Invert Your Mind

Got my Lenovo Thinkpad X300 last week and I’ve been using it for development for only a few days. Here are my first impressions:

Pros

• Very lightweight
• Fast - the SSD drive seems to make some things pretty fast and the system is fast enough for the work I do
• Nice screen
• THE BEST KEYBOARD ON A LAPTOP (as all Thinkpads have)
• The Trackpoint (never leave home row again)

Cons

• The fan is the WORST PIECE OF CRAP EVER!!!!!

After much research and pain it appears that Thinkpads in general have a horrible issue with fan noise. Apparently, the Thinkpad BOIS pretty much refuses to turn the fan off and the fan goes directly from 1000 RPMs when cool to 6000 RPMs when hot. There is no intermediate fan speed. Well, needless to say that 6000 RPMs is extremely annoying.

I would definitely not recommend this machine to anyone looking for a solid work laptop because the fan noise is considerable enough that after an hour or two of working with that drone you are certain to have a monster headache and feel like throwing up. I’ll probably sell it and get an Apple instead. At least then I know I’ll have very little problems with the hardware.

I host a number of projects including JCatapult over at Google code. We use the wiki over there for our documentation because it is simple and centralized. The wiki is stored inside the SubVersion repository and when you update the wiki it performs a commit to the repository. Pretty straight-forward.

One of the project members, James Humphrey, was editing our wiki last night, finished editing a page and hit Save. Rather than just updating the wiki page in SubVersion, Google’s custom built SubVersion server decided it wanted to completely revert our entire project back to revision 1. Yeah, I’m totally serious!

Well, the old revisions appear to be in the repository, but in order to clean this clandestine (hehe) mess up I’ll have go in by hand and revert our entire repository. This consists of roughly 10 sub-projects and 5 tags for each project plus branches, etc, etc. Really nasty.

So, here is my warning to all those out there that might be using Google Code, be careful. I’m working with Google right now on trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it. I’ll update this post once we figure it out.

Okay, this took me a long time to get working and I wanted to set out my steps. The most important part is noted below and it is the step that nearly everyone misses and if you don’t do it, nothing will work.

1. Ensure that you network layout is correct by plugging in a computer to the cat5 cable you will put into the Directv DVR
2. Attach network cable to Directv DVR
3. Reboot Directv DVR (red button next to card)
4. Enable and test network using Setup->Network->Connect Now and also Setup->Network->Test
5. Turn on the media server PC and install Windows Media Player 11
6. Open My Computer and share your My Music folder by clicking “Share this Folder” on the left side
7. Turn off Windows firewall
8. IMPORTANT! Open My Network Places and click “Show icons for networked UPnP devices” on the left hand side
9. Reboot Directv DVR again
10. Open Windows Media Player 11 and click the menu under Library called Media Sharing
11. Check the share checkbox and the new devices checkbox
12. You should also see “Unknown Device” in the list and click on that
13. Hit okay and you should now see the Music and Videos option on the Directv DVR menu

It’s 2008 and I’m hoping to start blogging more regularly again. To start, I figured I’d tell my readers my plans for 2008. Here’s the quick run down:

1. Continue building Inversoft’s Profanity products and increase sales

I did a lot of work last year getting the profanity database and filter working well. These products are slowly selling and Inversoft is getting more customers each week. I’m hoping to add some more advanced logic this year to reduce false positives even further.

2. Rebrand Inversoft and finish the website redesign

We have been working with the excellent designers from We Are Super Ordinary to rebrand Inversoft with a new logo and a new website presence. This should help us leverage our website as a good marketing tool for the business

3. Launch JCatapult and promote the heck out of it

JCatapult is starting to get to a 1.0 stage. I’m hoping to finish up the last few things in the next couple of weeks, including migrating SmartURLs into the Struts source repositories and make it one of the default plugins shipped with Struts. JCatapult will be based primarily on Struts2 and the SmartURLs port (called the Struts2 Convention Plugin). Once that migration is complete, JCatapult should be ready for a solid beta release.

4. Build a web application as a JCatapult example

I’ve had a few ideas and domains registered for nearly 7 years now and I’m going to try and build out one of these ideas using JCatapult. Hopefully I can find 3-4 developers that are interested in helping build this application in their spare time. Anyone who is interested, send me an email.

That’s the run down for 2008. I’ll try and post a few times each month on my progress, in addition to the standard technical ramblings I put up, which usually get more traffic than the rest of my posts. Time to get coding! Happy New Year!

Well, I think I’ll have to ditch GMail’s hosted email completely because of the way that GMail handles conversations (i.e. threads and mailing lists). After switching Inversoft and Pontarelli email to Google, I realized that GMail IMAP has a huge problem handling email sent to mailing lists. Apparently, if you send an email to a mailing list, the GMail MX server doesn’t place that email into your inbox when the mailing list sends it back to you. This is usually done by mailing lists programs like mailman and elmzm to allow you to track an email thread correctly. If you don’t have your own messages in a threaded view, you won’t be able to determine who is replying to you or what emails you have replied to.

The reason they do this is because rather than managing the GMail conversation view based on the emails in a folder, it instead manages it based on the emails in the folder and the emails you have sent. This is pretty obviously not following the KISS methodology and is probably best dropped completely in favor of a more traditional approach to threaded views. Thunderbird 2.0 provides a pretty decent threaded view of any folder and I’ve never had any issues. This is completely handled using only the emails in that folder and Thunderbird doesn’t rely on you sending emails from Thunderbird in order to handle threaded views. This is pretty smart since in many cases you can send email from an account via different SMTP servers and different programs or web applications.

Here’s the note I sent to GMail support about this issue:

This issue is known, but I wanted to let you know that it is really painful and would be a good thing to fix. The issue is that email I send to a mailing list via the GMail SMTP server or my companies SMTP server do not show up in my GMail inbox ever. The mailing list daemon is sending the email to GMail’s MX server, however, since the email was sent by the account that is receiving the email, it is never put into my inbox. Here’s an example:

1. Open Thunderbird
2. Write an email to dev@struts.apache.org
3. Send the message via SMTP server at newton.inversoft.com
4. Apache’s elmzm daemon sends the email to all the list members including brian@pontarelli.com
5. GMail’s MX server receives the email from Apache’s elmzm daemon addressed to brian@pontarelli.com from dev@struts.apache.org
6. GMail’s MX server drops the message and doesn’t deliver it because it is addressed to the account it is receiving the message for.

This is a huge issue with IMAP support and makes using GMail extremely difficult because I cannot manage threads correctly from Thunderbird since I cannot see my replies or the root message if I started the thread.

Please fix this problem because it makes the entire hosted GMail solution unusable for anyone that uses mailing lists regularly (90% of my mail comes from mailing lists).

If you need more information about the issue or help testing, please feel free to contact me. For now I will have to switch over to another email hosting provider until this is fixed.

I really hope they fix this soon because with the Google hosted business solutions this is going to cause MAJOR issues for businesses that use mailing lists for internal communication.