Firefox

Is email broken? I think most people would agree that the situation with email is at best uncomfortable, and at worst downright unusable for some people. I have been using email for about 20 years now, as I had an email account (via packet radio) way before the web was around (the Internet predates the web, anyone remember Gopher?). And at Universities we’ve had good email for a long time. I am lucky, as here at UWE we now have several levels of spam filtering that can be deployed, and I have my own at the client level as well. That means I see very little of the spam that some people get. I also use Gmail, and the spam filtering in that is excellent. But, for the majority of people, its a downright mess.

Especially if you happen to use Google Docs for a significant amount of your online writing tasks, you may have noticed that there was a notable lack of integration between Google’s suite of “Office-esque” products. The simple reason is because each of these products were independently designed and stitched together over the course of the last year (anyone remember Writely)?

Last month a bunch of us were sent by Vonage to RailsConf 2007. I did a talk (with my co-worker Stephen Becker) on working with legacy systems, and the approach we have been talking to using rails (and other technologies) to eat away at the problem (I’ve since nick named this approach the “Evaporative Model of Legacy System Maintenance”).

Je m’inquiétais un peu car Windows Live Writer est un outil très bien foutu et le silence de près de six mois chez Microsoft pouvait laisser entendre un abandon du logiciel. L’équipe qui s’en charge est donc toujours là. Une partie provient de l’acquisition d’OnFolio (mars 2006) ce qui est une bonne nouvelle.

This leads to to the question wether there are any tools available that can automatically create torrents for files in a download repository and that are able to create an initial seed. This would be a nice addition to our Maven Repository Browser.

I just caught this article over on Wired Blogs about Jesse James Garrett’s reaction to AIR. Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax so it makes sense that he would be happy with AIR, but he has a couple of good quotes about what it means for developers and how it extends the reach of Ajax - all things we want it to do:

GOOGLE now owns Blogger, Writely, Dodgeball, Feedburner, YouTube, and Picasa. EBay took over Stumbleupon and Skype. YAHOO snatched up Del.icio.us, WebJay, Jumpcut, Upcoming.org, Oddpost and perhaps Facebook soon.

Today I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Charles Teague, who is a principal development lead on the Windows Live Writer Team. Charles was part of the original group of folks who came over from Onfolio when Microsoft acquired the company a few years ago. That same group of people lead by Charles and J.J. Allaire who worked on Writer at Onfolio are still working on Windows Live Writer today.

Focus Generator is a really neat (and new) technology which will allow you to present an attention getting marketing message on your website without getting blocked by popup blockers.