Archive for December, 2009

When Did Thunderbird’s Account Setup Become a Pile of Poo?

It really is a sad day. I used to think of the main Mozilla projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, the pinnacle of open source. I’ve always recommended Thunderbird as a mail client to those who prefer not to use the web client available from their provider. I was extremely disappointed today when I had to help someone setup an email account on a server that didn’t use their domain name as part of the hostname of the mail server. I see what they are trying to do (and indeed, it made setting up my email account using mail.whatan00b.com as the server incredibly simple), but if one has to not use fairly predictable settings, said one is hosed.

The below screenshot is of the server info as detected by Thunderbird when I put my email address in:

Note that the outgoing mail server is a drop-down.. populated from.. where, exactly? Now, I realize that you can just go ahead and create the account and go back, but one can’t create the account without “re-testing” (validating) the config. So.. it has to be correct before creating it, but yet it won’t let me correct it. Yup, it’s that awesome.

Next, changing the protocol in the drop-down didn’t change the port number. When Thunderbird didn’t find the correct mail server (which is going to be the case almost every time when one’s email is hosted in a shared, hosted environment), Thunderbird automatically populated the protocol with POP. Not a horrible thing, but changing the port when changing the protocol seems like a pretty obvious thing to do in order to avoid frustration with users (and indeed would have helped with some frustration for us tonight).

The last frustration that we ran into was that when selecting the “Manual Setup” option, things weren’t quite so.. er.. manual. It was more like some automatic settings that couldn’t be overridden after clicking the manual frustration button. Since it defaulted to POP when it couldn’t figure out the server settings, simply hitting the manual setup button created a POP account.. Not so bad if you could easily switch the protocol. Of course, not so. To get that corrected, one has to remove the account, create a new account, type in your name and login info, let it try to figure out the settings for you, manually edit the settings to change the protocol, and create the account by hitting the “manual setup” button (intuitive, eh?). Then, you can finally edit the server name to put in the correct info. Ugh.

At the end of it all, I would still recommend Thunderbird to others from a usability perspective, but now with the disclaimer that it’s nasty to setup the first time if you don’t use a mail.domain.com or similar server. I just really wish that we didn’t have to sacrifice power and easy customizations for alleged ease of use.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Dec 29th, 2009

Don’t Neuter Your Software If You Can’t At Least Be Professional About It..

Since I was snowed in on Christmas, I got a bit of time to play around with my little server here at home. I got it this fall and installed VMware ESXi on it to do a bit of experimenting on. Today, I was getting a bit of cabin fever, so I started playing around with some of the features that I saw existed in vSphere 4, but never got a chance to try out. I noticed an option to hot-add and hot-remove virtual CPUs to guests which sounded like a good deal of fun on this wintry day. Nope, apparently the option exists for me, but I can’t actually save it without a proper license. They could have at least “grayed” the option out so I couldn’t click on it.. Or, at the very least, VMware could have at least proof-read the error message at least once:

Nice work, VMware. Some classic software developer English, right there.. Perhaps Ralph from the Simpsons wrote this dialog?

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Dec 25th, 2009

BlackBerry = Single Point of Failure?

RIM/BlackBerry is starting to make me angry. We’re now in the midst of the second multi-hour outage in a week. Last week we lost (BIS) email in North America. In fact, it was for most of the morning and spilled into the afternoon in my timezone. Today, apparently mail hasn’t been delivered for some time and I only noticed when my email seemed suspiciously quiet. This time, however, it’s everything. Phone calls and text messages seem to go in and out with no problem, but anything using the BlackBerry data services seem to be hosed.

Now, I understand that large systems like the BlackBerry Internet and Enterprise Services are complicated and eventually go down. Really, I do get it. What goes up must come down. However, the whole thing is starting to get frustrating to me and I’m ready to give up.

First, there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with outages. For me, a majority of the frustration could be alleviated with a simple notification or a way to know that something is up. During these outages, there was nothing on BlackBerry or my wireless carrier’s websites, no automated text messages, no nothing. I simply had to realize that email was quieter than normal and check out crackberry.com (an unofficial, yet useful site). Not exactly confidence-instilling. After the incident we got a bit of a “my bad” (I still have yet to find the official statement) from RIM, but just crickets to the public during the outage. At least when Gmail had a system-wide outage earlier this year they were up-front about the issues.

Second, the outages happened all over North America. Yes, multiple several-hour-long outages affecting an entire continent within a week. The sad part is, we come to expect it. Something needs to be done. I can understand that with an IT system this large there will likely always be issues, but something needs to be done to segment pieces from one another. A single issue may cause a system-wide outage occasionally, but not three times in two months is unacceptable.

These outages, of course, come along with having a centralized message delivery system like the BIS/BES. I’m ready to give up and now am on the brink of going on the market for a non-BlackBerry smartphone that will connect directly to my mail servers (the others are mocking us..). It’s a sad day that it’s come to this. I really do have quite a love-hate relationship with my BlackBerry (Tour). It’s a solid phone, a great interface, and great management features. I just can’t constantly think of it as a single point of failure that I have no way of knowing whether or not it works except by sending stupid test emails.

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Filed under News : Comments (2) : Dec 23rd, 2009

So Simple, A Caveman Could Run Your Next Data Center?

I really enjoy reading about redesigns in data centers and this one at Iron Mountain certainly is no exception. According to the report, the company is working on an experimental data center approximately 22 stories underground in a cave. The data center uses its massive limestone exterior as a kind of heat sink, literally allowing the rock walls around it absorb the heat. It also can feed off an underground lake as liquid cooling for the air conditioners when necessary.

The experiment is a clever, yet incredibly simple idea. It’s about as far away from Google’s alleged experiments with data centers on the ocean that we read about last year as one can get. Feeding off the rock walls around it for cooling, these certainly seem a bit more sturdy and safer to me than a floating data center, but they would definitely be inconvenient to get to (though, I suppose having to hop on a boat or helicopter would be fairly inconvenient as well :) ).

There are plenty of other areas and environments where we can feed off the environment for keeping data centers cool. For instance, in the area where I live we have pretty cold winters. If we would simply pull in cool air from outside, it could cut down on unnecessary resource consumption for cooling quite a bit. Of course, in the winter we have to watch that the humidity doesn’t drop too far, but it would certainly help.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Dec 15th, 2009

Want Faster Browsing? Google FTW!

Well, Google is at it again. I am now relying on yet another set of Google products..

This week was a big week for non-Windows users waiting for the Chrome browser. Earlier this week they released the beta of Chrome for Linux and Mac. I actually held out a bit on using many of the pre-release version of Chrome on Linux/Mac, mostly because I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands, but also because I didn’t realize just how much faster it really was than the browsers I’d been using. But, it wasn’t just Chrome that has sped up my browsing experience this week either.

Last week Google announced the general availability of its new public DNS service, touting it  as a speed booster(?). DNS typically isn’t something that we give a ton of thought to when chasing after faster browsing speeds, but I was pleasantly surprised by a bit snappier browsing experience. Of course, my download speeds really aren’t any faster, but the initial connection to my favorite websites (and non-favorite I suppose..) has sped up a bit. Just how much faster did this new DNS service make my little network go? Well, I really don’t have any numbers. If you haven’t tried it, it’s definitely worth a shot.

All’s not entirely well in my new Google world since Chrome is still in beta. I have to close the browser on occasion because things start acting up and some of my saved passwords are acting a bit weird, but overall the experience has been great. I still have to rely on a combination of Firefox and Safari for things that Chrome is buggy at (or can’t do like my Zimbra admin :( ), but that’s to be expected with a beta.

If you are running a Mac or Linux machine as a desktop, I’d encourage you to check out the new Chrome beta. I guess even more of my data are now belong to Google..

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (0) : Dec 10th, 2009

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