Notes from a Desi Geek

I have a GMail account which I mainly use for all my non-essential mails.

Few days back, I joined a Yahoo! Group using the GMail account and all the mails from that group started flooding my Inbox. Even though GMail groups mails as conversations, it started becoming difficult for me to identify non Yahoo! Group Mail from Yahoo! Group Mail.

I thought, separating these Group mails should be simple. I went to Settings->Filter and created my filter which would apply right label to all the *incoming* group mails and move them out from Inbox. The keyword here is incoming. There is no way you can apply a filter to mails which are already present in your Inbox! I checked the help section and could not find a way around it.

Now I don’t know about you, but I create filters/rules/labels after I see bulk of emails matching some kind of pattern. I do not envision that I would be receiving particular kind of mails and I should create filter. And in its current form, GMail filters are not so useful for me. What do you think?

JD

Did you ever receive 10 different files to your webmail account (like Yahoo, Hotmail)? Did you crib about how painful it is to download those files one by one?

If yes, then GMail has the answer. Whenever you receive multiple files as attachment, GMail zips the files and allows you to download all the files as a single zip file!

How cool is that? Last I checked, no service provides this feature.

Btw, the link text says ‘Download All Attachments’, I would prefer if it would say ‘Download all attachments as one ZIP file’.

It’s the little things like this which makes using GMail so much fun.
JD

Couple of days back, Anil blogged about how you can speed up your Acrobat Reader.

One of the problem, which I faced earlier with Acrobat reader, was that I could not disable PDF View inside browser. I prefer to download PDF file and then open them separately in Acrobat Reader.

I am sure you would have come across pages which links to PDFs without giving warning, and if you were not careful to look at Status bar before clicking the link, you would suffer a little penalty of your browser getting hanged till Acrobat Reader loads.

In an ideal world, all the pages whould have some kind of indicator that the link you are going to click is not normal link and it’s for PDF file. Sadly, it’s an imperfect world. Fear no more! Get yourself Target Alert Firefox extension. Once installed, Target Alert goes through all the links in page and marks all the PDF links, mailto: links, zip file links with appropriate icons. so that you would never click on that PDF file by mistake again! [If you have ever clicked on mailto links by mistake, same extension does the trick for you!] Great, isn’t it?

This is how your page, with PDF, ZIP, mailto: links, might look once you have Target Alert installed:

Thanks to SlickDeals, I came across a great deal at Musician’s Friend for Accoustic Guitar. [Yes, I am a wanna be guitarist! ] I purchased Guitar from Musician’s Friend site and here is the part of shipping confirmation mail.

1Z1A715V*********** [Hiding for reason I don't know. ;)]

If the tracking number above appears in one of the United Parcel
Service (UPS) formats, click this link and paste in your
tracking number: http://wwwapps.ups.com/etracking/tracking.cgi

UPS formats are: 1Z### ### ## #### ### # or T### #### ###

If your tracking number appears in the FedEx format, click this
link and paste in your tracking number: http://www.fedex.com
The FedEx format is 12 numerals in a row, with no separators. Be
sure to delete the leading zeros when entering your number on
the FedEx website!

Obviously, this is a program generated email. I wonder why they have included so many instructions when the program, which created this email, could easily figure out whether tracking number is from UPS or Fedex and include the right information. Also, just like Google, why not provide direct link to UPS and Fedex website so that person can see tracking results without copy/pasting any of those tracking numbers.

JD

Today morning I read about John receiving spoofed email, which tried to induce him to click on faked Paypal login screen. I wanted to tell him that easy way to verify whether email is from Paypal or not is to check the greeting. If you see ‘Dear Paypal Member’ as greeting, it’s fake. If you see ‘Dear [firstname] [lastname]‘, then it’s genuine.

Surprisingly, I received a very similar mail to my GMail id this afternoon. [Btw, I don't have Paypal account associated with my GMail id.] It’s interesting how GMail handled this mail.

It displayed a warning in red to indicate that email is fake. See below:

If that warning was not enough, GMail removed the link (which was pointing to http://64.119.183.112/billing/verification/paypal/ )from the mail. See the highlighted part at bottom in above screentshot, it should be actually a clickable link.

I think that’s a great idea! Most of the time, phishers display a legimate URL as text and link it to their own site. By taking this step, GMail insured that even if a user ignores the big red warning and copies the link from email, he/she would land to genuine Paypal screen!

This made me curious about how GMail figured out that mail is spoofed. So I went and looked into headers.

X-Gmail-Received: 25ba27ed91116c063538f4ca126d8d9871861f1e
Delivered-To:
Received: by 10.36.58.15 with SMTP id g15cs21285nza;
Wed, 6 Apr 2005 13:24:08 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.54.76.3 with SMTP id y3mr425845wra;
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 13:24:08 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from ns3.worldcall.net.pk (ns3.worldcall.net.pk [203.81.192.10])
by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id 27si350983wrl.2005.04.06.13.24.06;
Wed, 06 Apr 2005 13:24:08 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: softfail (gmail.com: domain of transitioning service@paypal.com does not designate 203.81.192.10 as permitted sender)
Received: from killer (host172-202.worldcall.net.pk [203.81.202.172] (may be forged))
by ns3.worldcall.net.pk (8.12.5+Sun/8.12.5) with ESMTP id j33NqR98002882;
Mon, 4 Apr 2005 05:52:40 +0600 (PKST)
Message-Id: <200504032352.j33NqR98002882@ns3.worldcall.net.pk>

Do you see that Received-SPF header? It’s a new header which can help fight email spoofing.

How it works? pobox.com explains how SPF works.. In short,

1. Domain XYZ.com publishes list of IPs from which it sends out emails.
2. Whenever your email server receives mail domain XYZ.com, it checks the list of IPs for XYZ.com domain, and IP, from where you received mail, doesn’t belong to that list, your email server can mark email with appropriate SPF Header to indicate that email is not from XYZ.com domain. Short and sweet!

GMail interface checks for this SPF header and displays the red warning box, as required. It also removes all the hyperlinks from such mail. I wonder why Outlook (and other Email clients) doesn’t do the same. So John, other than making sure to be fully awake, you can use GMail as your email client!
JD

You must be thinking about what Wetshaving has to do with bug in Firefox?

Allow me to explain.
Today, I came across article on Wetshaving on MSNBC. Everyday morning I ask to God, why do I have to shave? I find shaving very irritating and it gives me ’shave bumps’. This Wetshaving article explains how you can have a smooth shave. When I started reading the article, I thought the article would be just couple of paragraphs but the article is 7 pages long! Would you believe that? So I decided to take print of the article to read at liesure.

I click on File -> Print Preview in Firefox and what do I see? The Print Preview window is smaller than the content and scroll bars are all messed up. Vertical Scroll bar is required but is absent mysteriously. Horizontal scrollbar is ‘incomplete’. See the snapshot of how the Print Preview Window looks like. See the messed up scroll bars?

Then out of curiosity, I decide to change Print mode from Portrait to Landscape, which should ideally lead to increase in number of printable pages, but it didn’t happen. So I clicked on next page button ( with > as image) and I found that number of printable pages have increased but the count is not updated. So you can see text as Page 11 of 7! You can see the snapshot here.

Did you ever imagine that reading about Wetshaving can lead you to Firefox bug? Now let me find a bugzilla URL where I can submit this bug.

JD

With all respect to Mark, I think he is on the wrong track, when he said that Microsoft can’t ship software.

Delivering your platform and other applications to user base of millions is not as simple as checking in your code in your source control system. It needs to be tested for usability, backwards compatibility and if you read Raymond Chen’s blog, you will be aware how gigantic task it is to test system for backwards compatibility and making sure that it works.

Things are comparatively much, much easier when you talk about web applications because by their very nature they don’t need to tested for thousands of hardware/software configurations but merely for 4 or 5 type of browsers. Testing web apps for compatibility is easier and it

• Did you know that lady guy [see comments] named Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ which used to call Web Log earlier?
• Did you know that first banner ad was run by Hotwired in 1994?
• Did you know that movie site imdb.com started as a Usenet site?

Find all these interesting tidbits about Internet on Yahoo Netrospective.

Yahoo Netrospective is a site launched on the occassion of 10th birthday for Yahoo!.

Happy Birthday, dear Yahoo!
Update:Russell points to Yahoo! Birtday Album Photos. Very interesting photos indeed! JD

I guess I am bit late to blog about CrimsonBay. It’s like ‘desi’ iTunes, where you can download hindi songs for 69 cents or 99 cents, depending on how you pay for the song. Btw, I found about the site through an article in Business World. The article (which I can not link to) states that this service aims to target huge number of Indians in US, who doesn’t have an easy way to liste/buy hindi music. Rediff Radio service (which I dislike) is not enough, what is really needed, is iTunes like service where I can buy hindi music legally. So, site such CrimsonBay are most welcome. I have few complaints though.

1. What kind of name ‘CrimsonBay’ is? It is not related to music, it’s not related to India, and it’s not even catchy? Don’t these guys know importance of a good business name? If I were the owner, I would have named my service as desiTunes. The logo of service would look like

Yes, I know the logo and site name very much resembles to some thing else, which is very popular, and I think it would have caused controversy. But why not create controversy and get noticed like a Purple Cow rather than go completely unnoticed.

2. Their site isn’t all that special. It doesn’t scream ‘I am cool, check me out!’. This, coupled with the fact that they have limited collection of songs to start with makes a non starter.

3. They have come up with a really nice idea that if you buy songs using their ‘debit’ account, they will offer song at 69 cents. That’s neat! But they are not publicizing it enough! If I were the CEO, I will create the following banner ad and run through rediff/sulekha. [Btw, wait and watch the animation]

CrimsonBay Guys, I grant you all the rights to use above idea for your campaign!
4. In this age, when blogging is the next medium to get word out about your service, they are literally absent in blogosphere. Why o’ Why? They are missing out BIG TIME on free and very effective method of generating buzz.

I guess that’s enough for now! Crimson Bay guys, if you are reading this, get in touch with me. I think I have few ideas to make you guys do better.
JD

Blogosphere was all praise for the wonderful Google Maps when it was launched in beginning of February.

The dust has settled right now and last week I actually needed driving directions.
Obviously I headed to Google Maps. I gave the Start and End Address. Directions are shown and I start looking for Printer Friendly Page. There is none! There is only a ‘Print’ link which will directly send the page to Printer. I don’t have a chance to preview how the print out is going to look like. Anyway, as a trustful Google user, I gave Print Command. And what does the Print look like?

• The printed page begins with a big map taking 50% of the first page. Now, I don’t really think that including such a big map in print is of any use as you can not really use the map.
• Even worse, the directions are listed from 1 to n without using a table. This makes it very very hard to read directions when you are driving alone. In fact, I will say it’s dangerous!

Compare this to Mapquest. Check the print version for the same driving directions. Notice, how useful it is?

• It has meaningful icons on left which tells me whether I am supposed to make left turn, right turn or exit from the free way.
• Distance is easily readable in the right most column.
• They have that little note section at the end which I find it useful at times.

Only drawback is that they do not highlight the street name like Google Maps does. But still, I think Mapquest offers much better printed driving directions then Google Maps.

Few more things I like about Mapquest:

• Mapquest saves list of addresses you have searched for. This is available via drop down for quick access. It has saved me lot of time.
• It has ‘Avoid Highways’ option while determining driving directions, which can be useful at times.

Google Maps has fantastic web interface and Mapquest has better print version. Can we marry these two somehow?