I store everything in Roboform even though it costs money, because:

1. It’s convenient: one click and I’m logged in
2. It’s encrypted and password protected
3. All information is available from all compatible browsers and directly from the Roboform interface as well
4. It’s available offline

Offline support is important to me because I use it to store all kinds of information that I want encrypted, but which doesn’t necessarily pertain to online services. So I like that available even when I’m offline but, say, need my bank info to make a call to my bank.
Until now, Roboform for Chrome has only been available in the online version (which is similar to KeePass and other online password storage solutions). As of a couple of weeks ago, there is now an alpha version of the full Roboform toolbar.
Of course, it comes with all the warnings for alpha products, but I’ve been using it for a week or so and no serious problems. On one website, I used Roboform to fill a form and got a popup saying Roboform had become unresponsive, did I want to stop it? I clicked yes, but in fact nothing bad happened. It correctly filled and submitted the form and Roboform was still available on subsequent pages.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this!

When I first heard about ChaCha I was amazed: I can text in a question and get an answer in two minutes. I was amazed because sometimes in the course of my research, I have questions that take days to answer or that I can’t answer at all. Imagine getting that down to two minutes. Then I thought maybe they don’t have God-like omniscience and maybe, just maybe, they aren’t set up to do archival research on sixteenth-century Geneva. Maybe you need to focus on simpler questions, more modern questions.

At Pubcon, someone mentioned that you can use the AdWords search preview tool if you want to see where you rank for a given search term without interference from personalized search (if logged into a Google account) or geo-targetting (always on based on your IP number which is sent to Google with every request). This cool tool also lets you see what search results (and ads) you would get in various geographical regions.

So I thought I would do a somewhat whimsical search and searched on bowling deaths. The choice isn’t arbitrary. I usually rank #1 for that search, but I was curious to find out whether that was true even if Google didn’t know who or where I was. And sure enough, there I was, still #1. But ChaCha came up as the number two result with a clear and succinct answer that looked suspiciously familiar. To the question "How many deaths are caused annually by bowling," the ChaCha expert answered

On average there are four bowling deaths due to bowling or bowling equipment each year. Natural deaths while bowling do not count.

Sure enough, the "source" cited was none other than my article. The problem is, my article is satire. The point of the article, to the extent that there was one, was to highlight the idiotic ways in which journalists use statistics, often failing to understand the importance of sample size, significance (as determined by chi-square and such) and so forth.

That article gets a lot of mentions in forums, almost always with a "heh heh" after it. ChaCha is unique in treating it as fact. So I guess that’s the downside of getting answers in two minutes. Maybe I just guessed right in my satirical article? Nah. ChaCha cites its sources, in this case, it’s my very own analysis death rates from bowling.

I wonder how many other examples one could find. Are you a ChaCha user? Have you gotten any tragically bad ChaCha answers? If so, add a comment and tell us about it. I sure hope you weren’t asking for directions!

In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

How I Use Twitter

First off, don’t follow me. If you don’t already have my phone number and email address, you’ll probably be disappointed by my Twitter stream, and even if you do know me well enough to have those things, you still might be disappointed. If you’re thinking of unfollowing me, go ahead. It won’t hurt my feelings. I don’t stay on topic unless the topic is "random thoughts that cross Tom’s mind". I see my audience as my wife, some friends, and strangely, myself. My Twitter stream is a bit of a diary — a cool link, a random thought, a quote I like, a local event. I don’t expect to have an army followers and I’m not trying to build up a Twitter empire that I can leverage to get you to buy my açai berry treatment for flatulence. Just recently, I found out that a local non-profit that I think does great stuff is in rough financial shape (Yosemite Assocation). I tweeted in hopes that my few followers would retweet my donation reminder to their many followers and get some money rolling in. Other than that one time, I’ve never wanted anyone other than a handful for friends to follow me and I only follow a few people who are not friends.

Who I follow is another matter. If you’re trying to use Twitter to connect, here’s how I do things. I’m just one guy, perhaps completely atypical of the average Twitter user, but if you are looking to create a Twitter empire that includes me, you might want to read this.

Why I Might Just Block You

In a word: spam. At first it was a complete mystery why people who don’t know me would follow me. How were they finding me? As near as I can tell, most of them have alerts for some keyword and they habitually follow anyone who triggers their alerts. Some of these people trigger on words relating to Yosemite. That’s fine. I expect they’ll be fundamentally disappointed and unfollow me eventually because, as noted above, I do not stay on topic, but that’s their decision. I certainly don’t hold it against them and some people don’t mind a low signal to noise ratio. If that’s you, welcome aboard.

When I do hold it against them is when they clearly don’t even read the update that triggers the alert. For example, after Ben Bernanke said the economy could recover in late 2009, I said that a pterodactyl could attack New York. A spammer who triggers on New York started following me. At the height of it’s absurdity, I mentioned "browns" as in non-native brown trout that are eating native frogs in Sierra lakes and I immediately got followed by someone who Twitters about the Cleveland Browns. Of course, this didn’t help his brand because I thought "What a [expletive deleted] idiot". I block these people and can see that eventually Twitter will need real spam filters.

Why I Will Follow You

A lot of people are marketing via Twitter and some outright are spamming. I suppose that’s their right, but you have to know how to do it.

Personally, I like to only follow as many people as I can read, so at a certain point, if I follow more people, I have to get rid of some. Second, if I follow you, it’s because I want to follow you and not because I care, at least initially, whether you follow me back. I’m not interesting to 99.9999% of the planet and I’m certainly not interesting to everyone that I find interesting. I don’t expect you to reciprocate just because I follow you and, frankly, I probably won’t reciprocate just because you follow me. You have to be interesting in some way and here’s what makes you interesting to me:

• You are a friend of mine or perhaps my wife. If you were in town and didn’t call me would I be bummed? If yes, then I probably do want to know that you’re enjoying your morning tea or are frustrated at work and all the little details of your life that I’m otherwise missing. Thanks for being better about keeping your friends in the loop than I am. If you’re not my friend and you tweet about everything that passes between your lips, I won’t follow you.
• You are inherently interesting even to strangers. Maybe I don’t know you, but you’re just plain funny like Tim Siedel, aka @badbanana or you have a high percentage of your tweets on topics I care about. I’m interested in hiking and wildflowers in Yosemite, so I follow several Yosemite Twitterers I don’t know.
• You engage. If you have no @replies, you had better stay on topic (like SkiingExaminer, who does engage a lot, but I would follow him either way because he sticks to skiing. No posts about his morning cup of Joe there). The importance of engagement surprised me. I didn’t really see it until I started thinking more carefully about my behavior. I enjoyed Mike Linder’s presence on Twitter, so we started trading @replies. Then I finally hunted him down and cornered him at his workplace. I’m glad I did. Nice guy. And he said he was glad I did too, but would I please lower my weapon.
• You update occasionally rather than constantly. I’m not sure what my limit is, but if you update more than 10 times per day over the long term, I’m probably going to unfollow you unless you’re fricken brilliant. If you’re updating every fifteen minutes, you must be bringing me closer to enlightenment, riches or ice cream with every update.

One last comment on auto-responders. Somehow, you may have decided that you should send a welcome message to everyone who follows you. I find that getting an automatic message from a computer is a sweet and wonderful experience.

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).

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"/>

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but os 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.

• 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.

It turns out there is a ‘Delete’ and go to next conversation Greasemonkey script that will do just what I’m looking for, but recent Gmail upgrades broke that script. So out of luck again. [Update, June 22, 2009: this script has been fixed. Check it out.]

Over at JimsTips.com, Jim suggests using Gmail Keyboard shortcuts (Gmail Help article) deleting with the # key, which does kick you back to the message list and then using the ‘k’ key to move to the next message and the ‘o’ or <enter> key to open the message. The thing I dislike about that is that it is three page loads when it should be two (in other words, why do I have to see that damn message list?).

So my similarly kludgey, but somewhat more elegant solution (or maybe not) is to:

• Turn on keyboard shortcuts (in Settings -> General).
• Create a label named ‘Delete’ (or ‘aaDelete’ if you want to be sure it is at the top of your label list).
• When reading a message, type ‘l’ (that’s a lower-case L) to bring up the label list.
• Hit the downarrow key once to select my top aaDelete label at the top of my list
• Hit the ‘k’ key to move to the next message.
• When I’m all done, I can view the messages deleted aaDelete and select and delete them all.

Yeah, stupid, crappy, cumbersome way to do it. I know. Tell Google.

Now if only they would come up with a proper way to view all unlabeled messages, but my solution to that is reasonably workable, if a bit cumbersome.

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!

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.