#Rant

I was just reading over at TechCrunch about Google quickly hiring Don Dodge after he was let go from Microsoft. It seems Don will be doing what he used to do at Microsoft – Developer Evangelism (good for him, and Google!).

I’m very happy to see that Google is putting their stock options and cash where their mouth is to evangelize their APIs, platforms (Android, AppEngine) and tools to developers.

A while back I wrote about the lack of Google’s outreach in the Israeli developers community, and it is still very visible in Israel by the jobs listings as well as various events and conventions that Microsoft Technology still dominates the Israeli high-tech software scene.

At Yedda (my day job) we recently ordered 3 new laptops.

Our spec was very specific (that’s how we are ;-) ):

• Core Duo 2 running on at least 2Ghz
• 2Gb of RAM
• 100Gb or more hard drive
• WXGA+ screen (1440×960 resolution)
• 14.1″ screen
• Non shared memory video card
• DVD burner

The reason we want 14.1″ screens is due to size and weight (some of us, not me, rides on bikes and/or motorcycles to get to the YeddaHQ). We also wanted as high resolution as possible and the WXGA+ seems very good.

I’ve recently started to use Google Apps for Your domain to host my private emails on the sandler.co.il domain.

Google Apps for your domain is quite cool and was very easy to configure. I mainly moved to it due to the unbelievable amounts of SPAM and I didn’t have the power or time to configure SpamAssassin in a reasonable way that would actually work.

When I moved, one of the things I did was to change the “default” URL in which me and other members of my family use to access the web mail of the domain. Google Apps for your Domain allows you to do just that by configuring it in its configuration screen and settings a CNAME record that points to ghs.google.com.

Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned.

I have been using you as one of the primary communication tools that I have form your very first days. I have stayed within the 2Gb PST file limits but when I was told that Outlook 2003 can hold up to 20Gb I have rejoiced, joyed and thanked you for your kindness.

I still dreaded the old 2Gb limitation but decide to look forward for a better future. I therefore installed Outlook 2007 blindfold as I have known that each version of Outlook brings it’s own bliss and helpfulness to the world.

I own a Nokia E61 cell phone. A nice phone all in all (aside from the backup problems my wife encountered).

Gmail has this cool little applet that lets me access my Gmail account in a nicer (and better cached) way from my cell phone. It’s a really nice program and I use it quite often.

It has one problem though. If you host your own domain through Google Apps for Your Domain to get the Gmail like interface for your Emails you cannot use this program.

Is it just me or Universal Binaries for Mac are a world domination scheme to increase the bandwidth usage of the world?

I know that the Apple folks didn’t want people to start figuring out “Do I have an Intel process or a PowerPC one?”, after all most people don’t really know what’s inside their machines, but in 99% of the cases, when downloading from the web most sites that do provide the software could tell quite easily if the the browser is running on an Intel Mac or a PowerPC Mac by looking at the “User-Agent” string that the browser sends.

I really like Amazon. I really like Amazon’s recommendations and ever since I inputed most of my books into Amazon I get really good recommendations.

There is one thing that bothers me, though.

I recently made a big order from Amazon and included two books which I was long overdue in owning and reading them. The books were “Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” both by Douglas Adams.

We recently got a Mac Mini to the office so that we can test Yedda better with Safari and in general how Yedda looks, feels and works on all of the various browsers on Mac (mainly Safari, FireFox, Camino and Opera).

It’s a cute little machine. I can easily understand why people fall in love with Mac and Apple products in general.

After setting it up and powering it up I ran the Software Updates so that I will have the latest, greatest and safest Mac software.

This is going to be a long rant about the new Nokia PC Suite Content Copier backup file format and how its software is NOT compatible with previous versions and there is no mentioning anywhere from Nokia (other than the fact they changed the backup file format stated in their help).

My wife recently upgraded from her Nokia 6230 to a brand new Nokia E61. She really liked the personal information management (PIM) features and that it had a full QWERTY keyboard.

I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon.

When reaching the check out screen I, obviously, selected to group my shipments to as few as possible. I then looked and saw that it was grouped into two shipments, one book should be shipped the next day and the other 4 should ship only on the 20th of March – almost two months afterwards!

This was a bit strange considering the fact that Amazon showed that all books were in stock.