Business website and personal email with Network Solutions

This is a guest post by David Jackson from TotalMarketing.com.

Starting a website for your business can be a tricky process. However, if you decide to work through a professional website hosting company such as Network Solutions, the process can become a lot more simple, and your website will look all the more professional. You will be able to purchase a legitimate domain name upon which to build your site, and from there you can create just about any type of website you want to, with all of the features that you deem necessary or helpful. One thing that you may want to consider among these features is setting up a personalized email account that coincides with your business and its new website.

What this means is that rather than trying to run a business online and using your private email account (for example, myemail@gmail.com), you will become the owner of an email account that coincides directly with your business (something like myemail@mybusiness.com, for example). This gains you instant credibility in the eyes of your website’s visitors and those you do business with, as it simply provides you with a more professional image, and also helps to separate your private life from your business life. With an email account that exactly matches your business site’s domain name, you will simply be taken more seriously, and you will have a separate email account for all of your business concerns.

You can also feel good about your business email account as a reliable and hassle-free management system for your business-related emails. To begin with, your account format will be easy to manage. Additionally, however, you can set up the highest levels of virus and spam protection, meaning that your account will remain free of the annoyances of spammers or hackers. You will not receive emails that you won’t need, or that aren’t directly connected to your business dealings.

Securing an email address that matches your business domain is just one of the many perks offered by professional web hosting companies when it comes to setting up a site for your small business. With just a little work and a few small fees, you will be able to set up a site that is both professional and interactive, allowing you to run a thorough and legitimate business online. In the end, the benefits you pay for are up to you, but it is beyond a doubt that a professional web hosting company can help you to build a site you and your business can be proud of.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 impressions

I managed to put my hands on to a Galaxy Tab 10.1 last week and I was happy to try it out. Thanks for the device for Slava.

After the package arrived, I removed the Amazon wrapping, and a nice box unveiled itself:



This is a 32GB Wi-fi only version, with 1280x800 TFT touch screen, Dual-core 2 x 1GHz CPU as I learned it after turning the box upside down.

I removed the serial numbers and other identifying numbers from the photo. I was too lazy, so I did it in Lightroom, these are the visible smudges at the side of the box. I was also lazy on taking the photos: I did not have my lights with me when I made the shots, and the indoor lighting was just enough for these. The built-in flash would have been even more lame, so after taking some test shots, I quickly abandoned it. Nevertheless I hope these photos and my experience will be useful for some.



The device is pretty nice, it smiled to me right after opening the box:



The box contained the charger with a US plug, the Samsung standard earphones (similar ones were given to the Galaxy S and Nexus S and the old Galaxy Tab), a small brochure about the device and the cable. This is not a micro-USB cable as it is usual among the phones. Samsung had its own style.





The device itself is really sleek. Very thin, and just simply beautiful. It is easy to hold in hand and not too heavy to carry around.



The USB cable connects at the bottom of the device. It charges over USB, unlike the Motorola Xoom.



The volume buttons and the power switch is at the other side. If you hold the tab in landscape mode, then it is at the top left, if you hold it in portrait mode, it is on the top right. This is also some kind of Samsung standard, Nexus S and Galaxy S also suffers from it. Can anyone explain the logic behind it? I think that the on/off switch belongs to the narrower side of the tablet/phone and while HTC, Apple and even Nokia seems to understand this, Samsung seems to deliberately go against it.



The earphone jack is located at the top, close to the front-facing camera:



The back of the device is nice and smooth. The front and the back camera is located at the top in landscape mode, which is better if you prefer taking photos and video-chatting in landscape. Note, that the iPad has the front-facing camera at the narrower side, which is good for portrait-video chat, but in landscape mode it is strange. Just imagine videochatting with someone who always look left or right of you. Interestingly Apple promotes the iPad with a landscape videochat in their iPad landing page (4th picture). I have no clear opinion on which one is better, probably putting the cameras to the longer side makes it less off the center, so the videochat does not seem that unnatural then.






After unpacking, I started using the device. My first impression was that the screen quality became much better over the 7" Galaxy Tab, even the automatic brightness seemed to be pretty usable. It is also better than the Motorola Xoom, of which I had a washed-out feeling when I compared them directly. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is also lighter and thinner than the Xoom: 565g vs. 708g and 8.6mm vs. 12.9mm.

I was satisfied with the battery life, I only needed to charge the device in roughly every 3 days.

I was slightly worried about the build quality, though. I did have it only for a week and managed to make a scratch at the edge and I felt that it is too thin to be durable.

I don't want to introduce the Android 3 Honeycomb OS, the UI basically the same as other devices which recently hit the market, Samsung did not do too much customization there. After a few hours of usage, the browser seemed to be pretty fast, the operating system seemed snappy, the gaming experience was good, the Market app looked really nice, Gmail was like a charm and the overall usability of this device was more than satisfactory. Oh, well, if I set up my favorite live wallpaper, the home screen started to slow down significantly, but, well, this wallpaper is not designed for the 1280x800 resolution I assume.

Overall I really liked that device and I recommend it. Personally I always carry my laptop around, so another device would not make sense in this large form factor. A 7" or a 8.9" version would be much better for my taste, so I'm looking forward to try out those when they come out!

Run Multiple Google Chromes with different profiles on a Mac

UPDATE: Google Chrome Beta (starting from v16) now supports multiple profiles. It allows almost the same thing that this article describes below. See the announcement about it in the Google Chrome blog.

If you have multiple accounts in different sites (GMail, Picasaweb, etc) and ever wondered how you can be logged in into both in your favourite Google Chrome browser, then I have a nice solution for you.

Of course you can use the Incognito mode to enter the credentials of a second account, but it is not preserved accross sessions. After a while providing the credentials over and over becomes boring.

I've read a little on how to run multiple Google Chrome instances on a Mac and found this wiki. I used it for myself and shared the link. While this is a good starting point, my friends started to complain that things did not work as they expected, so I decided to write my own tutorial on how to run multiple Google Chrome instances on one Mac:

Step 0: Install Google Chrome

I guess you already have Google Chrome installed. If not, install it from here. From now I will assume that it is in your /Applications folder.

Step 1: Create a shell script to launch a custom Chrome instance

Copy the following text into a file and name it as /usr/local/bin/custom_chrome.sh (or download it from here):

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 profile_name"
  exit 1
fi
PROFILE_NAME="$1"
GOOGLE_CHROME="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
USER_DIR="/Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/${PROFILE_NAME}"

exec "$GOOGLE_CHROME" \
  --enable-udd-profiles \
  --user-data-dir="$USER_DIR"

Make this file executable: in Terminal, run: sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/custom_chrome.sh

Step 2: Create your own Google Chrome application

Let's create a new profile "corp" and name your new application "Google Chrome (corp)".

For this, you have to open the terminal and do the following steps:

$ sudo bash

Password: your_password

# cd /Applications

# APPNAME="Google Chrome (corp)"

# mkdir -p "$APPNAME.app/Contents/MacOS"

# cd "$_"

# echo -e '#!/bin/sh\nexec /usr/local/bin/custom_chrome.sh corp' > "$APPNAME"

# chmod +x "$APPNAME"

# cd /Applications

# chown -R your_username "$APPNAME.app"

# exit

Now you have another Chrome instance with a profile which is independent of the main application profile!

Step 3: Make a custom icon for this application

The default icon of a new application is not really nice, so you can either copy the icon from Chrome, or download a custom one.

Google Image Search for "chrome icon" gives you a bunch of beautiful icons. In this article, I used the Chromium logo, the image from this techreviews page, a neon-style icon and an icon from this forum post.

To install a custom icon, the first, you have to select the application in Finder, then click on "Get Info":

Now open your selcted icon with your browser, and drag the image into the Icon in the "Get Info" page:

Note, that Google Chrome sometimes changes its icon back to the original icon when it is running and as far as I know the only way to change it back is to restart the browser.

Step 4: Enjoy the result of your work

Now you can drag your new Google Chrome (corp) application to your Dock and watch it running parallelly with the original application.

Parallel::ForkManager 0.7.6 (#perl, #forkmanager) and publicity

I've put out a new Parallel::ForkManager release: 0.7.6 with small changes:

• Added datastructure retrieval from child processes. (Ken Clarke)
• Using CORE::exit() instead of exit() for mod_perl compatibility.

The new version is available in the project page and (sooner or later) from CPAN.

I did some research about the module publicity and found the following things:

• The most interesting story is that Nathan Patwardhan ported this module to ruby.
• It is mentioned in the perfaq8 man page.
• An introduction article about it in www.perlmonks.org from 2003.
• An article and discussion: Use Parallel Processing For Faster Perl Scripts.
• A blog post about Parallelization in PERL by Michael S. Williamson.
• The following RPM-based Linux distros have packages: Fedora, AltLinux, Redhat EL, Mandrake, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, PLD.
• The following Linux distros also have packages: Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo.
• Other unix packages: OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
• Someone actually had a talk about it in Madison, WI.
• There is a module which plugs in P::FM to App:CLI. I don't exactly know what it is, but seems cool. :)
• Still in CPAN, there is a project called Archer, which seems to support it, too.
• Other modules popped up which uses P::FM or mention it in their doc: Parallel::Prefork and Parallel::Forker, Parallel::ForkControl, Proc::Queue, Parallel::Loops, MyCPAN::Indexer::Dispatcher::Parallel, Parallel::Simple (the author even wrote a review of the module, scroll down to the SEE ALSO section).
• A hell lot of other discussion threads in www.perlmonks.org

Enjoy!

Emaily 0.7.1: Simplified email delivery, more stability (#emaily #googlewave)

Emaily 0.7 was announced last week, and it turned out that there are some cases where it still does not behave the way like it should. Today I'm happy to announce the fruits of some hard fixing and planning work, Emaily 0.7.1. The changes are the following:

Incoming emails are not distributed

In earlier versions, when a wave received a reply from an email user, and it has more than one email users and the incoming email did not have all email recipients listed in Cc: or the To: fields, then Emaily decided to deliver the email to the missing recipients. This was intended to be a feature, but it is very annoying in some cases, so we decided to disable the incoming email-distribution entirely. If a reply comes to a wave from email, it is not sent to any other email recipient (unless it is edited by a wave participant, in that case, it behaves like a new and edited blip).

This is not a problem if the communication is between one wave user and one email user, and less disturbing in some cases when there are more email users, especially when one participant is a mailing list.

Emails are sent out to every participant at once

Previously we sent out emails to each recipient separately, so that email participants did not see the participants of the conversation. The spirit of the wave is that every participant is visible for the others, so now we've changed this behavior. Every outgoing email now has all email and wave participants in their To: field.

An advantage of this is that combined with the previous feature is that if email participants use the "reply all" feature of their email client, then everyone will get every part of the conversation in a multi-participant conversation without the need of control from Emaily.

Manual send is disabled

Manual send will require some rework, and is more confusing than helpful, so we removed it temporarily. Now every message you finish in a wave will get delivered automatically after about 30 seconds.

Redirecting emails, mailing lists

With these changes, it is now safe to redirect your emails to wave: you don't need to worry that your nice wave robot sends out emails when you did not want to.

You can even subscribe to a mailing list with your emaily email address. If some other Emaily user is a member of the same mailing list, then you'll have a common wave created from the emails coming from the mailing list, so you can even discuss things faster (realtime), than members of the mailing list.

Enjoy the newest version of Emaily!

Emaily release: 0.7: Stability improvements (#emaily)

Emaily has reached its new milestone today: 0.7. We've been working on Emaily for a long time with no announced release, so I thought an update would be due.

Recently our efforts was split into developing and extending Emaily as a robot and working with the Wave team on some other cool thing which I cannot tell right now. But yes, it is related to emails. ;)

Stabilization

On the Robot side, we managed to finally stabilize it, so that we feel it is now reliable and usable with basic functionality. We think that we fixed all the errors we saw recently in our console and for now, you have a reliable email to Wave and Wave to email gateway. We do expect standard emails to arrive properly (normal means not too big, not specially crafted, etc.) and that wave updates are sent out reliably.

Email recipient handling vs. Wave participants

Email is different than Wave on how it deals with recipients/participants. Thus, any integration effort between these systems has to have tradeoffs. We figured out our way of handling email recipients, and we think that this approach handles some very common cases, though definitely not all.

One of the goals of the robot is to be as transparent as possible without being confusing. Starting from this release, when someone answers to an email which was sent out from Emaily and adds more email recipients to the reply email, then the robot will add these people to the conversation. Starting from that point, these people will get all updates on that wave and they can even reply. There is no current way of unsubscribing from a wave from email, but wave participants can remove any email participant, so you just need to ask someone.

The same works if this is a new email which arrives to your Wave. If there were more recipients, you will see them as wave participants, so when you answer, everyone will get the answer.

Future

There has been a lot of work done recently on the most requested features also: rich text emails and attachments. Actually they are almost ready.

Two weeks ago, we had a 4-day hackaton, where a team of 6 people worked on Emaily, and the biggest achievement was the development of these features. They require some polishing before release, but they are definitely around the corner!

The Emaily Team in the Hackathon

Class::Date 1.1.10

Class::Date 1.1.10 is released. This is a new release after a long time. (You don't need to change something which is perfect do you? :) )

Project link: http://code.google.com/p/perl-class-date

Changelog entry:

1.1.10  Sun Jul 18 13:27:39 CEST 2010
 - Remove the deprecated UNIVERSAL::import (Vladimir Timofeev)