Monthly Archives: October 2006

Computers/Technology, PocketPC, Psion

Redesign the Psion 5mx

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Mobility Guru recently posted an article proposing producing a redesign of the Psion 5mx. For much the same reasons as I discussed a couple of months ago they like the small form factor, however they then list the OS, EPOC as a flaw and propose that a new Psion 5mx should use Windows Mobile, or even Windows XP instead!

The fact is that my Psion 5mx running EPOC is still the most stable computer I own, and compared to the number of times I have to reset my Windows Mobile PDA over the average day, I wouldn’t be keen on trading in the Psion for a Windows Mobile replacement. Give me a Psion 5mx running EPOC, Symbian, with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and I’ll be happy…

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

Taming the Mailbox

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Like most people who have been on the net for a while, I get a lot of e-mail, the majority of it either junk, newsletters or spam. In amongst that are usually a few important e-mails that I need to deal with or respond to, like e-mails from friends, from Church organisations and so on. The problem of course is that quite often the important mails get lost amongst the piles and piles of other stuff that comes in.

For a long while I’ve had a quite complicated folder structure set up, and a vast selection of e-mail rules set up in Apple Mail to try and pre-sort the incoming e-mail and fish out anything important. Whilst it gets some of the important mail, at other times it totally misses things and they get mixed up in the pile, there is also the problem that mails sometimes come under two headings, but can only physically go to one location – leaving me having to decide where they need to go. However last week as a result of a mistake that messed up the whole mail database, and a suggestion as to how to do things differently, I’ve totally changed around the way I handle my mail.

The change goes back to dealing with a problem with spam. I went through a period a couple of weeks ago where I was getting a lot of apparent e-mail bounces. A closer look at the bounce messages revealed that one of my domains was being used by a spammer, to generate random return address on their latest mass mailing, so they were falling through the various redirection’s I have set up and dropping into my account as the default address. Not surprisingly this was getting decidedly annoying, so I adjusted the mail rules on the mail server and put anything that wasn’t an actual address into a separate mailbox. Whilst this solved the problem, I needed a way to see what was going on, so I tried to set up a second mailbox for this mail separate from my usual mail. To cut a long story short, in doing this I managed to totally scramble my mail database, complete with an archive of over 20,000 e-mails going back a good many years. Having said that, it wasn’t a total disaster, just a bit of a pain, as all I had to do was to backup the existing mail database, clear down the existing mail configuration and rebuild the database from the backup. At the same time I also picked up a copy of Mail Steward a well regarded tool that integrates in with Apple Mail to provide a useful archive of mail. I used this to take all the older mail, cutting down the number of messages I was keeping in the main mail database to just those received since January.

Unfortunately, one of the key things that I couldn’t rescue were all the multitude of mail rules that I was using to pre-sort the mail. As a result, I thought I’d take a look at whether there were any alternatives to my folders. Coincidentally, the Hawk Wings blog, that particularly focuses on Apple Mail had just posted an article referring to a great guide called ‘Get Control of Your Inbox’ which suggest just such an alternative, and then explored how to set it all up in a good level of detail.

The basic principle of the plan makes use of a clever feature of Apple Mail, the smart folder – for those of you with iTunes it is exactly the same concept as the smart playlist. Effectively, rather than physically move mail around, each smart folder is defined by a set of rules, and then Apple Mail uses the Spotlight engine to dynamically maintain the contents of the folders. The guide advises using smart folders to group your e-mails together – the advantage being that this gets over the difficult to classify mail issue I mentioned earlier, as the mail will just appear in more than one smart folder, as long as it meets the criteria. The physical folder pattern is quite different. The guide suggests using some of the principles of GTD, so there is one single archive folder, and then a set of active folders that contain only the messages that require some action. The basic idea is that you process the entire contents of your inbox into one of these folders – straight to the archive if it is irrelevant, or into various folders dependant on how quickly you can deal with the mail. For example whether it requires immediate action, is waiting on some other action by someone else, or whatever. Once a particular mail has been dealt with in one of these action folders, it is again sent to the archive. What this gives you are a set of physical mail folders containing only those e-mails that require action, everything else is in the archive. However thanks to the smart folders, I’ve still got the same groupings I had before.

Another key aspect of the plan is the need to process all the e-mail in the inbox quickly, so it suggests Mail Act-On a little tool that uses the mail rules engine to construct custom processing hooked up to key presses, so for example I could define a rule to send the selected mail messages to the archive just by pressing ctrl-A. Alongside this they also recommend Mail Tags, another plug-in from the same stable as Mail Act-On that amongst other things provides keyword tagging for e-mails. This for example would allow me to tag Church related e-mails in terms of whether they are related to a particular committee, the choir, or something more general.

Setting up the two plug-ins was relatively straightforward. I ran into a couple of hiccups, when for some reason Mail Act-On would only process some steps of my multi-step rules, but a bit of tweaking with the design of rules, and the choice of keyword tags sorted that out. Since the tags are able to be included in smart folder rules, the new keyword tags that I am using for Church e-mails have also given me a good deal more control over how Church e-mails are sorted, enabling me to keep the e-mails related to various committees separate easily. Mail Act-On allows me to quickly process the contents of my inbox, a lot better than my previous complex set of rules. It takes barely a few seconds for me to make the initial decision as to how to tag and file the incoming e-mails, and get them out of the inbox, giving the biggest advantage – that for once I actually have an empty inbox. Once I’ve processed the contents of the box, I can then go the various action folders and deal with those e-mails that need to be dealt with, without being distracted by the piles of junk.

If you continually find yourself crumbling under a pile of e-mails, even if you don’t use Apple Mail the techniques can be used in other mail clients to try and organise your own inbox in a similar manner.

Picture youve got mail, originally uploaded by Peace Cuh.

Church, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Sock Puppets, Trolls, and Secretly Blowing Your Own Trumpet

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Anyone who has been involved in any sort of online community will be aware of the problems of sock puppets and trolls – accounts that are set up to make anonymous comments, and which take advantage of the anonymity offered by online communities either for some sort of gain, or more often than not to cause trouble. Indeed one of the topics of conversation in the recent UK Channel9 video was trying to deal with precisely that problem on the Channel9 site.

However, there has been a lot of talk on Christian sites over the past couple of days over the news that the same problem has occurred on the Christian site Ship of Fools. Among other things the site includes a Mystery Worshipper feature, where people can review Church services which they attended. Suspicion has fallen on to two glowing reviews by the same person, one for Westminster Abbey commented on the exceptional singing of the priest taking the service, the other for St Marks in Reading commented on the fantastic quality of the preaching. Suspicion was aroused when a parishioner at St Marks e-mailed the site to complain that the review was a fake because of the flattering compliments it paid to the preacher. After some investigation it was found that the self same priest whose preaching had been complimented, Fr David Peters, had also reproduced the Westminster Abbey review in the St Marks Parish Magazine claiming to be the anonymous priest whose singing was complimented.

Initially Fr Peters, who in addition to officiating monthly at Westminster Abbey also travels the world to lead services at major Anglo-Catholic shrines, denied that he had posted the reviews, although with mounting evidence he has now apologised to both his parish, and the Archdeacon and Bishop. On top of that, the story is even now flying around the blogsphere, even being picked up by some of the national media. Another example of bad publicity going further than good? Perhaps. But certainly a salutary lesson in trying to anonymously blow your own trumpet – especially over the quality of your sermons…

As an aside, a little final note. St Marks in Reading is one of the local Churches that has passed resolutions A, B and C, and so is under the pastoral care of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet rather than Oxford. Indeed I knew that they were an Ebbsfleet parish already because when they hosted a Rockmass a few years back the Youth Group voted not to attend in protest at the fact that they wouldn’t accept women priests. However it seems that in disciplinary situations like this, responsibilities pass back to the Oxford Diocese. Probably a rather difficult situation if the local Archdeacon is a woman as it is in other parts of the Diocese.

Movies & TV

Winter is Coming

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So we know that winter is coming, because the new series of Strictly Come Dancing has kicked off on BBC1, so once again we’ll be watching every week until Christmas, passing comment on the skills of a bunch of celebrities – all of whom dance a lot better than we ever could! I’ll get onto that in a moment, but first we also had the launch of the new Robin Hood, something that prior to the success of Doctor Who on a Saturday night I doubt would have been produced.

In terms of TV versions, this new Robin Hood has a lot to live up to. The last major British TV adaptation was twenty years ago, the much loved Robin of Sherwood, and I suspect that largely because of the influence of that Richard Carpenter version nobody has tried again. In terms of the new version, we are very much back with the more swashbuckling character of other versions, without any of the mystical and pagan aspects that can be found in Robin of Sherwood, and even in subsequent movie adaptations such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. In this version, the BBC have opted for the nobleman version of the legend, with Robin of Locksley, Earl of Huntingdon, and his manservant Much returning from the crusades to discover that things are not what they left behind. The old Sheriff of Nottingham has been ousted, and the new Sheriff and his men are ruling with an iron fist. Robin initially tries to use his position to change things, but is soon forced into a corner by the new Sheriff where he has to decide whether to allow things to continue, or intervene and become an outlaw.

As an episode it was a pretty enjoyable romp through the legend. As has become customary the Sheriff is suitably larger than life, in the form of Keith Allen, with Robin being played by relative unknown Jonas Armstrong. The character of Robin is definitely more of the cheeky lad mould than some previous interpretations, however the feisty Marian played by Lucy Griffiths is more than his match, indeed saving Robin’s life at the climax of the first episode. The main annoyances during the programme were the presentation. Many of the scene changes during the episode were captioned with the name of the location – fine, but do we really need the cheesy arrow noise as they appear? Also the number of times they used slow motion running was truly annoying, and again, pretty cheesy. Hopefully as the series goes on we’ll loose some of those gimmicks, as to some extent it would make it a much more watch-able programme.

Strictly Come Dancing was entertaining as ever, and amazingly we managed to successfully predict the first exit. The format has changed somewhat this year, with another increase in the number of celebrities resulting in only half the field being up for the chop every week – also perhaps a response to the majority of the female celebrities being knocked out early on last year. As before there are a few surprises amongst the celebrities, and definitely some with untapped dance potential, and again the general standard has increased. We’ll wait and see who starts to shine as the weeks progress.