Angelo DiNardi

It seems like every time you just want to do some silly maintenance task you end up screwing something up royally well. A few weeks ago I accidentally fsck’d the running ext3 filesystem on this server, ignored the warning message it spit out, and killed the filesystem. That’s what I get for mistyping the /dev device and ignoring warnings. The problem with the fsck warning is that it was really easy to bypass. Given, that’s what I expect from a UNIX-ish system. 

There’s still plenty of things broken here and on the server as a whole. It’ll all be back eventually. Note to self: when the backup server fails, replace it sooner rather than never.

So in July I wrote a small iPhone app called MailWrangler. Basically this app enabled a user to add their GMail accounts (standard and Google Apps For Your Domain) which they could load and switch between them quickly. It embedded Webkit in to the app and logged you in to the accounts automagically. Normally to check multiple Gmail accounts in mobile Safari you would have to log in and out of all of the accounts, typing the username and password for each. Using just the Apple Mail application you aren’t able to see threaded views, your google contacts, archive (quickly), star, etc without going through the hassles that are present when using Gmail’s IMAP on the iPhone. There’s a similar app for the Mac desktop called MailPlane.

I submitted my application on July 17th. On August 29th I finally heard back from Apple:

… Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. …

This is an interesting claim since although handing email, my app is simply directly loading and showing Gmail inside of an application. How you can confuse Gmail with Mail.app I’m not sure.

There was another issue:

… There is also no way to edit an account once it has been added. …

I agree that this should work. Currently you have to delete and re-add the account. You don’t lose anything since all the account info stores is a username and password. I felt for a first release this would be fine (how often do you change your gmail password?). The number of apps with this specific issue and other issues that apps have which are in the store, mine seems to be on par or ahead of the game. If you’re going to have rules about this, enforce them across the board. The number of shitty apps in the store is off the charts and yet mine that actually works is getting blocked.

What did I pay to be able to do again? Oh right, deal with Apple’s messy bureaucracy. I guess I should just write another flashlight or glowstick application to actually get published. That’s the only apps Apple seems to want in the store.

This was a bit of a pain to find via Google tonight so I figured I’d link to it and help others find it.

Tonight I was doing a bit of Javascript work and in the interface I was building had a couple of elements using CSS floating. They were all contained together inside of another DIV. Issue was that I had other things after the container in the layout that should have been block level and gone below it. Trouble was that the floating items were floating around this later item. I needed a way to “contain” the float elements without modifying any surrounding elements to account for them.

I finally dug up the Clearing Floats page on quirksmode.org. In the end setting “overflow: hidden” and “width: 100%” on the containing DIV took care of “containing” the floats to just that DIV. Awesome.

Did I mention I love quirksmode.org? Honestly. It’s one of the best JS resources there is.

Plaxo: once a nice, simple, useful service gone the way of craptastic social networking. Maybe I’m not like most people but I don’t need EVERY SINGLE ONE of my web services to be a social network. I don’t want connections and invitations and sharing. I got plaxo to solve a need: having my contacts when I’m away from my main machine via the web. Secondary was as a backup if something happened to that machine. It worked and did the job well.

They had a method of syncing your contact with the person’s actual contact info if they had the service. Ok. That’s reasonably useful. And it was on the sidelines. Storage of contacts was still first and foremost. Then they started adding things like calendaring and connections. A mini-feed kinda thing that’s just as useless as facebook’s. And on and on. Pretty soon the contacts storage was on the sideline and the rest of their social features were in front. When I got a connection request from someone I knew that was it — I didn’t like the service anymore. I haven’t really used it in months because it was more annoying every time I logged in.

So since I just got MobileMe and everything seems to be working better (not perfect yet — but generally usable) and I have the iPhone with my contacts synced to MobileMe and my computer I decided to rid myself of Plaxo. MobileMe’s address book app is just like using the OS X address book, simple and useful. It stores contacts — nothing more, nothing less. It does it’s job just fine.

Thanks for trying, Plaxo. Like everything else you had a good service then screwed it up with social crap. I may build and use web apps for pretty much everything if I can, but I never caught on to the social thing. I want simple, useful services and that seems to be the thing slowly becoming more rare on the web. Of course, that’s probably a big reason I love Apple products. They do what they’re supposed to do well, and not much more. And that’s fine with me. If it fits my need I’ll use it and if not I’ll find something else that does. 

So in an interesting turn of events I bought an iPhone 3G on Friday. Got in line at the Stanford Mall Apple Store at 6:15am. I was out the door of the Apple Store with a new iPhone at about 9:30am. I was around the 40th person in line, give or take a few. I’d say it was a pretty good morning (Yeah they couldn’t activate me in store and it took me a while once I got back with it… ).

I was also interesting in MobileMe (because I like synchronization and push) so I bought it with the iPhone for about 30% off. Although it’s been through some rough times.. and still isn’t *perfect* yet.. it definitely works when it does. I’m sure it’ll improve once things settle down and Apple fixes whatever issues are plaguing it.

So this leads me to LifeSync. The point was to sync my Google Calendar to iCal. Well now I don’t need to. I’m using MobileMe as both online calendar application and the sync tool between my Mac and iPhone. Although I don’t need it myself anymore I’ll definitely try my best to make sure it keeps functioning for those that will continue to use it.

Back to playing with iPhone applications.

After a lot of reflection while looking at the ocean I decided to release LifeSync for free starting today. I realized much of the reason it wasn’t out yet was the need for a “perfect” 1.0 release version and setting up all the licensing and billing stuff. It is simply too much for only having a few hours here and there to do work on it. Releasing it free means a) it’s not perfect and since you’re not paying that’s a little bit more acceptable, and b) I’ll have more time to fix issues rather than deal with licensing and billing issues.

It really comes down to the fact that I can’t take people’s money without having a really great product. I think LifeSync does the job well (I use it constantly for my own calendars) but it isn’t the best. But for a FREE product — I think it is a great value.

So spread the word, there’s a FREE OS X Google Calendar & Apple’s iCal synchronizer available. You can get your copy at http://lifesync.thetr.net. If you think it’s worth it, feel free to donate something to me via the Donate button on the LifeSync pages!

Earlier this week I helped to bring a Computer Science House tradition back to floor. CSH was long known for it’s huge consumption of Jolt Cola. For years there hasn’t been Jolt in the CSH drink machines on floor because they weren’t selling a container which the machines could vend, until now.

We finally realized that Jolt is now selling 16oz cans which are the same size as a standard soda can except that in height. After some work on Big Drink (the larger of the two old vending machines CSH has which can drop cans or glass bottles) I was able to make slight modifications (remove some parts) which allow us to now have Jolt in the machine once again! Awesome indeed. 

I’m hoping CSH can live up to the past and once again consume huge amounts of Jolt. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to have a sales representative at Jolt once again (or so the story goes…). 

Over the weekend I was at the RIT Innovation Fair with the Computer Science House showing off our networked vending machines Drink and Snack. I was interviewed by RNews. I was quoted near the end and I’m in the video too.

R News: ‘Imagine: RIT’ Fest Draws Thousands

Scott Smitelli decided to make a logo for LifeSync:

Thanks Scott!

I spent my evening and some of the night taking a drill and two jigsaws to one of CSH’s networked drink machines. I’m not done yet — I’ll be back on floor tomorrow to continue the work. We’re replacing the current locking mechanism with a stronger deadbolt.

Why does it seem I’m always the one taking power tools to steel?