Today, they rolled out the new look for GMail (at least I got my first look today). The new look is a mixed bag. I generally find it less readable. The layout of messages is much harder for me to navigate. I find it harder to see what’s going on in a message thread, because in the past I had collapsed versions of all messages in the top of the screen and I could expand and contract them as I wished. I still haven’t figured out what the organizational principle is for the new layout and, from a usability point of view, any interface that you can’t figure out after an hour is rather a usability failure.

But, just after firing off an email to Google to explain why I found their new interface so difficult to navigate, I was poking around the settings and realized that GMail Offline is finally back and now inlcudes offline access to Calendar and Documents! It is currently only integrated with Chrome as a sort of standalone app (download for GMail or Calendar and Google Docs).

This is what the GMail offline app looks like:

GMail Offline Interface

1. Secret Sync – this is an add-on that encrypts files on your computer, using a key that nobody at Dropbox has, so even if someone gets into your Dropbox account, they can’t read your files. It’s free, but they plan to roll out a “pro” model with additional features.
2. Spider Oak offers client-side encryption built in, so it’s essentially the same as Dropbox + Secret Sync and is, like Dropbox, free for 2GB.

Secret Sync (or actually, I think it’s SecretSync as one word), being a different company entirely from Dropbox, means that your DB and SS passwords are not shared between companies, so that should be as secure as your passwords.

Spider Oak is one company, but they claim a higher level of privacy than Dropbox:

At SpiderOak we have created a true ‘zero-knowledge environment’ meaning that no one including the SpiderOak employees will ever know what you are storing on your SpiderOak Network. We can maintain this environment because at no time will anybody know your password (or the answer to your password hint) except you.

I still haven’t decided whether to switch. I’m pretty pissed off at Dropbox for the misleading statements they make on their site (saying all files are AES 256 encrypted – essentially unbreakable – but neglecting to say that they have the keys and with certain forms of attack the hackers could have them too!). Still, one of the things about Dropbox is it is very bandwidth efficient and I am bandwidth limited because I’m often connected over satellite. Dropbox tries to upload just the pieces of a file that have changed (based on filesystem sectors?) and to not even upload common files that a lot of people share (very popular songs). Once you switch to full encryption, I would think that changing a single period in a document would result in a completely different encrypted file, like if you were doing a hash, and require a full upload.

Spider Oak says no:

SpiderOak will scan the file and find only the changes, and store new data blocks for those areas of the file. This means that SpiderOak is able to store all historical versions of a document using little additional space.

For example, if you’re working on a research paper, and add new sections, charts, and other information to it as you go along, SpiderOak just stores these additional items. So, SpiderOak will be able to store all of the historical versions of your research paper using about the same amount of space as would be needed to only store the most recent version.

So it would probably be worth it to switch, but we turtles don’t do anything fast!

It seemed that if I saved the document as RTF and then opened it again in Word, it automatically converted the problematic characters. But since this is a book in the late stages, meaning it will not be proofread again, “seemed” really wasn’t good enough. I wanted to know. But I couldn’t search for the characters, because I didn’t know what they were. I needed to search for “any characters that are not the ones I allow in this document.”

Word has fairly good “wildcard” searching, but it starts to have trouble with more complex search expressions, especially complex “not” expressions. I live and die by PowerGREP, which I use for all kinds of things. It is an amazing, but somewhat expensive, tool for text processing that goes miles beyond plain GREP. Plain GREP as anyone from the Unix world knows, allows you to create complex search expressions, called “regular expressions” that let you effectively do thousands of search combinations in just one search. PowerGREP is GREP integrated into an application that makes all foudn occurences of your search string clickable (i.e. click on it and it takes you to that line in an editor), let’s you select files with great precision and easy and lets you chain many regular expressions together and run them in one go. It is an amazing tool and I’ve been using it since at least 2005 as you can see from my user testimonial (that link is an affiliate link by the way – if you buy through that link, I get a commission).

In my case the document is in French, with a few special formatting characters, so this is the “whitelist” of characters I want to allow:
[^A-Z\}\{\*@\&\~\+\#a-z0-9ÉÀàùéèôûêîçÇë\(\)\[\]\.\\/,;:»«’”\?\!–—\-_\s=]

As regular expressions go, this is actually one of the most trivial and straightforward that you can use. There are only a few tricky things. The [] define the character set, the ^ negates it (meaning, find any except the ones listed), the \ “escapes” a character that would otherwise have a special meaning, and then some sequences do have special meanings like “\s” which means “any whitespace” (space, non-breaking space, tab, return, etc).

Pretty quickly this finds most things that don’t belong, but it won’t find the odd Unicode characters rendering as two characters, because they display as two standard characters. So now that most cleanup is done, you want to find characters that are not being displayed as the standard Unicode character, but as a composite character. For example, with standard Unicode encoding, if you look for the word Châteaux in the RTF file using a simple text editor (so no conversion and rendering of the RTF as formatted text, but showing the underlying code), it will show in the source code simply as Châteaux just as expected. In the file I received from a colleague, however, it showed instead as Cha\u770\’5e\loch\f0 teaux with all that extra stuff. The \loch and \f0 codes will show up thousands of times, so we ignore those. But anything that shows up as \u and then some digits is one of these Unicode characters that is not rendered as a single character in RTF. So we can catch all those with a dead simple regex:

\\u\d+ (slash U and any number of digits)

If that gives false positives, you can refine it to

[^\\]\\u\d{2,4}

This will get rid of anything with an escaped slash and since all Unicode characters are going to have 2-4 digits, we don’t return cases with one or five digits. We get rid of the escaped slash only because if I have a string like \u770 in my text, it that would show in the RTF file as \\u770. So in my initial example above, it goes into code as Cha\\u770\\’5e\\loch\\f0 teaux.

If you do a lot of complex search and replace (or just searches) in text, including computer programs and the like, PowerGREP is absolutely worth the money. You can download a free trial that runs for 90 days. I suspect at the end of 90 days most people will decide that they have to have it in their toolkit or that they have no use for it whatsoever, depending on the kind of work they do.

Alternately, you can try one of these that are free. I have not used them and only know what you see on the page:
BareGrep which is ad-supported, though for $25 you can turn of the ads. BareGrepPro ($35) adds some of the features of PowerGREP, though it looks like it’s still much simpler in its capabilities.

Grep for Windows is free and you can have the registered version for a mere $5, but he really needs a better website with some screenshots or something, because it’s hard to see what it actually does and how much of the regular expression syntax it supports. If you’re on a budget though, it might be worth a look.

You can also get the standard Unix grep utility running on Windows, but it’s quite basic and, how shall I say this, if you don’t already use it and know where to get it, it’s probably not what you’re after.

The problem is, I have hated the interface design of every Apple product I’ve ever used. Among the most collossal mistakes — on the original Macs, you eject your floppy drive by dragging it to the Trash.

Switching from Audible to eMusic because of iTunes Player Interface Sins

Until recently, I was locked into using iTunes at least some of the time because it’s the only authorized way to burn books from Audible to CD (the unauthorized way is to play the book start to finish using a sound capture card and essentially re-record it as an MP3). Unfortunately, every time I have to use the iTunes player, I feel like screaming. It’s the main reason I just cancelled my Audible subscription. And frankly, the need to use the iTunes player in order to buy tunes off iTunes is the main reason I refuse to patronize iTunes. I just did a free trial of eMusic, and I’m sold. It frees me from the evil that is Apple (yes, I know, MS and Google are the evil empires oppressing poor little Apple. Thank God. I think Apple is the most rapacious of the three, they just haven’t been as successful at world domination yet, but I think we would all come to regret it if Apple had the power of a MS or Google. No friends, they would not use it repsonsibly, but that’s a long topic).

So where does the iTunes interface fail?

1. Managing Audio Books is Next to Impossible.

I have two choices. Let iTunes manage my files, or manage them myself. Since I have a lot of audiobooks, I can’t let iTunes or any other player pull data from the internet manage your tracks. For example, for Harry Potter, which runs to almost 100 discs, it files them under 5 authors. For a single book, it will be the tracks under multiple titles. And it will split tracks from the same disc.

In my opinion, the author should always be condsidered the “artist” for an audiobook, not the reader or some other random person. If I let iTunes handle this, I’ll get Harry Potter books filed, stupidly, under the artists:

1. J. K. Rowling (space)
2. J.K. Rowling (no space)
3. Jim Dale (the reader)
4. Nicholas Hooper (who wrote one of the soundtracks for the movie… uhh this is an audiobook, not a movie)
5. Patrick Doyle (ditto)

Then for album titles, I’ll get

1. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
2. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 01
3. Harry Potter & the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
4. Harry Potter The Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
5. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone [motion picture soundtrack]

Now, I’m not just anal. This means that in order to put together a playlist for a single book that actually plays the tracks from the book in order (which is kind of important for most books), you would have to hunt through, in the worst case for the scenario I gave above, 25 folders. Okay, I have not encountered the worst case, but I have had a single books split willy-nilly among as many as five folders. So there’s no way you can let iTunes manage your files and still be able to listen to a book in sequence without considerable effort.

Fine, I’ll manage them myself. But the tools for managing files are incredibily rudimentary.

No file management and Import Settings are just format and quality settings

That's "advanced"???

If I burn tracks from a CD using iTunes, I have hardly any control over what goes where. I can select a main folder for my iTunes media and I can tell iTunes to manage the media or not. That’s it! In Winamp or Windows Media Player, I can say where I want imported files to go. They still mess up if I let them pull information from the internet, but at least I can burn to a “quarantined” area where I can look at the files from burn and make sure it didn’t spread them all over my media collection. With iTunes, I can’t do that.

Doesn’t Monitor my Media Folders

Seriously, I have to buy a $25 app just so that when I add files to my media folder, iTunes will see it by default? Otherwise, I have to “import” every time I add files. As I said, I don’t want to manage everything through iTunes. Of course, this wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the misguided playlist metaphor that dominates the interface.

Playlist Metaphor

And then, in iTunes, everything is done in a playlist metaphor. Yes, I can “Create playlist from selection”, but that means I have to find the files within iTunes, select them all (and for a book this could be 250 tracks if it’s 10 CDs with 25 tracks per CD), create a playlist and then play it. With Winamp, for example, I can just play a folder and I can also ask it to recurse down the directory tree and play everything in subfolders. In order. It takes me 7 seconds.

And then, and here’s what set me off this morning, if I want to burn a CD, I have to first create a playlist. Now, I only wanted to burn one track to a CD and normally I would never use iTunes to burn with, but this is an Audible book and Audible only works with iTunes (even the Audible Player won’t burn the book to disc). Now, let’s say I have a track downloaded to my desktop and I want to burn a CD in Windows Media Player. I simply open WMP, drag the file into the playlist area, and hit “Burn”. There’s no playlist saved, created or other annoyance.

I’m sure this is all well and good if my overriding objective is to use an iPod, but it isn’t.

Better Alternative – eMusic plus Winamp

So I have come up with better alternatives to managing media and getting my ID3 tags in my MP3s. That’s for a future post. But how can you get rid of dependence in the iTunes player? Well, there are only two services that really require me to use it: Audible and iTunes itself. So the key is to dump those services. These days, alternatives abound. For buying music and downloading audiobooks, you can go to Amazon or Wal-Mart or whereever.

If you want a subscription like Audible, though, I’ve switched to eMusic. Okay, full disclosure: I signed up for the eMusic free trial offer that came with my wife’s new laptop (but actually, if you just go to the site you get a similar offer without buying any laptop). The selection is somewhat limited in the free trial, but I still managed to find plenty of music and a book that I wanted. Even with a full subscription, you don’t have a catalog as extensive as Audible or iTunes, but it’s not bad and it’s cheaper than Audible ($10/month versus $15/month). For music, it’s subscription-based, so if you download more than ten tracks per month at iTunes, eMusic will be cheaper.

Most of all, though, the main thing that got me to switch is that eMusic files come as MP3s, so I can use any player I want to play, burn and otherwise enjoy my audio with any player I want, including easily putting it on a CD or my non-Apple MP3 player so I can enjoy my audiobooks in the car.

Good bye Audible. Good bye Apple. In the case of Audible, I’m sorry, because I like Audible and if they would let me manage my books easier, I would stick with them. In the case of iTunes… good riddance!

Now that I have that pointless rant out of my system (I’m understand that nobody really cares but me and that bashing Apple is an unfogiveable sin), as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to show you how I now just use filenames and create MP3 tags from filenames to manage everything, then I can control the sort order in any player… coming soon.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but you can open the troubleshooting page by going to Settings -> Offline and scrolling down to the link for the Troubleshooting Page.

On my page, I noticed several errors for Failed to get blob down at the bottom of the page under “Recent Errors”.

A BLOB, of course, is a Binary Large Object. I realized at that point that I had unsynchronized messages with images attached (that is to say with BLOBs attached).

I tried moving these to Drafts, but that still didn’t work, so I copied and pasted the contents into a text editor for safe keeping, deleted the messages, cleared the browser cache, closed the browser, reopened, and reloaded GMail.

Success!

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that can cause this, but I didn’t find any good information on this on Google Groups or with a quick search, so hopefully this will help someone or at least give some directions to look in.

Since this is a long review of my trials and travails with Live Mesh, let me give a little summary at the top for the impatient types and the pros and cons of Live Mesh.

Live Mesh pros

• Synchronization through your internet connection, so it does not depend on the reliability of your home network.
• Real-time synchronization that works in the background so you don’t have to remember to sync.
• Off-site storage (5GB) so you can actually sync while one computer is off.

Live Mesh negatives

• Data integrity and potential data loss. Live Mesh doesn’t use a transactional model, or anything close, and deletes data willy nilly while it sorts out your supposed conflicts (see the "Cardinal Sin" section at the end).
• Performance. Synchronization through an internet connection is very slow. It will take days to synchronize an amount of data that you will synch in minutes through the local connection.
• System performance. My system ground to a halt while Live Mesh ran, eventually getting to the point where it took over four minutes to launch Word. It normally takes under two seconds.
• System stability. After a couple of days, both computers running Mesh started to experience major issues. Application crashes, system instability and lockups, system crashes. These computers were formerly quite stable and restabilized as soon as I removed Live Mesh.
• Phantom conflicts. I created perfect mirrors in the file systems for the folders I was planning to synch. Same files, same timestamps. Mesh flagged almost every one of them as a conflict. I’m not sure how Mesh determines whether or not there’s a conflict, but there is a serious problem with the algorithm. The two other synch/compare tools I ran found no conflicts.

Bottom Line

A friend is running Live Mesh with great success so I know it can work for some people, but for me it was a disaster. I have previously depended on two excellent, stable and reliable tools, Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and I’m back to using those and that’s what I still recommend. Live Mesh has, in my opinion, fundamental architecture flaws that simply can’t be solved by any number of bug fixes. I’d like to see a product like Live Mesh, but properly implemented.

My Live Mesh Saga in Detail

So, this long saga of my Live Mesh trial (in at least two sense of that word) may try the average reader. If you want the real meat of it, skip to the Cardinal Sin section at the end.

The Problem

The hard part is keeping the computers in synch. For normal daily syncs, I have been using Allway Sync, which is a great product. For more complicated syncs and anything involving synching a local machine with data on a server, I use Beyond Compare, which is a file/directory comparison tool, but has some great synchronization tools (I need to review these, because they’re worth knowing about). The Achilles heel of Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and almost every similar tool, is that they depend on my local network. Unfortunately networking my Windows XP Home computer and my Vista Home Premium computer is an exercise in frustration, with the Vista computer unable to see the XP computer ever, and the XP computer losing the connection to the Vista computer frequently. Also, these syncs only happen when I remember to do them, rather than happening in the background. That means I don’t waste system resources on background processes, but I could get caught with my data down, so to speak.

Enter Live Mesh

In theory, Live Mesh would solve both of the problems. It does it’s synching through the regular internet connection and it synchs files whenever a file is created or modified. For the first 5GB of data, it also stores the data on your Live Mesh Desktop, which is on a remote Microsoft server. 5GB is kind of laughable by today’s standards (I commonly file a 4GB photo card on a weekend hike), but it’s more than zero. Then finally, Live Mesh includes a remote desktop tool that gives you access, upon approval, from one computer to the other, and unlike the solutions that run over the local network, it worked from the Vista machine to the XP machine as well as the other way. Sounds like a great solution. And it’s a Microsoft product. I know for many people that means run for the hills, but I figured if anyone should be able to get something to work stably with the two latest Miscrosoft operating systems, it should be Microsoft. Figure again.

Getting Started — Initial Quibbles

I found getting Live Mesh up and running rather unintitive. Before installing it, I had done an up to the minute sync and so I knew both file sets were identical. It took some playing around to figure out how to tell Mesh which folders to match with which folders. On two machines with identical file structures, that might not be a problem, but since XP has My This and My That (e.g. My Documents) and Vista has just This and That (e.g. Documents) the file paths do not line up. So what Mesh likes to do is create a new folder on the target machine desktop that correlates to the source folder on the machine you’re working on.

The trick is that when you add a folder to Mesh on one machine, tell it to synch with the other machine (or was it not synch?). Then go to the target machine, right click the light blue folder on the desktop and tell Mesh which local folder to match that to. If the folder is dark blue, it’s too late, you can’t change it and you have to delete the Mesh folders and start over again. And again. I repeated this several times before I got it right. If that sounds confusing and unnecessarily complex for what should obviously be the simplest use case and primary task for Mesh, you’re starting to get why this is not a positive review. Eventually, though, I got all that figured out after much trial and error and Mesh started its work.

And then I started looking for missing features I had come to expect from Allway Sync

• File masks — omit certain types of files from my synch because I don’t want to copy, for example, shortcuts from one machine to another because XP and Vista have different file paths. Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Folder masks — omit some subfolders from synch. I keep my archived backups, for example, only on the desktop (and external hard drive). Again, Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Force a synch — this isn’t part of the Mesh paradigm. It’s real-time synching. The thing is, 90% of the time when I use the laptop, I don’t have an internet connection. So when I’m getting ready to head up to the mountain house for a few days, I like to force a quick synch before I head out the door. In theory, Mesh is up to date at all times, but that’s only true if you have a connection between the machines at all times. That might be good for an office worker who is synching with colleagues or a file server, but it’s not my situation.

Signs of Trouble

Now, if these two machines are in synch, it takes Allway or Beyond Compare about 5 minutes to run the analysis and generate a report. Unless I’ve just uploaded 10GB of photos or unzipped some massive open source application with thousands of files, the actual synch takes a couple of minutes. Usually I allow ten minutes total, but half of that if I know they’re basically already mirroring each other.

So Mesh started working. I expected that the internet synch over 1.5Mbps DSL would be slower than over the local network, but I was completely unprepared for this. Even though the folders in question were identical, Mesh was working for days and there is no progress indicator, so I had no idea whatsoever whether or not I was even getting close. Granted, I was synching about 50GB of data, but every file was bit for bit identical with identical timestamps. How hard could this be?

Then It Gets Bad: Crashes, Slowdowns and Conflict Hell

Apparently, really hard. As Live Mesh ground away, my Vista computer became progressively slower and less stable. Applications crashed. Live Mesh crashed and had to be restarted several times. It got to the point where I couldn’t work. I counted four minutes and two seconds to launch Word. And it wasn’t Word’s fault. Every app started behaving like that. And Word started to get a little crazy and at one point I could not save documents. Even closing and reopening Word (four minutes remember), I could not save a document. Finally, I shut Mesh off temporarily and Word sprang back to life, launching in under two seconds, but I actually had to reboot to get file-saving abilities back. So I decided I could only let Mesh run while I wasn’t actually doing anything. Eventually, though, Mesh crashed and would not restart on the Vista machine.

Meanwhile, it was cranking along the laptop and I decided to let it run and see what woud happen. What happened is I started getting notifications that I was out of disk space and that computer was crashing too. Now, I only had 22GB of free space on that machine, but since I was not adding one single byte of data, I figured that would be okay. Not quite. In two days, Mesh had brought down two computers, both of which had run reliably for years.

So clearly, I had to get Mesh off my system and uninstall it. So I did. That was easy enough. Now I had to figure out how to get things back the way they were. The first thing I noticed is I had a Live Mesh folder on my desktop. I looked inside and it had a subfolder labelled “conflicts”. Hmm… that’s interesting. Why would there be any conflicts? I wonder what’s in there. Answer: thousands of files. A total of something like 18GB of zip-compressed data. Now, that’s enough for me to damn Live Mesh to the Seventh Circle of Software Hell. Why is it finding conflicts when the data is bit-for-bit identical, has the same hash, and has the same timestamp? I mean, for God’s sake, what other tests are there? What possible conflict is there?

Essentially, Live Mesh saw every single file it analyzed as a conflict, and that was what was filling up my disk — when it sees a conflict, it puts a zipped copy of the file in a Live Mesh folder to await resolution (or so I thought). So I deleted that folder to get the XP machine running again.

The Cardinal Sin: Not Respecting Data Integrity

Then I fired up Allway Sync to analyze the disks in case Mesh had changed any data. Oh, my naiveté! Thousands and thousands of deleted and new files. So then I fired up trusty Beyond Compare for a little more analysis. It turns out that every time Live Mesh had found a conflict it had deleted one copy and moved, not copied, that file to the Conflicts folder. In the meantime, it had created thousands of placeholder files with the name filename.ext.xlp.

I don’t think I lost any data, because Mesh keeps one copy and deletes the other, but I had to go through and delete thousands of *.xlp files and then essentially move 27GB of data (the uncompressed size of the 18GB of compressed conflicts) from the computer that still had a copy to the one that didn’t (not always the same).

So here’s the cardinal sin: any data synch like this should be as transactional as possible. In SQL, you can group operations into transactions, which means that a set of operations fails if any individual operation fails. Here’s an example. When you go to the ATM machine and ask for money, the transaction looks like this:

• Request money from account
• Debit account for amount
• Spit bills out the slot
• Roll up the transaction

If the machine fails to give you the bills, the transaction fails, the debit gets rolled back and you don’t have to prove you didn’t get your money. The financial system and any system that depends on having the data right depends on a transactional model.

The key principle is data integrity. You can get a lot wrong in an application, but you shouldn’t screw up the data integrity part. So in my opinion, the fatal and fundamental flaw of the Live Mesh architecture is that it does a poor job of maintaining data integrity. Now, data synch can’t be fully transactional, because if the connection dies, you can end up unable to roll the transaction back. But, the placeholder files that mark the fact that Mesh has flagged a conflict should be in the Live Mesh/conflicts folder and the original data should be left intact for as long as possible. In other words, it should identify the conflict, which presumably requires user intervention of some sort, and do nothing to the data until it has instructions from the user. The Desktop/Live Mesh/conflicts folder should hold the placeholders and leave the original files alone until the last possible moment. To go around deleting my data and creating placeholder files in my data folders merely to mark the existence of a conflict is borderlin criminal!

So for me, the broad outlines and concept for Live Mesh is interesting, but the implementation is so fundamentally flawed that I don’t think any amount of bug fixes could redeem it and convince me to use it and I can’t recommend it.

Not Bad Really

I’m testing Office 2007 Home Edition. Some things I like. In general, I like the interface and find that but for a few incredibly annoying things, I could really appreciate this. In fact, it’s the best version of Office so far in my opinion, but that does not, of course, mean that I’m happy;-) People complain about the size of the Ribbon, which is sort of your command center in Word, but I find that if you take some time to set things up, you almost never need to expose it. For example, I create a Quick Styles set for each document template (always use styles, never direct formatting, right?) and the right-click context menu then has pretty much everything I need and most days I can leave the Ribbon minimized for 95% of the time. So for me, it’s a cleaner, more compact interface than older versions of Word and most actions take at least one fewer keystroke or click than in Word 2000. It’s much much smarter at putting the right things in the right-click context menu.

A Fitting Companion to Vista

Still, to me it is at the same time the Office equivalent of Vista. That is to say, the improvements in interface are offset by just absolutely abysmal stability and quality control at every level. It looks great. There are some nice, ehttp://raisedbyturtles.org/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=233&type=image&TB_iframe=trueven beautiful interface enhancements. But deep down, some things are just plain broken. Like I say, a fitting companion for Vista.

Whenever I use a Microsoft product, I wonder if they just don’t do any unit testing at all or what (unit testing is where every time you design a part of a program, you also design a program to test all possible options).

So What’s Pissing Me Off Today?

So the things driving me nuts right now are:

1. Improper language handling in footnotes. Most things in my computer are in English and I have an American keyboard, but I write a lot in French (a lot as in I’m writing my fifth 400+ page book). I also use a lot of footnote (a lot as in the book I’m working on currently has 2227 footnotes). So I set my computer locale as English (US) and the document language as French. But every time I create a footnote, it switches to English. I say switches, because it actually briefly shows in French, but after a second or two switches to English. So I decided to go nuclear: I went into the Word Options —> General —> Language and changed the Primary Editing Language to French. No luck. I went in and changed the Footnote Text style to explicitly use French. No luck. So far, nothing I’ve tried has allowed me to create a footnote in French. Even in a French document, with my primary editing language set to French and the Footnote style set to French, when I create a footnote, it’s in English and I have to manually change it to French. Nice work guys. I haven’t seen anywhere else that mentions this problem.
2. Proofing Tools Hell. When I tell Word not to check spelling and grammar in this document, turn off autocorrect, and tell it not to check spelling as I type, why does it insist on running the proofing tools anyway half the time? Why does it occasionally and without rhyme or reason that I can see insist on highlighting the occasional spelling error anyway? This is an edition of an old document — 80% of the words are not in the dictionary. The only way I have gotten this to really quit happening, is to disable proofing tools altogether for all documents. Obviously I don’t want that. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere.
3. Proofing Tools Hell 2. But wait, that’s not all! Why, after all these years, is Word still incapable of letting me keep the proofing tools on in a document with a "too many spelling errors"? My document has footnotes that include archaic terms and proper names. Because there are a lot of those, I can’t have it check spelling errors at all because it has some maximum number of spelling errors that it can check and every important document I’ve ever written exceeds that number. Come on! If I want to use proofing tools, I would have to run spell check and laboriously tell Word to ignore the thousands of words it doesn’t know. Just highlight the mispellings and let me scan for the ones I want to correct. This is a known problem in all versions of Word since at least Word 2000 and that Microsoft sees no need to fix.
4. 

   Empty Document Pane in Word 2007

   The Phantom Window. A new one with Word 2007 and, I believe, only happens on my Vista machine (or is it the XP machine?). Word has the bad habit of opening an “empty” window when I open a document, but when I close the empty window, it closes the document. For example, when I launch Word it shows me a blank document by default. So then I go to the Recent Documents menu and click on the most recent document. It opens the document in one window, and leaves an empty window. This can also happen if I double-click on a Word file — it opens one window with the file and another empty window. I do not mean, by the way, a window with a blank document. I mean a completely non-functional window with no document of any sort whatsoever. Fortunately, this is intermittent so I can open and close Word until it opens correctly. Alternatively, I can open a document in the empty window and then close it. If, however, I simply try to close the empty window without opening a second document in it, Word closes entirely, include the document I’m trying to open. I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere on the net, but no solutions posted.
5. Phantom Footnotes when Track Changes is on. I had a footnote, which I deleted. Sort of. The number disappeared and the footnote disappeared, but it still counts. So, assuming this was note 3, the notes are now numbered 1,2,4. So I tried to use find and replace and find the mark and delete it. Word 2007 won’t find it. But if I go to References —> Next Footnote, it stops at the phantom note. So I cut and pasted the text into a new document to see what would happen. The phantom note disappears. So I cut and pasted the text in the original document. Unfortunately, the footnote counter doesn’t disappear, so now the notes in the original document are numbered 1,2,5. Great. It turns out, this is quite a simple fix — it’s caused because I’m tracking changes and Word does not update footnote numbers (and many other field code-based numbers) until changes are either accepted or rejected. This makes sense in the “Final with markup” view but is damn confusing in the “Final” view that is supposed to be, uh, the Final view.
6. Large Document Handling. This is a shame. One of the main reason our workgroup quit using Wordperfect was because it was so cumbersome with large documents. With WP, you pretty much had to divide a large document into subdocuments and then assemble it from a Master document when you wanted to generate an index, cross-references and so on. Since we have a massive index and hundreds of cross-references (possibly thousands), this was just too much of a hassle (plus WP was unstable and kept corrupting our files and creating "holes" in the middle causing data loss). Word 2000 shined here. Indexing was logical, flexible and accessible via search and replace in a way that neither WordPerfect nor Open Office could match. We left Wordperfect primarily because of the stability issues, but after a serious look at Open Office, we chose Word 2000 because of how well it handled indexing and cross-references and how well it worked with large documents. Lately, with two large documents open, I feel like I’m back in the 1980s. With a relatively fast dual-core processor and 3GB of memory, things draw to a standstill. I click on a point in the text and literally go make a cup of tea while I wait for Word 2007 to decide it’s ready to accept input. It’s pretty strange — everything goes along fast and nice, but then things begin to bog down until I simply have to close all instances of Word and start back up. Meanwhile, the CPU is not running hard and there seems to be system memory left. Other applications open quickly and run quickly while this is happening. If I let it sit for 15 minutes or so, it seems to sort itself out too. I’ve tried turning off background saves and some other things that supposedly slow Word down, but no luck. It’s still terribly slow compared to Word 2000.
7. Interoperability with Other Versions of Office. I’m not a MS hater. I don’t dislike them any more than I dislike Google or Apple. That is to say, I think they are all aggressive companies who have used every advantage and all their available resources to shut out competition whereever possible. Traditionally, MS had the most resources and was the most successful at this strategy. Now Google seems to have taken over. Apple, with its totally closed, proprietary systems, has tried just as hard as the others, but with less success. Okay. But if there is one thing I hate about MS, it’s that you can’t run multiple versions of their programs at the same time. If you want to keep Word 2000 and Word 2007 on the same machine, prepare for Hell. It will effectively want to run an install program every time you use Word 2007 if you had the poor judgment to run Word 2000 since the last time you ran 2007. Want to run Internet Explorer 7 and 8 on the same machine? Forget it. The only way to really do this with MS products is to run virtual machines using VMWare or some such with each machine having it’s own browser and version of Office. Would it really be so hard to let me run multiple versions? I might have a good reason to do so, like the fact that you broke large document handling in your new version!

Okay, I have that off my chest. I’m sure MS is listening.
Microsoft has been working on its reputation a lot lately, but honestly, the number one thing they could do for their reputation is add six months to the testing cycle and do multiple public beta tests and not release until they’ve fixed the bugs. Aarrgggghhh.

Not bad. They tout all over that it’s “totally free”, which it is – it’s Ad Supported. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but there’s adware and there’s adware. In other words, Opera and Eudora were long ad-supported and all they did was show ads at the top of the application while you were using it. That’s fine with me and more or less like visiting a website with banner ads. You have to pay for stuff somehow. As long as it doesn’t install some ad server on my computer that runs in the background whether I’m actively using their product or not, I don’t mind (though I might like the option of paying a reasonable fee to upgrade to paid, ad-free version).

A bit more looking and I came across a bunch of other VPN clients and settles on Security KISS which is free if you keep usage to reasonable levels and works fine, but of course adding in this proxy and encryption will slow things down a fair bit.

Anyway, if you’ve tried it and have any info on what sort of ads it runs, I’d much appreciate it!

[update]
Okay, I did a bit more poking around and it looks legit.

• PC Magazine lists it among their five favorite free security tools in 2008.
• I looked around the anchor free site and it seems that the way they work is that by going through their platform, it allows advertisers to place ads on wifi hotspot login screens and on websites themselves. Basically, they have signup forums for both wifi providers and site publishers to opt in to running ads associated with their platform and then presumably they have a way for advertisers to put their stock on selected websites. For example, the page for web publishers says:
  

  Join thousands of premium web sites who are earning from AnchorFree’s patented technology that touches our in-transit audience…. Allow us to place contextually relevant advertising directly on your site to earn incremental revenue attributed to our multi-channel platform.

  So essentially, it’s similar to Google ads. Actually, a clever business model if I understand it correctly.

Anyway, it seems all relatively open and legitimate and definitely worth a few ads for the peace of mind it would give me when on an unsecured network. I’ll try it I think, but I would still really appreciate a comment from someone who can verify whether or not it will show popup ads on my computer or silly things like that.

Created simply with one line of HTML like so:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300×150&chd=t:85&cht=gom&chl=Easy" alt="Google-o-meter demo" />

You may ask, how many writers on this blog have tried the Google Charts API? Let’s see:

And here’s the HTML:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300×200&chd=t:1|0&cht=bvg&chds=0,2&chbh=a&chtt=RBT+Authors+using+Charts&chco=4D89F9|C6D9FD&chdl=Yes|No" alt="Bar Chart" />

And where did those authors come from?

And again, one simple line of HTML:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=440×220&chd=t:0&chld=CA&cht=t&chtm=usa&chco=FFFFFF,0000FF,FF0000&chf=bg,s,EAF7FE" alt="Map of the US"/>

AOL or Apple customer? Click for full size

AOL or Apple Customer - fill in the right blank. Click image to view full size

Especially with the AOL triangle thing looking like an arrow, to me this looks like one blank for AOL customers and one for Apple customers. It’s even worse when your login fails, because then it draws an arrow between the AOL logo and the blank, which just emphasizes the connection between AOL and the bottom blank. One has to wonder, has Apple tested the usability on this at all? I thought it was just me, but I showed it to Theresa and she had the same reaction as me.

By the way, one blank is for username and the other for password. Of course, this is a pretty standard interface, but as more sites (like my banks and credit cards) now have two or three-step logins, so you enter your username, then you get a verification image, then you enter your password. I assumed it was like that here.

What I Do Now (2011)

Before I tell you how to find unlabelled email, I have to say that I eventually just gave up. It was too much of a hassle to keep my shortcut updated as I changed labels. What I do now is try to be diligent about adding important items to my filters. If it’s a bill or an essential business email, I filter it to add a label that makes sense. So everything sent to the email address for my vacation rental in Yosemite gets copied and forwarded to my GMail account. It also gets a label “Rental”. When I’m in a hurry and think I have to catch up on rental business, I just view email with the Rental label. Once it’s processed, it goes into one of the nested labels under Rental (Awaiting Reply, Booked, Non-Customer, Former Customer, Admin). That makes a sort of mini inbox for the rental that I can deal with effectively, without getting sidetracked by notifications from Facebook. Then when I need to find something, I just use search. Yes, I have been assimilated by the Gorg!

Shortcut for Finding Unlabelled Emails

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but oh so cumbersome. You have to do a negative search for every label you use. That is, you look for messages not labelled Labe1 and not labelled Label2 and so on. There’s no way around this.

If you do this more than once, typing in all your labels in the arcane syntax Gmail uses gets old. So what I’ve done is simply create a shortcut, which you can do quite easily and it works up until you add a new label, but then it’s just a simple matter of editing the bookmark.

So first, you have a full syntax and a compact syntax and, as far as I can tell, the compact syntax does not work with multi-word labels. So if you have Gmail labels with spaces in them, you have to use the full syntax and substitute hyphens for spaces.

So let’s say you have the following labels:

1. Label1
2. Label2
3. Label Three
4. Label Four

First, we want to exclude all messages that have those labels. To exclude a labeled message from your search, you use the -label: operator.

For the single-word labels, we’ll use the short syntax. This allows you to group terms within curly braces without repeating the “-label:” qualifier. So it looks like this in your Gmail search box

-label:{Label1 Label2}

Simple as that. Now for the multi-word labels, in theory as I read the instructions, I merely need to add quotes around the terms, and they should work within the curly braces. Not so for me. If you create a filter and look at the test search, that’s not how it does it either. So based on that, what I found worked for Label Three and Label Four was:

-label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

So the entire search, with both single-word labels and multi-word labels, looks like this

-label:{Label1 Label2} -label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

Now, that will create a URL that looks like this

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/-label%3A%7BLabel1+Label2%7D+-label%3ALabel-Three+-label%3ALabel-Four

Now you can save this as a bookmark or shortcut and instantly access your unlabeled Gmail messages. Sometimes Gmail will add a zx parameter to your URL that looks like zx=afeoasdxou3swf that is just a random string so that if your ISP is caching data, it will see this as a unique URL and won’t give you cached data for Gmail. Since this effectively creates a single-use URL, if that appears in your URL when you do your search, you should edit it out before saving the bookmark.

Note that if a message has two labels and you are only excluding one of those, the message will still show up in your search. So if you have something labeled Label1 and Label5, and you use the search above, it will still show up in your results.

Also, sometimes a conversation that is labeled shows up unless you relabel the entire conversation, because one message is unlabeled or is still in the Inbox or whatever. If you select the whole conversation in the list view and label it, that takes care of that issue.

Labelling Your Backlog

As per Karen’s suggestion below (see comments), if you’re trying to identify your unlabelled email just once and go label your back log, then you can view All, apply a label like “NoLabel” to it (or move them all to the Inbox as Karen suggests, but my Inbox is always overfull to start with and it stresses me out to much to put processed mail back in the Inbox… makes me feel like I’m making negative progress!).

Now go into ever other label folder, select all and remove the “NoLabel” label. Now if you go to the NoLabel folder, you have all your unlabelled email. If you’re going to do this on any kind of regular basis, though, you’ll want a bookmark as described above, otherwise this will be pretty time-consuming.

Dealing with Child Labels and Labels with Special Characters

James asks, what happens if you have special characters like underscores or slashes in your Gmail labels? If you are using the Gmail sublabel feature, you will automatically have slashes, because Gmail separates parent and child labels with slashes (look at Gmail in the Basic HTML mode and you can readily see this). First off, most special characters are just entered as such. Slashes must be entered as hyphens.

So let’s say you have the following setup:

• Main
  • test1
    • test2
  • test3/test4
  • test*,:-test-./test

In that case, your search syntax will be, respectively

• -label:main
• -label:main-test1-test2
• -label:main-test3-test4
• -label:main-test*,:-test-.-test

Note that a label called “test3/test4″ which is a single label, behaves exactly the same as test2 which is a child label of test1. And for anything except slashes and spaces, which are both replaced by hyphens, you just use the character as it appears in the label. That’s even true for the colon, even though it’s part of the search syntax.

• Doesn't sync with Yahoo! mail, contacts or calendar as advertised. According to their response to my bug report, this is because of anti-DOS (denial of service) measures. So in other words, Yahoo! mail servers interpret a request to synch on the part of Zimbra as a DOS attack. Great.Update: the Zimbra team has supposedly addressed this problem in response to my bug report and this is slated to be fixed in version 1.0. If this is indicative of how they work, the final true release of Zimbra could indeed rock.
• Then apparently Google went and changed their Contacts API right after Zimbra RC1 was cut, so that doesn't seem to work either.
• While on the subject of gmail, Google lets me use any "send" address so I can use gmail as a client for any account, but I can't take advantage of this with Zimbra via my gmail account, so it's pretty much useless of sending from my gmail account too. Granted, that's sort of a weird request on my part and I don't think there's anything Zimbra or any client can do about it. I could explain why I want to do this, but you probably don't care.
• And then there's the minor little problem that I could neither start nor shut down Zimbra. So I was resigned to uninstall and reinstall. Except that I couldn't do that either. Getting it off my computer is turning into quite a hassle in and of itself. If there's one thing I won't forgive in an application, it is poor uninstall functionality. If you do nothing else, make sure your application uninstalls gracefully. I can forgive everything else because if you don't mess up my system, I have nothing to risk by trying you again at version 2. If you do mess up my system and require booting into safe mode, editing the registry and crap like that, I'm not likely to try your version 2.

So in short, I've changed my review rating from "Give it a try" to "Stay far away."

Back before all that, my review read like this:]

Finally, Zimbra Desktop has arrived at Release Candidate status and features I was missing in the Beta version have been added as promised. Check out the Zimbra blog category for Zimbra Desktop for lots of other details. It now provides everything I want and includes for free features I would have been willing to pay for. For me, this is a Thunderbird killer. It could even be an Outlook killer, but since most people get Outlook for “free” (that is to say bundled with Office), I’m not sure there will be any inroads there. Anyway, some key Zimbra features:

• “Email, contacts, calendar, and documents all in one application.” That’s not something I’ve traditionally liked, but this isn’t too bad.
• “Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts and calendars.” This is huge. Try synchronization of contacts and email. Something I’ve been seeking for a while – all my contacts in a central repository that gets synched with other copies. Sort of like CVS or Subversion for contacts.
• “Read email from any POP or IMAP email account including AOL, Hotmail or business email.” I don’t care about AOL or Hotmail, but excellent IMAP support for my main work account is key.
• “Works on Windows, Apple, or Linux desktop computers.” Windows only here, but partly because of legacy apps like Photoshop. The more apps I have that work on multiple platforms, the freer I’ll be in the end.
• “No limit to the size of your email storage.” Whatever. GMail and Yahoo with their GBs and GBs of storage are close enough to no limit for me.
• It works online and offline. Bold on this one. This is huge. I often have no connection or a dialup connection. I want my address book synched with an online repository, but I want to have it available when I’m offline.
• Multiple TODO lists. I love my Abstract Spoon ToDo list application (I need to write about that one too), so I doubt I’ll use the Zimbra feature, but it’s not bad. To replace the AS Todo list, it would need labels, priorities, due dates, hierarchy and all that. But for litttle “Call mom” type of tasks, it’s not bad.

[Update - some stuff in here is wrong - seem my comments]
I must say there are a few interface shortcomings that will hopefully be added/fixed for version 1.1 or 2. Above all, the address book allows only sorting by last name (I prefer first name sort) and you can’t see all addresses in one list (you see the As, the Bs the Cs etc). More importantly for some, it effectively runs as a sort of daemon in the background and then has a front end that launches on demand. Currently, it shares most of the code of the full Zimbra server, which means that it eats up memory, as in the daemon takes up 100MB when it’s just sitting there checking to see if you have any new mail. You are effectively running a server. If your computer is at all short on memory, this is not for you. The official word from Yahoo! is that they will first make Zimbra Desktop feature complete and then work on optimizing the runtimes. Personally, I think this is good practice — prototype first, then scale/optimize later. You could consider this a prototype, but damn inefficient. For me, my machine has plenty of memory and I would rather have an email client I don’t hate than an extra 100MB of memory, but that will depend a lot on your machine (I currently have Photoshop, Firefox, Word, Canon Scangear, Skype, iTunes, WAMP Server, Workrave, Abstract Spoon ToDo List and more running without problems, so Zimbra’s resource usage doesn’t bother me a lot).

I’m not sure yet how well address book synch works and whether or not it’s true two-way sync. For me the beta client was the most stable client I’ve had since Eudora and the Release Candidate seems solid too.

Unlike Thunderbird, you really can manage a Gmail account with Zimbra. For example, if I “move” a message to a Label in Zimbra (drag the message to a label), it automatically labels the message and archives it, so it takes it out of your inbox. At least for my part, that’s how I would like a desktop client to work with Gmail. I’m still new to Zimbra, but in my quest of a solution that does not crash, it’s running neck and neck with GMail offline. I’ve never cared for GMail, but with Gears it’s fast and that was my main complaint before. The main issue with GMail offline, is that you don’t have access to your address book. Since I’m offline a lot and use the address book for phone numbers and such, that’s a huge downside to Gmail Offline. I know they’ll probably have it within a year, but Zimbra has it now.

For anyone still with me, here’s a run down of what I’ve tried and why I don’t like them:

• Lately I’ve been experimenting with GMail offline, but it has some issues. Most significantly, you don’t have access to your address book when you’re offline. As I just mentioned, that’s a big negative for me. Also, there are interface issues. I want to delete a message and then immediately see the next one, not be taken back to the damn message list every time. I hate this. I have found a way to sort of delete and go next in GMail, but it takes a lot more than the one click that it should. Also, there’s no built-in way to see unlabeled emails. I built a custom search and shortcut to show unlabeled Gmail messages in one click but this should be built in.
• Thunderbird. I’ve been a Thunderbird user since version 0.4 or so and for me it has just gotten more and more unstable. I finally gave up on Thunderbird 2 crashing constantly and went to Shredder, the beta of Thunderbird 3, but that crashes at least as often. You can get some rudimentary synchronization between Gmail and yout Thunderbird contacts using Zindus, but it kept overwriting my data in funny ways and I lost a fair bit of stuff in my address book. Also, since Thunderbird and Gmail contacts use quite a different format (address is all one field in Gmail whereas it’s broken out into street, city, state, etc in Thunderbird. So that causes certain undesired effects. This was a “lesser of all evils” solution, but I’ve never really liked it.
• Outlook Express used to come with Windows. It set all-time standard for instability, so no go there, plus it’s now horribly outdated. No synchronization either.
• Windows Live Desktop Mail Client comes with Vista and it was never to my liking, also had funny stability issues and didn’t have synchronization with an online address book. Also, I just never really liked the interface.
• Outlook had no real advantages over Outlook Express if you don’t want calendaring and, though I do, I hate the way Outlook does reminders. Also, unless you pony up for an Exchange account, no synch between computers or online accounts. More annoyance than I could handle. Also, it’s rather bloated.
• PocoMail. A friend swears by this, but no or inadequate IMAP support. So scratch that.
• Zimbra Beta 1. Promising, but didn’t solve the synchronization problem and I didn’t like the interface that much.

I must say, it pains me to see the issues that Yahoo! is having, because I think they have some great products like Zimbra and I just hope that if Yahoo! gets sold, the buyer does good things with the best of Yahoo!

Anyway, if you feel like your current email client just isn’t doing it for you, Zimbra is worth a look.

After Craig’s comment below, I might rephrase this to say that a ticket may only be closed as a result of customer action or inaction. So it’s always acceptable for a customer to close a ticket. It’s acceptable for the tech to close the ticket if he has some assurance from the customer that the issue is resolved. And it’s okay for the system to close the ticket automatically after the customer fails to respond in a reasonable amount of time — 48 hours in some contexts, perhaps 30 days in others, depending on the nature of the business.

What bothers me is when you get a totally perfunctory response, often one that makes it abundantly clear that they tech didn’t actually read your issue, but was trying to process issues as fast as possible, scanning for keywords and giving stock responses (“clear your browser cache”, “log out and try logging in again”). Half the time, I have specifically stated that I have cleared the cache and tried this with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome and Safari and I still will get a response like “Clear your browser cache and try again. To clear you cache: In Firefox… In Internet Explorer…”

Status: closed.

It just makes me want to strangle someone. More importantly, it makes me want to avoid doing business with that company. It’s only partly that they didn’t fix the issue. The huge part is that they have clearly failed to listen and to read my issue. It may be just an internal issue management strategy, but it sends a powerful signal: we’re done with you, go away. And my usual response is: but you didn’t answer my question, so screw you. I am going away. I’m going away with my money. I’m going away with negative comments about you to my friends, on forums, maybe on my blog if you really upset me (see Paypal Buyer Protection Sucks). You would have to do worse than close a support ticket for me to call you out by name, but it is the sort of thing that erodes my confidence in a company.

Furthermore, because I’m the kind of person who usually tries a lot of things before I write to support, they are also missing a chance at getting valuable feedback, on either usability or a program issue. Just recently, I sent Moosejaw a bunch of usability feedback. They didn’t simply close the issue, they wrote me a thank you, also apologizing for the many problems I found on the site, and sent me a $75 pullover as a thank you. That’s almost ridiculous, but that’s a company that values customer feedback! I told the service rep that I had not expected any material compensation, I only wanted the site to improve, but I must say the seriousness with which they took my feedback gave me a much warmer feeling toward the company. Given the amount of outdoor gear I buy, I suspect they’ll make it back on me in a year or two, not to mention the “press” they’ve gotten out of it by me telling my friends (and mentioning it here).

It remindes me of a co-worker back when I was working at a hotel in college. She had worked at Disney World in the late 1970s at the complaint desk, which of course is legendary in the hospitality industry for handling such situations. Do you know what rule of thumb they used was for how long she should spend responding to each complaining customer? Answer: as much time as possible! They told her to never break off the interaction until the customer was satisfied or walked away. “But what about the people lining up behind them?” she asked. Answer: they’ll just be that much madder when they get to you and they’ll take even more time, but don’t send anyone away angry if at all possible. If they’re lining up, it’s our job to get more people out here. It’s your job to make sure that the one person in front of you right now goes away happy.

So when I ask for support, it’s up to me to decided when my issue is closed, when I’ve been satisfied. Strangely, I used to find it odd, even slightly annoying, that the tech reps at JaguarPC, my web host, never closed tickets, even when I said, okay, I’m fine, close the ticket. It’s always up to me to close the ticket and I’m not even sure the reps have the authority to close your ticket. As near as I can tell, only you do. Foolishly, I used to see that as a chore. Now I realize that it is a privilege and a best practice. That how it should be done.

This last time, I also got the message

The current command did not succeed… The mail server responded: No messages match. (Failure).”

Finally, that let me find an answer at MozillaZine and Google Groups. I had never seen this suggested before and it’s so easy.

• Put the cursor over the Inbox in the offending account and right click (Windows) and select “Properties”
  

  Mailbox Properties

• Then just click the Rebuild Index button
  

  Mailbox Properties Dialog

I wish I had known that a couple years ago!

Floutet, Aima, 294
Floutetta. Vr Monthouz, Aima (dite la Floutetta)
Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami, 111, 164, 176, 515
Dentrue, Jeanne (fl. d’Emery, 357
Folliet, Pierre, 27

After tearing my hair out for a while I noticed a clue. See it? I finally noticed that the parentheses weren’t closed on the out of order items. When I looked, I realized that the markup in the actual text, that is the entry that is supposed to end up in the index in the first case was

Maître, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard)

So at least in Word 2000, if you try to index text with a semicolon in it, it truncates everything from the semicolon on (the text in bold). That part just gets completely cut off and doesn’t show up in the generated index, but it isn’t entirely discarded. Note in particular what it’s done: it is now indexed alphabetically according to the truncated text that is now invisible. In other words, I tell it to index Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami; fm. de J.-Ja. Bonivard), which I expect to appear like that under Mai, but instead it appears as
Maitre, Louise (fl. d’Ami and gets filed under Fm. Very strange behavior. I suppose I could use it to set an alternate order to my index. I can think of hundreds of situations where I would want to do this. Oh wait a minute, maybe not.

I wonder if Microsoft has fixed this in the intervening eight years. Since there’s nothing in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, I’m guessing it’s still not fixed unless there was a total rewrite of indexing and it got fixed by accident, but I don’t think there’s been a total rewrite of Word for a long, long time.

If you arrive here because you had the same problem in a newer version of Word, please leave a comment. For that matter, if you’ve tested it in another version of Word and the problem doesn’t exist, please leave a comment to that effect. Just curious.

Why wasn’t my default choice working?

I finally figured out that Roboform was listing my choices alphabetically and ignores my preference.

It turns out taht there’s a simple setting to fix this. By default, Roboform is set to “use best URL match” and, given several equally good matches, sorts alphabetically regardless of what the default is set to. So you simply turn this setting off and your defaults will work. Changing the setting is simple:

1. Fire up a browser that has Roboform integrated.
2. Click the down arrow on the Roboform icon and choose “Options” (see screenshot #1)
3. Under the General Options tab, uncheck the box that says “Show Matching Passcards with the best URL match on top (screenshot #2).

Roboform Options Panel

Roboform Settings Screen

So that got rid of the one little nit I had to pick with Roboform.

I started working on a new/old laptop (new to me, but was my wife’s before her employer bought her a work-dedicated machine). Yeah, my old laptop was pretty much unusable at this point (like go make a cup of tea while waiting for it to switch from a Firefox window to a Word window). Great! Except for one annoying thing: over in the task bar, the tooltips are partially or fully hidden. Sometimes this is marginally annoying (as in the example below). Sometimes the tool tip is so covered over by the system tray that you can’t even read the message box so if you don’t know which icon you’re looking for, you can’t find it. Uggh!

So in a case that isn’t completely egregious, but gives an idea of the problem, it looks like this:

So in other words, you end up with the tooltips behind the taskbar. This bug has existed since Windows 95. The Microsoft solution is absurd: logout, restart, hope it improves (it doesn’t, or rather it does, until the next time). Other solution suggested: set it so that the taskbar does not always stay on top. Great idea, except that is even more annoying than the broken tool tips. I looked at a bunch of help forums and everyone agrees that there is no fix. Everyone, that is, but someone who posted in a comment somewhere, which led me to the Tooltip Fixer from Neosmart which immediately and simply fixes the hidden tooltip problem. And voilà!

I downloaded it, installed it and in three minutes it was fixed. It took me longer than that to make a small donation to his Chip-in fund. I only gave $5 (I’m a cheap bastard), but if everyone with this bug gave him $5 none of us would be poorer and he would be retired.

1. I actually do pay for most of this stuff. Not much, but if somebody has a donation button, I pretty much always donate somewhere between $5 and $20. It’s the right thing to do.
2. As they say in the open source world, this is all free as in beer, but only some is free as in speech.

Everybody knows about browsers and email clients, so that stuff comes last. I’m trying to list some stuff that you might not know about, but which will (er.. may) improve your life. Then again it may not. I’ve arranged the list in increasing order of geekiness, so things like MySQL clients are way down the list. Also, I have not bothered to include things like Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp and such that everyone knows about.

So here’s the list. It’s Windows-centric, though some apps are available for other platforms.

Desktop Timer

• Egg Timer. How can this top my list when it’s such a small app and not actually even free? Is it really my favorite almost-free software? It’s not, but I like it a lot and it runs constantly on my computer because of the particular way I use it: I set it to go off every 40 minutes and when it goes off, I do some pushups, pullups or ab exercises. I keep a set of Powerblock dumbells near my desk (someday I have to write about why these are the best adjustable dumbells), so sometimes I can do curls or flys as well. Sometimes I just get a cup of tea if I’m lazy. These exercises every forty minutes are great for the health of my back and my eyes. My wife just started using it to time her rehab exercises for her frozen shoulder throughout the day. After months of frustration and no progress, her range of motion has finally started increasing again . I used to use a program that I wrote called Drop 20 because it goes off every 20 minutes and says “Drop and Give Me Twenty!” but I didn’t make the timer adjustable and I found every twenty minutes was just too frequent. Disclaimer: Egg Timer is actually not free, but since it only costs $5 and you can try the full version for free, it’s a lot like free and think it justifiably belongs in this list, rather than a list of $$$ tools that I like. Maybe some day I’ll get back to Drop 20 and fix it up, because it’s funnier than Egg Timer. You can download Drop 20 for free, no spyware, no obligations (but my copyright!). Seriously, the one thing I do like better about my app besides the humor is that it runs from the system tray, rather than taking up all that space on the task bar.

Foreign Character Typing

• AllChars. This tool is fantastic. Literally. If you type in more than one language or regularly use characters that are not on the keyboard (en and em dashes, copyright symbols, things like that), this thing ROCKS! It can be customized with your own characters and snippets and also handles a variety of special characters — that em dash was typed in .03 seconds using CTRL+m+- … and so was that ellipse with a simple CTRL+3+. One thing that’s cool is that AllChars does not interfere with other control sequences because it is sequential. In other words, you type CTRL, release it, type “m” and release it, type “-” and release it. That actually makes it much faster than having to hold down the CTRL key (and if you type one-handed while eating, it’s easier too.

French Dictionary a.k.a. Dictionnaire française

• XMLittré. As the name implies, this is the famous Littré multi-volume French dictionary available for download to run on your desktop. A few years ago, it would cost you perhaps the equivalent of 1000 euros to own this. Now it’s free and, if you’re like me with a penchant for the old and literary, this is superior to more recent dictionaries in many respects. Note: this is not a French-English dictionary, it’s a French dictionary and it runs on the open source StarDict engine, which you must install.

Task Reminder

• TaskPrompt. I’ve tried some paid task managers and of course there’s always Outlook if you have Microsoft Office. I like this one. It has everything I want.

Email Backup

I like to keep my inbox clean and I get some big attachements, so my account fills up from time to time and I have to delete messages. But sometimes I wish I hadn’t. But how do you back up you accounts?

• IMAPSize – a tool to backup the mail in your IMAP folders. Does one thing. Does it well. Free. It actually does some other stuff, but that’s what I use it for.
• Mozbackup – to backup of Thunderbird mail (and all Mozilla stuff). Too bad I’m not using Thunderbird anymore because it was crashing literally every five minutes. Someday perhaps they’ll fix it up and it will work again for me.

Desktop Search

The dominant conceptual model for a computer is still the desktop and file cabinet metaphor. That metaphor was fine when you had all your files on a 720kb floppy (which is the computer the Apple engineers invented for). The problem is, that model is broken and I have grown tired of looking through eighteen levels hierarchical directories. In steps search.

• Copernic Desktop Search. It still indexes the broadest variety of file types and I still have a certain number of legazy WordPerfect files, though the new version annoyingly always wants to open my browser and take me to the web. If I wanted all that web integration, I would use Google Desktop search. I don’t really want the browser interface/internet integration. I want a desktop tool and Copernic allows all sorts of filters (file type, file name, and so forth). I’ve lost my love affair with Copernic.
• Windows Vista Integrated Search via the Start Bar. For 90% of what I need, I use this, but for more obscure searches and anything based on file content rather than file name, I still use Copernic. It’s one of the few things that Vista brought me, aside from the ability to run Adobe CS3 as I’ve already mentioned (see my post on WebmasterWorld—Vista: get ready for pain). Yes, I know, it’s not free unless you already have Vista. And if you don’t already have Vista, do not crossgrade (I don’t use the word upgrade unless I truly feel it’s essential).

Graphics and Image Management.

• Irfanview. Irfanview is a simple image viewer and allows for some simple manipulation (resize, convert to other formats, rotate, lossless rotation, rename, gamma adjustment and a few others). It’s not Photoshop, but more often than not it’s what I use. I particularly appreciate the ability to do lossless JPEG rotations in batch based on EXIF information. In other words, my camera attempts to add a note to the EXIF information in the JPEG file that tags it with the orientation of the camera when the picture was taken. I can just Select All in Irfanview thumbnail view and rotate all my images correctly in one go. I can also batch resize, add a little sharpening, and batch rename all my images. Unless I have an image that needs a lot of manipulation, I just don’t bother to fire up Photoshop.
• Exifer. This really fits the “Do one thing and do it well” definition. It didn’t used to be totally “free” in that it was a “postcardware” (i.e. you have to send the author a postcard). Now it’s unmaintained and no postcard required and, though five years old and the author says it’s not up to modern standards for speed and whatnot, it works just fine for me on Vista. Exifer allows you to edit EXIF info in your image files. One of the cool things it lets you do is sort images by the timestamp in the EXIF info, and then rename them with a sequential counter. So when my wife and I take pictures on different cameras, if the clocks in the cameras are synched up, it will sort them nicely even if you’ve changed the file creation timestamp. That sounds obscure, but it can be real handy.
• Iconico Color Picker. A really great color picker. Similar to the Whatcolor tool above—a little more sophisticated for picking colors, but without the color names for most colors.

Mapping and Hike Planning

• Google Earth. Nothing more fun when planning a hike. Has Yosemite Trails on it.

Search Tools

That’s for another article as there are a zillion search tools, but just to throw one out:

• Quintura Search maps your search as a sort of linguistic web. I’m sure there’s a practical usage for it, but I enjoy it’s entertainment value.

Zip Utility

• IZARC. I’ve tried so many of these over the years. Got sick of paying for them, but was disappointed with the free versions until I found this one. It is much faster than the other free utility I used to use, is much more stable with Vista, and can handle almost every format.

FTP Client

• Filezilla is excellent and, in fact, also has a free FTP server as well, but I’ve never had a need. As good or better than any free or paid tool I’ve used.

Registry Cleaners and System Cleanup Tools

These might scare you a bit, but I’ve never had a problem. I have over the years had various paid ones and don’t see any real advantage — none of them really get everything and these are a lot less bloated.

• Eusing Free Registry Cleaner. Does one thing and does it pretty well.
• CCleaner – a registry cleanup and file system cleanup tool. So it does two things. It doesn’t matter which of these you run first, the other will find some remaining junk. Run them both. Watch the options on CCleaner and make sure you set it as you want.
• Startup Inspector. Lets you get control of everything that loads into your computer at startup. Slowing down? You probably have all kinds of junk running in the background that you don’t even know about.

File Rename

• AF5 batch file renamer. Why would need a file renamer when you can just right click and rename? If you asked that, you don’t need one. If, however, you sometimes need to batch rename, perhaps even based on regular expresssions, then this can save you a lot of time. You can definitely download it, install, and then use it to rename 100 files a lot faster than you’ll ever do it using the Windows interface.

Simple Programming Editors

• HAPEdit. I use this when programming in PHP. Good syntax highlight, code suggestion, brace and parenthesis matching. Everything I need. I’ve tried a lot open source PHP IDEs and they’ve never really had much value to add, but did add a lot of bloat and instability. If you really want something better, you need to pony up $300 for the Zend Environment, which has kickbutt debugging. But this is a list of free tools and $300 ain’t free. Some people tell me they don’t need code suggestion because they know PHP well. My response is: I don’t need spell check, because I know Englsih rreally wlle… oops. It will save you a lot of bugs from typos.
• Notepad++ has a lot of the same features as HAPEdit, but does not have code suggestion. is a bit different. It’s a bit lighter, a more appropriate Notepad replacement, but not quite as feature-rich for PHP programming.

MySQL Desktop Client

• SQLYog. Wait, doesn’t MySQL come with a perfectly adequate command-line interface? Yes, it does, but so does SQLYog, but SQLYog aslo comes with a GUI table browser, and lots more. Awesome productivity tool. The free version doesn’t do HTTP Tunneling to let you connect to a remote server that has only the SSL port open, but for developing in your sandbox, the free version is awesome. By the way, you can also use PHPMyAdmin… if you really have to… but you will suffer. Not to knock it, but being browser-based, it is just not anywhere near as fast and versatile as SQLYog (though it will work on a remote server).

Testbed Server Sandbox

If you’re going to build websites, you really need to have a testbed server so that you can test your PHP scripts. It lets you test WordPress, Drupal or what have you locally before showing your mistakes to the world or bringing your site down with a typo.

• WAMPServer — there are many packages to install a free server using Apache and MySQL and PHP. I used to install them all separately and you still can of course. I also used to use ApacheFriends until I went to Vista and it had problems. Now I use this one. They all get you to the same point but lately this one works best for me. The ApacheFriends package will also install PERL if you need that, and I don’t think WAMPServer does.

So I went hunting for Firefox extensions that would save me from this aggravation and found that you can strike back at these miscreant web developers using built-in settings in Firefox. Hooray!

First, let’s just stop this nonsense of letting other people decide how big my main browser window should be. They can still set windows to open at a certain size, but resizing an existing window will not work with this simple tip. In Firefox, in the top menu bar, go to Tools » Options.. » Content and click on the first Advanced button, not the Advanced tab or the second Advanced button in that panel (talk about good UI design).

Now you’re in the Advanced Javascript Settings window. Just uncheck them all. I don’t see any reason to let a script on a web page do anything for me. If I really need to resize my window, for example, I’ll do it myself thank you very much.

Now we come to the case, though, where the developer has not created a resizable popup window, so I can’t resize it and, as often as not, can’t use that page at all. Nice design buddy. But, again, Firefox comes to the rescue. Up on the address bar (i.e. where you normally type http://raisedbyturtles.com, or would if you didn’t already get updates via the RSS feed or email), you enter the Firefox configuration screen by entering about:config and hitting the enter key (in other words, no http or anything like that, just about:config). This will bring up thousands of options. To pare down the list to what we want, down where it says “Filter” type in dom.disable_window_open_feature. Now you have a list of just the features you want. Double-click on any line to toggle that feature between true and false.

You can have your pick of which options you want to change and which you don’t. This is working pretty well for me:

You can see a full write-up on those features on the Firefox tips page, but these are the ones we care about:

dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are resizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar

Set this to true to always display the menu in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.location

Set this to true to always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars

Set this to true to prevent sites from disabling scrollbars.

Enjoy better surfing without those annoyances!

I find no evidence that Safari requires Quicktime to run. In fact, the most relevant page I find at Apple suggests that Quicktime is more likely to render to Safari unstable and is only needed to display streaming media (and I get by just fine without it in Firefox). Maybe I’m just wrong about this and Safari simply cannot and will not run without Quicktime, but frankly, I don’t care.

And why should Apple care? Because Apple is a company that often “gets it”. They understand how to be customer-centric, hip, cool, friendly. Somehow, while Windows ran on a completely open architecture and Apple OSes ran only on proprietary equipment, Apple managed to gleen all the good warm fuzzies while MS was vilified. In other words, Apple excels at reputation management, guerrilla marketing and all that stuff. Think different.

What better way to get a Windows user away from Windows than to offer up for free a killer browser with the implied hint that if you like the browser, you should see it integrated into an entire OS. What worse way to get me to switch than to do like MS always does, treating me like they know better and they’ll set it up for me. Please, think different.

So thank you Apple for making a windows version of Safari available. I appreciate it. Really. I just don’t plan to ever install it as long as it’s a two-fer with Safari and Quicktime. I know you think you’re helping me out, but I don’t need help really. I just want to try a new browser.