Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • IMAP

    When I first got email, it was long before Hotmail was a reality, let alone this concept of unlimited Gmail storage. Email was tightly controlled and maintained, with ‘free’ accounts being unheard of. If you didn’t get an email with your college, you didn’t get email. High School students, like I was in the baby-internet days, didn’t need email. This worked out to a lot of advantages, keeping kids off the nasty places in the ‘net simply by virtue of requiring an email address to log in.

    Initially, we all used PINE for email and logged in via telnet into the server to access everything. ‘finger’ was a useful command, and you knew everything you needed to that way. I liked having all my email in one central location, since you always knew where to go to get it. But there were down-sides to this, of course. If the server was down, you had no way of reading your emails!

    Shortly thereafter we got access to Eudora and POP3 email. Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) let you download your emails to your computer, putting the onus on you for maintaining and deleting your mail. It was deleted from the server once you downloaded it, and it was only on your computer. Initially, I was able to stash everything on a single floppy, or two depending on how I felt about things, and Eudora was just as useful as I wanted it to be.

    For over a decade, I used POP3 and I was happy with it.

    This last year, I’ve been using webmail on my laptop, while leaving my desktop running some lengthy process, and then later downloading everything to the desktop. This shortly became inconvenient, and while I could copy everything between the computers, I didn’t really enjoy it, and it was becoming a pain in my ass to run the sync. Not to mention webmail when you have one account is fine, but when you have 5 or 10 (long story) you want to shoot someone.

    I’ve always known what IMAP did, but for whatever reason it never appealed to me. Basically, where POP3 downloads the email to your computer, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) leaves it on the server and allows you to synchronize every time you access it.

    E-mail clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This alets multiple clients to access the same mailbox. Most e-mail clients support either POP3 or IMAP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support IMAP. Basically POP3 offers access to a mail drop. IMAP4 offers access to the mail store.

    Now there are downsides to IMAP. Once you delete that email and purge it, it’s gone. Forever. Quando is gone forever, sire (Only my father will get that reference *sigh*). And if your ISP takes a walk, you lose all your email forever. Except I really don’t keep a whole lot in my email any more, when I get around to it. I store bills and stuff for a while, but that’s really it. Everything else gets saved offline to a folder or deleted. If it’s something I need access to from multiple places, maybe I’ll keep it in the email for a while. But usually not.

    So for now, it’s IMAP for me.

  • Pilot Fish Woes

    This is a true story. (more…)

  • Surfin’ Safari

    Safari 3 beta came out for Mac and Windows. Naturally I download Safari 3 for Mac last night and test it out, planning to pick it up on Windows when at work.

    On a Macintosh, things are like a pleasing mix of Firefox and Safari. There are a couple bugs I dislike (like Firefox’s ‘Allow Popups from…’), but I adore that it now alerts me ‘Dude! You’re closing multiple tabs!’ if I quit, and ‘Hey, you’re entering text in this window, you sure you want to close it?’ if I close this tab. So on that note, yay.

    On Windows it sucks balls. Oh, it’s fine on my XP home edition, but as soon as you add in Windows wackiness of Roaming Profiles, and proxies, and it dies.

    Mac makes two critical errors:

    1) Not letting you manually adjust proxies. Picking it up from IE seems sensible, but having used IE and multiple other browsers, I can tell you it’s a bad idea. IE settings work for IE. Firefox has to be different, slightly, and so does Safari. So instead, they should default to IE, but allow you edit access.

    2) Preferences don’t grok roaming profiles. There’s no way around how huge this is. If you want Safari to be used in corporate America, you must allow for roaming profiles. This means either you let relative pathing do it’s job, or you allow the users to manually set profile locations. The latter plan isn’t really going to work, since Mac lives by the ‘Do everything simply and have the user do nothing.’

    My solutions are simple sounding, and they won’t fix everything, but it’ll get them started.

    Hey, Mac, I used to build MSIs!

  • Why not homogenize?

    For another site I maintain, I use a total of six different coded products. Not one of the lot is actually integrated with the other, and no, I don’t use the same password between them. I’ve been having thoughts about merging the various tools into one vended support option, but as I look into the options, not one meets all the goals I have.

    Most of the time, when people look at a One Ring solution to keep all their products in line, they think of two aspects: usability and style.

    Usability means that, on the back end, you only have to learn one style of tools. We all know that no two product vendors produce the same style of code. Microsoft’s suite of word processing tools are, by far, the best out there, but Photoshop’s the place people go for photo editing. The interfaces between the two software tools is nothing alike. They’re so far un-alike it’s laughable. Hell, even Word on Windows is dissimilar to Word on a Mac.

    So for usability, people like things to look the same, or at least similar, so they don’t have to think hard when wanting to make a change. That makes sense.

    Style is more complicated. They want things to look the same. This makes more sense when you’re talking about a webpage, were you might have multiple background tools, but you want the whole site to look the same. This is called seemless integration. I call it style, since it’s a look and feel situation for the end use. Style points are useful. Style points keep people coming back to your site.

    In web software, which is as far as we’re going today, seamless integration is the #2 thing. #1 is content, a point most sites I’ve seen tend to miss. You have to have something worth reading, or people won’t read. Second? They have to enjoy the visit.

    A pox on all the sites with dark backgrounds and light fonts! That is not enjoyable! Most of us grow up with black text on white/light paper! We’re used to it, we like it, and our eyes have adjusted. Pander to us!

    There, was that too hard?

    Once you get a design, folding your multitude of tools into a seamless integrated design is fucking hell. Period. The majority of my sites are hand-coded, which means any integration was done manually. Over the years I got wise and used PHP includes, and then a PHP/SQL pastiche. But I attacked each part of the website problem as a separate entity.

    I needed polls, so I found good software. I needed an RSS feed, so I found one I liked. I needed a better gallery, so I picked on and so on and so forth. Doing things that way made extra work for me, this is true, but it also allowed me to tackle each new component as an individual. Would it have taken less time if I’d found an all in one solution? Yes, but it falls back on the problem that what I need doesn’t fall under usability and style.

    When I look for a new addition, I look for it as it’s own thing. A gallery needs to stand alone, without the rest of the site, and meet my organizational goals, my pretty URL goals, and my bandwidth goals. I’m confident enough in my l33t skilz to hack a system and make it look like how I want.

    So for me, a hacked up mishmosh system suite is what I need. Each tool is tailored specifically to my goals, and while it makes more work for me, the end user never has to deal with most of it.

    And if they’re happy, I’m happy.

  • Caveman Tech Support

    The tech support problem dates back to long before the industrial revolution, when primitive tribesmen beat out a rhythm on drums to communicate: (more…)

  • Stop repeating yourself!

    Almost a year ago, I blogged (and sent to a mailing list) a little ditty on how people know who you are on the net.

    One of the readers replied:

    : Admittedly, there a many legitimate reasons to have two IDs on one bulletin board.

    This might make an interesting follow-up article.

    Does it? Let’s find out!

    Some background information for the neophyte: Bulletin boards/forums have an ‘Admin’ who is the lord of all they survey. They run the code, generally the design, and have access to all things. Below the Admin are the Moderators, who have a varying degree of power. Some can only close nasty topics and some can do everything but blow the board’s code up. In other words, there are a lot of possibilities when we get into how much ‘power’ a moderator can have, so your millage will vary from board to board. Take this post with a grain of salt.

    Reason One: You’re The Admin

    In this instance, what you see logged on as the admin is not what you see as a user. For those of you at my office (and hi, I know you’ve found this page, I won’t tell anyone you read it from work, but I can see your IP address!), this is the same reason we have some people as admins and some as users. I’ll step it back.

    A user can log in, read posts, post a message, maybe send someone a private message. Just the simple stuff. That’s all they need to do, after all. Read and communicate. That’s all a user needs to do.

    An admin, however, can see the code, gets different error messages, and has control over not just the code, but the database with all the personal information.

    Now, as an admin, you also get a very different layout for the board, and when you’re designing things, it can be a problem. You know that what you see as an admin doesn’t match Joe User, so you make a second ID that’s just a user, and use that to test things from a user’s perspective.

    Reason Two: You’re The Admin

    No, I’m not repeating myself.

    If you’re the admin, sometimes you want to just be you. Having a second ID with which you can catfight with the best of them sometimes takes a load off people’s minds. It makes you normal and people have normal conversations.

    Reason Three: It’s a gaming board and you have multiple characters

    Some bulletin boards have roleplaying adventures and you can interact as different characters. Hence, different IDs.

    …

    Crap. I ran out of reasons.

    Okay, so there aren’t a whole lot, but there are some.