There is a very nice talk on Google Tech Tacks named Everything is Miscellaneous where the speaker discusses problems with data organization/categorization. I am not going to cover anything from the speech here since it is better to see it. Myself I found it very relevant to a lot of problems people face everywhere like, for instance, categorizing/tagging blog posts, bookmarks, files/directories in on a file system or mailbox folders. Watch it :)
Found yet another search from Google: Google Blog Search. I don’t know for how long it is already available, but I have found it just now and only by accident. Looks fine and is useful to search only in the blogs.
It seems that for the past few days I got stuck on checking up different bits of software. This time I want to share some more of my expirience:
1. NetworkManager - I haven’t checked this apps for a while now and I was amazed on how good it is. It detects all network settings and informs me about all WiFi networks available in the area. It is also very handy to switch to a WiFi connection detected just by selecting it in the list.
2. Firefox 2 - I have installed FF2 immediately after I got FC6 running on my laptop. It seems to good, with some additional nice features like inline spell check, but I have missed one other thing there - a restart session restore (thanks for CBN to pointing it out). Now I have removed a Google Sync extension since I was using it only to restore my pages and now it can be done directory by Firefox built-in functionality.
3. GNOME - I’ve been using KDE for a long time and like it a lot, but it seems that GNOME works much better (with all those effects and whatever) in FC6 release. I think that I will probably stick with GNOME for a while and see what I do later (though I am waiting for KDE 4 a lot).
I have been checking a lot of Google services for the past days and it seems that I just felt in love with all of them. I have moved all my emails to Gmail, my calendar to Google Calendar, RSS feed to Google Reader and bookmarks to Google Bookmarks so let me just make a couple of points about each of the services:
Google Mail (Gmail)
I liked even from before, but never had chance to play more with this thing. Finally I did and I even redirected all my other email accounts to Gmail. It works very fine, but there are still some thinks missing (which I have submitted through Google Feedback form):
- Multiple signatures. This is very important feature when more that one account is used from inside of Gmail. I would like to have multiple signatures and an option to specify a signature per account
- “Send on behalf” identity is always there. When you send out a message from additional (non gmail) account through Gmail, it writes down something like “Sent on Behalf of externall@address.com from gmail@gmail.com” and I really don’t like it. I would better have a normal “externall@address.com” in From since I have already verified that the external address belongs to me.
The rest works pretty fine through. Maybe filters should be a bit improved to make it possible to specify the order of application of filters as well as an option to stop executing filter check against message if it matches a particular filter - but this is minor stuff.
Google Calendar
Very, very nice tool. There are a lot of nice things there and everything works good. The only thing that I would also like to see is:
there is an option for downloading a calendar with iCal file which can be then set up on KOrganizer or similar desktop software, but then it works read-only. I would like to see something like posting the iCal back to Google Calendar to sync the desktop client with Google. But this is also minor since I usually use a web interface to interact with calendar and do receive reminders for events with SMS to my mobile.
Google Reader
This is the part which has significantly improved since the last time I have checked it. Now it gives me a nice interface where my RSS feeds are like in a folders and I can read them like in forum format (conversations?) or I can have a list of headings and go over one by one. Now I like Google Reader much more that BlogLines, but still - I found one missing point for me: the folders/labels in a left hand side are not sortable as well as feeds inside. I would better have an option to organize them there with particular order. But anyway - I like Google Reader and will stick with it for the time being.
Google Bookmarks
This is what I like and what I’ve been missing. I don’t really like del.ici.us or technorati by some unknown reasons. I just needed something simple. Google Bookmarks is exactly what I need. Simple add bookmarks and categorize them with tags :)
This is it for now, maybe I will find some more of interesting stuff at Google :)
I had faced a problem with mounting Win Srv 2003 shares to linux box (particularly FC4). The usual way for me to mount was: mount -t smbfs -o username=user,password=pass //host/share /mount/point
This time it was giving me an error: cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.
After some searches in Google I found out about mount.cifs which solves all the problems. From now on, whenever I need to mount a share from Win Srv 2003 I use a command mount -t cifs -o user=username,pass=password //host/share /mount/point or an entry in /etc/fstab: //host/share /mount/point cifs auto,user=username,pass=password,rw 0 0