Of course, the time to depart arrived and I had to stop. Still, I read about 25% of the book in one sitting. I replaced the book on the shelf, noting to look for it at the library and/or add it to my wish list. (Even if I wanted to buy it, I wasn't exactly in a position to do so.)

The next day, en route to the upstairs computer lab, I checked the public library catalog. The Cuckoo's Egg wasn't in stock, and was checked out until the 21st of April, but I noticed that one of Stoll's other books was: High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian. On impulse, I checked the book out.

What I found inside, later, was intriguing. My parents have been skeptical of computers for a while. Though my dad uses them for his business, and my mom is warming up to them after years of asking me why I find them so interesting,¹ there's still a big disconnect between us.² I've vaguely known the reasoning behind their conclusions for years, but High Tech Heretic has shed some light on the details—and not monitor glow.

Programmed Instruction

Despite my parents' computer skepticism, I took my entire high school education online. I believe it was a good experience, though not for the reasons one might expect. It's not that I necessarily learned more than I would have in a conventional school—though I probably did, since the online coursework better fit my learning style—but rather that I spent a good chunk of my "school" time correcting the course material. Lazy QA teams had left the text, quizzes, and tests riddled with little errors. Through my teachers, I sent corrections, and my correction work earned back more than a few points that were wrongfully denied me in nearly every course—though I never got so much as a "Thank you" from the course distributors. (A rare few courses were bereft of glitches. I treasured them, because I didn't have to keep second-guessing everything.)

What was interesting about some of the corrections, though, was that sometimes it was just a matter of input formats. Most of the graded tests were multiple-choice, but many of the in-text "Self-Check" quizzes featured free-text inputs. Such quizzes were graded by JavaScript code, to give students an idea of how well they understood the material. But some of them had vague or quirky requirements about how answers were entered, and some of the quirky expectations made by the programmers resulted in points lost by students.

Stoll addresses the issue on page 16, in reference to B. F. Skinner's experiments with programmed instruction in the 1950s. Skinner's approach was nothing new, really—it mimicked a popular learning method preached by many educators then and now: repeat a topic until the student demonstrates understanding. Skinner's machines rewarded students for correct answers with further exploration of the topic, while incorrect answers led to review.³ However:

…programmed instruction flopped. The machine forced kids to regurgitate whatever answers the programmer wanted. There was no place for innovation, creativity, whimsy, or improvisation.

This sounds very familiar. Almost too familiar. The quizzes in my online coursework sometimes had bizarre expectations for what was to be typed into the text boxes. I once had a quiz (thankfully not graded) that balked at accepting a floating-point number (0.17 or something) with the leading zero; the expected input was .17 and too bad if you've been trained to put in the leading zero. The programmers were treating all text box inputs as strings, rather than parsing the values into numbers when appropriate. We all know that programmers are lazy, but certain kinds of laziness are inexcusable.

Skinner's ideas persisted, even into the years of my childhood. I had plenty of educational computer games in my youth, and maybe they did help teach me. Very little of what I know comes from conventional schooling—I know that much. Reading, writing, arithmetic, higher math, typing, (amateur) programming—all of it I learned outside the classroom. Reader Rabbit, Treasure Math Storm, and Edmark's Mighty Math software deserve more credit for my education than any school classroom I ever set foot in. Forgive me if it sounds like bragging, but I could read and write circles around most of my traditionally-educated friends all through my schooling. Kumon and my learning-friendly home environment can take the credit for my perfect score on the ACT's English section, not the school system.

Stoll also brings up computers in the classroom repeatedly. One great example is the replacement of science labs with computer programs. My local high school has a chemistry/physics lab, but an unscientific sample of the classes taught in the room shows much greater use of the computers for experimentation, rather than the lab equipment.

Learning the Tools, Not the Trades

Stoll also brings up the issue of learning how to use specific tools rather than the concepts underlying them. Chiefly discussed in the chapter "Calculating Against Calculators", the arguments focus on numerical fields; however, the thread is present practically from the beginning and applied to all subjects.

Through school, students are handed calculators in math class. They're trained to punch in the numbers and trust the calculator to come up with the right answer. Now, common sense dictates that one should always be able to estimate, so as to be able to catch errors in a calculation. In theory, students are taught to mentally check the calculator's results; in practice, assignments are turned in with answers stating that a radio tower is a fraction of a millimeter tall.

On page 85, the University of Illinois is used as an example. The school developed a calculus course centered on the Mathematica software. As such, the students learned how to integrate functions using Mathematica, rather than learning how to integrate. Students trained to use certain software programs for problem-solving often didn't know what to do when the electronic part of the equation (sorry) was removed.

In my math classes, I can remember very few times when I wasn't encouraged to use a calculator. A TI graphing calculator was a requirement for high school math classes, but I got through four years of online instruction with a photoelectrically-powered scientific calculator, used mostly for checking myself and dealing with nasty decimals. (I was fine graphic linear equations on graphing paper, but I did cave in and download a software program to do the parabolic and asymptotic functions for me.)

Learning tools at the expense of the underlying concepts isn't just limited to math. From my own experience, as well as friends', I've seen courses teach how to use a particular software program to solve a problem, without explaining what the program does. Modern English course requirements for electronically-submitted papers just begs for students to rely on spell-checking software. Many of my fellow students routinely misspelled even the most common and simple words. I can't help but blame Microsoft Word; it's the de facto standard for word processing these days, and defaults to automatically correcting a huge list of common misspellings so sometimes the user doesn't even know he's made a mistake. That's a bad idea for software used in education.

Systems Design Philosophy

Perhaps one of the best points made in the book is taken from David Gelernter's thesis: "Technology's most important obligation is to get out of the way." This point, from page 139, illustrates the basic purpose of machinery: making life easier. Bad design and useless features remove the helpful aspect of technology and replace it with nuisance.

Ah, PowerPoint

Following chapters on, among other things, the wiring of libraries and the planned obsolescence of computer systems, an entire chapter is devoted to PowerPoint and its fellow presentation software products. I thought the best part of this chapter was the section discussing the use of presentations in schools.

With my online learning experience, I was thankfully spared most of the PowerPoint junk that has made its way into the school curriculum. However, I had teachers in the offline world as well, and a few of them used PowerPoint to disastrous effect.

One such teacher followed the model for meetings presented earlier in the chapter: Notes for the students, slides on the screen; the lectures consisted of reading the slides aloud, with zero additional information presented in the spoken words. I was always bored to tears in that class. It was ironic that the course title was "Public Speaking", since such a class should be teaching students how to keep an audience's attention instead of how to make the audience yawn.

Another teacher—this was in a public school—taught her AP U.S. Government course using PowerPoint. She read from the slides, often rushing through and/or skipping slides for time (no worries, the slides were available on her personal Web page for study at home). Her habit of putting paragraphs on the slides wasn't exactly prime PowerPoint use, but at least she added extra tidbits to her lectures that weren't in the textbook or on the screen.

I should also note that part of that Government class was a group presentation project, on which I got a good grade just by going up and reading a few of the several slides produced by my group while I was sick. That isn't a complaint—I like good grades just as much as the next guy—but I didn't really have any input whatsoever on the project save for a few grammatical corrections. (I won't get into how my classmates made it difficult for me to contribute, even though I was perfectly willing to do my share.⁴)

I present these examples mainly to illustrate my own personal experience with the problems Cliff mentions on pages 182–183. (It's interesting that his main classroom example also involves a social studies teacher.) I'm sure educators would be quick to defend the growing use of PowerPoint in schools by citing technological familiarity for future job use, same as they would for school Internet connections (which are useful, but often inadequately restricted).

Dated Material?

I did have the thought throughout the book, however, that perhaps some of Stoll's opinions would be quite different if written today. In particular, page 189's assertion that professional editors and journalists just don't exist on the Internet is no longer true. That assertion is a fundamental point in several arguments following—arguments that would probably be different (if only slightly) if written from a 2010 perspective instead of a 1999 perspective.

Similarly, page 191 asserts that search engines don't understand concepts and ideas, only words. Today's indexing engines aren't perfect, but great strides have been made in machine understanding of language. Just look at services like Aardvark. (This is, of course, just a tiny subset of the possible examples I could have pulled from the book.)

Of course some things—unfortunately—never seem to change. I stupidly didn't note the location of it, but somewhere in the latter part of the book Stoll laments that search engines rely on correct spelling to find information. Spelling is a skill seldom taught or learned in today's world (it seems), and we rely more than ever on spell-checkers. Many services offer their own (see Gmail & Google Docs as examples) in the event that the user's browser doesn't have one already built in. Search engines have been trained to recognize our mistakes in queries (à la Google's classic "Did you mean?" lines) and sometimes I think they also detect mistakes in pages they index.

Overall

High-Tech Heretic contains a good many well-placed warnings, and I very much appreciate Stoll's opinions on the replacement of human and paper resources with technology. However, I hope that his later writings are better edited. This book has quite good spelling (good, since he brought up that issue) but the grammar is lacking in a few spots; I found a decent number of omitted or misplaced words.

Nitpicking aside, the message of the book is clear and appreciated. Technology has a place, and we shouldn't let it get out of the corner we've set aside for it.

Update (05/04): Corrected missing markup that caused most of the text to appear as a giant footnote. Proofreading failure on my part; sorry!

Notes:

1. She's begun asking me about websites and such: Hosting recommendations, platform suggestions, that sort of thing. It's kind of cool that she's interested now.
2. I used to go to my dad with questions about the computer. Now, he comes to me with his questions and I use search engines to find answers for my own.
3. I had several experiences with this type of learning, including both online (with Stanford's EPGY program) and off (with Kumon, a Japanese-originated curriculum in math and reading).
4. Schools seem to use group projects a lot without teaching students how to collaborate, kind of like a lot of theatre classes tell the actors to project without getting into the mechanics of doing so.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

tr.im's home page as of 2010-04-06

Ever since discovering the service about two years ago, I have shortened almost every URL I post to Twitter, Facebook, and several other such sites through tr.im. That will have to stop, apparently, because those addresses will no longer work in the not-too-distant future. It is unfortunate that nothing can be done about the millions of tr.im links that have already been flung to all corners of the Web.

Apparently, the August 2009 announcement/scare (see Mashable's coverage) should have been taken more seriously—a lot more seriously. Following that little episode, the overwhelming response from users convinced Nambu Networks (tr.im's developer, whose main products are Twitter apps) to abort the planned shutdown. I, and a lot of other Internet users, thought all was well.¹ Crisis seemed to have been averted. Now this.

Mashable, in the article from last August, stated optimistically that someone would probably buy the service before the planned hard shutdown sometime after December 31, 2009. Obviously that hasn't happened, or the service wouldn't be shutting down. But there has to be a better solution than pulling the plug, even if that doesn't happen until 2011 or 2012.

I can accept that Nambu administrators have had to deal with a lot of spam links being generated using their service, but it puzzles me that the spam would lead hosting providers to threaten termination of the site. After all, Nambu is not responsible for the links its users submit, nor the contents on the other end of its redirections—but that's far beyond my expertise.

However I must wonder: Instead of just giving up, why not develop better spam-fighting algorithms? Digg, Reddit, any site that accepts user-submitted links—even Facebook and Twitter—have countless spammers fighting to get their links in front of millions of users, and they all do a pretty good job of keeping it off the site algorithmically, with no human intervention. I don't see bit.ly giving up its fight against spam, or is.gd, TinyURL, SnipURL, or any of the other established shortening services. They must have spam link submissions too, but they get by. None of the other shortening services I've come across in the past few years have ever threatened to disappear, for spam volume or any other reason—and I've looked at a lot of them. Yet tr.im has done so now twice in less than nine months, and it looks like this time may be for good.

A lot can happen between now and when Nambu decides to finally pull the plug on tr.im's redirection service, of course. Perhaps a buyer will surface. (Then again, offers were made in August, only to be turned down because Nambu didn't feel it could trust the potential buyers.) Perhaps Nambu will change its mind—again. Heck, I'd buy the service and run it myself if I had the funds. Anything's better than breaking millions of links across the Internet; shutting down a service like tr.im will even affect email archives, since shortened URLs make their way into emails all the time.

No matter what happens, I'm going to follow the old saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I stayed loyal to tr.im and Nambu after they threatened to make my digital world fall apart last summer. I continued to use their awesome service because I loved it—the name, the interface, everything—and they've turned around and made the same threat, only stronger. I cannot possibly ignore this decision, what amounts to pulling out the knife they stabbed in all of their users' backs in August and driving it back in an inch away. It's absolutely infuriating. SnipURL (and snurl.com, sn.im, cl.lk, and snipr.com—the service maintains five different options), here I come.

tr.im, you've been a great example. Nambu, I sure as hell won't be buying any of your software products, ever. You better give some serious thought to giving us users a way to keep the redirections working, or at least a way to export the redirections we've created so we can go through and change or annotate whatever old content we can to keep the links from breaking, because that's the big reason I'm angry. If you simply shut down, you will be intentionally breaking a large percentage of the Web.

Is this the future of millions of tr.im URLs all over the Internet?

Is this the future of millions of tr.im links?

Notes:

1. It is, however, true that many users vowed to never again use tr.im after that episode. I wasn't one of them, but as it turned out that was a mistake.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

He calls for a RESTful design that among other things would globalize message identifiers (rather than changing them the instant a message is moved to a new folder), replace folders with labels (a la Gmail), require the server to handle email search indexes, and make conversations the basic unit of email (instead of individual messages). reMAP would also make handling MIME messages unnecessary; the client could simply call the server with a request for text or HTML message representations without having to deal with parsing the MIME format itself.

I personally am in agreement with his entire proposal. The experiences I've had with IMAP in the past have highlighted shortcomings in a standard that was drafted over 15 years ago. Email has changed a great deal since then, but IMAP has not been revised to accommodate the enhancements made by newer clients and services like Gmail.

If IMAP is to be improved, it's probably appropriate to just completely replace it with something new. If the new system can translate IMAP commands into the equivalent operations in its own protocol, that's even better, because then servers can be upgraded without worries of breaking compatibility with older clients or the need to run server applications for IMAP and reMAP side by side.

There's plenty of discussion going on at the original post and on Hacker News. If, however, you would like to say something here, please don't hesitate.

As a side note, I see that Gabor is using Blogger's FTP publishing option, which will be going away soon. I hope the link will still work when he has to move.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

The fact is the internet is open can lead to theft especially to content stealing and plagiarism.

Until now, there was very little to discourage and deter this serious crime. Yes content theft and plagarism is a crime in some jurisdictions.

You cannot rely on others or the authorities to continue to police the internet as they do not have enough resources. You need to protect your content and deter this theft.

The basic form of content theft is to copy and paste your content to another medium.

Well Houdini, prevents this using a little known special algorithm that prevents copying by making the selected text that is targeted by the perps to be copied, to disappear! Yes disappear!!! The only way to recover is to reload the page in the web browser. If they try again, the content disappears again. As long as they keep trying to select and copy your content, the content will disappear before they can get a chance to execute the copy command!

After a few unsuccessful attempts, the theives will move on to a easier target.

Your safe!

— WordPress › Houdini « WordPress Plugins

So what can we glean from this PHK Corporation plugin's description, other than the fact that the author has poor English skills? We can most definitely conclude that phkcorp2005 has no understanding of how most copying of Internet content is carried out. As I and others have pointed out many times over in blog and forum posts, copying is usually not done by a person using a mouse to cut and paste, but rather by automated computer programs called scrapers. (For the uninitiated: See these two Wikipedia articles.)

What is left out of that messy, error-riddled description is the word "JavaScript". It is by no means the only word or phrase that should be inserted, but it is the most important. That fifth "paragraph" (the formatting is also very poor) should say "special JavaScript algorithm", which is synonymous in this case with "useless JavaScript algorithm". All it does is wait for the user to try to select text in the browser and clear the selection if any is made. Besides, any copy-protection scheme based upon JavaScript is inherently useless by virtue of the fact that it doesn't do anything to prevent copying. There are tons of ways to get around it. Disabling JavaScript, for example (as mentioned below).

For example, take hatkirby's rant. I quote from that post the list of circumvention techniques below:

1. Go old fashioned and turn off JavaScript. Yep, the script is rendered useless.
2. More advanced content thieves likely don't just go around to random blogs and copy/paste off of them. They write screen scrapers, small programs that visit sites and download specific parts of the site. As these do not render pages and simply download from them, the script isn't even seen by the scraper.
3. Due to the nature of the Internet, anyone, and I mean anyone, can see the source code of a website. It's done differently in different web browsers, but it's always pathetically easy and, as it simply shows HTML code instead of parsing anything, no scripts are run.
4. RSS. Syndication feeds are normally viewed in feed readers with little to no JavaScript interpreter. Script bypassed.
5. There's this cool little button on most keyboards that says "Print Screen". Even on the keyboards that don't have it, there's usually a key combination that achieves the same effect. It takes a picture of whatever's on the screen. No selection occurs and yet the thief has a copy of your article. They do, however, have to retype it, so this keeps the lazy thieves out.

That's just a smattering of ways to get around the JavaScript inserted by Houdini.

In the face of all the arguments presented, the plugin's author has insisted that the purpose of Houdini is not to "prevent" copying, but to "deter" copying. I don't think that statement holds any weight whatsoever. It still depends upon the copying being performed in a JavaScript-enabled browser by a human.

There's also the matter of just how absurd copy-protection of any kind is on the Internet. Every single document or file anywhere on the Internet must be copied in order for the user-agent (usually a browser in the case of human interaction) to retrieve and display or otherwise make use of the content. This is why it's quite simple for any user to just view the source code of a page. It has to be copied in order to display the content.

Also mentioned in the first (started, chronologically) forum thread is the ability of JavaScript to disable the browser's context menu and thus the "View source" option. That's just as useless as the selection-clearing code, and actually more so because many modern browsers allow specific JavaScript capabilities to be disabled—capabilities like removing or replacing the context menu—as an alternative to disabling all JavaScript. The "View source" option is also present in other places—places such as the browser toolbar's "View" or "Tools" menu—which JavaScript code cannot modify even in the most permissive environment.

Legitimate quoting must also be considered. There are a million and one reasons why someone might legitimately want to copy a few sentences of a blog post. Maybe they like it enough to post a quote to Twitter or Facebook, or perhaps they want to comment on it in a blog post of their own. Content theft is a big problem, but the old methods of periodically searching for and reporting content stolen from one's site are infinitely preferable to this plugin's ineffective method.

Finally, why require the use of a shortcode? Why not just add the script globally to all content pages and forget that stupid "This page is copy protected" header?

At most, Houdini has the ability to add a superfluous <h5> tag to the page and annoy legitimate users with an obnoxious script while doing absolutely nothing to thwart real content thieves. I wonder if WordPress Extend would consider removing this laughable plugin from the directory... Of course, we bloggers would then be denied this ripe opportunity to satirize this particular piece of code.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

If you've had much interaction with me regarding computers, no matter what the medium—Twitter, Facebook, email, dinner conversation, small talk during a gathering—I've probably mentioned a service called Dropbox. A few of you have already succumbed to my uncharacteristic marketing tone and signed up, but I thought I'd blog about it and perhaps get more people on board.

I'll start with the reasons I like the service, and then explain why, exactly, I'm doing this a little later.

The site bills itself as an online synchronization and backup solution. I use it mostly for the backup, but that will probably change in the future. After all, it was created by a couple guys who were tired of forgetting their flash drives. It's ironic to note that my current use of Dropbox is to back up my 8GB (soon to be 32GB) SanDisk Cruzer Micro, using a modification contributed by another user.

Dropbox is just plain fun to use, and it has a lot of cross-platform compatibility. It synchronizes files between computers running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux; keeps backup copies online (using Amazon's S³ service—not that I should get too technical); stores revisions when files are changed; and keeps deleted files in case of the inevitable "damn, I shouldn't have deleted that" moment.

The backups, revisions, and deleted files are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. Files can be added, updated, deleted, and otherwise managed via the website, too, which is great for travel or forgotten files (presentations, school projects, whatever). There is also a mobile website for PDAs and a higher-end version optimized for Android- and iPhone OS–based devices, as well as an iPhone App (there's an app for that™) which of course also works on the iPod Touch.

When naughty Vista workstations have tried to corrupt irreplaceable recordings and other files, Dropbox has restored them (with a little direction from me). Last summer, I bent the connector on my flash drive pretty severely while working on a design project at a poorly arranged Emerson computer desk. It still works, and retracts; but after asking around a bit and hearing that the drive was now likely unreliable, I was motivated to upgrade from the old Dropbox U3 mod—which had trouble on all sorts of non-personal computers—to DropboxPortable—which has worked everywhere so far. (It still won't work at the local public libraries, though. But neither will anything else; they blanket–block EXEs.) If and when my drive decides to give up the ghost, I know Dropbox will be there to give me my drive back just as I had it, as soon as I replace the failed hardware.

I also back up my music collection in Dropbox, which is a great, perfectly legal way to make sure I don't lose any downloaded or ripped MP3s. As it turns out, it's also useful because the device I use as my MP3 player—a Roland Edirol R-09HR—happens to be very picky about file structure. If there's one bit out of place, I get an "Improper Song!" error and can't listen to that file. When this happens to a song that used to play, I've often been able to go back into the previous file versions for that MP3 and load a playable version onto my R-09HR. It's much easier than using a so-called "repair tool" on the file.

There's also the matter of deleted file recovery. I've used the deleted file recovery to reinstate everything from seldom-played music (deleted to free up space) and design research (I just messed up) to irreplaceable recordings from my R-09HR (corrupted by Vista).

The list of times Dropbox has come in handy and/or saved my bacon is endless. If it's saved me so many times in the space of one year, it can surely do you some good.

So do yourself and the great people at Dropbox ("the Dropboxers") a favor and give it a try. I'll bet you won't be disappointed.

Note: Signing up through the links in this post will net you an extra 250MB* of storage in addition to Dropbox's free 2GB plan. That extra storage will stay with you if you decide to upgrade your account. (Disclaimer: You'll also earn me an extra 250MB.*) I tried to work out something special with the Dropbox team via their now-defunct affiliate program, but they stopped the program just before I inquired, so I'm unfortunately rather limited in the benefits I can pass on. Too bad, really; I had in mind something rather spectacular.

* – Please note that you must install the Dropbox application on at least one computer before you or I will receive any additional storage.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

It never got much use by readers of the old site, so I initially didn't bother transferring it here; but now that Skribit has launched and (I see) done a lot of work on the experience users leaving suggestions have, I figured I might as well install the WordPress plugin and give it another go. It doesn't take up any space in my sidebar, either, now; since I stopped paying attention to it, a new floating tab option has popped up. For now, it's over on the right-hand side of the page.

Go ahead, shoot me some ideas! I may have something of a backlog from the last few months, but I certainly don't have an endless list.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Update (05/07, 22:45): My update was broken, so the update had to be updated. The filter should now catch DMs, too. Believe it or not, I was wrong that Twitter changed the address that direct message notifications come from; it stayed the same. So that part of the filter didn't need to change. All's well that ends well, right?

Update 2 (05/07, 23:05): Well, scratch the new filters. Twitter went back to the old From addresses tonight. Y'all can use the old filters again. What a fast-paced 24 hours, eh? I'll leave this post up just for posterity, but please don't try to use these new filters and then complain that they don't work.

To make things easier for myself, I'll assume that everyone's seen the old filter setup I published at the end of last month.

The old method was quite convenient for those of us with multiple Twitter accounts, because the email addresses in the From headers changed depending on the address associated with each account (after October 30, 2008 and before this afternoon). Now they all come from noreply@twitter.com (as they used to last year), with the account-specific email addresses tucked away in the reply-to headers (which I can't filter on in Gmail, so that sucks).

Not only did the addresses again become uniform, but that was basically the only easy way to tell the difference between my personal account (which has Topify set up) and the others I run (which don't). Now I have to go through several hoops, and the filter string is longer.

Anyway, here's the updated updated filter string; put this all in the "Has the words" field in Gmail's filter settings:

(to:(you@yourdomain.tld) from:(noreply@twitter.com) subject:"is now following you on Twitter") OR from:twitter-dm-you=yourdomain.tld

As before, you@yourdomain.tld is the email address set in your Twitter account settings, the address to which all your notifications are sent.

I won't bother making an XML file for the new filters, because it's only one field. I'll probably leave the old one for posterity—at least until my Google Page Creator account is completely borked by the transition to Google Sites—because it's easier than deleting it and then updating my old post to reflect that.

Just for the record, Twitter, I'm not happy that I'm having to retool my filters this soon. If you want to make me happy again, put back your email headers the way they were last week. kthx

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Update (05/06): Twitter prettified their emails, but I still think Topify's are better. Unfortunately, Twitter also went back to using the same address (noreply@twitter.com) for all users' notifications, putting the email-address–specific addresses in the reply-to header. So the filter setup in this post doesn't work any more. I had to come up with a new, more complicated filter... Stupid Twitter...

The Beginning

The first enhanced-notification service I discovered was Twimailer, created by a British developer named Jon Wheatley (and apparently later sold—shortly after I signed up—to a Romanian named Toni).

Despite the admonitions in the article above (on ReadWriteWeb) about changing passwords and all kinds of security precautions, I'm not worried about my own account. There's one simple reason for that: I never actually switched my email address in Twitter's settings. Instead, I created a Gmail filter to auto-archive follow notifications from Twitter and forward them to Twimailer. That way, I:

• had all my follow notifications even if the service went down (it did for several days) or glitched (sometimes I get messages with no information)
• only forwarded the messages Twimailer needed to be useful, rather than everything
• made sure to keep password resets (which I haven't used for my main account in the last few months anyway) completely out of Twimailer's hands

I was very comfortable with this system. I can only guess that Jon's original intent was to simplify the setup process. After all, most people don't bother with email filters, and wouldn't necessarily know how to set one up. Changing settings on Twitter's website is a lot easier.

A New Age

Thanks to a TechCrunch post about fighting Twitter spam I read tonight, I discovered Topify, an invitation-only (for now) service based in Israel that offers all of what Twimailer did—and more.

I found an invite on the Topify blog (sorry, no link; you gotta dig through their site too so it's fair for everyone) and quickly signed up. The Twitter password field distressed me a little, but it's obviously necessary for all the extra features (like follow-back, reply to direct message, and block), all of which can be done via email with Topify. (In the future, I hope Topify will implement support for Twitter's OAuth authentication and delete users' passwords from their system. Consider this a request, Arik.

Anyway, switching was pretty painless. All I had to do was change the address to which my Gmail filter forwards and add my direct-message notification From address to the filter. I'm currently waiting for something to happen on my Twitter account so I can try out the new service. (I considered running Twimailer and Topify side-by-side for a bit, but decided against it; redundant emails would increase my processing time, the opposite of the intended effect.)

Filter Details

For those who want to copy my setup (I'm telling you, it's a lot more resilient than the default instructions from either service), here are the filter settings to enter. Update (05/06): These settings are left here for posterity; they won't work anymore thanks to Twitter's changes from today. See the first update near the top for more detail. Update (05/07): These should now work again, since Twitter appears to have gone back to the old email headers.

In the filter's From box, enter:

• Topify: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld OR twitter-dm-you=yourdomain.tld
• Twimailer: twitter-follow-you=yourdomain.tld

Replace you=yourdomain.tld with your email address, using = in place of @.

That's all you need to do for filter criteria. (If you have only one Twitter account coming into your inbox, it's even easier; you can omit the -you=yourdomain.tld part(s) of the filter criteria. It doesn't hurt to include them, though.)

For actions, I selected "Skip Inbox" and "Mark as read", and told Gmail to forward these messages to my secret Twimailer/Topify address.

Click the Create filter button, scroll down your filter list, and you should see something like the following (image is linked to full-size version):

(There's also an XML file available to import, for those with the Filter Import/Export feature enabled in Gmail Labs, but creating the filter from scratch is pretty easy. The file link might go dead in a month or two when my Google Page Creator site is moved to Google Sites, but I'll know because things like the site logo will stop working. If that happens, I'll definitely fix it.)

Note: As I was writing this, I discovered Chris Messina's post about this, published almost two months ago. My little hack is nothing new, I guess; but I'll publish anyway because his instructions are focused on Twimailer and Twimailer only.

Wrap

Let me know if you find this little hack useful. I haven't time to make a bunch of pretty screenshots (unlike Chris , so if you have questions, post in the comments.

Incidentally, this is my 500th blog post. If that means anything.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

It's taken 21 months—almost two years—but GrandCentral ("One number for all your phones, for life") has finally gotten an upgrade (and a new name). I'm totally excited, and happy that the long-awaited upgrade (previously known as GrandCentral 2.0) is finally here. Meet Google Voice: "One number for all your calls and SMS".

New Features

Yes, Google Voice added several new features. One of the things that always, always bugged me about GrandCentral was the fact that my number couldn't receive or send text messages. Well, now it can. According to TechCrunch's expansive overview, the same technology that powers the SMS in Gmail Chat Labs experiment (known as Gateway) is used in Google Voice.

Other new features include voicemail transcription (sounds promising), very specific per-contact settings (definitely a trap for us OCD types), a completely overhauled interface (w00t! Less Flash!), conference calling (cool factor = 100), and easy dialing out via the phone interface.

I have to stop and talk about the dial-out feature. First of all, it was nearly impossible to dial out from GrandCentral unless you either had a new voicemail from the person you wanted to call (so you could press '2' after it to call them back) or had access to a Web-enabled device. Simply dialing out wasn't considered. Now, in Google Voice, there's a "press '2'" option right in the main menu! Finally!

Also, under GrandCentral's auspices, calling out was free during beta, with the shadow of paying per minute after testing was over looming in the future. Google changed that in Voice, which allows free calls anywhere in the United States. International calls are at greatly reduced rates (compared to conventional long-distance). Each new user gets a free $1.00 credit toward international calls, though I don't know if they'll keep that up once sign-ups are opened completely—it could be something just for migrating GC users.

Migration, Stranded Data, and Missing Features

Existing GrandCentral users get (or will get this weekend) a migration link at the top of their grandcentral.com inboxes, which will begin the automated migration of a GrandCentral number to Google Voice. The process was pretty painless, even smoother than the transition to the new FeedBurner system last month.

However, much data is not migrated. Most of the settings are reset, custom greetings and names must be re-recorded, old voicemails/calls/recorded calls are left behind on grandcentral.com, and contacts must be transferred manually by exporting GrandCentral's Address Book to CSV and importing it into Google Contacts. The automatic merging of imported contacts only merged about half of the duplicates in my set, and I had very few contacts to deal with. That was fortunate, because the rest of the merges had to be found and made manually.

In the future, I hope Google will provide a utility to migrate old voicemails from GrandCentral, especially if grandcentral.com is eventually shut down or redirected. Currently, the top of my GrandCentral inbox says:

Since you have migrated to the Google Voice Preview, you can now access your new messages and update your settings by logging in at google.com/voice. Feel free to continue to access grandcentral.com for your older voicemail messages. We're glad you dropped by.

That's inconvenient. But really, how often do I visit old voicemails? Not much. Besides, a lot of them were inexplicably lost... Their listings are present, but they can't be played; I'm guessing the files somehow went missing. I'm not happy about that, but... at least it hasn't happened again.

A minor annoyance is the loss of custom ringback tones, the sounds played to a caller while the phone is ringing on your end. (Google does have a suggestion to bring this back on the Google Voice Feature Suggestion page.)

Future Ideas

Of course, Google Voice is not without holes. It can't forward to numbers that require extensions (I don't need it now, but might in the future). It can't take an existing number and turn it into a Google number (which would be eminently useful, I think, for my mother).

Image via CrunchBase

There are also no apps for iPhone or Android yet (and I don't care about Blackberry, kthx). But the feature suggest page I mentioned above has all these and more. I've suggested about 75% of the features currently on the list, including integration with Gmail and Google Talk. I'm hopeful that these and more ideas (like the two I posted on Twitter) will be implemented, and sooner rather than later.

Speaking of future ideas, Lifehacker ran a short post yesterday speculating that the reserved "Voicemail" label in Gmail is for integration with Voice. It's actually for Google Talk voicemails (GTalk has a calling feature that I almost never use because of various technological or locational constraints), but it could certainly be useful for Voice messages as well, if Gmail and Voice are ever integrated.

Reaction

Despite the inconveniences, I think I'm going to like the service. It's a vast improvement upon GrandCentral; in fact, TechCrunch's Leena Rao says (in the overview mentioned above), "Google is finally bringing us the voice service that was promised back in 2006." I agree; the old GrandCentral was convenient, but Google Voice promises to be many times as useful.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761

Last night, I found a chat in my Gmail account that I'd never seen. It was sent an hour after I left the public library on February 26, while I was offline, but never showed up in my Inbox. It wasn't even labeled as sent while I was offline. I was baffled completely until I realized this afternoon what I'd been doing that night at the library.

February 26 (a Thursday, the day of #snowmageddon here in Minneapolis/St. Paul) was the day I discovered that Ping.fm—my very favorite social networking tool, second only to Twitter—had added support for Google Talk statuses. Of course I had to try it out; I'm an early adopter.

So I went into my network settings on Ping.fm and added my Google Talk and AIM accounts. Next thing I know, Gmail Chat is complaining that I'm no longer invisible (I like to be invisible because it minimizes interruptions). It says I'm signed in somewhere else. That somewhere else could only be Ping.fm.

By that, I gather Ping.fm actually signs in to Google Talk and receives all chats sent to one's account, 24/7. Not only is that inconvenient (I'll continue with that in a moment), but it's a bit of a privacy hole, especially if you don't fully trust Ping.fm. And honestly, I trust a lot of websites with a lot of things, but I like my chats to stay inside Google's ecosystem, thank you.

Anyway, the fact that Ping.fm is always signed in to one's Google Talk account means that one always appears to be online, and offline chats won't work. Invisibility in Gmail Chat is also disabled. Both of these, combined with an apparent dysfunctionality (I couldn't get my GTalk status to update from Ping.fm), led me to deactivate the integration.

What I'm trying to say is, Ping.fm has a lot of work to do before I'll even consider re-adding my GTalk account to my Ping.fm networks. It doesn't work, and causes a lot of problems.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2010 by Voyagerfan5761