jerakeen.org / everything

All change

2010-02-19T10:45:22Z

I’ve been using the nick ‘jerakeen’ for at least… hmmm… 13 years? A long time, anyway. It was a pretty good name, I think - it’s decently unique, quite easy to spell, it’s a slightly-obscure and yet nerdy reference, and (crucially) pretty unique; It’s been pretty easy to maintain myself as the top google hit for the word.

But that was 10 years ago. For a while now I’ve considered this whole ‘handle’ thing quite childish. And there are other Jerakeens now and the mis-addressed twitters and delicious links are getting annoying, not to mention the fact that I’d quite like my work to be associated with me. It’s clearly time to do what all the other Serious People have done, and just use my actual name everywhere.

Thus, I’m retiring jerakeen as a nick/handle/whatever it’s called. In hindsight, using the same name for myself and my domain was a mistake, so I’m retiring this domain entirely as well. I’m renaming myself on all the services that will safely let me do so, creating new accounts on most services that don’t, and just putting up with it on the few services (hi flickr!) that I’m pretty much tied to.

So, the new me can be found as

@tominsam on twitter
tominsam on github
tominsam on delicious
tominsam in lots of other places. You get the idea.

I’m going to move my web output to the movieos.org domain, which I’ve had knocking around unused for a while now. It’s in a terribly rough state, but I don’t expect I’ll break it too much. This gets me a new email address as well, which will probably be the most

This site will obviously stay around. Permalinks are important. But I’m going to bake it out to flat files and retire the terrifying CMS that powers it. Likewise, I assume I’ll keep watching the old accounts for a few months in case anything still gets @jerakeen-ed to me. And I’m sure I’ll forget things. But in so far as much as you have to pick a line and say ‘this is when I’m changing my name’? This is it.

Liked Phil Gyford's twitter

2010-02-02T15:37:28Z

Liked Phil Gyford's twitter: [[ I may not have found the ultimate solution for reporting the world's news, but I have put the door back on the fridge. ]]

Liked John Gruber's twitter

2010-01-27T20:33:00Z

Liked John Gruber's twitter: [[ Must be something wrong with this demo unit -- doesn't have Flash installed. ]]

Liked Chris Heathcote's twitter

2010-01-23T11:17:55Z

Liked Chris Heathcote's twitter: [[ Melton Mowbray, lock up your pies. Cheathco's in town. ]]

Stupid marketing

2010-01-21T08:06:58Z

“Smart has the plans. Stupid has the stories. Be stupid.” Sigh.

Marked "Breaking News!" as a favourite on Flickr

2010-01-21T07:23:30Z

Marked “Breaking News!” as a favourite on Flickr

Wrong

2010-01-21T07:13:05Z

It’s very early.

yay more email clients

2010-01-17T17:56:08Z

Sorry. I’m cynical about this new email client thing that Brent has kicked off. Don’t want to be a source of stop energy. But quite aside from my normal IT‘S DOOMED instincts, I think they’re solving the wrong problem.

There are people on the list saying that an email client needs to be aware that people have 3 computers and a phone nowadays. There are people wanting it to be properly mailing-list aware so that you don’t have to set up manual filtering rules. There are people wanting it to be more understanding of current email conventions, so it (for instance) will trim automatic mailing list footers from replies so you don’t get 30 lines of repeated cruft.

But the first of these goals undermines every other clever feature. Most of the current problems with email are inherent to IMAP, because IMAP is just a heap of folders with too many configuration options (folder prefix, for instance..). IMAP doesn’t do magical mailing list filtering, so it doesn’t matter if I have a clever client that does, because my phone won’t benefit from any of it. And if I reply to a mail from my phone, the footers won’t magically get trimmed, my phone doesn’t do that. And if your phone doesn’t sync with your desktop address book, you won’t be able to compose mail to your friends anyway.

Google Mail gets this right. They don’t do IMAP except as a backwards-compatible API to their mail store. They got to start again, and properly reinvent what mail is. Mailing list and spam filtering is done on the server side, rather than relying on the client to pull down all your mail, sort it, and push it into new folders. (Yes, there are server-side filtering systems. I don’t know any GUI clients with first-class support for them.) There’s one address book, and one place for that annoying ‘people I reply to go into my address book’ setting, and my mail sig, and all those other stupid things you need to tune every time you get a new email client.

The Android GMail client is a perfect example of what a client looks like in this world. It talks to the (secret / private) GMail API, it does offline mail reading, and queues actions so you can archive / filter / whatever mails while offline and it’ll push changes later. You can read and write mail. It doesn’t try to do anything clever, because anything clever done on one client isn’t reproduced on any other client. And if I don’t have a client on my current computer for GMail, I can use a web browser, and still get all the features of the server. I use the web gmail interface for everything anyway, because it’s better than any GUI client I’ve got.

GMail is a long way from being perfect. I’m not saying it’s the Solution. Maybe you disagree with the auto-conversation threading, and there’s the large nit that you’re not allowed to write your own client on the GMail API (due to the Google terms of service, plus you’d have to reverse-engineer it anyway). But I believe that Brent’s effort is never going to produce a truly great mail client because ‘Uses IMAP‘ is one of his core requirements.

Bauhaus

2010-01-17T15:32:06Z

“we write everything lowercase, in order to save time.” - Herbert Bayer

Bauhaus

2010-01-17T15:02:57Z

“If we design things in a wat that they work properly and their function does not interfere with each other, they are ready.” - Marcel Bauer

Not for baby storage.

2010-01-17T10:41:30Z

Cake Tin

2010-01-10T15:09:19Z

A cake tin for making Cake For The Family - everyone gets a differently-sized slice. Found in the Museum Of Things shop.

Snow

2010-01-09T12:52:59Z

It’s snowing again.

Possible contrib.humanize addition - Django developers | Google Groups

2010-01-06T13:49:10Z

To summarise: if I were you, I would give up now.

Luke Plant on English. Good advice.

Marked "Untitled Fucking #20100105" as a favourite on Flickr

2010-01-05T19:47:08Z

Marked “Untitled Fucking #20100105” as a favourite on Flickr