Articles on Personal Computing

One of the curses of the computer age, especially for those of us who do development work, is the vast amount of detail that one has to keep track of. Among other things, there’s:

• The sites I like to read regularly
• The sites where there’s some tidbit that I just might want to find again some time
• The usernames and passwords to the dozens of sites I have accounts on
• My to-do lists for various projects
• Commands that I have a hard time remembering for administering my Linux hosting boxes
• Tips on something or other than someone gave me that I mean to follow up on someday

... and so on. I used to deal with all this with a combination of Outlook notes, word documents, post-its, and my increasingly unreliable memory. This all worked reasonably well as long as I stuck to one notebook machine, and one desk, as the center of my life.

I’ve been moving away from that approach, so I can be more mobile and use multiple machines without worrying about syncing. I’ve found a few tools that have been very helpful.

For sites I want to read regularly, RSS feeds of course are the answer. Add the feed to my feed reader, and the content comes to me automatically. (Of course, this changes the problem to one of too much stuff to read, but that’s inevitable.) I’m using FeedDemon as my feed reader, sync’d to a NewsGator Online account. This setup isn’t free ($29.95 for FeedDemon, plus $19.95 per year if you want the premium version of the online service), but I like the fact that I can read feeds offline or online and everything stays sync’d.

For those web sites I just want to remember in case I want to come back to them some time, I’m using del.icio.us for all my bookmarks. I use their Firefox plugin, which gives me one-click access to either add a bookmark or view my bookmarks. And now it doesn’t matter what browser I’m using, or what system I’m on—I always have the same bookmarks available.

For everything else, I’ve found 37Signals’ Backpack invaluable. I keep to-do lists for various personal projects there, and I use their “writeboards” (online documents) to keep all my miscellaneous notes. I’ve been training myself to always keep my notes there, so I always know where to look for them. I started off with one writeboard will all sorts of miscellaneous notes, and as it grew, I split it up and now have about a dozen different ones. There’s lots more that Backpack can do that I haven’t gotten to using yet. You can start with a free account, but I quickly hit its limit and splurged for the $9/month premium version.

I struggled with whether or not it was reasonable to keep a list of usernames and passwords on a writeboard. It is really convenient, but I’m sure security-minded folks would frown on it. I ended up with a compromise: I made up my own personal secret code, so what I record on the writeboard is not actual passwords, but a coded version that is easy for me to translate to the real thing but hopefully not so easy for someone who finds this data. I suspect this still isn’t really good enough; I’d prefer it if the information was encrypted on the Backpack server. One thing the premium account gives me is SSL access, so I feel a little more comfortable with some of the sensitive information I’m storing there.

For projects that involve multiple other people, I’m using Basecamp, also from 37Signals. I use it much like I use Backpack, but it allows me to manage a list of other people who have access to individual projects.

Do you have solutions to these problems that you’re happy with? Please leave a comment and share your approach.

A central presumption behind hosted applications is that Internet connectivity is becoming universal. There are some obvious problems with this presumption, such as when you’re on an airplane, or when your home Internet connection is down.

But there can be problems, even in the big city. Ironically, at the Web 2.0 Summit conference this week, the demand for connectivity completely swamped the hotel’s and the conference’s ability to supply it with any reliability or speed. Inside the conference rooms, free wireless connectivity was sponsored by AOL, but often I couldn’t get connected at all, and when I could connect it was painfully slow and erratic. Even on a wired connection in my hotel room at the Palace, the throughput was reminiscent of dial-up days. Apparently having more than 1,000 people paying $3500 a head to be there wasn’t enough to pay for an adequate Internet feed for this connectivity-hungry group.

As Paul Saffo from Insitute for the Future quipped many years ago, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. It’s easy to believe that someday IP connectivity will be as common and reliable as electricity, but we’re sure not there yet.

I’ve been using Outlook for a long time, for email, calendar, contacts, and notes. (I realize this may immediately lower your estimation of me, but at each step of the way it seemed a sensible thing to do for one reason or another—most recently because of Adobe’s edict that ‘thou shalt use Outlook’.) Now that I’m on my own, and trying to embrace the idea of hosted applications and transparent use of multiple computers to access a single source of data in the cloud, I’m working on weaning myself. So far, it’s been modestly successful.

For email, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the webmail clients offered by my hosting company; they just seemed too clunky. Gmail was attractive, but I didn’t want to give up using my personal domain. Then along came Google Apps for Your Domain, and now I have the best of both worlds. I still have my own domain name, but Google hosts my mail and provides a Gmail interface. I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and it has been working quite well.

I expected to feel a big loss in the quality of the interaction, but I haven’t. The AJAX interface is pretty responsive, although I have seen it fail from time to time. I’ve also been accustomed to filing my mail in an array of hierarchical folders, and Gmail’s “archive and then search” approach at first seemed limited. But then I realized that since I’ve had desktop search on my PC, I’ve found it easier to use that than to sort through the folders anyway. So now I have essentially the same behavior, my PC doesn’t have to spend cycles indexing my mail, and I don’t have to file any of it.

There are some things I miss, though:

• The Delete button (along with the Archive button and other controls) scrolls away when you scroll down a message. There’s another set at the bottom of the message, but for long messages, I find it a pain to have to scroll to get to the buttons. It would be nice if the buttons stayed put instead of scrolling away.

• I enabled the shortcut keys and learned a few of them, which reduces the need to scroll to find the buttons. But there seems to be no shortcut key for Delete—an action I use often. Google seems to want you to archive instead (for which there is a shortcut key), but I get a lot of mail that I just don’t see a reason to archive. Why should I archive daily news updates or mailing list postings when there’s a much better archive readily available online?

• The action I most frequently want to take when going through my mail is “delete and read the next message”. Since there’s no shortcut key for delete, this requires scrolling until the Delete button is visible, clicking the button (which returns you to the message list), and then clicking on the next message. I’d sure like to have a shortcut key that would do this.

• There’s no support for embedding images in HTML email. I really miss this.

• You can’t drag and drop a file from the file system into a message. You have to click Attach and then browse the file system, which I find to be slower.

• Typing names doesn’t automatically look them up in the contact list. If it is an address I’ve sent to recently, it appears in the type-ahead pop-up list, which works fine. But if it isn’t in this list, I have to go to contacts, find the person, and then start the email again.

I’m sure that many, if not most, of these limitations will be fixed in time, and so far I can live with them. Perhaps the most fundamental limitation is the inability to do anything off-line. With Outlook, I could read mail, write messages to be queued for later sending, and search existing mail, even if I was on an airplane or otherwise without a network connection. If I end up traveling a lot, I may start using Gmail’s POP3 option and going back to a desktop client at these times.

For my calendar, I’ve switched to Google Calendar. So far, this is working well, and I haven’t found anything I miss about the Outlook calendar (other than the frequent opportunity to swear at my computer). I like the quick entry mode of Google calendar—you can type “Lunch November 15 at 12:00” and it will put it on your calendar. And I love being able to easily share my calendar with my wife.

The Outlook calendar as used at Adobe is a complete mess. It’s model of managing meeting invitations by sending messages back and forth, and then storing state information independently in each client, is a horrible idea and has caused no end of grief for hundreds of people there. Not only do you get a constant stream of calendar notices to which you have to respond, but the system is full of bugs (for example, sometimes marking the recipient’s time as busy even when a calendar event invitation says to mark it as free) and limitations (e.g., meetings you’ve declined are gone forever and there’s no easy way to change your mind). This is an application that should be centralized, not distributed in this way. Being out of a big organization now, my needs are much simpler, so I’m certainly not stressing the Google Calendar to the degree I stressed Outlook. But so far, so good.

The two other things I use Outlook for, contacts and notes, surprisingly haven’t been quite as obvious how to switch over to hosted solutions. Gmail will import the Outlook contacts, but it is clearly designed just for an email address list and isn’t adequate as a general-purpose contact manager. Plaxo seems like one possibility, but I’m still looking.

As for notes, I’m converting tem to a series of documents in my Basecamp account, but this doesn’t feel quite right yet.

For more than 10 years, I’ve arranged my computing around a single notebook PC that went with me everywhere. With docks, monitors, and keyboards at home and in the office, this was a pretty good solution. It avoided having to install software on multiple systems, and it ensured that I had everything I needed wherever I was.

This strategy began to fall apart for me largely because of my photo collection. With about 60,000 photos, I can’t fit them all on any notebook disk drive. For about a year, I carried an external drive with my notebook. Then it was two external drives. And then one of them died. I had everything backed up, but this drove home the fragility of this solution. Plus I wanted a higher performance system than a notebook can provide for working with large images, especially panoramas, and I wanted a system that my family could use to access all the photos even if I’m traveling with my notebook PC.

Going out on my own also added another set of issues and opportunities. Now that I’m freed from the dictates of corporate IT, I no longer need to use the accursed Outlook calendar, and I can craft my own IT solutions.

So I decide to move as much as I could to hosted solutions, so my data lived independently of any of my computers. I’ll chronicle this effort in a series of follow-up posts.