Category Archives: Internet

The joys of the international money market

I use gandi.net for a lot of my domain registration. They allow payment in your choice of US Dollars ($15 per year), Euro (12) or UK pounds (8.30). So when today I had to renew a domain, I checked what the cheapest option in Australian dollars.

US $15 = A$17.38
EU €12 = A$20.05
UK £8.30 = A$19.38

So no contest, USD is the way to go. Thanks for providing the option, Gandi!

(Yeah I could switch to a cheaper registrar. But I don’t have the time or energy to do so at the moment, thanks for asking.)

My Location

Google Maps My Location uses either GPS (if it's available on your phone) or triangulation from the closest towers to show where you are. And yes, it works in Australia.

But it's not as impressive as I first thought. When I tried it initially in the Melbourne CBD (where there are

lots of towers) on my non-GPS-capable Nokia 6230i, it showed the map and pinpointed to within a few hundred metres of where I was at the time, pointing roughly to the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. Wow!

Alas it turns out that it points to that location wherever I am in greater Melbourne. Oh dear.

Still, at least it got the right city and continent. That's a start.

Getting used to Thunderbird

I'm liking Thunderbird. Ditching Windows Desktop Search and installing Google Desktop Search has worked well — suits my filing system. Well, except for the occasional __GD_something_or_other process that wants to keep running when I'm shutting down the PC.

Things I've had to get used to in the switch from Outlook:

Alt-S to Send doesn't work. Alt-Enter does (Outlook supports that too.)

The column sorting icons being upside-down.

It defaults to sending from the account you're looking at when you start the new mail, rather than a fixed default. Easily changed if you remember to check it.

It also inserts the signature automatically when you change the From account, which is neat.

It didn't take long to get used to the vastly better IMAP performance in Thunderbird.

I don't use a Calendar plugin. Tony pointed me to a Nokia phone sync, but I haven't tried it yet — I do backup my phone contacts, but for most of them I don't have email details, so syncing is not really a priority for me.

That's about all at the moment. I've imported all my old Outlook folders into Thunderbird, which took ages, but works fine. So, byebye Outlook!

Google Groups filtering

I like Google Groups a lot, but it’s far from perfect. Of all its annoyances, the lack of a killfile (filter) is the biggest.

Fortunately there is a solution for those using Firefox:

1. Install Greasemonkey

2. Install Damian’s Google Groups Killfile script

3. View one of the offending posts in Google Groups and click on Ignore User. Hooray, now I can finally read melb.general free of all those MI5 Persecution posts! (You can read all about that here, if you wish.)

How many people still use Mailwasher?

Does anybody still use Mailwasher?

“MailWasher retrieves information about all the emails on the server. With that information (some of which is also processed by MailWasher) you can decide what to do with each individual email – download, delete, or bounce back.

If you check your account with MailWasher first, you can delete or bounce the emails you do not want. Then, when you use your email program, it downloads only the remaining emails, those that you want to read.”

MailWasher’s been around for a while, and I know some people still use it. I tried it some time ago, and it just didn’t seem worth my time to review the headers and choose which items to delete/bounce, as a prelude to actually downloading and reading my email. I might feel differently if I was still on dialup, or perilously close to my download limit. But as it is, if any spam gets through to my mailbox, I’m happy enough deleting it from my email client.

And given the spammers use fake originating addresses and rarely seem to validate the lists they use (I know this because they’ve faked my address as an originator, so I’ve seen the bounces), I’m not convinced bouncing spam back does any good.

So Mailwasher was great in the olden days of dialup, but these days… I guess some people still use it, but I don’t see the need.

Some people have taken to passing their email through Gmail (forward from your email address to Gmail, then read via Gmail’s POP or IMAP access), to make use of Gmail’s spam filters. My ISP has spam filters which work fairly well, so I haven’t resorted to that yet.

Gmail gets faster / IMAP

So I tried IMAP for Gmail in Thunderbird. And to be honest, while it works, I’ve stopped using it because it’s too slow. Probably due to the sheer distance to the Gmail servers, it plods along compared to my other IMAP servers, and indeed compared to Gmail itself.

In fact, Gmail appears to have had a further upgrade in the last few days which makes the web site even more responsive. Actions such as Delete now appear to happen immediately, with little lag after clicking the button. I reckon they’re doing more processing behind the scenes — the give-away is that if you try and leave the Gmail page straight after doing something like deleting a message, it warns you that you may lose your changes.

They’ve tweaked the interface too, with a highlight > icon showing the current message, a nicer popup for email contacts, and you can Sign Out of chat if you don’t want it bothering you.

And the space available is still creeping up; mine reckons I’ve got almost 5Gb available: “You are currently using 373 MB (7%) of your 4731 MB.”

(I haven’t yet moved all my old Outlook mail to Thunderbird. Want to test out the Windows Desktop Search add-in for Thunderbird, so I know I’ll still be able to find stuff! Alternately I might switch to another search; preferably one that supports both Thunderbird and Gmail.)

The latest splogging method

A new example: http://sl-weekly.com/

Basically an excerpt from a blog, with a random introductory paragraph up-front to make it look human, presumably in the hope that the trackback will be accepted.

Random introductory paragraphs:

I’ve a passion for X and keep looking for good articles. Today, I checked if I could find more info by entering ‘Y’ in Google and found this
People are always asking me to blog more often, well here you go, I looked up some info on ’Y’.
Last night I used Technorati to find more info on ’Y’ so I could post it into ‘X’. And this is one of the many results I found
Today I was digging for some info on ’Y’ and came across the following section

Of course, it’s pretty obvious if you look at a few posts in a row. Less so if you’re getting the occasional trackback request.

Thunderbird with Gmail IMAP

Works as advertised. A little slower than my local ISP IMAP/SMTP servers, but not too bad, and because Thunderbird will happily wait for a server while you do other stuff, it's not painful at all.

Gmail's tags don't quite translate into IMAP folders, but it's probably close enough.

Conversations display as separate email messages in Thunderbird. You can use View / Threads to make it similar. Filing stuff in Thunderbird only does one message though, whereas in Gmail that'll do the whole conversation.

Deleting from Thunderbird moves it to a folder (eg gives it a Label) called [Imap]/Trash — which is how it appears over in GMail. Ideally it would move it to [Gmail]/Trash which seems to match the “real” Gmail Trash, but TB doesn't have that option.

Sent messages by default go into the TB folder Sent, but this can be changed to match Gmail's [Gmail]/Sent Mail in TB: Gmail account properties; Copies & Folders; When sending messages; Place a copy in: Other / Sent Mail on Gmail.

Moving messages to [Gmail]/All Mail appears to be the equivalent of pressing the Archive button in Gmail.

There's a bunch more help on comparing Gmail and IMAP actions.

All in all, works well.

(Reminder: Gmail IMAP is rolling out this week. If your Gmail preferences say “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” then you've got it. At present you'll need to switch to US English for it to be given to you.)

Thunderbird for IMAP

Thunderbird date column With GMail now offering IMAP (but it’ll take about a week, and you have to switch your Gmail account to US English) I can read all my email boxes from the comfort of the desktop when I’m at home, as long as I have a good IMAP client.

So I’ve tried Thunderbird. I’m quite impressed so far with it; it’s as smooth-as-silk on the IMAP account that Outlook 2007 seems to have so much trouble with. And overall it’s much more responsive (Outlook seems to periodically go out to lunch).

More critical will be the long-term storage of my mail. I’ve got a lot of old stuff in Outlook, and would need to ensure I could migrate it across and make it easily searchable (as easy as via Windows Desktop search) to get rid of Outlook entirely.

One thing about Thunderbird bugs me though: the sort by date column uses icons that seem to be backwards. What’s with that?

And why does the icon look like an envelope wearing a toupee?

ANZ computerised banking is user-hostile

I have an ANZ Bank account. Using their website to pay bills is an exercise in frustration. I only have one account, but the website insists on me picking it out of a dropdown with two entries – the first one, the default, instructing me to pick an account. Failure to do so results in an error – “Please choose a From Account.” I only have ONE! Assume that’s where I want to pay from! Then one must pick who to pay, with an option to pick previous billers from a drop-down list. If you pick from the dropdown without JavaScript enabled, you get the error “Please select a biller from the drop-down list or enter a biller code.” – with JavaScript it fills in a few fields for you, but why does it even need you to fill those fields in if you’ve picked your biller already? Fill them in when I click the “I’m done” button!

Finally, we come to a bugbear I have with ANZ currency fields. You can’t enter a dollar amount, it has to include a decimal point with two following cents; they can’t infer from a lack of a decimal point you’re talking about a dollar amount. They enforce this rule on their website, and they insist that at an ATM you enter the number of cents you wish to withdraw from the ATM. Given the smallest unit of currency available from an ATM is $20, what is wrong with this picture?

Numbers

Google Maps has just added street numbers for its Australian maps. No more wondering exactly which block the arrow is pointing at, you can now see the street numbers when you zoom in.

Real Estate Websites Suck: Part 3

So I’m receiving emails, and discover that I’m getting the same thing twice from realestateview; I wonder if they’re duplicates, or there’s overlap, or what. The emails I’m getting don’t tell me what the search criteria that generated them are, but does tell me that

The following recently listed properties match your search criteria.

whatever they are. Helpfully, instructions for changing a search are included:

To change your search, first de-activate your membership using the link above, then go to the Property Search Page to re-enter your new search.

You’re kidding, right? Delete the search, whatever it is because it’s some kind of secret, and then recreate it from the secret search criteria? How the freak is that easy to use? Not only that, when you “deactive my membership”, it’s not clear if just that email-search-thing or all of them will be turned off. Dare I try? Have I anything to lose? I dare, and I try, and it doesn’t tell me what the freak I just did, but it does tell me that it worked.

What moron designed this system?