Archive for the 'IT' category
Friday, January 7th, 2011
If you don't know about this, here's a great Google tip. Change your search settings to allow 100 search results. It's much easier to go through a lot of search results when they are on a single page than to go through ten at a time. Google has some very good compression so loading 100 results doesn't take much more time than loading 10.
One of our principal areas of business at Foliovision is SEO. So when I upgraded to Apple's Snow Leopard on my main work computer (I only upgraded since Leopard 10.5 won't run on a Macbook Air 11": still prefer Leopard and its quiet reliability), I was horrified to see that I could only get 10 search results from Google in both Safari and Omniweb.
So I thought the problem was with Safari 5 or webkit as Snow Leopard forces an upgrade to Safari 5. I tried the latest version of OmniWeb. Same issue. Impossible to get 100 results. Now I was really unhappy. My work life was about to become miserable rooting through Google search results ten at a time.
I had just installed Chromium* to see how it compares in memory usage with a lot of tabs open as I have just dropped from 8 GB of RAM to 4 GB of RAM and was feeling the pinch. Safari 5 uses a lot of memory with 40 tabs open - what is disappointing is that when you close all the tabs, Safari hangs onto a lot of the memory. Chrome creates a separate mini-application for each tab using even more memory than Safari but when you close a tab it gives back all of its meemory.
So I decided to run the Google results test on Chromium. No problem to get 100 results with Google Chromium.
Google Instant 100 search results in Chromium
Considerably more research alerted me to a solution: turn off Google instant in Google's settings and Safari would yield 100 results again.
Strangely I could get 100 results with Google instant on Google's Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. So the issue is not with compatibility between 100 results and instant (I thought perhaps it was a bandwidth issue).
It looks more like a deliberate crippling of Safari and Omniweb to give Chrome a leg up in the Apple browser wars. Even more diabolical, you have to save your settings twice in Safari after turning off Google Instant to get your 100 setting back.
Google wins our Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish award of the month for their attack on Safari and other webkit browsers.
"Don't be evil." Maybe. Apparently, a little bit wicked is completely fine. See footnote for evidence of outright evil.
* Note: Don't ever use Google Chrome, it's spyware which will not even run without an admin level updater application on your computer! Get the latest build for Chromium for OS X here: cherish that direct link, Google hides it.
By Alec
IT, SEO |
Thursday, January 6th, 2011
I've written at length about how to move from POP to IMAP on Apple Mail. This is an update on how to improve your experience with IMAP on Apple Mail.
A tendency to multiply outgoing draft messages is the most irritating characteristic of Apple Mail IMAP. Sometimes they expand to 25 versions of the same outgoing message. You don't want to delete the most recent one but you do have to stomp them out like weeds, sometimes several times per day. Due to this issue, I was considering moving back to POP. There are no settings on the server or in your account settings which seem to cure this trait.
Apple Mail IMAP draft messages
Fortunately there is one clever workaround. Stop using IMAP for your drafts. If you set Apple Mail to save your drafts locally, they don't proliferate. There is a significant disadvantage. Any drafts which you have locally will not be available on your other computers.
For me, the absence of drafts across my secondary computers is a price worth paying to not have drafts proliferating like rabbits on my main computer* all day every day.
* A Macbook Air 11" 1.6 GHz 4GB these days: the Macbook Air is holding up well under stress apart from the 4GB of memory which is very tight in a busy Safari sessions with photo editing in the background when one is writing web log posts. Like now for instance.
By Alec
IT |
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
Every time I use my Apple computers, it becomes more and more apparent that Steve Jobs has wholly sold out user's privacy. Publicly Jobs denies privacy violations:
We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the [Silicon] Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously.... A lot of people in the Valley think we're really old-fashioned about this...Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly.... let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data. That's what we think.
But use of an Apple computer on the ground suggests differently.
Apple Aperture violating your privacy
Let's start with a simple example from a pro app: Apple's Aperture goes after configuration.apple.com every time even with all web checkboxes turned off. l.google.com (location for Google) is understandable if you are using Aperture's built-in geo location services. But not if you have it turned off as I do.
I'm not the first one to find Apple's monitoring of our use of their apps disturbing. The issue of iLife '06 phoning home was a sore spot as far back as 2006. What goes on with iPhones with individual apps tracking every use along with your unique iPhone ID and your Facebook profile is astonishing.
But with the pro apps for which we are paying hundreds of dollars, one would think that one had more than paid for the right to privacy.
Apparently not.
What is even more disturbing is that with a virgin Little Snitch install, almost all Apple servers and services are considered safe and permitted out of the box. Why does Objective Development implicitly trust Apple? Moreover, there is nothing to prevent Apple from engineering around Little Snitch and Apple has certainly done so.
known Apple privacy violations in Aperture
I am slowly becoming convinced that there are back doors into even our fruity and once alternative Apple computers. I wonder if user tracking was a deal Apple signed with the devil to be given free road in telecommunications. For decades, Microsoft has taken the side of the US government and security institutions against users. There are hidden files on Windows computers which log all your internet visits and emails in plain text. Very handy for law enforcement. Here's what one IT professional's experience:
Internet history, documents and all sorts of potentially sensitive data is cached as well. When recovering documents for users I've found copies of those documents in some really strange places. The user was just glad I recovered some or all of their lost work. I just sat there scratching my head as to why there was a copy there and not in the normal temp dir where you'd think such files would be kept. Varies from version to version as to where those things turn up.
If this doesn't worry you as a US citizen, take a closer look at the supervisory protection offered by your courts. No requests for wiretaps were turned down in 2009 out of 2,376. These are only the visible wiretaps and not the secret ones rubber stamped behind closed doors. That none were turned down suggests that US law enforcement is not being supervised by the courts. It's the same as all students getting A+ on their exams.
The Obama administration is openly insisting on unrestricted access to all online communication. Governments all over the world and most notably the UK have enacted laws to force you to reveal the key to any encrypted data with penalties of up to two years in jail. In the case of the UK, even the assessment of taxes or any charge payable to a government department justifies invoking RIPA. The list of agencies who are allowed to invoke the act is forty or more and includes local councils including fire authorities and the Charity Commission.
There is perhaps nowhere where your data is less secure than the UK. Basically if you are travelling to Britain, you'd best take a laptop with next to no information on it: just the bare minimum to access your email. You are free to complain to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal about inappropriate use of surveillance authority under RIPA. In ten years, 956 complaints were registered: only 4 were upheld. Again, the case of all students receiving A+. Those grades don't tally well with the five law enforcement officers jailed for running illegal surveillance networks using RIPA means to ill ends.
Glenn Greenwald quotes surveillance expert Julian Sanchez:
If you want to sift through communications in bulk, it's only going to be feasible with a systemic backdoor.
Apple is doing their share in providing those backdoors and detailed tracking of its users. It does no harm that the data they are collecting on consumers gives them enormous power in the marketplace. So not only do they get favours from the powers to be, they make money to. Plutocratic oligarchy at its best.
What is Apple doing with all its loot? Spending it on filing more patents. The spurious patent strongbox of Apple is filled like a pirate's chest.
Google is no better than Apple and probably worse. So as a computer user, you have three commercial choices of whom to trust with access to your data:
- Google, the greatest data miners in history and close allies of the US government
- Microsoft, proven collaborators (how much of their poor security practices are deliberate and how much is intentional is the only question)
- Apple who is slowly violating its core principles and tracking you for all its worth
No matter where you turn, you are compromised before you leave the gate, easily trackable at every moment online and with your cellphone. You are always in the matrix.
Google's Chrome browser installs invasive tools by default that check in with Google on every run, ostensibly looking for updates. A more privacy aware open source version of Chrome called Chromium exists for Mac OS X in nightly builds no less. For some reason Google hides those builds on their Chromium public pages, only offering instructions on how to build the damn browser from scratch.
Google offers only Chromium build source
It's looking more and more like Linux is our only option if we want to retain our privacy. I'm surprised to see Steve Jobs sell out like this. I suppose he'd call it pragmatism. I'd suggest it's betrayal.
If I decide to stop using Apple computers, that's 5 personal computers down and ten more company computers. I think it's time someone took the bull by the horns and started producing sanitisers for of OS X which shut down all of this phoning home with a combination of Little Snitch behaviour and automated creation of hosts files, with regular monitoring and testing of other backdoors. The task is very onerous as Apple can always enclose special keys or particular data in encrypted files. The only way to prevent your computer being compromised is to allow no outgoing communication at all without your assent and a minimum at that.
Particularly vulnerable is Mobile Me. With Mobile Me, you are able to share Mail, Contacts, Calendar and control your computer remotely depending on what options you enable. Presumably Mobile Me communicates all of the requisite information, whether you turn on selected services or not. So once you've used Mobile Me even once, US authorities have full access to all of your computers.
I had to help my own sister with her Mac. The only system which worked reliably to access her Mac and help her with it was Mobile Me. Mobile Me was a blessing to be able to get her new Macbook Pro working just right. On the other hand, signing up and enabling some of its features on my own computers probably compromised decades of relatively secure computing practices.
One of the reasons that Microsoft got away from its antitrust case after an initial guilty verdict are their ties with national security in the US. The cost to national security by breaking down the computer OS monopoly were considered larger than the gain by enforcing anti-monopoly and antitrust legislation. The backdoors and collaboration with national security were Microsoft's get-out-of-jail card. Google plays the same card and thus can break privacy and copyright laws with relative impunity.
Steve Jobs is no fool. Having seen competitor one thrive and survive via collaboration (Microsoft) and seen competitor two burst from zero to exceed Apple's market capitalisation earned over decades in just a few short years (Google) via such collaboration, there's just no way the gentleman feels in a position to protect users.
On the other hand, Apple users are said to be wealthier and better educated than Windows users. Surely one day we'll be smart enough to realise we've been had and we are all sailing in boats with sieve ridden hulls.
Ironically, these backdoors can help to protect the innocent. In one case, the surveillance backdoors on the iPhone saved an innocent man from 5 consecutive sentences of 14 years on false rape charges. But the exception proves the rule. We are under more and more tacit surveillance using our Apple phones and computers.
What could Apple do to reengender trust among its users? Remove any calls to its servers without explicit authorisation from the OS or their own applications. For those who want a simpler experience, give them a global security setting which means something. Something like three simple options:
- No calls home without specific authorisation (i.e. manually checking for version and software updates).
- Anonymous information for updates without system profiles and for time with no location information.
- Full functionality for the best and simplest Apple experience.
Unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen.
Sooner or later if you value your privacy, a permanent exile in the Antarctic icecap with the other penguins looms. For political activists, Linux should be de rigeur as the starting OS. It's a little difficult for me at this point with decades now invested in expertise and productivity on Apple computers. I own and use dozens of great OS X only shareware programs as well as commercial graphics and video applications like Aperture, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro for which there are no adequate equivalents at the South Pole.
It's looking like a second computer is in line now for just private writing and private life. Even if you can't leave behind Microsoft, Google and Apple for your business life, you should get a second machine Linux machine which never goes online. Even an Apple computer would be fine, as long as you never ever plug it in. The recommendation is epoxy for the networking ports which include Ethernet and Firewire and removal of wireless functionality. DHCP is just too easy and tempting. You'll need to hold on to USB for backups.
By Alec
IT |
Monday, November 29th, 2010
People are building the weirdest applications for web 2.0.
Like the iPhone, there is a web app for that. Just ran into Rypple today.
It's a dedicated internal feedback tool. I understand that there are external feedback tools but internal ones. Wow.
I wondered how potentially an anonymous feedback tool would go over around here.
Great but nobody would use it.
I thought about how many hours would be involved introducing it and monitoring and how much feedback we'd get.
Great but there would be very little use.
I then checked their list of customers. Mozilla is on the list, some company called Vivaki. Another one called George Fern.
Mozilla is an open source company which we admire enormously and probably not terribly different in terms of company culture. But much bigger.
All of these companies have multiple teams and multiple managers. I.e. they've broken out of the human society structure. Human society is based on family/packs of six to eleven individuals. Under normal conditions, more than ten and we start to fracture off into different groups.
So a company needs to restructure as they get over ten.
Even at Foliovision that applies. We are at around fifteen and one of the groups had to break off under their own manager. I still lead a group of about ten plus one manager.
How does that affect Rypple?
We are too small to be using such a tool. At Foliovision everyone still has extended direct contact with their managers. If you have a question or concern, it's not difficult to bring it up.
We do have a couple of shy employees who don't speak up until s/he is a bit cross or steamed up. Perhaps Rypple would help them. But the administrative load to carry would be too much. Like carrying a washing machine through the mountains.
On the other hand, would you want to live without a washing machine at home?
Not likely.
If you do run a larger company (thirty plus*), you might want to take Rypple for a trial.
* Rypple as its own team of 17+. Nice looking app but that's a lot of people supporting a single, fairly simple tool. Equivalent of the entire 37signals staff who are supporting four apps and an education business.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
This seems to be the month of project management tools
Just found what is a great service bcToolkit. bcToolkit gives you great reports on the hours recorded inside Basecamp.
Here's a couple of samples:
bcToolkit time by project report
bcToolkit time by client report
On the other hand, pricing for bcToolkit seems a bit out of line. For their reports, bcToolkit wants the price again of your Basecamp subscription. If you're paying $50, pay $50 again. If you are paying $99 pay $100 (more expensive than Basecamp itself). I don't see the value there. bcToolkit does not provide half the functionality of Basecamp.
Are there any more affordable alternatives for reporting on Basecamp time keeping? As a matter of fact, yes.
If you use Freshbooks, you get all the reporting of bcToolkit plus invoicing and expenses.
Fresbooks reports Basecamp hours
sample Freshbooks user summary by tasks
If for some reason, Freshbooks doesn't work for you and your team does its time tracking inside Basecamp, bcToolKit is worth considering. Having access to these kinds of reports helps a lot with billing and planning.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
We are very big Basecamp users (we hover between 70 and 100 active projects at any given time). We've been waiting a long time for a 37signals suite. I've been curious to try Campfire seriously (which we can only do in the context of a large account).
Finally they delivered and the offer is pretty good. For Highrise for example, the account bundled in the $149 would normally cost $149 by itself. Of course, what we'd need or use would fit into the Plus at $49/month (although we'd be close with the 15 user limit). In the end, we haven't said yes yet.
37signals Suite Review
Value of the offer.
The Pro suite is equivalent of:
$99 Basecamp (100 projects)
$149 Highrise (50,000 contacts, unlimited employees: we'd need $49 separately)
$149 Backpack (10,000 pages, larger than any existing Backpack plan: we'd need $49 separately)
$49 Campfire (60 users instead of 75: we'd need $24, 25 users)
So for a single fee of $149, the paper value is $445/month. The real value if we used the services to the max with our existing staff and client list is $222/month.
The value proposition is great, with plenty of room to expand. But my main question is upgrading going to improve our business processes and our lives. I'm not sure yet.
Here's my main concerns:
- increasing our dependence on 37signals: it's always dangerous to put too much of your business process in the hands of any third party, as Microsoft customers have learnt to their peril over the years. Lock-in. Right now we are waiting on 37signals to improve the mobile versions to stop complaints from BlackBerry users.
- Backpack does not allow you to export pages to html (only Writeboards will go cleanly). That's a nuisance as the source code is so messy you can't just view source and move it over. I was thinking about using Backpack for the drafts of our documentation but we'll just keep doing it as WordPress drafts in Foliopress WYSIWYG. So we'd be unlikely to use Backpack much, although our SEO department might go back to using it for collaborating with external writers.
Each writer could have his or her own page. We'd get all our documents then in standard format, ready for html. This did work really well for us at one point.
- Campfire will be great for quick chats, but I'm worried that a lot of coherent conversation will just end up in these quick chats and hence not be searchable from Basecamp. So Campfire is a plus and a minus. Currently we get by very well with Skype for this kind of communication. With this step, we could eliminate Skype from our workflow along with any IM service.
- Highrise. Really we'd like to use Highrise. We need a better sales process (one with less me in the middle of it, and it looks like Highrise might be the solution). We are still doing a lot of work with Relenta for outgoing group email and may manage to replicate our sales process in Relenta, but Dmitri and the guys have slowed down in terms of improving Relenta and before totally committing to Relenta, we'd like to see some new features and a faster upgrade schedule.
There's a good chance we'll eventually end up upgrading just for Highrise. If we do, then 37signals scores big as we'd be able to move our clients in real estate over to Highrise which has lots of great features for real estate (deals and cases).
Focusing on Highrise: Integration with external tools and even with Basecamp itself
Our main accounting and invoicing tool is Freshbooks. We love Freshbooks and did contribute a lot of tweaks to its development a couple of years ago. Freshbooks totally satisfies our sophisticated four currency and fifteen member team's needs now so we don't need to bother to ask for too many improvements anymore.
Highrise does integrate with Freshbooks. But frankly, integration with Freshbooks stinks. It's a simple import tool really, with no information or links shared back and forth. On the other hand, JavelinCRM/CapsuleCRM (too bad about the forced rebranding guys) does full integration with Freshbooks, even fetching Freshbooks financial data automatically. As Freshbooks is now the center of our client contact data, I'd really appreciate better integration here before jumping on board. In fact, data sync is one of the biggest issues we have with the 37signals suite.
Even their own Basecamp doesn't integrate with Highrise. The best 37signals now offer is importing Basecamp contacts into Highrise. The problem with this integration is that normally a contact would start in Highrise as a lead and only later move to Basecamp as part of a closed deal. Get ready for data reentry, 37signals user. Moreover, Highrise won't sync with Apple Address Book or Google Contacts. I know sync is one of the worst productivity killers for app developers (burns up to 90% of programming resources), but some kind of working sync is really pretty important in this day and age at least for core contact information.
The generally unfriendly attitude of 37signals to sync (even among their own products) makes me very reluctant to upgrade to their suite or integrate Foliovision more deeply. Take another example: Backpack. For everyone I'd like to add to Backpack I have to do it by hand. Not the end of the world for the twelve core Foliovision employees, but I would think as a suite subscriber, there would be a shortcut allowing me to pick people from my Basecamp contacts or Highrise contacts.
Highrise: the competitive landscape
Highrise does very well against SalesForce (expensive), SugarCRM (free but complicated), ACT (difficult to use) and TopProducer (expensive and complicated). It's more interesting to hold 37signals feet to the fire against similar best of breed web applications.
So in this case, whether I go for CapsuleCRM or Highrise/suite, I end up with no sync between my CRM and Basecamp. At least with CapsuleCRM, I do get sync with Freshbooks making that part of life easier.
The next issue we run into are todo's. Our whole team has all of their todo's in Basecamp so they see all their todo's in one place. They can even order their todos with our new tool Ascent List. With Highrise todo's this working system would be temporarily broken and they'd have to look in two places. We can fix that though.
Now we do get to a rub here. 37signals is great on volume pricing. With Basecamp, I'm limited by 100 projects in my current account but as many staff and as many clients as I'd like. CapsuleCRM would charge me $12 per staff member. If I wanted to bring the core Foliovision staff on board (most of them would hardly use it, but locking them out of our CRM is hardly the hallmark of a progressive organisation), I'd be looking at about $150/month. I.e. three times more expensive than the Highrise solution. With the Highrise solution, we'd also be able to keep growing with no incremental cost.
I can solve the cost issue by just adding sales and admin staff to CapsuleCRM for about $60/month. It would be great if CapsuleCRM would do some kind of bundles for small business like Freshbooks and 37signals, even if it means two levels of users (one kind can't use the sales tools).
Highrise: Mailing out
37signals think of themselves a high-minded lot. The last thing they'd like to be bothered with are spam complaints and ISP relations. Hence there is no mailing functionality in Highrise. This is where Relenta shines. You have your contacts which you can easily place into groups. You can put them on email sequences when they arrive, or even later. You can send out mass emails to any group with the click of a button.
Highrise could make this all a reality by plugging into an external email provider. Unfortunately when they created their API, 37 signals left tags out. Meaning that it was very difficult to send to the right people with an external email provider (SendLoop, Newsberry, MailChimp, ConstantContact).
Only MailChimp has had the patience to come back now that the API has been improved and rework their Highrise sync. It actually seems pretty good now. Alas, I don't care for MailChimp. Just a bit too funky and a bit too fiddly. Really like SendLoop when I tried them but no real Highrise sync. Advantage, Relenta (integrated). CapsuleCRM, neutral (MailChimp integration but a bit weaker than Highrise).
Returning to value: TCO
The 37signals bundle is a great deal for any small business. Maintaining these tools, let along building them, from open source software would be many times the monthly cost in time of using their suite. The suite even includes time tracking in Basecamp (again I must say we use the Freshbooks time tracking as it's more robust for billing purposes and as usual with 37signals, the sync/integration is pretty weak) so apart from invoicing, you have almost all of your business needs met apart from an internet connection and a telephone line. You won't even need to bother with local networking (always a hassle) unless you are editing video as the online network from just Basecamp is robust enough to fill all your needs.
With this suite you can scale up to 100 projects, 50,000 contacts and unlimited employees for just $149/month. That's easily $1500/month of infrastructure for $150 when you count admin and IT hours.
Just fix the syncing and interaction with external tools and between the apps to be more robust and I'm on board. Yesterday. In the meantime, we'll hobble along with just Basecamp and look elsewhere for our CRM solution to Relenta and CapsuleCRM.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Sunday, November 7th, 2010
For years we had our sites all on Cartika Hosting and we loved it. For about five years I think. We recommended Cartika Hosting to all our clients and put up a lot of sites on Cartika.
The disk space limits and even bandwidth were always pretty tight in comparison to what you could get with Dreamhost, Bluehost or Hostgator. But we didn't mind.
What we wanted was quality and security and for that we were prepared to pay a significant premium over discount hosting. We called it "business quality hosting", after a rough ride with our own site Foliovision on Dreamhost for a few months with our client sites on Hostroute.
Keep reading When good suppliers go bad, or why we don't recommend Cartika Hosting anymore
By Alec
Business, IT |
Sunday, November 7th, 2010
For some reason Flickr - they should know better as good coders - have decided to be cute and try to prevent downloading of some images. Photographers probably requested the feature so much that Flickr went against their better judgement and coded this hack. We get this kind of silly request from clients all the time: "I want a website where no one can copy any of my content ever."
If you don't want people to be able to copy your content, don't put it on the internet, people.
Flickr, given that they have some good coders working for them, came up with an anti-download hack a little bit better than the standard no save on right click which is easily defeated by just pressing the spacebar or disabling javascript.
The Flickr trick is CSS based and consists of a div which carries the style classes "facade-of-protection" and a div called "spaceball". Basically Flickr is putting the image behind an empty div so you can't get at it with your mouse to save it.
In this case, "Disable Javascript" won't get you access to the image. It's being hidden by CSS. On the other hand, "Disable Styles" i.e. CSS will.
Keep reading How to download protected images from Flickr
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, October 28th, 2010
The new MacBook Airs are adorable, particularly the 11". Should you get one...reluctantly I must say probably not. Here's why.
MacBook Air 11" & 13" side by side: notice how pleasingly compact
the 11" is - can it replace a MacBook Pro though?
No standard memory socket.
We own lots of Macs in this category at Foliovision (old MacMini 2 GHz with 9400 GPU: a great basic machine). The bare minimum memory for a really great work experience on an OS X computer is 3 GB. Apple should be putting 4GB soldered on and leaving us at least a single installable memory slot. I'd put in another 4 GB, other might even put in an 8 GB sodimm (Samsung has started mass production).
Keep reading What's wrong with the new MacBook Air?
By Alec
IT |
Monday, July 26th, 2010
We just had a small hosting accident yesterday.
One of our clients had his weblog cut off with the dreaded Bandwidth Limit Exceeded notice:
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Richard’s visitors had pumped 80 GB out already this month on his FreeTheAnimal weblog primal living weblog. Not bad for a single writer not in a formal network. Every month his traffic is growing. Congratulations Richard!
These 80 GB of bandwidth are the real thing, with just a few slightly overweight images, not a single big file accidentally uploaded.
Richard was surprised and upset to see his weblog cut off as were we. While most hosts cut clients off as a routine matter of business, we do not. We treat our clients as we would like to be treated ourselves.
Keep reading No “Bandwidth limit exceeded”: How to manage bandwidth limits in cPanel hosting courteously
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
You do want to be using SSL. Unencrypted connections are far too easily eavesdropped. On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that SSL only gets your login and email encrypted between your computer and your smtp server. Once your email hits the big pipes, it’s unencrypted again, vulnerable to whomever can get access to the transit points. A rogue operative in any ISP or fiber optic supplier could still siphon off huge amounts of data. Even if such a person existed, s/he would be unlikely to be able to regularly get all of your email though. However, random emails, especially if they traverse exotic territories with loose security could be grabbed.
Email is not private. Don’t forget that ever. Email is not private.
Keep reading Setting Up Email Securely on cPanel servers: example WiredTree
By Alec
IT |
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
The most important thing which you must know before starting the move is whether the mail account to be moved is POP or IMAP.
If the account is POP, your task is fairly straightforward.
You want to make sure that you move any unread move (mail from between the time your client last collected email and the time of the move is picked up and put on the new mail server). The best way to do that is to log into the old mail server and the new mail server via IMAP simultaneously. You will see what has been read and what hasn't. Just move the unread messages.
If you move the read messages, when your client logs in again via POP, he or she will have to sort through a 1000 or even 3000 archived messages in the inbox. Not fun.
We recommend using Apple Mail as the IMAP client as it's very easy and quick to set up. Windows Live Mail hides the IMAP accounts and folders and is ugly as sin. Thunderbird is very fiddly and exposes too many options but could do in a pinch or if you don't have a Mac handy.
Keep reading How to move clients email accounts (or your own) from one server to another with no lost mail
By Alec
IT |
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
As I've mentioned, I handle hundreds of messages per day for myself and my clients. I have separated my email from bulk email effectively now, but still found my computer sluggish.
The problem seemed to be around Apple Mail. I'm new to IMAP so I decided to dig deeper. I initially thought the issue was with Rules, as I have SpamSieve and many dozens of rules to deal with bulk email (things I might want to read but don't want in my InBox).
The problems turns out to be something else altogether:
Smart Mailboxes. Every time you get new mail your Smart Mailboxes folders update their unread counts: "Updating Smart Mailbox Unread Counts" is the message you will see in Mail's Activity Monitor.
Apple Mail
Smart Mailboxes
Spiking CPU
Keep reading Apple Mail, IMAP, IDLE and Smart Mailboxes don't mix well, spike CPU
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
If like me, you are an old Eudora hand, you probably used POP reliably for decades before moving to Apple Mail and the possibility of troublefree IMAP use.
Apple Mail Setup IMAP: To Take the Leap Or Not?
You’ve probably also heard horror stories of unsynced and lost email from those who took the jump to IMAP in the 90’s. You prefer the security of local mail on POP for the following reasons:
- your mail doesn’t spend much time on the cloud so there’s less possibility of it being read unless someone is actively tracking you
- what’s on your computer is getting backed up by you so you have physical control of the data
Now however you may have a Mac Mini, a Macbook, Macbook Pro 17” portable desktop, a Windows 7 netbook, a Nokia N97 mini smartphone with keyboard, an iPhone and an iPad as well as a photo studio Hackintosh. Or five of the above at any given time.
Keep reading Apple Mail: Migrating from POP to IMAP Smoothly for Power Users
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
If you have tried to set up network backup on OS X and you ran into the message "the backup disk image could not be created", probably this article will help you.
OS X's TimeMachine software had native support for network backup until the OS X Leopard 10.5.2 was released. Apple had its own reasons for the decision to remove network backup, but many advanced users including us at Foliovision would still like to be able to back up over the network.
We have a bunch of Mac Minis in a mixed network of Linux and Windows computers. We'd like to use all our Minis for work and not for backup and use one of our older Linux towers to store the backup.
How do you do it?
Keep reading How to create a network backup with Apple's TimeMachine
By Matej
IT |
