Not to blow my own party blower... by

I know I say this every year, but Happy Birthday The randomness of tomorrow, today!!

Google App Engine is quite easy to use by

I made a Media Library using Google App Engine, if anyone's interested. It allows you to build up a list of all your various media (DVDs, CDs, video games, etc.), categorise them by type, rate them, and keep track of any Items that you've lent to friends.

Parking Fail by

How on Earth does this happen!?

Hmmm... that's disappointing by

As I've mentioned before, I want an iPhone. Especially since they announced the new one... which is, technically, what the iPhone should have been since it was launched; 3G wasn't exactly new technology back then...

I have a Gmail account to which I have all my mail directed. The iPhone has settings to access Gmail over IMAP so changes on the iPhone are reflected in the Gmail web interface. However, new emails aren't pushed to the iPhone; you still have to tell it to "manually" (it's automatic, but as opposed to the emails being pushed...) check every 30 minutes, or whatever you choose. I also have my own domain, which Gmail is configured to use as the default from address.

The new iPhone software is going to support Microsoft Exchange, and Apple also announce their own version of Exchange for the rest of us called MobileMe. MobileMe, like Exchange, will do push email (as well as push contacts and calendar, but they would be more of a bonus than a necessity) for a price. However, what I wanted to know was would I be able to link it to Gmail (via IMAP) so that it could push my Gmail emails to the iPhone I'm planning to buy at the end of the year and also pass any changes made to those emails by the iPhone (mark as read, for instance) back to the Gmail web interface. And, of course, I'd want to use my own email address.

On Monday, I finally managed to find an appropriate "Contact Us" form on the Apple website (it's much harder than it should be) and asked Apple if these two things would be possible. I've just received the reply (well, a few hours ago, but it was picked up as spam...). So, according to the reply:

Unfortunately it won't be possible to retrieve emails from a 3rd party IMAP account with MobileMe. [...] It will also not be possible to send emails from custom addresses via MobileMe.

Apple Support, via email

It's Firefox 3 Download Day by

Writing about web page http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Firefox 3 should be released about now.

For the next 24 hours, all full downloads (updates do not count) should count towards their world record attempt. So what are you waiting for?

There's this Nigerian prince I know that needs to get some money out of the country... by

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A by

(There's a screenshot on Flickr if you can see the video below.)

It would be nice if Gmail could tell me itself... by

I don't use Thunderbird; I just use the Gmail web interface. However I'd previously installed Thunderbird just to have a look.

So, using IMAP, I have established that my (currently) 20,333 conversations contain 27,620 emails... which is still less than the spam I get.

I restarted about 10 times, but I got there in the end... by

My score's much better this time...

I have more spam than emails... by

Between 1:00am on 14th May 2008 and 3:28pm on 13th June 2008 I had received 68,217 spam conversations* in Gmail:

If I've done the maths correctly (I rounded to the number of days), then that's 1 email conversation* every 1 hour, 38 minutes, and 28 seconds and 1 spam conversation* every 38 seconds.

I'm sure there will be many people that get much more spam that I do, but it's still a lot of spam...

(Coincidentally, since I took the screenshot the spam has risen to 68,303)

UPDATE: Another quick calculation: taking the number of spam over the past 30 days, and extrapolating it over the past 4 years gives about 3 million spam...

UPDATE: The number of spam I get has increased somewhat this year, and I've just found documented evidence that I used to get less spam. I'd forgotten about that one...

---