Gmail Notifier is Google’s official Windows-based Gmail biff tool. It’s in beta, but works well for me.

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I’m back to posting after a long hiatus. Lots going on now so posting will be light; however I’ll try to keep posting once in a while.

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I was in the beautiful city of Sofia on a business trip. Even after years of Communist rule, it has managed to retain its old world charm. Some photos:

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Windows XP SP2 is out. This is a must-have upgrade; now Windows users have no excuse for letting spyware all over their systems. MSFN notes that even users with pirated copies should have an easy, hassle-free upgrade:

There have been a number of discussions on this newsgroup regarding whether SP2 will install on non-genuine (aka “pirated”) versions of Windows. Here is the official Microsoft position on this topic:

We expect that nearly all Windows XP users, running genuine or pirated Windows, will have access to the security technologies in SP2. The same users that were blocked from installing SP1 - those that have used a small set of legacy pirated product keys - will be blocked from installing SP2. We believe that there are very few systems in use today that use these keys — in other words, the pirates have moved on to other keys which we are not blocking.

So how do we characterize our policy?

We want to make sure that the broadest number of people can install SP2. The nature of malicious attacks on computer users is constantly changing and we will continue to evaluate how we deal with security updates for pirated versions of Windows to best protect our genuine Windows customers.

Thanks,
Gary Schare
Microsoft

Given the number of users running pirated XP and jamming up the net with trojan traffic, this is great news for the net at large.

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Dave Winer:

That’s often been the lie around Apple, that they invent and Microsoft steals. I like to tell the story of how Mac scripting software came to be. I was in the audience at a Bill Gates speech in the early 80s in Palo Alto where he described a system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet, word processor, plotting app. I made a note. That’s a good idea. A few years later I started work on such a program. Showed it to Apple. Next thing you know, Apple has this great idea. A system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet…

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Right or wrong, Joel scored a slam dunk with his ditty on the API Wars. I disagree with a couple of the points there (and the article does take care to note that it is overgeneralizing) but one of his points rings true: Microsoft lost a whole generation of developers. However, it is not clear that soldiering on with the Raymond Chen approach¹, with its 80s era design, would have solved anything. MS web devs were already fleeing to Java and PHP because cranky old ASP (even ASP 3) wasn’t cutting it any more. Worse, beginner web devs were moving to PHP and Java in droves because of (a) free dev tools (Weblogic+JBuilder is a free download for individual users, and you now have Eclipse) and (b) much better community support at php.net and the then-Java-only serverside.com. C# and VB.net were huge reductions in barrier to entry for MS development. If anything, the only quibble I’d have is: why isn’t VS.Net 2003 a free download for home use yet? The Framework SDK is not good enough when you’re competing with a Weblogic Workshop (based IIRC on Borland JBuilder) download from BEA².

Joel spends a lot of time talking about backward compatibility across Win32 and .Net. I’m not sure why, because the gulf between them is huge, and, to my mind, necessary. Win16 was a huge shift from processor-centric DOS programming to C-based Windows programming. Win16 morphed (reasonably) gracefully into Win32, but it’s important to realize that managed code (whether Java or .NET) is yet another paradigm shift. Thinking about managed code as “just another set of libraries” is to miss the point.

From a traditional Comp.Sc. viewpoint, what Microsoft calls “managed code” consists of a set of orthogonal features, mainly

1. bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine
2. automatic memory management
3. a “sandbox” execution environment and a standard security model
4. importantly, a large, standard set of libraries to program against

It is possible to have each without the other. The language D, for instance, includes garbage collection but not bytecode generation or a sandbox. Pascal has offered bytecode for ages but not automatic memory management and so on. Smalltalk had almost all of it except a standard security model. Java put all these together for the first time, and was incredibly popular with developers. .NET added some new twists, and when the dust settled, the .NET environment was more than a set of Win32-callable DLLs.

On Robert McLaws’ LonghornBlogs site, a poster asks:

.NET 1.1 is not completely backwards compatible with .NET 1.0 == true
Is it or is it not? It is not.

The correct answer is, it does not matter. If you believe it does, then you do not understand .NET SxS. Of course, Microsoft has made massive screwups with SxS, but that does not take the feature away. Of course, given that Joel depends on a download model to run his business, I can sympathize with his fury over adding 20MB to his runtimes. But look at it this way — how many FogBugz customers are on dialup? CityDesk is a slightly bigger problem, though. Note to Microsoft: where are the AOL-style disks with the .NET Framework (plus Windows+IE patches)? Longhorn is years away, you guys gotta keep us happy until then!

Finally, there were those who rejected Joel’s central Web-uber-alles thesis, notably Olivier Travers:

And is the final frontier of HCI to have keyboard shortcuts that work, or can we expect a little more from those ever more powerful computers? What a startling lack of ambition [...]

I would probably point to Joel’s older Five Worlds article and point out that Joel was mainly talking about forms-oriented apps. Nobody’s quite ready to cede Photoshop to the web yet :-). Although after watching Joel’s follow-up posts, I have this to say: the day Design-By-Committee makes a platform with a better user interface, pigs will fly. Opera and Mozilla can’t even iron out their ECMAScript and CSSx differences yet — and I’m supposed to trust these guys with my forms, too, now?

¹Full Disclosure: I actively read and enjoy Raymond Chen’s weblog, and can actually remember a time when we needed hPrevInst arguments. I also happen to think a lot of today’s kids are spoilt on PHP and C# and Java (Do I sound like a curmudgeon before I’m even 30?), but that’s a topic for another rant.

²MSDNAA has been plastering campuses with free VS.Net CDs, at least in India, but I wonder how many converts from the LUGs they’ve got.

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Folk bothered by Firefox’s slow (1-line) up/down-arrow scrolling can install Cosmic Cat’s SuperScroll extension and set directional scrolling to an IE-like 4 lines.

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Yahoo Messenger 6 is now bloatware, piggyback-ware (it installs several Yahoo tie-ins, like Yahoo Internet Mail and Yahoo Autocomplete even when these are unchecked in Messenger Installer Options) and vampire-ware (refuses to die: removing Yahoo Internet Mail was an ordeal because it did not respond to UnRegisterServer during uninstallation — I had to waste 5 minutes driving regedit stakes through its heart). You’ve been warned, stay away. Until Yahoo cleans up its installer act, version 5.6 should work quite well.

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Microsoft has Rational’s developer toolset firmly in its sights with its updated Whidbey roadmap. Modeling, code analysis, testing and test management — and even source control.

Yes, good ol’ Visual SourceSafe is getting its guts ripped out and will be replaced by something codenamed Hatteras (aka Visual SourceSafe 2005) that I’m sure will finally be a real source control system offering from MS (too bad it’ll only work well for Windows developers).

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Undocumented MSN Messenger ‘feature’: Shift+Ctrl+” toggles smart quotes in the Conversation Window. Unfortunately, not only does this completely undocumented keystroke not give any feedback to the user (and it’s easy to press this by mistake while IMing away) but also breaks some emoticons: produces a weepie , but :‘( and :’( produce nothing.

Update: The shortcut is Shift+Ctrl+(Double Quotes) on en-us keyboards only, the en-gb shortcut seems to be Shift+Ctrl+~.

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I’ve been using Gmail for about 5 days now (found out via Evhead about the Blogger offer before the Slashdot story broke) and here are my first impressions:

• The service’s reliability is very good indeed. Even for a beta, this beats Novell’s MyRealbox, and is way better than the other 1 gig free email provider, Spymac.
• Search - Gmail’s strongest pitch - still needs work. “tolkien” fails to match “tolkien’s,” etc. “Silmarillon” does not result in a “Did you mean… Silmarillion” (both of these work in Google’s standard web search). So searching your mailpile isn’t quite as easy as searching the web - yet.
• Being able to access Gmail fully over HTTPS rocks (Go to https://gmail.google.com/ instead of http://…). Myrealbox is the only other free provider that has this, and they are nowhere as reliable.
• Currently you can only store 20 filters. Not quite adequate if you get tons of email.
• Gmail has its own operators for searching email. Some of them are quite nifty, although I would love to have a not operator and a has:responses operator. I expect Google to allow these searches to be carried out through their advanced email search form, since the sheer number of operators may be a bit much for CLI-phobic users.
• It’ll be interesting to see how spamfighters like Suresh treat Gmail when it goes live. Gmail adds no X-Originating-IP, X-Originating-Email or X-Sender header. I wonder if this is Google’s commitment to protecting its users’ privacy, or just an omission in the beta.
• Gmail support informed me that forwarding incoming email to another address is “coming soon”, as is a plain-HTML version of Gmail (the current version is very Javascript heavy, as others have noted, but is probably the most usable webmail interface on the planet.)
• Currently Gmail offers no way to compose HTML email. Not a big problem, but some people may miss it.
• No ads in outgoing email (or in incoming email for that matter). That gets a thumbs up. Many other web email providers, especially Indiatimes (which routinely inserts dating ads into users’ outgoing email), should take note.

Overall, great service so far, and lots of promise. An IMAP interface to non-archived mail (so I could use my favorite MUA) and my happiness would be complete.

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For those interested into building location awareness into their apps (and have MSDN sub IDs) this is a sweet deal: MapPoint sub free for MSDN users. You get access to their staging environment for a year and upto 50k commercial webservice transactions. (via the Early Adopter weblog)

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