Security

A friend recently had their Gmail account hacked. They had a strong password, but they admitted they had used the same password for other sites. Luckily, they discovered it quite quickly and it doesn't appear that any harm was done.

It's a good idea to use a separate, strong password for your email account because your email account is the "master key" to all your other online accounts. (most password recovery mechanisms use email) I do sometimes reuse the same password, but only for unimportant things like forums or bug trackers which don't have credit card numbers or any other critical information.

This incident gave me the push to get around to setting up 2 factor verification on my Gmail account, something I've been meaning to do for a while.

It wasn't too painful. I installed the Google Authenticator app on my iPhone so I don't have to use SMS.  I also set up my LastPass account to use the Google Authenticator as well.

Most people can't even manage to use decent passwords, let alone deal with 2 factor authentication. But if you can put up with the small extra hassle, it's probably worth it.

Also on the security front, I recently decided to install anti-virus software on our Mac's. There's still debate on whether this is necessary, but with Apple's growing popularity, they're becoming an increasingly attractive target. I picked the free version of Sophos to start. It's always hard to tell how good anti-virus software really is, but this was easy to install, hasn't had any noticeable affect on performance, and is completely unobtrusive. Of course, it's yet one more piece of software running on your machine, and can't help but slow down startup.

Guava Overview

A good overview of Google's Guava library for Java.

AnOverviewofGuavaDevoxxFRApril2012.pdf - guava-libraries - DevoxxFR 2012 presentation slides

Google Squared

Here's my first Google "Square":

8000m peaks

My initial search for "8000m peaks" only came up with 7 of them. Clicking "Add next 10 items" at the bottom added 6 more, plus some climbers which I had to remove. For some reason it didn't find Cho Oyu. But it was the first suggestion when I clicked on "Add items".

It automatically came up with reasonable columns - Image, Description, First Ascent, Height, and Location.

I couldn't figure out any way to sort them, e.g. by height

Not Your Father's Spreadsheet

Google Spreadsheets has some interesting features like Google Lookup and Auto-Fill.

Drag and Drop Files into Gmail with Firefox

A post by Tim Bray led me to a post by Mrgan whose main complaint is that you can't drag and drop files onto Gmail attachments.

I agree this is a shortcoming. But if you use Firefox you can fix it with the dragdropupload add-on.

And the advantage is that this add-on works with any web site/app, not just Gmail. Whereas, if one desktop app implemented drag and drop, that wouldn't help any other desktop app.

Mrgan's other main comment is that off-line already works with desktop mail apps. That's true, but I still think Gmail's new offline mode is better - you can use it on multiple machines, and it has a flaky connection mode. And unlike POP (IMAP is better), it keeps your email on the server so you don't have to worry about backing it up.

Even Tim Bray seems to think that email is better as a desktop app. Maybe that's because he uses a single machine (a laptop) for work, home, and travelling. For me, using multiple computers (and operating systems), I think Gmail is a lot better. I think I'd prefer it even if I used a single computer, but the advantage might not be as clear.

And, unlike Tim, I do think that Gmail's "conversations" are a big improvement. They take a little getting used to, so anyone who doesn't use Gmail won't necessarily see the advantage. But I find I really miss Gmail's conversations when I use other email apps.

Another thing I think Gmail should be applauded for is that it doesn't add any "junk" to my messages. I think it's pretty ugly when I get professional business communications with Microsoft or Yahoo ads (spam!) on the end of their emails.

Google Desktop versus Mac Spotlight versus Vista

One thing that frustrated me when I started using Google Desktop Search was that I would type my search, it would correctly identify and highlight the top result, but when I hit Enter it would open my browser and show me the search results there (instead of just running/opening the top result). Eventually I discovered you could change this in the Preferences "Launch Programs by Default" (instead of "Search by Default").

I guess I should mention that I use Desktop Search as much or more to launch programs rather than find files. My Windows Start menu has so many programs on it that it is a hassle to use.

Now I have the same hassle on my Mac. Spotlight finds the right result, but when I hit Enter it brings up a search window instead of running the top result. Unfortunately, so far I have not found a setting to change this. It hasn't been too annoying yet because I don't have as much software installed on my Mac so I don't need to use it as much.

As much as I like to dislike Microsoft, they appear to have got this right in Vista. The new search box defaults to running the top result when you hit Enter.

I wonder how Beagle on Linux works in this respect?

PS. I normally have my Google Desktop set to show on my Windows task bar, but today it was missing. I thought it must have crashed or something so I rebooted. But still no search box. I checked whether it was still set to run on startup but that looked ok. When I tried running it manually from the Start menu it displayed in "pop up" mode, but came up so fast it must have already been running. When I checked my preferences I found it was set to not show up. I'm pretty sure I never changed this, so I'm not sure what happened. Maybe some automatic update turned this off?