The Coming of Gmail
When Google released GMail they eroded the two primary advantages of the desktop email client, Storage capacity and POP access.
Before GMail, web based email restricted users storage capacity to a couple of megabytes, users could access their POP accounts but only if they paid a premium for this service, Gmail allocates a couple of gigabytes and are continually increasing it, and Gmail allows users to access a number of POP accounts free of charge.
How long will it be before GMail uses GEARS to enable it’s use off line?
Add this to all the other advantages inherent in web based email clients, why would anyone still want to use a desktop email client?
Not everyone has broadband
Not everyone has a fast internet connection and using web based email on a slow connection is painful.
What they need is the solution which requires the lowest possible bandwidth.
Enter the desktop email client.
An email client such as Thunder Bird can be configured to only download the headers while leaving the rest of the message on the server, the user can then decided what important enough to download in full. This is an extremely efficient use of bandwidth.
The Future
I don’t think desktop email clients have much of a future, as high speed internet connections become even more common the need for desktop email clients will decrease and they will become a niche product.
Maybe this is an indication of what will happen to other types of desktop applications in future, Just look at Google Apps for a hint of what is possible.
Conclusive proof of my theory that the Google search engine is intelligent, as defined by the Turing test 
The results of the query just need to be re-formatted.
What is the answer to life the universe and everything ?
Look at the top result.
This looks like a good idea for a mashup, some kind of service that can use Google results to generate a conversation with a person.
Yes! Regular Expressions are simple once you learn the grammar, and thats also the biggest problem with them, unless you learn the grammar, Regular Expressions look like the gibberish of some dark art, And unless you actually sit down and study you’ll not make much progress with them.
There are some good books on Regular Expressions.
Regular Expression Pocket Reference
Mastering Regular Expressions
Once you have Regular Expressions in your tool box you’ll quickly see many uses they can be put to such as page scraping or data validation, I’ve even seen them used them for updating Delphi code bases to the latest version of Delphi.
In the train timetable service I used 3 Regular expressions to extract the information need to output optimized version of the time table.
The first two
/<input type=”hidden” name=”DepTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]
/<nput type=”hidden” name=”ArrTime” value=”[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]
Are used to strip out the table elements which contain the departure and arrival times,
The strings which match the patterns are stored in two arrays, one for arrival and one of departures.
Then iterating through the two arrays a third regular expression is used
[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]
This Regular Expression returns the times from the strings contained in the two arrays and it is this information which is used to produce the timetables you see when using the service.
I’d be interested to hear an if there is an even easier way to do this.
There is an excellent tool available for working with Regular Expression, Regex Buddy It is a fantastic piece of software.
Most languages and platforms support Regular Expressions, For Delphi you can use the TRegex component which is free, for Delphi .NET it’s not needed as .NET supports Regular Expressions.
When creating the train time table service I decided to use a RESTful approach for the API, This meant the URL should confirm to a number of RESTful Principles.
1) The URL represents a resource and consist of NOUNs, not VERBs.
If you using Verbs then you are not using REST. you’re using RPC.
One of the defining principles of REST is the use of a limited set of Verbs POST,GET,PUT and DELETE which correspond to Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD).
This allows the easy contruction of URLS so that a consumer and go directly to the resource required.
for example
http://www.eoinprout.com/trains/Cork/Cobh/
will return the Cork Cobh time table resource.
2) The URL hides implementation details.
There are many advantages to hiding the implementation details not the least of which is that it allows the background implementation to be changed without affecting the API.
In my case the service is implemented in PHP but by using mod_rewrite it was possible to hide the implementation details of the service, One more advantage of this is that many search engines do not properly index dynamic pages which require the correct parameters to be set. This aids the discovery of the service.
3) The service should expose other parts of the service via links allowing discovery and traversal.
The trick here is not expose everything in one URL. In the case of my service the user starts at ../trains/ which presents a list of departure stations and links to a list of possible destinations, from there another link will return the URL for the particular time table required. so all the users needs to remeber is the ../trains/ URL.
4) GETs are used for obtaining a copy of the resource.
GET is the standard HTTP method getting content when you type a URL into the address bar of the browser it is a GET which is executed , On IrishRail.Com POSTs are used to retrieve a copy of the time table a user may be looking for.
There are serious disadvantages when using POSTs to retrieve a resource, The resource cannot be bookmarked, The URL for the resource cannot be sent to someone else, URL cannot be constructed and search engines cannot index the resource.
Tag Clouds are a useful way of visualizing information.
When I saw the tag cloud generated by del.icio.us using my bookmarks, I was surprised how clearly I could see myself in it.
It presents a interesting picture of my interests although it is a skewed towards computing related subjects, but being an internet based tool it is only to be expected (or maybe it’s me who is skewed ;)).
It’s interesting or worrying, I haven’t decided yet which, how much can be deduced about someone just from their social bookmarks.
Most new mobile phones have internet capabilities which makes it possible to browse the web while out and about.
The big problem with these services is the high cost of bandwidth on the mobile networks .
The basic price plans range from 1 to 2 cents per KB, This may not seem like a lot but it very quickly adds up.
For example, to check today’s train timetable between Cork and Cobh on Irishrail.com requires approx 167kb of data, this can cost as much as €3.34 depending price plan you have chosen with your mobile operator, Expensive for a train timetable.
3G networks have cheaper data rates then the GPRS ones but are still hugely expensive compared to standard broadband.
You can try reducing the amount of unnecessary data that downloads by turning off images, sounds and animations. But what is really needed are sites with content optimized for the mobile web.
In the old days, as a rule of thumb, we tried to keep a web page to 50kb or less.
We shouldn’t always assume a fast cheap Internet connection is being used.
PHPEdit is a great tool but by default PHPEdit (In this case ver2.10) installs with PHP5, and if like me, you need to develop with PHP4 then you’ll need to change the version of PHP PHEdit uses to debug.
Assuming that you’ve just installed PHPEdit then,
1) Get the required version of PHP, PHP 4.4.6
2) Extract the contents of the download to a permanent folder e.g. “PHP4Folder”, There is no need to do any sort of installation beyond this.
3) You will need to get the XDebug module if it is not already in the PHP4Folder/extensions folder and add it there.
4) Rename php.ini-dist to php.ini and open it in notepad.
Add the following lines to the php.ini file
zend_extension_ts=”./extensions/php_xdebug.dll”
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_autostart=on
xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger=on
xdebug.profiler_enable=on
xdebug.profiler_output_dir=”./profiler”
xdebug.profiler_output_name=”timestamp”p”
and save it.
6) Open PHPEdit and go to the Debugger Settings,
Change “CGI php executble” to point at php.exe in the “PHP4Folder”.
restart PHPEdit and your all set to go.
7) To make sure that your using the correct version of PHP create a small script calling phpinfo(), looking at the output will allow you to confirm which version of PHP PHPEdit is using.
This post on the Daily WTF reminded me of the old days when we used the 5.25″ floppy disk and some of the problems we had because of its “floppy” nature.
The disk itself was encased only in cardboard which meant that the life expectancy of the disk was extremely short.
Once, a disk we’d been expecting arrived in the post with a compliment slip. Someone had driven a staple through the outer cardboard body and the disk itself to make sure the compliment slip was firmly attached. Needless to say the disk was ruined.
The funnest thing I remember about these disks was when a person (who will remain nameless) was asked to post us a copy of a floppy disk they had, The next day a letter containing a photocopy of the disk arrived. We kept that photocopy on the notice-board for a long time.
Users were a lot less sophisticated in those far off days of yore.
Time moves on and we began to use CDs which are much tougher but not indestructible.
One CD I’d sent through the post was returned as damaged, it hadn’t be scratched, shattered, melted or anything else you might expect, It had been squashed flat (or is that flatter) and increased its diameter by about an inch. I never found out how.
Last week on a lunch time radio phone in show, a Google “scandal” broke.
A caller had for no apparent reason searched Google using her phone number, and got back a single result. Although when she tried to view it the classic “not found” message appeared.
Not to be defeated she went back to Google and clicked on the “cached” link and up popped hers and her husbands personal details.
Shocked at the apparent intrusion on her privacy she called the company to which the document belonged and demanded to know what was what.
She was told that the document contained the details of a number of customers (of which she was one) which had accidentally been copied to the wrong location on a server and exposed to the internet, but that this had been corrected as soon as it was spotted. Unfortunately Googlebot had got there first, Googlebot indexed and cached the page and went on it’s merry way. So even thought the company had taken corrective action the page was still available through Google’s cache.
The company is now in the process of contacting Google to get them to remove the page from their cache.
I didn’t have the heart to ring in and mention the WayBack Machine and other ways in which this page could still exist out in the wild.
I found it interesting that for the callers, Google is the internet.
Unfortunately they didn’t give out enough information for me the find the page on Google
Released on the 17th Skype 3.0 includes number of interesting new features .
“Extras” is the best new Feature.
Extras are basically Plugins developed by third parties for Skype.
There are of course games and the collaboration tools such as Shared White Boards and desktop sharing are pretty good.
Although the most “useful” extra is the KishKish voice stress analyzer, basically a lie detector, imagine the possibilities of a world where everyone has a lie detector on their phone. Yes I think it’s scary too.
Skype 3.0 is an upgrade worth getting
