dLux's blog

Emaily 0.7.1: Simplified email delivery, more stability (#emaily #googlewave)

2010-07-26T19:09:00.004+02:00

Emaily 0.7 was announced last week, and it turned out that there are some cases where it still does not behave the way like it should. Today I'm happy to announce the fruits of some hard fixing and planning work, Emaily 0.7.1. The changes are the following:

Incoming emails are not distributed

In earlier versions, when a wave received a reply from an email user, and it has more than one email users and the incoming email did not have all email recipients listed in Cc: or the To: fields, then Emaily decided to deliver the email to the missing recipients. This was intended to be a feature, but it is very annoying in some cases, so we decided to disable the incoming email-distribution entirely. If a reply comes to a wave from email, it is not sent to any other email recipient (unless it is edited by a wave participant, in that case, it behaves like a new and edited blip).

This is not a problem if the communication is between one wave user and one email user, and less disturbing in some cases when there are more email users, especially when one participant is a mailing list.

Emails are sent out to every participant at once

Previously we sent out emails to each recipient separately, so that email participants did not see the participants of the conversation. The spirit of the wave is that every participant is visible for the others, so now we've changed this behavior. Every outgoing email now has all email and wave participants in their To: field.

An advantage of this is that combined with the previous feature is that if email participants use the "reply all" feature of their email client, then everyone will get every part of the conversation in a multi-participant conversation without the need of control from Emaily.

Manual send is disabled

Manual send will require some rework, and is more confusing than helpful, so we removed it temporarily. Now every message you finish in a wave will get delivered automatically after about 30 seconds.

Redirecting emails, mailing lists

With these changes, it is now safe to redirect your emails to wave: you don't need to worry that your nice wave robot sends out emails when you did not want to.

You can even subscribe to a mailing list with your emaily email address. If some other Emaily user is a member of the same mailing list, then you'll have a common wave created from the emails coming from the mailing list, so you can even discuss things faster (realtime), than members of the mailing list.

Enjoy the newest version of Emaily!

Emaily release: 0.7: Stability improvements (#emaily)

2010-07-19T16:07:00.001+02:00

Emaily has reached its new milestone today: 0.7. We've been working on Emaily for a long time with no announced release, so I thought an update would be due.

Recently our efforts was split into developing and extending Emaily as a robot and working with the Wave team on some other cool thing which I cannot tell right now. But yes, it is related to emails. ;)

Stabilization

On the Robot side, we managed to finally stabilize it, so that we feel it is now reliable and usable with basic functionality. We think that we fixed all the errors we saw recently in our console and for now, you have a reliable email to Wave and Wave to email gateway. We do expect standard emails to arrive properly (normal means not too big, not specially crafted, etc.) and that wave updates are sent out reliably.

Email recipient handling vs. Wave participants

Email is different than Wave on how it deals with recipients/participants. Thus, any integration effort between these systems has to have tradeoffs. We figured out our way of handling email recipients, and we think that this approach handles some very common cases, though definitely not all.

One of the goals of the robot is to be as transparent as possible without being confusing. Starting from this release, when someone answers to an email which was sent out from Emaily and adds more email recipients to the reply email, then the robot will add these people to the conversation. Starting from that point, these people will get all updates on that wave and they can even reply. There is no current way of unsubscribing from a wave from email, but wave participants can remove any email participant, so you just need to ask someone.

The same works if this is a new email which arrives to your Wave. If there were more recipients, you will see them as wave participants, so when you answer, everyone will get the answer.

Future

There has been a lot of work done recently on the most requested features also: rich text emails and attachments. Actually they are almost ready.

Two weeks ago, we had a 4-day hackaton, where a team of 6 people worked on Emaily, and the biggest achievement was the development of these features. They require some polishing before release, but they are definitely around the corner!

The Emaily Team in the Hackathon

Class::Date 1.1.10

2010-07-18T15:39:00.003+02:00

Class::Date 1.1.10 is released. This is a new release after a long time. (You don't need to change something which is perfect do you? :) )

Project link: http://code.google.com/p/perl-class-date

Changelog entry:


1.1.10  Sun Jul 18 13:27:39 CEST 2010
 - Remove the deprecated UNIVERSAL::import (Vladimir Timofeev)

RITMO 2010, a Google Wave based conference, Email integration panel

2010-05-14T13:51:00.001+02:00

Recently there was a Google Wave based conference called RITMO 2010. You can imagine it like a virtual conference, where people are not gathered in crowded rooms, but sit in their comfortable chair in their home or workplace and discuss the conference topics through Google Wave.

This conference had a panel about Wave-Email integration. Mr. Ray and Emaily was invited. Here is the wave, you have to scroll down to 75% if you are interested in the past, present and future of Emaily:

Happy New Year and state report from the HQ #emaily #googlewave #wave

2010-01-23T23:31:00.003+01:00

Happy New Year (well, better late than never) and Hi everyone who is interested in what's up with Emaily recently:

As you might know, we, the developers of Emaily are Google Employees, we are doing Emaily in our 20% time. (GURU is helping us, he is not :) )
We are back from Christmas Holidays.
I am back from Sydney, where I met the Google Wave team, and we established a very good relationship.
We are now testing an upcoming version of the Wave API in Emaily and because it is not released yet, we cannot share the source code from the point where started using it. This requires a big work, so please don't expect bugfixes in the meantime. Once we ported to the new API, many strange bugs will disappear at once (like phantom people on the wave which is created form an email, receiving email inconsistencies, etc.). So you probably won't see the progress, but there is!
AppEngine is pretty limited for what we want to achieve, so we are thinking of rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services. For example if we run on AppEngine, we are not allowed to send and receive emails from your GMail account, just with a strangely encoded email address. We cannot use your GMail profile avatar in waves when you receive an email, etc. The consequence of that is that we once we start doing that, we probably won't continue the open-source version of Emaily. We simply don't have enough people to support the open source version. We prefer using our time to develop new features instead.
Wave itself is very heavily under development, and we also need to rewrite our code sometimes, which leads to inefficiency in our developmet and that also make the progress slow.
The good news is that more and more people are interested in the project inside Google, and we now have 4 developers working on the project.

Thanks for everyone who participated in the development by helping us or reporting bugs, or even testing features! We very appreciates that, and we hope that Emaily will deliver a much better user experience that it delivers today!

Cheers,

Balázs

Magyar billentyűzetkiosztás Androidhoz (Nexus One-hoz is)

2010-01-07T00:19:00.003+01:00

Sziasztok!

Az AnySoftKeyboard fejlesztői elkészítették nekünk a magyar billentyűzetkiosztást Android telefonokhoz. Egyelőre még csak teszt verzióban létezik, de innen letölthető. Nálam működik.

Emaily stability fixes, ~6000 email per day, Sydney

2009-12-02T23:41:00.005+01:00

Since the release of Emaily 0.3, the usage skyrocketed. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, many people started to use it. As I am writing now, it is expected to send out about 6000 emails per day.

When I first reported that Emaily sends out 1500 emails per day that number was wrong, the real number was much lower. The cause of the false report was a software bug, which tried to send an email in every minute, but it failed and it counted as email sending. When I fixed the bug, the daily number fell to ~300. But now, the 6000 seems to be a real number, as no bugs are known which is about resending. :)

In the last days, we made a lot of efforts to stabilize the system. We got many concurrency-related errors, some people complained about duplicated waves from emails, etc. Now it seems that the most severe problems are solved, we got barely a few errors because of the underlying datastore, nothing else.

The focus of the near future is to refine the send and receive logic (how exactly we will add recipients to the blips, wavelets), fix how a new incoming email appears, fix of resending the arrived blip to the sender, etc. Soon you'll see changes for these.

From next week, I'll be in Sydney and work with the Google Wave team to make Emaily and Google Wave better. Are you interested? Just stay tuned!

New #Emaily release: 0.3 - manual send, incoming email threading, new participant icon. #googlewave #wave

2009-11-30T11:09:00.002+01:00

Finally, Emaily 0.3 and some long-awaited changes are ready! In the last month, we have improved Emaily by:

Adding the possibility of manual sending (blip-by-blip, no automatic emails). You just have to uncheck the "Automatic send" checkbox, and in the new or edited blips, a "Send" button will appear. By clicking it, it will initiate the email sending.
Fixing the bug with accented, cyrillic, chinese, etc. (not plain US) e-mail subject encoding problem. (now you'll see "УРА, работает" instead of "???, ????????").
Support for threading of incoming emails. Your emails will appear as a new blip if they are answered by the email recipients. They won't always open new waves from now. (Credits for this goes to Christophe!)
Changing icon for email participants (to make it easier for you to distinguish email recipients from the robot itself). Note, that it is not the final icon, but better than the previous one.
Reduced the database and CPU usage of emaily when you have multiple email users on a wave.

Please take a look at the open issues page, vote for your favorite feature (or bug), and then they'll be implemented/fixed earlier.

We know that Emaily is still in an early stage, there are some missing features which we would like to address. There are also known issues, especially sometimes strange participants appear in the waves which Emaily creates (vote for this bug here).

Besides these, we have plans for improvements, too:

Adding the possibility to autocomplete email addresses from the user's addressbook. This is not that easy that it seems (vote for this here).
Add HTML email support for receiving and for sending also (vote for this here).
Add attachment sending/receiving (vote for this here).

If you did not find your favorite feature or you encountered a bug, please open a new issue.

We express our deeeeeeep gratitude to all who helped us in finding bugs and using Emaily. Guys, without you we would not have had such progress! Thanks all of you and keep going!

Enjoy using Emaily!

Best regards,

Guru & Balázs

representing the Emaily team.

Emaily short news: version 0.2.2: bugfix release; publicity, community; in the works #emaily #googlewave #wave

2009-11-17T23:25:00.001+01:00

I'm happy to announce the new version of Emaily: 0.2.2, the new homepage, some community news, and what are in the works.

Emaily 0.2.2:

There are not too many user visible changes in this release, it is mainly about bugfixing. If you are interested about the technical details, here they are:

We did not store the wave-id to the wavelets, just the wavelet-id. I assumed it is unique, but it turned out that there are many wavelet ids that are the same, so we actually ended up an almost unusable database. Now in this release, we will start storing the wave-id, so each wavelet is actually unique.
Some cleanup happened in the email-receiving code.
The datastore tricked me a little: I assumed that if I set a field to null, then it won't match a given numeric query (less than a number), but I was wrong. The result of this mistake was that every time the robot checked for emails to send, it looked through the whole database. Over time, one call consumed more and more CPU, and became slower and slower. The fix was easy, and now it works well.
There was a bug in the robot API, which made the robot fail and forget to record the changes in its state when a blip is deleted. This was probably caused by some recent change, because earlier we did not have this problem. I made a workaround for that, so this is also working fine.
Added an empty robot page in http://emaily-wave.appspot.com, which redirects to the homepage (http://emaily.dlux.hu).

I hope this release will be much more stable than before.

New homepage

Well, not actually new, but the informations are updated. I hope the usage is easy enough now for most people to use it.

Publicity, community

I opened a wave for questions and feature requests. If you did not know about that yet, check the new homepage for the link. (I don't want to write the link here, because it might change in the future. The reason is that it is getting pretty slow to load: 132 blips currently). Feel free to contribute!

Arpit wrote a nice review about Emaily, you can check it here! Thank you very much!

l3reak has a step by step description of Making Google Wave work with E-mail & facebook. Very extensive description on how to use Emaily! Good work, thank you!

In the works

We are working on two major things, and I hope we can get it done soon:

Manual sending:

Emaily currently sends unedited blips after about one minute, but some people prefer pressing the "Send" button instead.

Maybe you want to write a very important email to your love, your landlord or your boss: you don't want Emaily to rush you, do you?

Threading:

Now Emaily creates a new wave from all your incoming messages, but a conversation-like user experience would be much better: We'll create a new blip instead of a new wave when a reply comes from an email user.

If you are interested in the updates about emaily, subscribe to my twitter (dluxhu) or to the "emaily" label in my blog.

Emaily 0.2.1: Easier to use email sending in Wave #emaily #googlewave #wave

2009-11-09T15:57:00.004+01:00

This weekend was pretty busy in the Emaily world!

Christophe and me also worked on things, and we incorporated the first change from Karan, too. Some of them you can see already, some of them are coming in the next week(s)!

The biggest news is that you don't need to manually encode the email address anymore if you want to send an email to someone with Emaily.

Here is how to use Emaily now:

Add emaily-wave@appspot.com to your contact list.
Click on the contact entry, select "New Wave".
It will create a new wave with you and Emaily in it.
The robot will add a blip at the end of the Wave, and an input box where you can add email participants with their email address. It will do the hard work for you to convert their email address to Wave participants. No more manual work. You will see that the new recipients will show up in the recipients list.
After you finished, you can leave the blip as is, or you can even remove it.

Features to come in the next releases:

Make Emaily an extension: how about a "New Email" button to make things even easier?
Threading: do you want the answers in the same wave as you sent the first email from? We want that, too!

Enjoy!

Emaily release: 0.1.1: Bugfix. ~1500 emails are sent out daily. #wave #googlewave

2009-11-07T22:52:00.008+01:00

New weekend, new Emaily release. Not too much visible change in version 0.1.1, just a small bugfix, which made emails queue up. If you just got your email which you sent a couple of days ago, then this is why it happened. :)

About ~1500 emails are sent out daily with Emaily now. This is a big number given that it is just a very early version!

Spread the word, use this robot!

In the next weeks we're going to work on more usability features. If you have a feature request, feel free to send it!

Emaily 0.1: Google #wave now sends and receives email #googlewave

2009-11-01T12:47:00.003+01:00

We are sending and receiving emails, too!

This is a major breakthrough even if the code is in a very early stage.

Changes:

Now it does not send emails right after you submit a blip, it intelligently waits a little before sending. It even collects multiple blip changes into one email.
Email receiving is activated. You will get new waves from emails which are answered to your wave outgoing email address. (which is: yourusername+googlewave.com@emaily-wave.appspotmail.com). The code for this is made by Christophe.

Please note that the version number is 0.1, so many things are still not working, but we are working on them. These are:

Threading: incoming emails always create a new wavelet. In the future versions, if you get an email answer to a wave, then it will just create a blip.
Answering to the wavelet's address. Every wavelet has an email address, and whenever someone answers to that address, it is currently not working. Emaily uses it as an outgoing email address if an email contains changes from multiple people.
HTML emails.
Receiving emails automatically. Currently wave creation is triggered only when someone does something in a wave where the robot is a participant. This is the limitation of the API, but if many people will use the robot, it is not going to be a problem. So if you are testing Emaily, and trying to receive emails, just open a wave which contained an email recipient, edit a blip and press "Done" without changing the content. It will trigger creating wavelets from emails.
Sending emails from your username@googlewave.com. We cannot send emails from your email address currently because of security. We're trying to figure out how it would be possible.

Redirecting emails to your wave box email address

If you are brave enough, you can redirect all your emails to your wavebox. In GMail, go to Settings / Forwarding and POP/IMAP, select "Forward a copy of incoming mail to ...", write your wave incoming email address there: yourusername+ googlewave.com@emaily-wave.appspotmail.com. Select "keep GMail's copy in inbox" if it was not selected.

Note, that I DO NOT suggest this yet, but you can give it a try.

Happy Waving!

Balázs & Christophe

Emaily approved for the Wave Samples Gallery

2009-10-18T15:24:00.005+02:00

While we are still working on Emaily to make it usable for many people, I submitted it to the Wave Samples Gallery, because it can contain some code which would be usable for others, for example usage of guice in a robot and using the "proxyingFor" request field to determine the email address of an email user. The submission is just accepted a couple of minutes ago. Here is the entry for Emaily: http://wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=46003

For people who want to use it: it can send emails, but it cannot receive answer yet. See my previous blog post on the usage.

St Maarten airport (2004)

2009-10-14T15:02:00.006+02:00

In St. Maarten, there is a beach behind the airport. We had a couple of hours there. The airplanes are landing just about 20 meters above our head.

But the takeoff is also interesting. I tried to record it into video (with a Fuji FinePix 5000), but the hot sand was so burning so that I had to hide behind the car after a couple of a second, so the end of the video resembles to a disaster-movie:

Another movie from the same place (landing, no my video):

Emaily 0.0.2: Google #Wave now sends email - but lots of work ahead to make it usable

2009-10-04T15:54:00.005+02:00

I'm happy to announce Emaily version 0.0.2, which now able to send email. This is the first time email can be sent from Google Wave.

But don't be too excited about that, it is still not too useful, it has a lot of limitations. The main problems are:

You cannot receive answer to the email yet.
There is no rate-limiting on emails: If you edit a blip and submit it, then it will immediately fire an email to the recipient. When you edit a blip and finish editing, it will send it again, etc. It is a pretty annoying user experience for a user who is participating on a constantly changing wave. This makes me a little bit cautious about publishing it too much, because if people will start spamming with this tool, we have to disable the it until we add some rate limiting to it.

How to test it

First of all, you have to do some work with the email address you want to send the email to:

Take it apart into two parts: username and domain (the separator is the @ sign), for example for test@example.com the username is test and the domain is example.com .
Add the emaily-wave+username+domain@appspot.com to your contacts, in our example it would be emaily-wave+test+example.com@appspot.com.

You have to do it exactly this way, it will probably won't work if you do it in an other way:

Open a new wave with the previously created contact. Don't add multiple email-contacts to the wave, it is not working yet as intended.
Write your message.
Click "Done."

The email will arrive to the recipient's mailbox, but he cannot answer to it yet.

You can return and edit the wave, add new blip to it, these operations will generate a new message.

We're working on adding the ability to receive emails, plus rationalize the outgoing emails somehow. A lot of work have to be done on make it more user-friendly also.

Swine flu: the media vs. other opinions

2009-10-01T20:34:00.004+02:00

I got many emails, videos and documents about the Swine Flu antidote (TamiFlu) and the vaccine. I have no chance to check whether these are true or not, but there are a few things which are true for me:

I don't like the media, they usually concentrate on bad things. If there is one crazy lunatic in 1000 people, they will report it and state that everyone is a crazy lunatic, so everyone should be sent to jail.
I usually don't like the medicines, because they are trying to force something to your body, and they are usually suppressing the symptoms, not solving the root cause of the problem. Most of the time I did not think that using medicine is justified. Extraordinary cases of course can happen (painkillers after wisdom teeth operation, etc.).
Because of the reason above, I usually don't take medicine, just sometimes vitamins.
Medicines can have a lot of side effects.
I think the world as it is now is just simply crazy, and I don't believe that it is naturally like that. I saw people suppressed who just wanted to do some big and good thing. I feel that something is just not right.
Why a good doctor could not help a patient with cancer with his knowledge and why he asks the patient after a couple of months what she did with herself so that her results look very good? What did he studied for 10+ years?
Where is the homeopathic curing, which actually tried to handle the root of the problem? Why it is considered "alternative medicine"?

So far I got the following things:

http://vimeo.com/6702467 ("The swine flu is fool-up", English, with Hungarian subtitles)
http://www.davidicke.com/ (English page)
http://www.naturhirek.hu/index.php/egeszsegvilag/bigpharma/295-tamiflu-csillaganizs.html (Hungarian page).
http://lenkeidoktor.hu/ (Hungarian page, many blog entries from a doctor).

Against these informations, there is the media, and that many people are in danger, many people died, etc.

So, everyone have to decide for himself what he thinks about this topic.

If you have any material about this topic, please post it to the comments.

First release: emaily 0.0.1

2009-09-22T23:29:00.004+02:00

I made a new release about Emaily, an Email Robot for Google Wave.

This is the first release, it does not actually do too many things, just add an email-participant selection gadget to a wave, when itself is added.

How to use it:

Add emaily-wave@appspot.com to your Wave addressbook.
Create a new wave.
Fill the subject, start writing the email.
Add Emaily Robot to your wave.
You will see that the participant selection is popping up.

Work in progress. :) I am looking for coders and helpers.

More information about the project:

Home audio server from Mac Mini (or any Linux/Unix)

2009-09-13T17:08:00.002+02:00

I've read many posts about using computers as home media servers, but none of them provided the necessary functionality which I needed. In this post, I'd like to share my setup with a Mac sound server, and a Mac client. The process can be adopted to Linux easily.

The setup

First of all, I use a laptop as my main computer, and all of my music is in it. I bring it everywhere. At home, I have a Mac Mini. It is used mainly as a guest computer and for backup.

When I go home, I'd like to use my stereo to play my music. Plugging the sound cable into the laptop is too old-school, and it limits my movement in the flat, so I needed to find another solution.

I could use Apple's music sharing technologies (iTunes Music Sharing, iTunes Home Sharing - this is new in iTunes 9), but the problem is that it does not count in my laptop that I have listened the music. I have automatic playlists, which pick only songs which are not played recently, so that I don't listen music repeatedly. I also use iTunes DJ a lot, and remote libraries cannot be added to iTunes DJ, so it is also not working. I like my playlists, so it is not a good solution.

I had an Airport Express before, but it did not play music videos, just music. It would have been a good solution, though.

The best setup so far was that I mounted my iTunes library which relies on the laptop to the Mac Mini and started the iTunes instance in Mac Mini. It always took a couple of minutes to set up, so I did not use it frequently. Another reason why I did not like this was that I often started iTunes in the laptop accidentally when the iTunes run on the Mini, and that is dangerous: who knows what happens with your library file if two iTunes instance uses it. The last and most annoying problem was that if someone else used the Mac, then my iTunes was in the background, and could not use the audio output.

The solution

In my old Linux days, I used Esound to send music and sound effects to another computer. It was more than 10 years ago, but Esound is still around, I've found two blog entries which uses that to solve this problem: on MacOSXHints and on a DSLinux-related site. I improved them a little, and here is my solution:

The server

The server computer in my case is a Mac Mini. This computer is connected to the Hi-Fi, so this is turned into an audio server, like the Airport Express, but it also mixes the sound effects of the currently logged in user, so that guests also can listen to some music when they use the computer.

What you need to do the setup:

esound
netcat (I used gnetcat here.)

These can be installed through macports or might be available through fink, too. On modern Linux distros, these packages already installed.

I created a shell script, which starts the esound daemon and listens to incoming music. Put this script to any place, for example name it as /usr/local/sbin/esound.sh:

#!/bin/sh
BINPATH=/opt/local/bin # macports binary directory
export HOME=/Users/root
$BINPATH/esd -as 1 &
while true; do
$BINPATH/gnetcat -l -p 7752 | $BINPATH/esdcat
done

Add executable rights to this and create a home directory for the root user: /Users/root.

Then create a launchd config file, which will start this shell script every time you restart your computer:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>esound</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/local/bin/esound.sh</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Save this file as /Library/LaunchDaemons/esound.plist. Then load and start the script as root:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/esound.plist
sudo launchctl start esound

If you have a Linux box, you probably want to tweak the path of the binaries, and use the rc.d mechanism to start these jobs.

Now what you have is a music server computer, which listens accepts sound input on TCP port 7752, and automatically restarted in every reboot.

The client

The client is in my case also a Mac (a laptop). I used the following software in it:

esound
netcat (I used the standard nc command here)
SoundFlower

You can install esound and netcat as you did for the server. SoundFlower is a Mac application, so you should not have problem installing that.

Start SoundFlowerbed and set up SoundFlower(2ch) as a default input and output channel in Audio Setup.

Then start esd, esdrec and netcat to send the music to the server:

esd &
esdrec | netcat servername 7752

Start your iTunes, and Voila!

When you are finished and you want to listen to music again in your laptop, you just need to stop esd, esdrec and netcat, plus you can just map SoundFlower output to the Built-in Output.

Note

The original tips uses music compression, but I've found it not necessary. Uncompressed music uses about 170k/s bandwidth, it is fine for a decent wireless router. If you have problems with the bandwidth, you could take a look at the referenced tips how to do the music compression.

What did you do at 09:09 09.09.09?

2009-09-11T10:13:00.007+02:00

Something to remember: 09:09 09.09.09 was a special moment, and we won't have that special moment in this life any more (Update: thanks for Sorin, who pointed out that it is not really true, see below). So it is good to remember what did you do at that time.

I just turned into my other side after pushing the Snooze button in my iPhone.

And you?

Update: Actually I should have been written 9:9 9.9.9, because it is more unique, and the next similar time is going to be 11:11 11.11.11, and that's going to be the last probably in our lifetime.

Mainau Island

2009-09-05T21:46:00.001+02:00

On Sunday last week we went to Mainau island. This is a beautiful park close to the german border with a lot of flowers.

It was a really nice walk in the island. For me the most exciting part was the Butterfly House, where I could practice the macro-photography. It is a very humid closed place where there are plenty of flowers, trees and butterflies. Catching them was not really hard, some of them liked to fly to visitors, they were not shy.

I had to realize that macro photography is not really easy. Millimeters count if it comes to the focus. I wonder that maybe the autofocus system of my camera is not perfect (I tried to not move too much), I made a lot of blurry photos.

Besides bad ones, I made a couple of good one, and I'd like to share the best 3 with you:

When we left the island, I just simply loved the shadows on the bridge:

That was a really nice afternoon!

More photos maybe coming later if you have more time or the demand is really high. :)

Steps to replace an old mac

2009-09-05T18:07:00.001+02:00

Disclaimer: doing the following steps requires that you have some knowledge about Macs. Do these steps at your own risk. I used Mac OSX Leopard, maybe your system is different and will not work for you, I take no responsibility about your data loss.

I got a new MacBook pro laptop, and usually a new task comes with a new computer is to set it up. I had my old laptop, and I just wanted the new one to work in the same way as the old one. The first tool which is handy in case, is the Migration Assistant.

Migration Assistant

This program be found in /Applications/Utilities. You have to have a firewire cable and you have to boot your old mac in target disk mode. Here is how you can do that. I set it up to copy everything including all settings and all possible users. Unfortunately it cannot handle File Vault users, so I had to do it manually later. For me it worked for about 3 hours in the background (I could use the computer in the meantime), and after that, a lot of things were copied, including network settings, my MacPorts installation (in /opt/local), all of my non-encrypted local files (music, shell scripts, etc.), even my Hungarian Plus keyboard layout, which lies in /Library/Keyboard Layouts.

You can do anything during the copy, but make sure you don't do any permanent changes in your home directory if it is file vaulted, since you'll overwrite everything soon with your old home directory.

Copying a File-Vaulted user

I had a file-vaulted home directory, and this is not copied by the Migration Assistant, so I had to copy it manually. If you don't have file vault or don't want to copy it, you can skip this step.

Given that the old computer's disk is called Macintosh HD, and the old computer is in Target Disk mode, then your file vault home directory is in the Macintosh HD/Users/.username or Macintosh HD/Users/username . Note, that there are two Macintosh HDs, the remote computer is the one which has an eject button next to it, and this is what you need now.

You cannot see the files in Finder which starts with a ".", but you can navigate to the parent folder and press Cmd+Shift+G, and then enter the directory name, and it jumps into it.

Copy the username.sparsebundle file to your local computer somewhere outside to your home directory, for example in the root directory of your new computer (Macintosh HD).

When it is finished, you'll need to have another administrator user. If you don't have one, create it in the Account Preferences.

You can detach your old computer now, or if it is not finished with the Migration Assistant, wait for it, and detach it after.

Log out with your current user and log in with your other admin user. It is very important to log out with your user, not just use fast user switch, because we'll overwrite the user's home directory.

Find where is your main user's home directory, it should be in Macintosh HD/Users/username (or maybe .username, but it is usually happens only when you forgot to log out with that. Check if you are logged out properly before continue).

Assuming you copied your old sparsebundle to Macintosh HD, you have to do the following in terminal to have your old home directory replace your current one (replace username to your short username):

cd /Users/username
mv username.sparsebundle username.save.sparsebundle
mv /username.sparsebundle .

Now you are ready, and you are able to log in to your old environment in your new laptop!

Registered software, iTunes

We're almost ready, but some registered software requires a new registration, since you use them in a new computer. Check your Applications directory and re-register your software if you don't want surprises after some weeks when you try to launch your favorite but rarely used software out in the wild without internet and with no access to your registration numbers.

iTunes also requires you to register your new computer in iTunes store to listen to your audio and watch videos you bought. There is a menu item for that: Store/Authorize computer.

Time machine

Time machine will think that it is a totally brand new computer (which is actually true), and it will start backing up your system entirely into a new space. This is probably not what you want. If you want to continue using this new computer as you used your old one, it would be convenient to save to the same place as the old computer, and archive only the differences.

I've found a good tutorial about how to make it work here. The only addition to this that if you use a remote backup (not to mention remote encrypted backup), then the referred file which starts with a "." will be in a different directory: It will be in the folder which stores the sparsebundles, not in the directory where Backups.backupdb is in. After that, you also have to rename the sparsebundle file to match your new mac address. But other than that, that document fully applies and worked for me.

That's it!

Those steps seems to be necessary and enough to copy and set up everything the way it was in my old laptop. Double check that you have everything in your new computer, and then you can start to wipe everything from your old computer and give it to your daddy, your wife, sell it, etc.

Sunset at the beach

2009-08-29T17:40:00.001+02:00

One evening we headed towards Clearwater Beach. We parked the Mustang ("Mustang? What Mustang?" - you might ask. Well, I'll probably talk about that later), and went to the shore.

The water was pretty warm, Andi enjoyed it very much:

The sunset was beautiful, we saw rays coming through the clouds. When I took shots of the Sun, I got these kind of sepia-like photos. This style reflects the humid and hot weather:

Here the sun almost went down entirely. I would have been happy to have a 70-200 with me, this is all the quality I had with a 24-105: I had to crop, this is 1/4 of the original photo:

Later, the Sun disappeared behind the horizon, but its rays were still visible. This painted the sky to more bluish (at least this is how the camera set the white balance), as you can see it in the following photos.

In this shot on the left, you can see Pier 60:

Photo from the pier:

This place is busy even at and after sunset. There are street musicians, street performers, craftsmen every day. This event is called "Sunsets at Pier 60", it is actually a "daily festival", which happens around the time of sunset (whether permitting) and they even have a webpage: www.sunsetsatpier60.com:

As I progress with the photos from Florida, I'll post some more.

Enjoy!

Sunset at the top of Fort Harrison

2009-08-23T23:29:00.005+02:00

We've arrived back to Zürich after a couple weeks of Florida, and I started to look at the photos we made.

In the first days, we went up to the top of the hotel, to see the view and see the sunset.

The following photos are made there:

This photo was taken after sunset. The sun already set behind Clearwater Beach, but it painted a beautiful sky.

I made this long-exposure shot with a tripod, I liked the pattern that the light draws, and the color of the sky. (The signature is on the wrong side, I'll replace this photo once I get back my Pro account :) Update: Done. :) ).

The shadows were really nice here, plus the color of the sky was still beautiful. The idea of the photo is coming from Andi, but the execution was mine. Another interesting fact about this shot is that I did not adjust the saturation at all.

More photos coming as I have some time to process them!

Programmer jokes

2009-08-18T19:03:00.003+02:00

I've found many jokes about programmers here, I've copied my favourites to my blog, I hope you'll enjoy them:

A Cobol programmer made so much money doing Y2K remediation that he was able to have himself cryogenically frozen when he died. One day in the future, he was unexpectedly resurrected.

When he asked why he was unfrozen, he was told:

"It's the year 9999 - and you know Cobol"

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who have regular sex.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

very long pause….

“Java.”

An SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, "Can I join you?"

Q: how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: none, that's a hardware problem

and

Q: How many prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Yes.

Programming is like sex:

One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

from xkcd.

If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program.

The rest of them will write Perl programs.

These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"

The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"

"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

Unix is user friendly. It's just very particular about who its friends are.

A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

See the rest of them on the page there are some more very good ones!

Google Chrome for Mac displays flash

2009-08-08T22:06:00.006+02:00

The latest Google Chrome for Mac now support displaying Flash. The interaction with the flash media is still not working yet, but at least you can now view your favorite YouTube videos in it without the need to switch to another browser!

Good progress, guys!

If you want to follow the development, you can go to the known bugs list page.

Update: It seems that there are some work done in the Gears support also, Offline Gmail seems to detect the Gears, though it is not seem to be fully functional yet.