Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I know that most of my columns recently have been about the Treo and related software, so I apologize to those of you who aren’t Treo owners (potential or actual). But having recently upgraded to the 650, I can’t help but be fixated with the new and existing software out there which adds more functionality to the phone.

A couple of items in the news over the last day or so have caught my eye so I thought I’d share them and some brief thoughs.

First, over at MyTreo.Net, Marc Blank, the developer of ChatterEmail, is interviewed. I’ve owned ChatterEmail since an early beta came out last summer and it is the application I use by far the most on my Treo. Probably more than all other programs combined. You know how they say email is the killer app? Well, in my mind ChatterEmail is the killer email program for the Treo. I’d tried others like Snappermail, Versamail, the old standard mail program on the Treo 600, and a couple of others that I can’t recall the names of. ChatterEmail’s killer feature for me was push, which is instant notification of emails, ala the Blackberry. If you are coming from a Blackberry and want that experience, ChatterEmail is the only one to provide it at this point – or at least the only affordable one. The one item keeping people away from ChatterEmail is that it’s only IMAP, and many email hosts still only support POP. But in this interview Marc talks about his next beta that will for the first time support POP. He also makes some interesting technical points about the inefficiency of POP and how we should all be using IMAP if at all possible. Marc is a great guy, truly devoted to his customers. Even during the holidays this year he was continually churning out new beta versions with fixes and additional functionality on almost a daily basis!

Over at Treonauts, Andrew has been polling readers and researching himself the different PIM options for the Treo. PIM standing for Personal Information Manager and relating to the “core” applications of the original Palm platform which are still available on the Treo – the Calendar, Contact List, To-Do List, and Memo Pad. For anyone who needs their Treo to keep them organized, these apps are critical. The ones that come standard with the Treo are ok, but pretty basic. They get the job done for anyone who doesn’t have thousands of contacts, is a sales person, or is just incredibly anal! However, a bunch of different 3rd party apps expand greatly on these and Andrew has a good rundown on them. Personally I still use the built-in apps and part of the reason is that many of the 3rd party ones require several megs of memory, something that is in short supply on the Treo 650. Aside from which I simply don’t have a very hectic schedule, I’m horrible at keeping up with a to-do list, and my contacts number around 200 or so. I simply don’t need something as full-featured as many of these are.

Finally, I recently happened upon a new product which to me may rival ChatterEmail as my killer app. I think I’ll hold off on talking about it right now because I’m still evaluating it and want to do a full write-up and review, which will take some time. Hopefully I will have something for you within a few days…

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As much as I would like for my blogging to be a financially supporting endeavor, alas I do have to maintain a day job. This day job involves sitting in a cubicle all day and programming code, with the hum of florescent lights above, people typing, talking on the phone, etc. – your typical soul-sucking office environment sounds.

Somehow I don’t think this is conducive to health or sanity and so I’ve tried listening to music with headphones on and off, but it’s sometimes hard because it takes me away a little TOO much – I can’t hear anything, and sometimes I actually do want to hear what my colleagues are talking about. Music – even calm, classical music – can sometimes be a bit distracting when you are working. Not always, but sometimes I really need as little noise as possible.

Last week, J-Walk Blog posted a link to a program called Atmosphere that produces atmospheric background sounds on your computer. I’m sure you’ve seen devices that are stand-alone or are built into alarm clocks at a Bed Bath and Beyond, or the Sharper Image, but this one is just for the computer. It produces a bunch of natural sounds like rain, surf, crackling fire, wildlife, etc., and believe it or not this actually works REALLY well in a moderately noisy office environment. You can listen to this stuff on your speakers rather than headphones because even in a relatively quiet office environment, the sounds, played at a reasonable volume, get more and more drowned out by other office background sounds the further you get from the speaker. Sitting about three feet from my speakers, I can hear them loud and clear, but if I walk just another 5 feet or so I have to really make an effort to listen to the sounds in order to hear any.

The program itself is much more customizable than anything I’ve seen in one of those sound affects machines that do something equivalent:

It has twelve predefined sound “Scenarios:” Woodland, Country, Dawn, Coast, Storm, Tropical, Summer, Jungle, Stream, Downpour, Night, and Fireside. The scenarious include a collection of different sounds and predefined levels and frequencies to mimic something in the natural world. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

You can set up your own scenarios (or modify existing ones) and save each with their own name. You do this by including/excluding a combination of fifteen “Background Sounds” (Fire Crackling, Jungle, Ciccada, Surf, Rain on Roof, Hot Day, River Birds, Light Rain, Thunder, Water Flow, Night, SeaWind, Gentle Sea, Meadow, and Night Insects) in addition to a collection of 40 “random sounds.” The so-called Background sounds are sounds that may have one or more individual components (just the sound of a gurgling brook or perhaps the sounds of a bunch of different birds and insects), in a fairly constant regular pattern.

Random Sounds (40 of them) are mainly animal in nature (birds and insects mostly but also frogs, various farm animals, trains, boats, and foghorns) and are specifically programmed to play at random intervals, since these are sounds that in nature are somewhat random and unpredictable. However, you can set each of these not only to play or not to play, but also how often to play. They are still random, but instead of a range being from onece every three to seven seconds, you might hear them once every minute or two depending on how you set them.

The customization doesn’t end with just which sounds you want to include and at what frequency, but also the volume levels. You can of course control the volume level on your speaker, or your volume settings on your computer, but Atmoshpere lets you also control the overall volume of the Background Sounds IN COMPARISON to the overall volume of Random Sounds. To clarify a bit more, you can’t control the volume of each INDIVIDUAL sound, but you can, say make the background rain louder and the birds and insects softer, or visa versa.

Once you tweak your environment to that perfect combination of sounds that aren’t annoying but rather soothing and which take you out of your work environment a bit, you can save these settings for later recall. You can even record these to a sound file for later playing on your MP3 player while you’re away from your computer.

In addition to the main functionality of creating sound environments from the predefined sounds available, you can also apparently record your own sounds and add them as custom background and random sounds to be used within the program. This sounds like an amazing tool for those who want to be able to create custom soundscapes without the use of a studio or expensive editing software that’s really not designed to create stuff like this in the first place.

The final bit of functionality is in an alarm that you can set to go off. I suppose the idea behind this is that you could use the program to help you fall asleep and then be able to set an alarm to wake up. While a few might use this feature, my sense is that it either should have been more built out, or left out entirely. The alarm sounds like a telephone, but not a very loud and annoying one. It won’t jar you awake and there’s no way to customize it. The rest of the application is so well thought out, that this feature seems like it was an afterthought. Some ideas for future functionality might be to be able to program custom (or additional predefined) scenario that is louder and more “annoying” – say with more animal sounds or other atmospheric sounds that might be condusive to waking up – as your alarm, rather than just this one phone ring. A snooze button would also be good, as would multiple alarm settings, not just one. Also a “sleep” setting that would allow you to set the program to stop making sound after a half hour or hour would be nice, since after you fall asleep you don’t really need to keep playing it.

One of the best things about this program is that it is free, or at least there’s a free version called “Atmosphere Light.” Everything I’ve talked about so far is in the free version which I have, but apparently the version that VectorMedia Software sells has for a very reasonable $15-115 depending on the type of license you want to buy, has a ton more stuff, so I’m seriously thinking of buying it. You can download a trial version of the so called “Amosphere Deluxe” that lasts for 21 days.

It looks like it has over 20 additional Scenarios (although I think for these you may need to purchase it outright), and a lot more random sounds – looks like over double what’s on Atmosphere Light. And the interface is better organized allowing you to actually test out these sounds more methodically. The background sounds now have individual “panning” (I’m assuming this is a change in volume from one channel to another which simulates stereo dynamic movement), and volume settings. You can even randomize volume levels and set a maximum and minimum volume. Just an amazing amount of control, and something I’m sure some could spend hours playing with and tweaking if that’s something that floats your boat! The amount of control in regard to not only setting these various things, but also the randomness makes for a tool that you could use to create a truly realistic background environment. It also comes with a screensaver that lets you pick various panoramas to pan through and the alarm function, while still the same, is supplemented by a “Timers” feature that lets you set specific scenarios to play at specific times of the day. So you could set a relaxing one to play from 11pm to 1pm, then nothing to play from 1am to 7am, then another relaxing one to play from 7am to 7:15am to help you get up, and if you haven’t yet, a loud cacophony of birds and passing trains could be played from 7:15am to 7:30am!

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My friend Eric at Off Wing mentions that he is getting more hits from Firefox. I’ve mentioned how much I love Firefox but hadn’t bothered to check my logs. So just now I went and, holy cow, 21.5% of my hits are coming from Firefox! Another 5.61% are coming from Safari, which is the Mac version of Firefox. IE is still #1 with 62%, but I remember checking just a few months ago, before I knew about Firefox, and IE was up at 90%! Way to go, Mozilla! At this rate FF will overtake IE in another few months.

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I’ve been using Firefox for a while now and played with a bunch of the extension – I have a list here of the ones I like. Another feature that FF has is an integrated text field for searching for something on various sites. So instead of having to go to google to look something up, you can just type it in this text field on the browser. FF comes by default with “engines” for Google, Amazon, Ebay, Dictionary.com and Creative Commons.

I’ve downloaded toolbars in the past that did this in Internet Explorer, but was never very impressed, and my initial impression of this feature on FF was the same. One of the things that got to me was the inconvenience of having to click on the field. I tried figuring out a way to tab over to the field, but that didn’t seem to work, so I decided it wasn’t possible. I’m one of those people who uses the keyboard as much as I can over the mouse, especially when dealing with a situation where I know I’m going to be entering text – and that’s what the whole search thing is about!

Today I read a post on Engadget about how someone had created an engine for searches for their site in FF and that led me to Mozilla’s page dedicated to these. Like FF’s extensions and themes, one can install new search engines, and there are quite a few of them out there. I went browsing and came up with a bunch for sites that I go to on a fairly regular basis, or ones that looked like they might be very useful.

Doing a little more digging, I found that I can get to the search field easily with a control-K or control-E on my PC (probably the same for the Mac?). So far so good, however, there didn’t seem to be an obvious way of actually specifying what search engine you wanted to use. It’s one thing if you use one of these 99% of the time, but what if you use a variety of them? I discovered that when you hit control-K, and if there’s a no previous search word in the field, you can click the up or down arrow to present you with a scrollable list of previous search words. If there was a word already there, it will just highlight it and the arrow keys don’t do anything unless you hit delete to clear the field. Instead of hitting the arrow keys, if you hit control in combination with the arrow keys, the little icon that represents which engine to use changes! Voila! The only problem is that you now have to distinguish the search engine you want by this tiny icon. It’s better than nothing, but I wish someone would change this to simply pop up the same list that you see in my screen capture, which currently is only available by… yes clicking on the mouse on that little engine icon. The other little nigly problem I have is that I can’t see a way of removing these engines. It’s probably something I’ve just overlooked, but there should be some kind of “manage engines” screen linked to the pull-down list of engines.

In any case, despite the fact that the interface isn’t optimal to my peculiar preferences, the feature does seem to be potentially extremely powerful. It theoretically lets you find a piece info by hitting a key combo (control-K), typing a word, number, etc. into the field, and if necessary hitting another key combo of control-down-arrow until the desired engine is selected, and then finally hitting enter. Seems like a process that could take a few seconds before results pop up as opposed to browsing to a new site, clicking into the field you need, typing the search, and hitting return. I just tried this out and it took me approximately 3 or 4 seconds to look up Liv Tyler in IMDB and get the results on my screen – from thought to result in a few seconds. Doing it in the standard way took at least twice as long. The differential will vary, I know, but all in all, I feel a bit silly for initially discounting what could potentially be such a powerful tool! Here’s a list of the ones I installed with links to install them yourself if you are using Firefox [correction: there doesn't seem to be a way to easily create these links, but I'm trying to contact th developer community to see if it's possible and if it is I'll be updating this entry - for now, you'll have to settle for just a list - you can go to the site to install them yourself]

• Wikipedia – the collaborative encyclopedia – the English version
• IMDB – Internet Movie Database
• Pubmed Books – search for books geared to professionals in Medicine
• WebMD – Medical lookups
• Moviefone Location – type a zipcode to get a list of theaters and what they’re playing
• Moviefone title – type in a movie title to get a list of theathers it’s playing in
• MRQE - search printed or online reviews for a film
• Daypop – search both regular websites and the blogosphere in one shot.
• Froogle – search Google’s comparison shopping engine for a given product
• Shopping.com – similar to Froogle
• PriceGrabber – another price comparison engine
• Yahoo! Auctions – why be satisfied with only eBay’s auctions?
• Amazon.com Auctions – yet more auctions
• Yahoo Yellow Pages – find a store or company, etc. (this is one of those where you need to also specify where you are searching, but if you already have done this previously, it’s probably set in a cookie and doesn’t need to be done again)
• Torrentsearch – Mmmmm files….
• Craigs List For Sale – the local version of eBay, or something like that. I’ve never used it personally but have heard a bit about it
• The Quotations Page – to figure out where the hell that thing you just said came from!
• Jewish Encyclopedia – never used it, but figured it might be useful when a non-jewish friend asks why shellfish isn’t kosher, or somesuch, and since my own knowledge of this stuff is lacking to say the least!
• HowStuffWorks – when you really need to know why that evil sump pump just decided to stop working and create an indoor pool in your house
• AllRecipes – give the microwave a break and cook some real food!
• Epicurious – I think this is another recipe sight or general culinary/food info site
• Acronym Finder – What is this damn “FF” I keep seeing everywhere?
• Webster Thesaurus – like, uh… you know!
• Wordorigins.org – for when you’re really bored

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I’ve written some praises about Firefox already, but they have finally unveiled their first true non-beta release, Firefox 1.0. Unfortunately at the moment the site looks overwelmed by visitors, so try a little later if you can’t get in right away. Not that it matters that much, as their betas (or at least the one I downloaded a month or two ago) has been perfectly stable. Firefox looks like it could seriously take Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for a ride. I’m fine using it for all but some apps which require IE to run, like, predictably MS’s Outlook Web Access (although you can get it to work in Firefox, it’s clunky), as well as some active-X or Java apps that really should run identically no matter what browser you’re in. But if the groundswell for this great browser continues, you’ll quickly see developers bending over backwards to provide the same functionality for it on the few sites that don’t already have matching functionality. Of course, I’m sure MS will counter with some of the fine features that Firefox has, but I’m wondering if they will ever be able to get their browser as small and fast as FF, something MS is notorious for failing at! Could MS finally be usurped again in terms of internet browser share? I remember a time when they didn’t even exist. Even when IE 1.0 and even 2.0 were out, few people bothered with them because they paled in comarison to Netscape which at that point was a mature product. But MS redoubled after Bill Gates underestimated the online phenomenon and finally got things ironed out pretty well in IE 3.0, after which it just never looked back and Netscape just couldn’t get their act together enough to come out with an updated browser until it was way to late. So I won’t underestimate MS, but I’m glad they finally have a real competitor again in this are!

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I needed to take a minutes to profess my love for this “new” browser, called Firefox. It’s actually the distant relative of the original Mozilla before it was made into Netscape and commercialized. The Mozilla browser did stay around and continue to be developed, but when I last looked at it a year or two ago, it didn’t really impress me much. But Mozilla has been on a tear. They have been developing Firefox in an open environment similar to how Linux was developed. The vast cadre of talented programmers have reshaped this browser into a fast and highly customizable tool.

It was probably four years ago when I finally got tired of waiting for Netscape to update their browser and switched to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. As a web developer, I had to stay current with the tools that allowed for the latest web standards, including a reliable DOM, CSS2 support, XML, etc. Netscape’s browser was built on old technology and the newer version was being developed so slowly that it allowed MS to take the lead. When Netscape finally did come out with their completely redesigned browser, it was buggy and frankly too late as many people had switched to IE. I still strove to develop for as many browsers as possible, but with IE consuming 90% or more of the market, there wasn’t a lot of motivation to spend huge amounts of time on testing in other browsers.

Up until a month ago, I probably would have told you that Internet Explorer, just like many MS products over the years, had completely and permanently squashed all competition save for the rebel hold-outs that refuse to use anything from MS on principle. But I had started hearing things by other bloggers about something called “Firefox” I wasn’t quite sure what it was but made a mental note to check it out at some point. That point came maybe two weeks ago. At first I was not so amazed. It is after all, a web browser. It doesn’t do anything completely new. What it does do, though, is to do what a lot of other programs do but in one interface, and with great speed and agility.

Here are the main things that I’ve come to love about the browser and why:

• Speed: I never thought of IE as slow, but when you run Firefox for the first time, you will notice a big jump in how fast a page loads. This may not really be noticeable for slower-speed connections, but anyone who’s on a higher speed should immediately feel like a veil has been lifted.
• Tabbed browsing: user interfaces are a funny thing. Although there are certain obvious rules that you must adhere to in order not to make something unusable, so much of it is just subjective. For example, I know some people who use the mouse for most things whereas I like to use the keyboard for as much as possible. Similarly, some people like having lots of programs running and lots of windows on their screen at the same time, where others like a much cleaner look. Firefox is actually somewhat flexible in this, but the main point is that unlike IE (or other browsers I’ve used), you can contain all your “windows” within one, and just tab through them using the control key and the tab key in the same way that you would tab through separate windows with the alt key and tab key. This may seem like six of one half dozen of another, but at least for me it provides a much cleaner interface. I think one could make it even more useful by changing how tabs are displayed, but the way they are in Firefox is still a huge step up from none at all!
• Extensions: a great feature of Firefox is that it can be supplemented by add on functionality. Currently there are over 150 of these “extension” add-ons. You can pick and choose which ones are most useful to you, or not use any, but I¡¯ve found some very useful! Here are the ones that I currently use:

• • Linkification: sometimes people who are writing for the web neglect to actually create a link for an address. For example, I might just say – “Check out Mozilla.org.” Linkification actually makes “Mozilla.org” into a link, which saves a lot of time from having to type it in manually or even cut and past into your browser’s address bar.
  • Copy Plain Text: this is a nifty utility that allows you to copy a portion of text on a page as plain text. Often I will write things in MS Word or a web-based tool that carries all the formatting from the original text, which I don’t want, I just want the text itself to conform to whatever formatting I’m using in the destination.
  • Image Zoom: some people when posting images on the web have this idea that making it too big will slow things down too much, and so you get images that you have to squint at. This lets you easily increase (or decrease) the size of a given image on the page itself.
  • StockTicker: I used to have to go to a Yahoo Quotes page to look up the current price of stocks, but now I just have to look at the bottom edge of my browser to know how poor I am!
  • WeatherFox: I can glance at the corner of my browser and see what the current weather conditions are, and the forecast for as many days as I want, no more going to different sites and looking it up by zip code.
  • CuteMenus: this tool simply adds small graphical icons next to most of the menu items in Firefox, which helps make things easier and more visually interesting
  • DictionarySearch: don’t know the meaning of a word? Just highlight, right-click, and choose “Dictionary Search” and you will get the definition from Dictionary.com by default, or whatever other reference sites you might want – you can specify up to four with the current version.
  • Ieview: alas there are pages that I use that still don’t work quite right in Firefox (more on this below), and this tool lets you quickly open a page you might be having a problem with in IE.
  • McSearchPreview: for Google (and other search engines) searches, this extension puts a small thumbnail of each search results so that you can get a quick preview before actually clicking on a link
  • Gcache: Google “caches” web pages all the time, meaning that it saves a representation of them to its site. The main usefulness of this feature is that if a site has been taken down, or is down for maintenance, or whatever reason, one can still look at this cache, although it may be a little dated compared to the current content on the site.
  • Tabbrowser Preferences: while you can control a few features of how tabbing works in Firefox, there are a lot of ways that you might want to customize tabbing behavior and functionality. There are several tools that let you do this, but I’ve found this one to be the best so far.

• Customization: if it wasn’t obvious from what I’ve already mentioned, Firefox is highly customizable both with its extensions as well as “Themes” which are basically different looks (they are sometimes called “skins”) you can put on the browser to make it take on very different looks.
• RSS: given its open development environment, I’m surprised that there aren’t more RSS and blogging tools available, but at least “out of the box” one can create bookmarks as RSS feeds.
• Search: Firefox comes with an additional area that you can type into right next to where you would type a web address, but instead here you type a search term and hit enter and you will get your results in Google. Or, you can choose to search for the term in Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and other places. In addition to this type of search, the interface to search for a word on the current web page is very nice. You just hit Control-F, after which a search form appears at the bottom of the browser. As you type a word, it will find the first instance of it on the page and highlight it. If it doesn’t find anything, it beeps at you, but you don’t have to type the entire term, just as many characters as gives you a “hit” and it will update after each letter is typed. You don’t have to hist a submit button or the enter key or anything else. It just makes searching for something a lot faster. In addition you can opt to highlight every instance of the term on the page, which makes it even faster to quickly scan through a page for the pertinant information you’re looking for.

So, don’t download Firefox just because you hate Microsoft and their monopolizing ways, or just because you admire the principles around the open software development environment. Download it because it is the best damn web browser out there right now, and one that will save you time, energy, make your surfing more fun, and more organized. Download some extensions, play around with the tabbed browsing. I think it’s safe to say that you’ll very quickly fall head over heals like me.

One caveat that I’ve found is that, as I mentioned, there are a couple of sites that don’t work well in Firefox. One is the map in mapblast/Yahoo Maps, which i can’t get to resize to a larger map as I can in IE. I think this is a Java thing and maybe I just need to tweak some settings, but at least with the defaults I can’t use it the way I want. The other site that doesn’t work quite right is Outlook Web Access. This is a tool that is offered with MS Exchange so that you can access your data (email, Appointments, etc.) remotely via the web. It really is designed specifically for IE, and emulates how Outlook 2003 operates very closely, so it makes sense that it’s not going to work perfectly in a browser that’s not designed with all the same proprietary hooks that IE probably has been loading up on as MS aims for web-based client-server applications (ASP’s) as a new computer architecture model. You CAN use Outlook Web Access on Firefox currently, but it is a bit clunky compared to IE. I do love OWA because it allows for a lot more mobility, but I am so enamored with Firefox right now that this situation has compelled me to consider other options, although right now I’m fine with running IE just for OWA when I need it, alongside Firefox for all other browsing. IE is on all Windows machines anyway, so it’s not like I have to make a choice, although it would be nice if I only had to use one application…

So, don’t download Firefox just because you hate Microsoft and their monopolizing ways, or just because you admire the principles around the open software development environment. Download it because it is the best damn web browser out there right now, and one that will save you time, energy, make your surfing more fun, and more organized. Download some extensions, play around with the tabbed browsing. I think it’s safe to say that you’ll very quickly fall head over heals like me.

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I sometimes think of myself as someone who want’s to be super-organized (anal?) but my laziness and propensity to get distracted get in the way! I do feel a lot better when things around me are neat and organized, does that count?

I think my first PIM (Personal Information Manager) software that I used must have been Time and Chaos, which was a pretty sophisticated application even way back in the early 90’s. My brother introduced it to me, or maybe it was the other way around. Time and Chaos is still out there and apparently was just completely rewritten. The problem, though, is that if you want to have a solution that a lot of people support, you are probably looking at Microsoft Outlook. But more on that below.

After a while I found Lotus Organizer, which was a cute application which had a more graphical interface based on a date-planner.

Eventually, in ’97 or ’98, I started Using MS Outlook. I liked the fact that it was both an email client as well as an organizer in one. It was the first such integrated solution that I knew of. I finally made the switch and have been using it since. I still think a lot of the features in Time and Chaos and Lotus Organizer were/are more intuitive, but what are you going to do? MS is that 50,000 lb gorilla that is supported by all the other devices out there (phones, PDA’s, etc.) for synching. Of course most organizers can import and export via CSV files and such, but more integrated synching seems limited to only a handful, and Outlook is at the top of that list.

My goal basically is to have one database of contacts, tasks, appointments, etc. that synchs as seamlessly as possible between my home computer, mobile device, and whatever computer I happen to be using away from home (be it my own laptop or a friend’s computer or a public computer at a library, etc.).

In this vein I’ve tried a number of things. One was an Intellisync Go Anywhere (no longer available), which lets you host your Outlook Data and access it from any web browser. The problem with this is that you need your computer to be on and connected to the internet at all times. Mine is, but there’s always issues where the connection might go down and with my luck I would have just left for vacation when some service interruption causes the router to freeze up and require a manual resetting! Also, it was just slow. This was undoubtedly because my upstream pipe is 128KBps!

The other issue that I’ve been wanting to solve for a while is just the whole management of personal email between home and work. I used to work for a place where I had Outlook installed and I would just upload my Outlook data file (at that time it was 10-20MB) to an ftp site, redownload it at work, and then do this again when going from work to home. Quite a few times I would forget or not have the time to wait and with a somewhat iffy connection I would sometimes start the transfer only to get home later and find that it would crap out (or this would happen in the morning. When this did happen I would have to change it so that my messages were not deleted off the server until I got back to my most recent data file, and then redownload the more recent mail and then finally change it back to delete messages off the server. A major pain, as you can see. Eventually I ended up using mainly a web client at work, but once I got home and downloaded my mail to Outlook, it was no longer available on the web! Sure, I could have left a lot of stuff out there, but what with storage limits at the time and not wanting to rely on my web connection for doing everything with email, that just wasn’t going to work.

Then I found out about Fusemail, which is a company that offers a bunch of services that go towards what I was looking for. First, it lets you collect email from various accounts – or “fuse” your email accounts into one. Second, instead of the ubiquitous pop protocol, it offers IMAP, which basically means that the email stays on the server and your client (be it the web or a specific IMAP client like Outlook) is simply a “browser” of sorts reading headers and only retrieving what the user wants to see at a given moment. I still had the issue that I didn’t want to keep all my email up on this IMAP account, and not on my computer, because what if the site goes down, or goes out of business, etc? Also, storage quota was limited, so I couldn’t keep everything up there. So what I did was I would keep the last 3-weeks or so of email, and save the rest back to a local Outlook file. Fusemail also offers an “Outlook plugin” which basically recreates some other types of Outlook data on their server, like Calendar, Tasks, etc. You can synch this with your Outlook File. What I found was that getting this to work properly was troublesome. I got some excellent support from the Fusemail owner, but a few things have caused me to look elsewhere. One is that the web interface to all this Outlook data is uneven. The email client is pretty darn nice, but others are fairly bare bones and some don’t even display things really accurately. For example, if I have a multi-day event and look on the 30-day calendar, it is only listed for the first day of the event. I’m sure that Fusemail will eventually fix these problems, but I just have no idea how big their staff is. It very well could be two guys in the owner’s basement. It could be a dozen more than that, and it will likely grow with it’s increasing success, but right now I’m looking for something more polished.

I think I would have stayed with Fusemail if I had not looked around for an exchange host and found one that was only a couple bucks more per month than my Fusemail account. 1and1.com offers the cheapest hosting package for exchange that I’ve seen, coming it at just $6.99. They also offer a bunch of web hosting packages, but the Exchange hosting is what I needed. Basically, Exchange it Microsoft’s product that takes your Outlook data and makes it into a client-server account, rather than just a stand-alone application on an individual computer. It does a lot more than this, including letting people communicate between their Outlook data – for example schedule meetings and notify/invite others, etc., but the main thing is that it keeps all your data in a central location and then lets you access it in different ways from any computer or device that has the requisite client. So I can use my actual Outlook program at home, but the “Outlook Web Interface” via a regular web browser at home. The web looks and acts so much like the regular Outlook client that it’s easy to get confused which you are actually using. The one big disadvantage is that the web interface is about 1% as configurable as Outlook itself is, which is annoying to anyone who likes to customize their display, or even do some editing of things that isn’t possible on the web.

You of course still have the problem that all your data is kept on a server, and if that goes down you are out of luck. But I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’ve figured out an adequate solution for this. First of all, 1and1 gives you enough storage space – 500MB – to where you don’t have to worry too much about running out of room unless you do a lot of emailing of large files. My idea is that you archive your Outlook data every few months, but you just archive the stuff that’s 6 months or older. Of course, this needs to be based on how reliable your exchange host is, and I have no idea how reliable 1and1 will be. I just signed up yesterday. As one of the cheapest out there, I have to consider the possibility they won’t be one of the most reliable, but they look like they have their act together. I will say that setting up the account and getting it working the way I wanted to was not a quick and easy process. It wasn’t horribly difficult, and the information is available on their site, but you do have to hunt for it a bit and certain things do not happen instantly, so after you activate your account, you may not actually be able to log in for a little bit. Or email confirmations with activation codes may not arrive in your inbox instantly, but only after several minutes. This can cause a bit of confusion, but in the end is not too debilitating. I just wouldn’t recommend it for someone whose not particularly technical/computer-savvy. I will give 1and1.com credit for their speed, though. At least for the Web interface. It is very fast to the point where sometimes it really does seem like I’m using Outlook locally…

Now, some of you may be thinking – why not just host your own? This may be ok for those who are lucky (rich?) enough to have a huge pipe going to their house, or basically use their corporate network for their personal use, but neither of these apply. Plus, the cost of an exchange server is prohibitive, plus I simply don’t have time or patience to do all the configuring and playing with such a server even if I had everything else. Once you own your own home, or at least if you own it and take care of it yourself, you find that the free time to play with servers is not all that plentiful – unless you are already a network or systems admin by profession and so all this stuff comes to you second nature.

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I have a confession to make. I am a horrible speller! I have tried to counteract that with the handy spell-checker, but I was seduced into using a spell checker for Internet Explorer that I thought worked. It does indeed show you spelling errors and let you correct them, but what I found out just today was that it doesn’t actually change the text when you submit it! So please except my apologies for all the horribly spelled blog entries up until now. I will try to now go into Word and check the spelling before I submit something…

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