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I was reading Ars’ review of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” today, and started thinking when was the last time I saw a crash on my devices. So I popped open my log files and worked out the following last crashes.

• Windows XP – last crash: August 18th, 2003.
• Windows Vista – last crash: June 26th, 2006.
• Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” – last crash: May 17th, 2007.
• Ubuntu Linux – last crash: December 12th, 2006.
• Nokia Internet Tablet OS 2007 – last crash: June 22nd, 2007.
• Symbian S6v3.0 – last crash: 21 September 2007.
• Apple iPod – last crash: April 22nd, 2007.

Oddly enough, my experience has been that Windows is more stable than other operating systems, though I suppose it’s also because I spend less time tinkering with Windows than any of the other operating systems. The Windows XP crash is almost certainly because of Blaster. The Vista crash was during one of the betas when I was screwing around with registry settings. The Mac OS X kernel panic seems to occur without fail when I hook something up using Firewire, but excluding those crashes, I had a random kernel panic for no reason I could make out when I connected my camera to unload photos after my San Diego trip in May. I’ve no idea what caused the Ubuntu crash. The Internet Tablet crashed when I accidentally installed the wrong version of a program (a Mistral, not Bora, version). I ran out of RAM on my N80, causing the Symbian crash. And the iPod dies for no reason at all that I can fathom, though it’s been better in the last few months – fingers crossed.

Overall, most of my errors seem to be because of user interaction, not because of hardware failures. That’s impressive, and it’s also a testament to how stable and mature modern hardware has become, and how tolerant modern software is of things that would have killed older operating systems.

Okay, so it seems that Gmail will automagically save any messages you send through their SMTP server into your sent folder. No need to actually get Thunderbird to save a copy. This jibes with my own experience as well. Excellent.

I seriously wonder who came up the WMATA’s operating policies when it comes to their trains.

Sunshine? Too much glare, gotta drive them slow. Rain? No traction, gotta drive them slow. Snow? Slippery, gotta drive them slow. Cloudy? Could rain, gotta drive them slow. 8 Cars? Might not be able to break quickly, gotta drive them slow. 6 Cars? Might be too full, gotta drive them slow. 4 Cars? Definitely too full, gotta drive them slow. Any other reason? Can’t be too careful, gotta drive them slow.

And you fleece me out of $7.80 a day for what reason?

When I was in high school and in college, I set up over the years a number of instant messaging accounts. First ICQ, then MSN, then Yahoo and finally, AIM. Of course, I forgot the first ICQ number’s password, thus losing one of those uber-low six digit numbers, but c’est la vie.

Anyway, once I graduated, in part because I didn’t need to IM as much and because my preferred IM program (Trillian) basically stopped development, I stopped using all IM excepting Google Talk – and that because it was so tightly integrated with Gmail, it was hard not to use it.

Yesterday, after checking out Trillian (still effectively dead – version 4.0 was due in early 2006, and they’re still doing beta tests at the end of 2007), I downloaded Pidgin and tried it out. Despite the lack of audio-visual functionality that I had in my Trillian Pro setup, I find that it’s easy to use and much faster and much less of a memory hog. The only other complaint I have is that it doesn’t have a skinnable interface, thus making it impossible for me to make it look like my favourite IM client – AdiumX (which is also powered by libpurple, but for the wrong platform).

Still, I’m slowly starting to use IM again. I need to still recreate meta-contacts, rename people so I know who is who (clevernickname27461 is not very helpful) and reorganize the groups. For some reason, every IM program I’ve used over the years has put the same people in different groups, causing chaos. So I have people who I barely know in my family group, my family members in my CTY group and so on. Crazy. But if you see me online (I’ll setup a proper contact page in the next day or so), do say hello. Who knows, I might say “Hi!” back.

As I was trying to clean up and clean out old accounts today, I suddenly discovered that I had an Orkut account. Orkut? Me? I thought that was invite only!

Anyway, so I logged in for the first time in three years and… what the heck are these 4796 scraps?

Apparently I created back when there were about 4,000 people total on Orkut, a community for Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. In the three years since I logged in, the community had grown from about two people to nearly 35,000 people. Most of whom were complaining that I wasn’t moderating or administering the community and that there was rampant spam, junk messages, rude people and… yeah, the list of complaints went on and on. It was either that, or requests that I grant them moderator access or promote or join other groups. After looking through about a thousand of these types of messages, I tried to find a way to de-administer the community to someone else or leave it as a free for all (on Facebook, if you are the last administrator and you leave the community it gets marked as unmoderated and offers itself up for the taking). After an uneventful romp through the help, and a huge waste of time looking through Google results, I sighed, shrugged and deleted the community.

So if you suddenly discovered that the DDLJ community disappeared – sorry, you’re right, flame me here. I deserved it. And in any case, it’s easier to deal with being flamed than to read through several thousand posts, figure out who is being nice and who is responsible and appropriately assign them ownership rights (assuming I could ever figure out how to do that).

Let this be a lesson to you: don’t create communities in social networks that you will never again visit.

Okay, now, then – onto LinkedIn and MySpace and the other social networks I’ve created accounts on.

The big news in the blogosphere today is that Gmail is now supporting IMAP connections – or they will soon. This is a quick set of instructions to get Gmail working “right” with Thunderbird, because initially, Thunderbird and Gmail don’t quite gel like they should.

First, follow the instructions here. That should get basic IMAP functionality going. Then a few things you need to do:

1. In Thunderbird, find Account Settings (either under Tools or Edit). Find your Gmail account in the resulting window and select “Copies & Folders”.
2. Under “Place a copy in:”, choose Other, and pick Sent Mail under Gmail > [Gmail]. Apparently, it “just works”.
3. Repeat as appropriate for Drafts.
4. Close out Thunderbird completely (make sure you’ve caught every last pesky hidden window).
5. Find and open up prefs.js in your choice of editor. You should also make a backup of prefs.js.
6. Figure out which of the servers is your Gmail account – this means basically, find the line that says “user_pref(“mail.server.server#.hostname”, “imap.gmail.com”);”. Make a note of that server#.
7. Add the following below that line: “user_pref(“mail.server.server#.trash_folder_name”, “[Gmail]/Trash”);” replacing # with the server you identified in the step above.
8. Save and close out the prefs.js file.
9. This is key – start Thunderbird and check that Trash is not appearing immediately below Inbox. If it is, then there was a glitch somewhere and it did not work because of the glitch. Where the glitch is… I don’t know, it seems to be random, so try restarting Thunderbird. It doesn’t matter what icon the folder has – it took between two and three restarts of Thunderbird for the icon to show up correctly.
10. Finally, once all of this is working okay, fire up Gmail’s webmail interface and choose to edit labels, deleting any [IMAP] labels that may have appeared. Note that this doesn’t actually delete any messages tagged with it – just the label itself.

One thing I’ve not managed to figure out is whether step #2 is necessary – I think it is, but it’s also possible Gmail automatically places a copy of everything you send through the Gmail SMTP server there. I’ll do some more sleuthing and figure that out when I get a chance. Gmail saves all mail you send through your SMTP server automatically to your sent mail folder, so you don’t need to get Thunderbird to place a copy there as well. In fact, you’ll end up with duplicates.

Good luck and hooray for Gmail IMAP.

Someone once told me that I should be on Cranky Geeks because I would find fault with everything. I commented I couldn’t possibly be worse than John Dvorak, but was told that “John Dvorak has nothing on you”. Other people agreed. So I thought about it recently (especially given the spate of things I’ve tagged as annoyances) and realized that it’s not negativity that is driving a lot of this – it’s because I want to make things better.

For at least eight years, I’ve adopted a saying by George Bernard Shaw as my personal motto: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” That principle – the refusal to accept things as they are – gets people upset because they think I’m negative and abrasive when I criticize a pet thing of theirs…. just see my scathing review of Jefferson Friedman’s Sacred Heart Explosion if you don’t believe me. But as I find and report bugs, as I criticize and comment on products and as I review and rant on my personal experiences, I think I am providing feedback that helps create better technology and better products on the road ahead. It helps me and product designers refine technology and it helps me and other consumers find things we like.

So if I criticize your pet project or idea – it’s not because I don’t like it; in fact, just the opposite. It’s because I liked it, because I would like to make it better I’ve commented on it. Ultimately all technology should be like watches or cars: omnipresent black boxes that should work with the minimum of fuss or attention. That’s what I strive for and that’s why I give scathing feedback.

I’m going to start sounding like Peter Griffin any moment now, but I actually have a problem with Wikipedia that’s been nagging me for quite a while: I will happily use it, but I now refuse to contribute to it. Why? Well, basically, because of vandalism and such, there are bots watching for deletions and/or additions. This is great, except that if you actually make a mistake, you can get yourself banned. Here’s what happened to me.

I had a free moment and decided to add proper book templates to a couple of books. I hit save after editing a page and thought I had double pasted a template and went back to delete it. So I did so. A few minutes later I had a second double paste. Confused, I looked at the original template, and realized there were two templates in a row, and I had accidentally copied both. So I corrected the second article. Now a bot had spotted me deleting things, so I got a warning. I wrote on my talk page to explain what happened and deleted the text of the Bot’s warning in the process. Boom. Banned – three deletions of “large amounts of text” in a row in quick succession, including deletion of a warning.

Well okay, you contribute info. I’ll use info. I don’t see a need for this to be a two-way relationship either.

(Bonus – other ways to handle this: pay attention to the user history to make sure it’s clear whether or not the person understands why, make sure that the Banhammer doesn’t fall on someone who has explained their reasons behind deletion of text, put a box explaining the short version of the rules next to anything that is editable, and finally if someone edits their own page… who cares?!?)

This looks like a bad month for the wallets of the “gotta have the newest gadget”. Fortunately for the wallet, and unfortunately for me, I’ve already made the budget through till December. But if you’re looking for a Christmas gift…

First up is the Chumby – a truly open source software and open hardware platform that’s been gestating for over a year. I first caught wind of it around May 2006 when a friend of mine walked into my dorm room with a very, very early prototype and said, “Hey look at this!” Since then, I’ve seen the Chumby announced, received an invite to buy one and seen it go on sale. What stops me? I want to know more about the software platform, since I’ve yet to see a complete SDK and I’ve also seen the model go from a bazaar to more of a cathedral model, from more functionality and customizability on the device itself (add/remove widgets from the device) to less (add/remove must be done through a website account). What bothers me most of all is this sudden advertising binge that seems to have come up – advertising on my fully paid for device!? So until the capabilities and ads are fleshed out a little bit more and/or someone writes a new kernel that fixes some of the outstanding issues, this will have to remain on my wishlist.

Second – and this is one I am unhappy about – is the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. It seems that many of the complaints that I had about the N800, especially the poor camera quality, the awful onscreen keyboard and slow processor have been fixed. I suppose what bothers me is that this was introduced less than ten months (289 days) after its predecessor, the N800. By contrast, the Nokia 770, the first to bear the Internet Tablet name, had a 14 month (421 day) life. While I have no qualms about having bought it, given the immense use I have got from it, it does bother me slightly knowing the design timeline, the N800 was always designed as a stop-gap device to prevent people from losing interest in the Maemo platform. So… a bit unfortunate, but I think I will stick with my N800 and wait for the successor to the N810 in about eight months (given the current Nokia schedule). Who knows – maybe by then Ubuntu mobile will be ready to go?

Finally – there is Asus EeePC. The real appeal of the EeePC is not the features, but the fact that it essentially gives you a full computer (not a Internet Tablet-style) computer in a a tiny, easily carriable form. Essentially, it gives a person two out of the three things that make a golden computer: small form factor and low price, though it sacrifices, as would be expected, the great performance. Still, this maybe a better buy in the long run than the Internet Tablets? As Jon Stokes notes with his law of x86 inevitability, “The moment an x86 processor becomes available that you can squeeze into your implementation’s design parameters then the x86 legacy code base makes that processor the optimal choice for your implementation.”

So… Chumby + Asus EeePC anyone?

The big news over on the S60 world today is that S60 has implemented touch screens. Basically, it’s now (or will be shortly) possible to use the screen as an input device in the same manner as Windows Mobile, Palm and AppleMobile devices. This addition is supposed to be backward compatible and allow existing applications to basically “just work” without modification.

I remember using my hp6315 which was the first device (in my recollection) that allowed people to use both WiFi and cellular networks. It had a touch screen. Either due to poor design or – what I believe – the inherent flaw in touchscreens, the screen was almost always covered in scratches or grease or water and I almost always found my cheek pressing the onscreen menu and keys. This latter problem which was the cause of many random hangups, mutings and just outright annoyance on my hp6315, has apparently been solved on AppleMobile devices, such as the iPhone, by having a “proximity sensor” that locks the screen when the phone is being held up to your cheek, preventing accidental button presses. The former problem of course, continues.

But the most glaring problem of all with touchscreens is the lack of tactile feedback. So, even if you had a slight vibrate – ala Nintendo Wii – you need to look at the screen to see what’s happening and where you’re pressing down. It’s frustrating in the extreme to have to do that when you have either thick gloves on, or are driving or speaking to someone… In short, touch screens are a boondoggle if you are unable to look at the screen or engage in the fine motor skills required to manipulate the interface. That was the primary reason I gave up on the hp6315: it was just impossible to use in Chicago winters – the choice really started to come down to “will I succumb to frostbite this time or can I get away with answering the phone?”

Let’s see. Perhaps the S60 alliance can work out a compromise platform that allows both for keyboards and a touch screen interface and solves my basic problems with a touch screen interface. Otherwise, perhaps it will be time to step down to a “dumb phone” that eschews a touch screen interface for the more useful keypad interface. Or perhaps switch to the sole smartphone platform that has not yet adopted touch screen interfaces: RIM’s BlackBerry.