Oh, how long have I waited for this! Almost three years ago, I blogged about the then newly-introduced POP access for GMail (German) and, to summarize it for you, my conclusion was that POP does not sufficiently support GMail's specialities, in particular the big storage capacity (downloading tons of mail is no fun) and tagging (which could easily be replicated in IMAP folders).

Now, three years later, GMail implements IMAP and with that, in my opinion, GMail has become a global player in email that now actually deserves the name.

IMAP features are mapped to GMail features reasonably, for example tags to folders as I suggested, or IMAP flags to GMail "stars".

To test, I connected to my account with Thunderbird, and as far as I can tell now, it works nice and quickly. Good job, Google!

According to Jean Pierre, IMAP is not enabled for all users yet, but I assume everybody will get the feature soon. Once you do, make sure to check it out!

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Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.

Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn't like my name, Frédéric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. -Frédéric

I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my "é"s by regular "e"s but of course they are only half as nice :)

Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though "who the heck is that?" when receiving my email.

(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)

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What do Firefoxes snack on? Cookies, of course. So somebody went ahead and baked these Firefox cookies:

Yummy!

But, even though Firefox is clearly a web browser from outer space, let's still not assume these were space cookies ;).

(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)

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From the HTTP response headers that the del.icio.us API sends:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:10:01 GMT X-Delicious-Debug: Hi there (...)

Uh, hi, Yahoo! ;)

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Today I had to upgrade Apple's XCode to the current version 2.4.1, because the old XCode 2.2 that came with my OSX install CDs resulted in errors with some apps (ffmpeg, in my case). The XCode installation package weighs in at 924 Megabytes, just a little short of one Gigabyte. Slim is not one of the words I would use for that...

And all that just to install Macports, my favorite tool to bring the most powerful Unix tools to OSX.

At least their download servers are pretty darn fast -- that eases the pain:

I am just wondering: What do people do with a slow internet connection or a small harddrive?

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That's right, Amazon's new DRM-free MP3 store is an awesome alternative to the iTunes Music Store. All files are 256kbit and usually cost 89-99 cents each. This is the same quality as Apple's "iTunes Plus" but at least 30 cents cheaper.

Now we only need this in Europe too (where we are currently paying 99 Euro cents for DRMed and 1.29 for not DRMed songs which, at the current weak dollar rate, is an ugly 1.40 USD and 1.82 USD, respectively).

And I am curious to see how Apple will react to this. Bring it on, Steve!

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Almost half a billion Euros, which is about 600 million US Dollars, is the fine against which Microsoft fought with an appeal at the European Court of First Instance. Today, they lost: The court ruled that the decision of the European Commission to impose the fine on Microsoft was appropriate.

For almost a decade now, the European Commission has been struggling with Microsoft (to little avail) against their alleged abuse of their significant market power. In the center of the controversy is the hardly uninstallable Microsoft Media Player, which was considered an abuse of the OS monopoly to create another monopoly in the media player market. However, when it comes to monopolists abusing their monopolies, the European Union tends to have little sense of humor (a fact that Microsoft could have known in the first place). And thus, they fined Microsoft in 2004 with 497 million Euros and demanded them opening their APIs so competitors could give the consumer a realistic choice of softwares. Microsoft complained against that at the European Court, and now, only ;) 3 years later, the 248-page ruling was published.

Well, you can almost imagine how it went on in the meantime: After Microsoft still didn't completely comply with the demands after two years, they were fined with another 281 million Euros in 2006. In early 2007, the European Commission complained that Microsoft charged too much money for the API documentation and threatened to fine another 3 million Euros per day (dated back from the 1st of August 2006) if they kept up that practice.

Microsoft's main lawyer said today that they will "analyze" the whole ruling and then decide if they keep going on -- but I have a feeling that this is the amount of money that Microsoft is not happy losing: I assume the judges at the European Court of Justice (the next and last instance) are already waiting for the appeal in the mail.

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Last week, I had to back out a (quite big) patch from the to-be-published addons.mozilla.org trunk because while it worked on our developer instances, it behaved totally strange on the staging environment: When I saved a record using the newly added UI, the changes partly didn't show up in the database.

So we went ahead and delayed the release of the patch until we figured out what the problem was.

After a little digging around the internet today I found a hint suggesting to flush CakePHP's cached models/table descriptions from the app/tmp/cache/models directory every time a database change is applied -- which fixed the problem we encountered.

So, fellow CakePHP users, keep that in mind next time you alter your DB, and your life will be happier :).

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A teen from New Jersey unlocked the iPhone, so it can be used with non-US phone networks. Nice move.

The hack takes "about two hours and involves some soldering and skill with software" though, the guy says. So, if you don't want to brick your phone, maybe it's not such a good idea after all.

Also, I wonder how long it takes until the companies in question sue the bejesus out of that kid. Or, if they are smart, they just hire him. We'll see.

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Rumor has it, GMail's storage may some day soon be cranked up to 10 gigabyte.

That'd be sweet, for sure.

While I am really not (yet) in danger of hitting the limit (at the time of writing it's 2887 Megabytes), I still find myself deleting pictures etc. that I get by email if they are "too big" ever so often. Maybe I am too conservative there, but I still consider mails > 1 MB to be "big" and I tend to delete them if and when I can. It'd be nice if I had a reason to get more 21st-century-ish about it :)

I need to admit though, that GMail and most of its competitors are already beating accounts like my university email by far. I finally stopped using that one when I ran into its ridiculous 50 megabyte limit twice a month.

(via valleywag)

Update: It's Google's "Shared Storage" Program that made people's GMail storage amount increase. Sadly, they increased the impressive one dollar price for 6 Gigabytes to 20 dollars just shortly after the program was started.

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