Me 2.0

I’m glad that my previous post has attracted comments from the developers of both Snarl and Growl systems as well as others. I wasn’t expecting much agreement by posting such writing in Growl and Snarl users’ forum. They are all bought into the idea of those systems after all.

When I think of Growl and Snarl, I think of a consumer tool. To me they are not programming frameworks like Spring or Hibernate, neither they are tools for computer savvy people like Process Explorer. I see them and I think of my Logitech diNovo keyboard.

My old Microsoft media keyboard had some “media” keys: Play, Stop, Forward and so on. But it was pain to use: They only worked with Windows Media Player until iTunes 6. After iTunes 6 came out I think Microsoft realised there are more media players in the market than WMP. So a driver update later and I starting playing nice with iTunes. But still no WinAmp or others. While ago for reasons not related to the media keys I decided to buy a diNovo keyboard. And it was then when I realised I actually enjoy using the media keys that I had always thought were for non-IT users. Not only did they play nicely with WMP, iTunes and WinAmp, but they work with Spotify too! And for those who don’t know, Spotify is newer than diNovo by far.

Now try doing that with Gmail and Snarl or Thunderbird and GFW. I am not saying it is not possible, but the experience is by far different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting GFW and Snarl teams should carry the burden of integration themselves. It is not about doing the work yourself, it is about making it more difficult for developers to do the wrong thing which in turn would make it easier for end users. As it is, the developers have to do the installation and configuration themselves. This makes the final product, non-integrated and inconsistent.

This for me is a good end-user experience. What was the GFW or Snarl equivalent? Well you got your diNovo and you have Spotify. Now you can go and search for a piece of software that connects them, install it spearately, configure it separately, upgrade it separately and so on. And probably every time you upgrade your diNovo driver or Spotify, you’d have to worry if they still are friends.

To me, good software is not equal to good code or even nice UI. For me consumer software is a full experience and I think GFW and Snarl can improve hugely by introducing frameworks and support tools (very similar to the ones used successfully by Firefox) for their developers. At the moment the burden is on the developers although in a consumer market the blame is mostly put on “Growl” or “Snarl” not the particular plugin. If you disagree I suggest you work in an IT support department of a non-software house to appreciate the value of this experience.

I am writing this as a contributing to both tools. Not all contributions have to be in code I’d like to think.

Good luck

Mac users have enjoyed an almost universal support for Growl for years. Almost all good Mac applications support Growl and just use it if it is installed. This makes the whole experience with notifications very pleasant. Windows on the other hand has never had a single an unified experience for user notification. Growl for Windows (and Snarl) is trying to be that. There are some problems with that however:

• Both Growl and Snarl have been in development/beta for a long time. Growl and Snarl are consumer software and need to be easy to find and install. You don’t really expect everyone to find the best version of a software on SoureForge and install it?
• There is no single application directory for their plug-ins. No reviews, ranking, bug reports. Nothing. Try finding a Google Wave notifier for Snarl now.
• The biggest problem with both Growl for Windows and Snarl is that their plugins are stand-alone applications. That is just stupid. I can write an application and use Growl for my notifications if it is installed. But why should I install a separate application if I just want to have Gmail notifications? This means a separate install, separate tray icon, separate “Start with Windows” settings and no unified configuration experience. What’s wrong with Firefox plug-in system. Snarl and Growl plugins don’t have to talk to the host application like an external tool. The external API is for external applications.

Should I start a new open source Growl for Windows replacement?!

Today one my Google Alerts found 3 instances of new mentions of a website. They are alegedly from different websites written in form of website reviews. Have a look here:

Site number 1

Site number 2

Site number 3

If you are getting a message from DotNetOAuth like this “The message expired at 11/8/2009 4:28:42 PM and it is now 11/9/2009
12:15:40 AM.”, check your server’s date time and time zone. OpenId providers/relays uses UTC to communicate and a wrong clock/time zone can cause this issue.

I’ve tried different ways to get push email working on my iPhone. And I’m talking about reasonable ways for businesses, not non-scalable consumer based push Apps.

I was very happy with NuevaSync’s service for a long time and I paid for their premium service to get my Google Apps emails pushed to my iPhone. The service quality however has dropped dramatically. The service is simply not working properly on my iPhone and more importantly the support provided by NuevaSync is very poor.

My main reason of paying $25 to NuevaSync as opposed to using Google’s free service was the support. That advantage gone, I’m left to use Google’s half baked email push service which is not real-time, does not remove deleted emails sometimes and like all other free services from Google, comes with no support.

When your product is competing with someone like Google, your only hope is to provide kick-ass support and take care of your customers. NuevaSync has failed in that spectacularly.

Her is my new cycle for finding new music/artists:

• Listen to my recommendations on Last.fm
• Listen to their back album on Spotify
• Look them up in Eventful
• Buy the tickets from See

iContact (Google Contacts for Windows desktop) is now available from its new home here.

If you have to support an IT system like production servers of a trading system, then you know exactly how it feels to be on your “support day”. 

Many organizations use spreadsheets to track these days and allocate their staff to be on support. But these spreadsheet based solutions are not very efficient. The spreadsheets are not accieblie online, they have to be maintained manually, the changes are usually not tracked (unless combined with a source control system) and sometimes it become difficult to make sure the support days are dished out fairly.

This is when an online algorithmic scheduling system comes handy: Onyaka is just that. Onyaka is an online staff scheduling system that automatically generates support rotas (rosters) on a rotating and fair basis.

It supports vacations, different skill sets and multiple projects and most importantly allows managers to override its decisions for maximum flexiblity.

It is absolutely free with no limits. Can’t be better than that can it?!

Really liked this one:

http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/

It took me a while but I eventually got fed up with Sky’s rubbish modem/router. I got this Sagem F@ST black box when I signed up for Sky broadband. They wireless part of it was dropping connections left, right and centre and I had to disable it and get a Linksys Access Point instead. But since using Google Chrome, I started getting user authentications from the router for no reason as well as corrupt files when downloading big ones. I suspect this has something to do with the way Chrome uses lots of simultaneous connections.

Anyway, I was so fed up that I bought a Linksys AM200 “modem”, and flashed my old Linksys WRT54G firmware with DD-WRT to replace the Sagem box. I had used the Linksys router with a DLink ADSL modem before with no problems but since Sky is ADSL2+ I had to change it to an AM200.

The problem is AM200 is not really a simple modem. It has “some” router functionality. Enough to make connecting it to other routers very difficult but not enough to make it a decent router, even for home use.

So I embarked the task of connecting AM200 to WRT54G (which should be easy since it is advertised on modem’s box). Here is how I did it (after 5 attempts):

1. Sky is ADSL2+. Use this service to get your Sky DSL username and password.
2. Configure AM200 to use PPPoA with the username and password.
3. Get other ADSL settings from the old Sky modem (like VCL settings) and use them in AM200
4. Set the IP address of AM200 to 192.168.2.1 and subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
5. Enable the DHCP server on AM200.
6. Make sure AM200 is connected to the internet.
7. Disconnect your PC from AM200 LAN port, and connect AM200 LAN port to router’s WAN port.
8. Connect your PC to one of the LAN ports of the router.
9. Configure the router to get its IP address from DHCP
10. Set the IP address on the router to 192.168.0.1 and subnet mask to 255.255.255.0
11. Set the gateway of the router to 192.168.2.1 (modem’s)

Make sure DNS servers are entered in router (you can get this from your ISP or old Sky modem)

This should allow you to connect AM200 to WRT54G. Other configurations like Half bridged mode, Bridged Mode only and others will not work with PPPoA connections that have dynamic IP addresses (exactly like Sky ADSL).