Once again, I’ve decided to switch email clients; this time from The Bat to Gmail, or more specifically, to Google Apps. After some recent issues with The Bat (mostly relating to a recent update), I decided to make another go at switching to Gmail; but this time trying the Google Apps version.

After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.

The only downside is the expense - all in all, it cost $78.95 to go through this process. This was spent on two tools that made the process possible:

• Aid4Mail - A key application used for converting the various mail-storage file formats.
• gMOVE - Used for importing PST files into Gmail.

The process itself was simple, once I had found the software I needed, which took some doing. Here’s an overview, and some notes if you happen to try something like this (this assumes that you have Outlook installed).

• Export messages to mailbox format. (If you are moving from Thunderbird this isn’t necessary as it already is stored in that format.)
• Use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox files to PSTs
• Load PSTs into Outlook and cleanup as necessary (remove duplicates, cleanup directory structure)
• Launch gMOVE and use it to import the messages from Outlook to Gmail

There are a couple major differences in this attempt, compared to the last. A few things annoyed me about the way things worked after the last time, not the least of which is that by using Gmail Loader you loose all meaningful timestamps. So you don’t know when a message was sent or received.

gMOVE eliminated that problem. It sends the messages to a special POP3 server, and automatically configures your Gmail account to use it. That way, they can control the timestamps, and set them to what they originally were ¹.

So after all is said and done; I think I’m happy with this system; much better than last time. I simply can’t justify using a desktop based email client anymore. It just leaves you too out of touch.

1). There is a security issue here, so I wouldn’t do this with anything containing sensitive information.

Well, it was a while back that I said I would start writing again - that just never quite happened.

Much interesting has happened in these months, a few co-workers left the company, a few new faces came in; there was also a promotion and a number of new projects. Oh, and there’s a new relationship, and a fair bit of time now going to my old profession and now hobby of photography. Between all of these, spare time isn’t something I have much of - if any.

With all this in mind, many people would give up and walk away - but I see this as being important enough to fight for. It’s a matter of priorities and time management. For a developer, being active in the community is important; it’s easy to be left behind once you find yourself outside the loop. So, I’ll simply have to make community involvement a higher priority than it’s been. As for time management though, the story isn’t so simple.

I’ve been using Tasks (which I highly recommend) for awhile now to keep track of what I’m working on, and for that it is quite effective. For time management though, I need to reevaluate how I work completely; find a method that allows me to be as productive as possible. I’ve seen a number of articles, guides, and books on the topic, so I believe I’ve a fair bit of reading in front of me. As I go through this process, I’ll write about my findings, and share any solutions I find.

If anybody has advice on how to make time for everything, I would certainly like to hear it. Hopefully, this time when I say this blog is coming back to life, it actually will.

Later this week I’ll start the process of closing my start-up, aDeVIX Software. After months of planning and development, the decision has finally been made to call it a day. It was a great idea, but time and money conspired against us, with great effect.

We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.

We planned the design, the marketing, the budget (even allowing for snacks & drinks), covered every detail, but when you don’t have the time to write code, or the money to pay people to write it for you; no amount of planning will help. We then delayed, then came up with smaller, simpler products, then scrapped all that and went back to the original idea.

Months of work, thousands of dollars in various expenses, and not a single dime as income; much effort, no reward. Many thousand lines of code, a few websites, countless meetings, and enough notes to account for the clearing of a small forest; but no money, no assets of value, nothing. It’s a bit painful to think about all the effort, and see that it was all for not.

It’s certainly possible to make an ISV work, it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Can you afford the expenses? Do you have the time? Will you be able to support the product yourself until it brings in enough money to hire people?

In some ways though, I’m happy that this is done, as it now leaves me free of any potential conflict of interest when it comes to pursuing future opportunities.

Well, it was about a month ago that I wrote commenting on being sick, and letting you all know that I would be getting back to my normal writing schedule. That didn’t happen. Work happened.

All my time since then has been spent managing between 2 and 5 developers, and trying to get a project that would end up weighing in at almost 50,000 lines of code completed and to production. Seeing as we started without specs, and made the deadline, I’m quite happy about how it went. I learned some interesting things on this project, if I can find a way to write about it without breaking my confidentiality agreement; you may see more about it soon.

There are more projects, with similar near-impossible deadlines ahead, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep my head a bit more above the water.

About six months ago, I predicted the end of the Valleyschwag project, that prediction recently came to pass. The Valleyscwag team recently announced the last ‘issue’ and the end of the schwag express. I knew it was coming, looks like I called it a bit too soon.

The model they had was interesting idea, just not one that could scale. Perhaps with a more restrictive subscription system, maybe if they had based it on invitations instead of being completely open, they could have slowed the growth enough. Perhaps, it was an idea that just would have never worked.

Either way, what’s over is over. The final issue has already sold out, so the party is officially over.

A bit over a month ago, I came down with a nasty cold and things have been slipping since then. It’s taken me quite some to recover. This site, a number of personal projects and just about everything else has been neglected. Today is the first day in weeks I’ve been up to doing anything after work. I’ve finally started catching up on all I’ve missed.

Hopefully there will be more signs of life here in the coming days, as I dig out of the pile of thousands of unread items in my RSS reader. Once I dig through that pile, there are a couple articles I’ve planned that I believe will be of interest.

The latest and greatest version of WordPress (the software that powers this site) has been released. This release looks to be mainly small fixes; nothing earth shattering this time around. As always, painless upgrade, and all seems to be working well.

As I didn’t see a package for just the changed files, I went ahead and zipped them up. These are just the changed files from 2.1, so this should make the upgrade process much quicker if you’ve already got 2.1 up and running.

Back in March, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook as a result of being annoyed with using two different clients (work & home)*. So today, I’m running The Bat again, thanks to Gmail.

Moving to Gmail

I had been thinking about moving to Gmail for awhile, the other day I decided to bite the bullet and do it. There was some pain involved, but not as bad as I expected. The process goes something like this:

1. Setup any custom From address, personally, I had 5. Now, here’s a word of warning: pay close attention to the note on that page, I didn’t, and it bit me quite hard, here’s why.
2. Setup Filters to Label your email based on the To address, this way you can see what account a message was sent to.
3. Forward your existing email account to <your_name>@gmail.com.
4. Convert/Export your email to the mbox format (some clients such as Thunderbird support this natively), for some clients, you may need the help of something like Aid4Mail (this is what I used, works great).
5. Finally, use Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader to read the mbox files you just created, and shoot them to your Gmail account. One note on this, it sends one email every two seconds, assuming no errors, so if you have several thousand emails, this is a slow process.

Once you’ve completed those 5 steps, you’re done.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind, if you don’t want people to see your Gmail address via that custom From address, well, you’re out of luck. Google sends a Sender header with your Gmail address. This results in a number of issues, but the most painful for me was in Outlook displaying something like this:

“From <you>@gmail.com on behalf of <you>@example.com”

As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the most unprofessional thing a business email could display. It reeks of uncaring attitudes and oozes the impression of fraud. I use my email for business, so that isn’t an option.

Thankfully, I noticed this before it caused too much embarrassment, but it’s a death-nail for any user that needs mobile business email.

Moving to The Bat!

Thankfully I was only using Gmail full-time for around a day, so I don’t have to fight the battle of getting my email back from Google**. Thanks to the import features of The Bat, I moved my 15,000 or so emails over from Outlook 2007 in less than an hour. All told I spent around 50 hours importing email, setting up filters and cleaning up on Gmail; for The Bat!, that same task took less than three hours, and that includes setting up several fairly complex filters.

After a year using Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003, then one whole day with Gmail as my primary mail client, I’m glad to be back with The Bat!. The lag that so annoyed me with Outlook is finally gone. Everything it does is fast.

I wanted a real web-based solution, and the best candidate failed. Now I’m back to a desktop client, but one that offers better performance and more flexibility than Outlook can provide.

* Truth be told, I believe I was just frustrated with the lack of flexibility that Outlook has compared to The Bat!, and since I couldn’t avoid Outlook, I axed The Bat.

** Has anyone noticed that Gmail has no easy or even reasonable way to get your email out of the system? Locking users in seems odd for a company that promises to not be evil.

After being reminded of Alex King’s excellent Tasks task management system by a Download Squad article, I decided it was high time to give it a try. I had seen the software before, but never really evaluated it to see if it would be of any real use to me. This time, I gave it a more thorough look.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading in recent weeks about time and task management; and thus I’m trying to build a better process than what I use now. Seeing as my current method revolves around hoping to remember things, it doesn’t work so well.

After playing with the demo for a few minutes, I was quite impressed. I’ve used (or tested) many task management and related systems; Tasks seems to have gotten the model right. It’s easy to use, well designed, and uses a model that is flexible enough that you can apply just about any style you like.

One of the things I find so interesting is that this is web-based software, though is intended only for a single user. While this is certainly not the only application marketed this way, it still intrigues me. Traditionally, one would think that there would be little or no market for single user web-based applications that users install on their own servers. In reality though, this makes a lot of sense.

There are so many people that now have their own web site(s), running on real hosting accounts, that there would be a sizable market for personal software, made accessible anywhere thanks to being web-based. This is a great idea, and one of the factors that really made me like this software.

Once I was done with the demo, I started going over the requirements (basically PHP/MySQL), looking at the pricing and all the other details. With a price of US$29.95, it didn’t take long for me to decide. I was sold.

Installation was quick and painless (though not as quick as the famous WordPress install), within a few minutes I had Tasks up and running. Give or take a minor bug on preferences*, it all works very well. It works quite well out of the box, once the install process in completed, you don’t need to change anything else to be up and running.

The UI is responsive and well laid out; thanks to AJAX and plenty of tool-tips it’s a breeze to use. If you are looking for a better way to keep track of things, or working towards a better way to manage your time, it’s worth giving this a look. I think you might like it.

Update: After speaking with Alex about that ‘bug’ - it turned out to be Firefox being overly helpful with its Auto-Fill feature. There are a couple ideas floating around to work-around this, so even though it’s not a bug in Tasks, Alex is working towards eliminating the problem.

Well, WordPress 2.0.7 has been released, and I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1 Beta 2.

I was excepting a rather painful upgrade; not so much because it is a beta, but the rather large number of changes. After a couple simple tweaks to my custom theme, within 10 minutes it was up and running perfectly. Knowing the effort and quality the WordPress team puts out, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

So far it looks all is working quite well. If you see anything wrong, or just seems odd, please leave a comment so I can look into it.

I’ll be posting a mini-review of WordPress 2.1 here in a couple days.