Ben Galbraith’s Blog

I’ve been using the excellent SpamSieve plug-in for OS X Mail for the past month and a half. It works really, really well; so well, in fact, that I don’t notice just how much spam I get. So I was a bit surprised to scroll past the ol’ spam folder and see:

Didn’t I just empty that sucker? I checked out SpamSieve’s stats and saw (covering 9/26/06 until now):

I am amazed at the volume of junk email — 1,200 spams per day! I have no idea how my parents cope (actually, since I serve as their tech support engineer, I know exactly how badly they’re coping with this stuff). I hope Google || Yahoo || Microsoft || some start-up does something about this soon. If large amounts of this crap starts defeating SpamSieve, I’m screwed.

(BTW, the ratio of good:spam email in the SpamSieve is meaningless in my setup; a lot of my email bypasses SpamSieve entirely if certain criteria are met.)

I love Apple’s Pages. Sure, it’s missing tons of features from Microsoft Word. But what it does, it does well, and its got a fast and easy to use interface. Styles seem to work better than with Word.

Of course, I need to work with my Microsoft Word colleagues from time-to-time. I exported a Pages document to Word format today, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my Pages comments were also converted over to Word comments:

I assumed the comments would be lost. It’s the attention to details (like getting an exporter to work really well) that matter to me. Details, details, details.

Dion showed me Google Maps on his mobile phone when we were traveling through the back roads of Westchester County a few weeks back. I was impressed enough to phone my carrier, turn on an unlimited data plan (Cingular, $20/month) and give it a go on my Sony Ericsson K750i. I had no idea how to install it, but I just visited Google’s homepage via the phone’s browser, searched for “mobile google maps”, clicked on the first link, and it installed automatically. I used the app to drive from SFO to OAK last week and worked out great. Used it today to discover a new pizza joint a few blocks from my home. Sweet!

I also installed Google’s J2ME Gmail client while I was at it. I’ve avoided the Blackberry largely because (a) I want to avoid morphing into one of those folks who constantly interrupt their participation in a conversation or a meeting to play with it, (b) I have enough tethers on my life already, and (c) I like putting my phone in my pocket. I’m loving the Gmail client. Easy to check email, not that bad to type short replies with T9 text input, and I get all the options of the Gmail environment I already use as a backup for OS X’s Mail client.

Who knew J2ME could be this useful?

Every year or so, I like to take a look at the market and see if I can find a keyboard superior to my trusty old fleet of Microsoft Natural Pro keyboards.

This week I tried out Microsoft’s relatively new Wireless Laser Desktop 6000:

The Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 looks really slick. It has the traditional 101-key layout, unlike previous modern Microsoft keyboards which futz around with the arrow keys and so forth. It has a nice arrangement of user-programmable macro keys on the left-hand side which are easier to distinguish than the Natural Pro’s lineup of macro keys at the top of the keyboard. And, it’s wireless!

I replaced my Natural Pro with the Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 for one day. And, at the end of the day, I switched back to the Natural Pro. Here’s why:

1. The keyboard is too narrow. The span from the Caps Lock key to the Enter key on the 6000 is 11 inches, which is 1 1/4 inches less than the span of the Natural Pro.
   
   Smaller hands might have appreciated this; I did not. My hands felt a bit cramped — though I could have adjusted, were it not for my next gripe:
2. The keys are too mushy. Dozens of times the keyboard did not register a keystroke to my touch. I had to constantly focus on typing keys harder than normal. With the Natural Pro, my fingers fly over the keys, never missing a beat; it’s much closer to the feel of those old IBM click keyboards than the 6000 and gives much more satisfying feedback.

I tested the 6000 on OS X, and I should note that Microsoft’s Universal Binary drivers for the 6000 (and the Natural Pro) are excellent, though the latest drivers are not on the website; the Microsoft Hardware site directs you to download the IntelliType 6.0 drivers, not the 6.1 drivers that it should and that come bundled with the keyboard.

Next time, I’ll review another relatively new Microsoft keyboard, the (wired) Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000:

It’s election time. I’m increasingly frustrated by the often binary decision facing American voters: Republican or Democrat. The policy-making decisions of the world’s largest economy and largest democracy are complex, multi-dimensional, and of course, very controversial. Yet, I just get to choose “blue” or “red”.

The notion of choosing proxies to represent voters was necessary for all of the Republics of the past, but with the advent of modern technology, perhaps in my lifetime we’ll see a system that empowers the people to participate more deeply in the political process. Put the issues to the people and let us decide. Money can corrupt the individual representatives; who’s going to buy the majority of an entire country? (Of course, there are efforts to tie money to voting in recent states, but that’s another very scary story).

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday we can all participate more fully in the policy-making process.

With the advent of Ajax, it’s been fun to watch the Web in a renaissance as technologies we dismissed years ago have come into vogue. There’s such buzz in that space that some are beginning to predict that web applications will replace desktop apps entirely and that perhaps even a “Web OS” concept will take root.

Maybe the future is in Web browsers. But I’m pretty satisfied that for years to come, desktop applications will continue to play an important role in the software ecosystem. In short, the desktop matters.

In this vein, we’re happy to announce Desktop Matters, a desktop-focused conference to take place in February 2007 in the Bay Area, California (probably Feb. 23 somewhere close to Santa Clara). My Ajaxian partner-in-crime, Dion Almaer, will be co-producing and co-hosting the event with me, and Jay Zimmerman of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference series will handling the heavy-lifting and lending his conference expertise to the event.

We had considered making an event for all desktop technologies across all platforms. That vision may eventually come to pass, but this first Desktop Matters event will be focused on Java Desktop technologies.

While our recent Ajax Experience conference had sixty sessions across six tracks over three days, the Desktop Matters will be a one day / one track event. It’s not that we couldn’t find enough content to fill up a bunch more slots, but we felt that the Java Desktop community is a pretty tight-knit crowd and it would be more fun to throw everyone in the same room.

Sun’s Swing team has graciously offered to participate; Scott, Hans, Chet, Richard, and former-intern-extraordinaire Romain Guy will be there presenting.

The attendance fee will is still being worked out, but it will obviously be far lower than the typical $1,500 range for multi-day, multi-track events. We’re trying to make it as accessible as possible.

The agenda is still being finalized, but it will include topics such as how to be more productive with Swing, how to make Swing look amazing, and sessions on third-party Swing libraries and tools. We may even have some non-Java folks present, just to show us how things are done on other platforms — but that part of the show isn’t finalized yet and may not happen. The show will wrap up with a party / networking event, while Chet doing stand-up comedy at some point (he doesn’t know this yet, but we’re confident after a few drinks we’ll get him on stage).

Speaking of the agenda, would you like to present a session at the show? What with it only being one day, presentation space is very limited, but if you have an interested in presenting or simply being a part of the show in some way, please let me know (send email to desktopmatters@galbraiths.org).

I’ll follow up with a commitment on the date, the venue, and the price a little later this week or earlier next. In the meantime, I hope you’ll clear a space on your calendar and join us!