credibility, such as mentioning it was from a friend at a named local police department and that the police department friend had actually checked and verified it on snopes.com, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was still bogus.

Here are some tell-tale signs that stood out like a sore thumb: (see the link above for the full text of the message, minus the added stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph)

  1. Technical inaccuracies and gross misspellings. I haven’t seen a real virus in quite some time that tried destroying / format your whole disk, but if you have any hope of being believed that it’s actually happening now, you’ll probably want to try something more convincing than “This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc,…” (capitalization preserved to illustrate foolishness).
  2. The overwhelmingly repeated purpose of the message is to get you to “send it to as many of your friends as you can”. I’m seriously considering writing a mail filter that automatically trashes any messages that contain a plea to forward it to my friends; 99% of the time it’s legitimate trash, and I can live with that small false positive.
  3. Overly ambitious attempts to claim credibility by referencing big names: “This is the worst virus announced by CNN, it has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.” These type of claims immediately seal the deal for me - 100% positively hoax. CNN and Microsoft, in the rare occasions when they do publicly discuss viruses NEVER, NEVER, EVER use phrases like “worst / most destructive virus ever”.

Just a few things to keep in mind when you’re reading your mail. :)

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Phoneless

November 22, 2007 – 12:21 am

Well, I’m not really without a phone, but I have had to revert back to my old one since the charger plug on my current phone broke. Good thing I kept it around. It really makes me realize how much I used (and now miss) all the cool features of my current phone, though.

The main parts that are difficult to adjust to are not having really usable internet access on the device, the lack of “power-user” media playback capabilities, and various other benefits to having a computer that you can install your own apps on with you at all times.

The Symbian phone I went back to using does have IMAP e-mail and basic web browsing, but it’s nowhere near the same as what I had on my HTC.

The media playback thing is a big one, since I listen to a lot of podcasts (including radio shows released as podcasts). I’ve had to resort to using a cheapo MP3 player just to get by with listening to stuff, but it’s nowhere near the same. The biggest thing I miss in that regard involves functionality when dealing with large files.

It seems like a pretty small thing, initially, but when some podcasts are over an hour (sometimes even two), it is pretty important to be able to (1) turn off the player and come back later and automatically pick back up right where you were, AND (2) also be able to skip to an arbitrary point within a given file (using the touch screen), without having to fast forward or rewind to get there.

There’s lots of other stuff like the sleep timer, etc. that are nice to haves as well - probably too many to mention in this post.

Before anyone suggests an iPhone as a suitable replacement on both counts, let me say that I’ve used it (along with pretty much every other “high-end” phone device), and while it probably has the best browser on the market, for overall internet capability I still prefer the phone I had for the unlimited capabilities it provided that are noticeably lacking in every other platform I’ve seen.

Same goes for the media playback capabilities, actually. The particular software I was using on my phone has all the features of the iPod plus a whole lot more, several of which I found quite useful.

I don’t want to turn this into an anti-Apple post (or anti-anything, really), so I’ll stop there; all that was just to say that my eventual replacement will most likely be an HTC device, based on my experiences up until this point.

I am, however, going to be waiting a while to see how things play out - give Android a little time to take off, etc. I’d love to go with OpenMoko too, but I don’t think it’s going to be “ready enough” soon enough for me.

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Pownce - first impressions

November 21, 2007 – 11:22 pm

I recently signed up for Pownce, partly to be able to comment on friends’ posts there, and partly for research on a new plugin I’m thinking about doing.

I hadn’t signed up before, because I couldn’t really think of anything that I’d want to use it for that I wouldn’t rather just do on my own blog. I still can’t think of much in that regard, other than perhaps private posts that are only available to friends. You could still do this on WordPress, but it may not be as easy for the friends you want to share with.

To be honest, I think it says a lot about the nature of the platform that my primary reason for joining was to work around a restriction imposed by the system’s closed nature (specifically, needing to be a Pownce user to comment on friends’ posts, even public ones).

The other drawback I’ve found (similar to Facebook, although a bit worse in Pownce’s case) also centers around their “walled garden” approach to the information.

They do have some RSS support and quite a bit of e-mail notification options, but for some things that I consider pretty important (like seeing when someone has replied on a thread that you’ve commented on) there’s no other way that I can find than to go to their actual site and check it periodically. (PS - If you know of a workaround for this, please let me know)

They did recently publish an API which has some pretty limited functionality, but it would go a long way towards making me more of a fan of their service if the scope of the API would be expanded to provide access to all of “my” content (or content related to “mine”) in the system. I guess that’s the key concept here: who really owns the data? In closed systems like Facebook and Pownce, it’s clearly them, even though you might like to think of the information as “yours”.

On the bright side, this is probably a good starter system for people who would really like something like a blog but even signing up at wordpress.com is a bit too techie for them. Combined with the social networking aspects, I can see the attraction for a lot of people.

Bottom line: I’ll keep my account for a while in hopes that the areas I was down on will improve, but I don’t plan to publish much original content there; I’ll keep that as “my own” and maintain a heck of a lot more flexibility with it by publishing here on my blog.

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Redefining privacy

November 19, 2007 – 2:11 am

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States change their definition of privacy.

Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, wants Americans to redefine privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil in order to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering because, as technology has changed, a growing amount of foreign communications passes through U.S.-based channels.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a FISA court order between 2001 and 2007.

In other words, “we’re not spying on you, because we’ve changed the definition of what constitutes spying”. Next up: “redefining” torture, invasion and occupation, and patriotism.

But, on the bright side, congress keeps telecoms on the hook for illegal spying:

Full House and Senate Judiciary Committee Each Pass Bills with No Amnesty for Warrantless Surveillance

Washington, D.C. - Both the full House of Representatives and the Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to keep telecommunications companies on the hook for their role in illegal government spying on millions of ordinary Americans — at least for now.

By JB | Posted in Blog Posts | Tagged | Comments (2)

Second thoughts on Android

November 12, 2007 – 12:54 pm

OK, well after seeing the latest videos of Android, there is much less uncertainty as to how the platform itself will turn out. Specifically, the primary concern I linked to in yesterday’s post seems to not be so big of a deal, at least up front.

It’s certainly looking good so far, especially the Java SDK. At first glance, it appears that it might give Windows Mobile a run for it’s money in the ease of development arena, since Windows Mobile has been the leader as far as that goes for quite a long time with the .NET Compact Framework.

I still have concerns with the licensing model allowing for locked-down released implementations, but it is encouraging to see that both T-Mobile and HTC are participating, since I’ve had very positive experiences with HTC handsets from T-Mobile which were not limited or crippled in any way. Hopefully they will continue in that tradition of not encumbering anything on their devices with their first Android release. If so, I’ll likely continue to be a customer.

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God Grew Tired of Us

November 11, 2007 – 10:53 pm

If you haven’t seen the documentary God Grew Tired of Us, I strongly recommend it. We just finished watching it; I’d seen excerpts before, but the whole thing is so worth watching.

It’s an amazing story, seeing boys who grew up and escaped from Sudan into refugee camps, and then eventually to America, watching them experience western culture for the first time. Their insights on our society are priceless.

The one about Christmas and how we celebrate it really struck me, in this season. If I can’t find a video clip of it to link to, I’ll make one and post on it here shortly.

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Fall Drive 2007

November 11, 2007 – 10:52 pm

It was a good time today, driving up the 33, through Lockwood Valley to Frazier Park, then back home on the 5. We stopped along the way at all of the traditional spots, and had a great time with the family (and the extended family / friends).

God even stopped the rain at all the right times in all the right places, especially at our usual eating spot. Saw some really cool rainbows on the way back too.

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