Ramesh Bhaskar

As of this posting (May 29th 2008 4:51 PM), Google is down and has been that way for probably the past 45 minutes as I’ve noticed it. I Yahoo’d to find out any news about Google going down, but to no avail. I decided to then write to Techcrunch/ReadWriteWeb, because they are people who have sources to obtain such information (at least far better than what I can). Probably will be up on their blogs in a while.

What I wanted to point out is, we are so Google dependant that in the time it was down, I had no way to contact either blogs to let them know it is down (although I think they already do know it, since a lot of their work requires some kinds of research and they would most probably be using Google for it).

As of now, I can’t get access to my feeds, my e-mail, my notebook, orkut, or regular good old search. Is this time to start Yahooing or Liv(e)ing? What is surprising though is that even though Gmail is not working, GTalk is, and it even reports the number of e-mails I have unread.

Update (May 29th 2008 5:05 PM): Google is back up but behaving very erratically.

Update (May 29th 2008 5:30 PM): Google seems to be back up and at it.

To be honest, it does not work on iGoogle either, but I blame that on the widget developers rather than on Google themselves. But for Yahoo! Pipes not to work on Yahoo’s own services is quite bad.

I recently read a post on Lifehacker about using Yahoo pipes for more efficient searches on Craigslist. Hoping to put my new found knowledge to use, I decided to help a friend search for a car on Craigslist. All went well with being able to build the pipe and get information out of it. I was very impressed with what Yahoo! Pipes was able to do. In fact I went ahead and put the RSS feed into my reader to test whether I would get timely updates and it worked (hurray!). For the record I use Google Reader and it all worked seamlessly.

After I sent the link though, my friend tried adding it to her my Yahoo! account and then things went wrong. Apparently, my Yahoo! does not support RSS Feeds from Yahoo! Pipes.

Does that seem wrong or is it just me? When different services from the same company don’t play well together, it just sends out a wrong message. My opinion of Yahoo! is currently that they have a bevy of great services, but they are all so cluttered and unreachable that its just not worth it. Google is heading in that direction, but they have managed to keep it somewhat clean so far.

This is more of a generic setting than a setting for Gmail, however, since I started using IMAP only after Gmail offered it I’ve realized it only now. If you use the Archive+Label combo in Gmail to replicate the feeling of folders then you might have noticed after you’ve set up IMAP in Thunderbird that all the mails that come to your inbox show up with a nice count (n) in brackets. On the other hand, none of the mails which get automatically archived and assigned to labels get displayed.

Its only when you click on a particular label does it tell you if any new mail has arrived. This gets annoying when you have quite a few labels. So as an update to my previous post, I found this setting and thought I would mention it here if anyone else wanted to know.

In order to get the unread message counts on all your labels go to “Tools->Options->Advanced->Config Editor” and type in “imap” into the filter box.

The first setting you see is “mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new” and it is set to false. Double click it to set it to true. Restart Thunderbird and do a “Get Mail->Get All New Messages”. Now if there are any unread mails in any of the labels, it will display them as well (since it has now checked all the IMAP folders you are subscribed to.

Ever wanted to take screenshots of a web page in its entirety? Ever wanted to crop out a portion of it, highlight a portion of it, blur out specific details? There are times when I’d wished I have a tool to do that and now it exists. I’ve been using Screengrab! up until now, but after seeing Fireshot I don’t think I’ll be going back. Here’s a screenshot of it in action

It has a lot of features for grabbing the whole page, a part of it, annotating it, blurring it out, etc. Definitely worth being in your palette of Firefox Add-ons.

Download the Fireshot Addon.

This is one really well done video, I loved it…

Here’s the link to the original content - Mediatedcultures

I was always skeptical of shifting to another blogging platform because I thought that all of my earlier posts would be lost. I did recently shift however and thanks to the requirement of a friend, learnt that I can now safely backup my posts as well as comments and move.

We’ve both had our blogs on LJ and she recently shifted over as well. So she asked me if I knew any way to transfer the posts as well as comments. A little Googling and I found this tool called LJArchive. It allows you to take a complete backup of your data on LJ and export it to a XML file that Wordpress can then import.

Amazingly (and I’m not sure since when), Wordpress can consume quite a few formats. Plus I can also now take a backup of my existing wordpress blog, which is a feature I’ve always looked for in blogging platforms. I believe the same should hold good for any web application out on the Internet. You should be able to take your data and run with it. If not, its not “your” data per se.

I have a problem of wasting time on the Internet a whole lot by randomly browsing various websites. The problem, I have noticed is the browser. When you use gmail’s web interface you tend to browse through your RSS feeds. Now when you are online, you don’t tend to do just that. Once you start reading feeds, you shoot of on a tangent and hop, skip and jump from one website to another.

This is basically where you become less productive. By using a e-mail client you use the web less. You can check your feeds once a day, write your blogs once a day, etc. So why then Foxmail when there are clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook? One feature I liked about Foxmail is that you can have multiple accounts each with its own password. I’m not talking about mail passwords, I’m talking about account passwords to access the account in Foxmail. Thunderbird can be locked, but it is one lock for all accounts (and I believe it is an add on and not a standard feature). By default, it maintains one mailbox for all accounts. I initially took a look at Thunderbird for its cross platform usability, however I found Foxmail to be a better alternative than any.

I always wanted to host my own blog on my domain, but I never got around to figuring out how to do so. So over the past week I decided to take a look and get it done. What gave me a head-start was Blogger’s configuration panel wherein it allows you to configure your blogspot address. By default it is “your-cool-name”.blogspot.com, which is good, but I’ve been having a domain name that has been rotting for a while and decided to make use of it.

So you click on the ‘Custom Domain’ setting and then you have an option of purchasing a domain (Google has partnered with registrars but does not register domains themselves. Although they do give a Google Apps for your domain free if you register via them).

If you already do own a domain then you can go ahead and put in the address you want so that it points to your blog. So you have told Blogger what address you want for your blog (Ex: http://mylovelyblog.mydomain.com). But how does your domain know where to point to when it sees mylovelyblog as the subdomain.

Luckily Blogger gives you directions on how to do this. Add a CName record to your domain that points to ghs.google.com. Ability to add CName’s should be part of your registrar’s administration pages.

So once your CName is setup in your domain administration panel, and blogger knows what subdomain you are going to use, anyone who goes to http://mylovelyblog.mydomain.com is automatically redirected to your blogspot blog.

In my search, I read a lot about DNS and Apache. More on that later.