sync'ing Thunderbird with Google calendar
Just installed the Lightning extension which provides an embedded calendar (Sunbird) within Thunderbird.
This is made even more useful by the addition of the Provider for Google Calendar add-on that enables seamless, two way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Thunderbird.
Artificial Intelligence
Weird. This was also the subject of my final year project at University. My AI creation was written in 'C' on Unix and used the curses package. However, my effort wasn't so accomplished, had severe problems when a piece was crowned and didn't implement the 'huffing' rule correctly. Having said that, it did beat me on four occasions.out with the old, in with the new
A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad. Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy. Initially, I toyed with the option to simply disable comments on articles older than 90 days which accounted for 95% of the spam but would block authors with valid contributions. A little research revealed a possible alternative - Spam Karma. I was loosely aware of Spam Karma from the footer in Tim Hall's excellent blogThis blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 23182 Spams eaten and counting...as well as Andy Beard's positive review and useful tutorial on configuring Spam Karma. Initially, the Spam Karma interface was a little confusing. With Akismet, you literally set and forget whereas Spam Karma has a configuration page with a plethora of different options. Anyway, after deciding to start out with the default, out of the box settings, I just activated Spam Karma and waited. Sure enough, the never ending barrage of spam trickled in and the vast majority were correctly marked as such, valid comments were allowed through and I couldn't detect any false positives. The moderation mechanism wasn't quite as obvious as Akismet which emailed me whenever a comment was held for moderation. However, Spam Karma was actually better as moderated comments are held in the Spam list and can be quickly moderated from there. In addition, Spam Karma can email a daily/weekly digest summarising recent activity. I have been running Spam Karma for almost a week now and not a single comment/trackback spam has got past the barriers yet. A truly impressive and valuable piece of software. A few features in Spam Karma I really like:
- All comments are assigned a score depending on various criteria.
- Comments on older articles get penalised...
- ...but older articles with recent (valid) comment activity score higher.
- Instant comments within seconds of viewing get penalised.
- First-time commenters are presented with a captcha.
- Established commenters are recognised and scored accordingly.
- Trackbacks without a valid reference URL are penalised.
- My comments score higher than anyone elses :-)
- A detailed breakdown of the score assigned to any comment is available.
-12.5 0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching. -2: Browser doesn't support Javascript 0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL) -2: Flash Gordon was here (comment posted 8 seconds after page load). -9: Entry posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago. 0 comments in the past 15 days. Current Karma: -3.I was so impressed I donated $20 to the author and that doesn't happen very often. Another source of unnecessary email was valid blog comments (albeit much fewer). The solution for this was obvious. Subscribe to my own comments feed and read them in Google Reader. Another source of Web 2.0 irritation was that the Firefox extension for coComment broke some of the drilldowns in the revamped Google Analytics reports so I reluctantly stopped using it. This was a real shame as coComment was one of these Web 2.0 applications, I actually used on a daily basis. Again, I looked for an alternative and installed co.comments (yeah I know - it's a Web 2.0 domain with an embedded period) which works fine. There is a Firefox bookmarklet (not an extension) so the author has to remember to mark any comments posted whereas coComment automatically tracked these 'conversations'. The other advantage of the coComment extension was automatic notification whenever a comment was added to a tracked conversation. Again, the solution for this issue was obvious. I simply subscribed to the RSS feed for my tracked conversations and read them in Google Reader.
Google finally sees sense
On the face of it, the recent changes to the interface to Google Docs and Spreadsheets look trivial and superficial. Google's official announcement is brief and understated but Google Blogoscoped hits the nail on the head (twice):'The file listing now resembles a more traditional view in the style of, say, Windows Explorer.'...that ordinary mortals understand and are comfortable with.
'Google D&S looks more and more like an office application.'In fact, Google Docs looks and performs much better than the most popular office application. I recently upgraded three home PC's to Office 2007. I think Microsoft Office is a superb suite of professional applications (Word, Excel, OneNote) and represents great value for money as £85 buys licenses for use on three separate PC's. Inevitably though, my wife hated the new Word interface (shock of the new) because 'everything had changed' and she could not easily locate the old 'Print' button or even 'File-Print'. My wife doesn't use Google Docs and now she has mastered Word 2007, she probably never will. However, if she ever does, it will be easy to teach her how to migrate. If she wants to print a document, she clicks the 'Print' button or the pretty picture of a printer. This is completely intuitive and obvious. She won't have to call the Helpdesk and interrupt the Champions League Final just to print two copies of her CV. If my wife wants to delete a document, she either selects the document and clicks 'Delete'. Alternatively, if she has successfully completed my 3 days 'Advanced Course' (a bargain at £150) and is officially certified, she simply drags the document to the dustbin. Two choices. Both quick, easy and obvious. Another occasional task my wife needs help with is finding her CV. She keeps all 178 documents in 'My Documents'. She doesn't archive files by year. She doesn't remember that she last updated the CV in May 2003 nor does she know whether the document is named 'CV', 'Curriculum Vitae' or 'CV-Full' or 'CV-May-2003' . She can't fathom out the search interface from within Word (nor can I) and does not know that you can search for Word documents from a completely different application - Windows Explorer. She simply wants to find her CV. From within Word. Quickly. In Google Docs, she types 'CV' in the 'Search' box and is offered all the available possibilities with intelligent auto-complete. This isn't patronising. This is all about usability, interface design and mass market appeal. If Auntie Beryl writes yet another letter to her bank, she simply drags it to the 'Letters' folder. She doesn't need to know that this isn't really a folder and the document is now tagged as 'Letter'. Uncle Harry doesn't need to know the definition and intricacies of folksonomies. He doesn't care that, strictly speaking, this document could also be multiply tagged 'Bank' and 'Personal'. He just wants to type the letter, run a spell checker, quickly print the thing and make the 5 o'clock collection. I honestly believe, in the future, this seemingly trivial change will be viewed as the turning point when Google changed from a marginal, Web 2.0 application and started to offer a credible alternative to Microsoft Office (for personal but not corporate users - yet). This was the day that non Web 2.0 users can now be introduced to Docs and actually understand and use it. Ironically, the revamped Google Docs interface is very reminiscent of the Web based interface of Office 2007 which is another excellent software product and unbelievably close to the desktop equivalent.