Boring Questions About Gmail

by Steven Garrity

I’m considering moving some of my mail to Gmail, but have a few concerns with changes in the way I deal with storing organizing mail.

I’m wondering about two issues in particular:

  1. Is it possible to import a large archive of mail (about 1.5 GB currently in IMAP), organized in hierarchical folders and not lose the folder information? I understand that gmail labels are not hierarchical and don’t mind losing that aspect of categorization, but want the folders to map to Gmail labels.

    As far as I can tell, the only way to do this is to import mail one folder at a time (import, label, repeat). I could do this, but it would take days.

  2. Is there a keyboard shortcut to label a message and archive it in one action? I’ve been doing this in Thunderbird with the Quickfile extension.

I’ve been using Google Reader a lot, and Gmail much less. I’m struck that the interface is similar, but different enough to be a bit disconcerting. Google Reader uses “tags” and Gmail uses “labels”. It’s all about nomenclature man!

 

by Steven Garrity

Apple, Mozilla, and Opera have jointly proposed to the W3C HTML Working Group that they adopt WHATWG HTML 5 spec as a starting point.

 

by Steven Garrity

The YouTube quality doesn’t quite do it justice, but Money City Maniacs by Sloan is one of my favourite music vidoes. Circa 1998.

 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session 28

by Steven Garrity

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Twenty Eight

This session of Acts of Volition Radio is party will test your musical attention span with some long songs, but will reward you with some music gratification.

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Twenty Eight (42MB Ogg Vorbis) (or 38MB MP3)
Songs short and long. Recorded Saturday, April 7, 2007 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 41min.

Session Twenty Eight Playlist:

  1. Joel Plaskett – Snowed In
  2. Fountains of Wayne – Fire in the Canyon
  3. The Shins – Sleeping Lessons
  4. The Arcade Fire – Intervention
  5. Matthew Sweet – Thunderstorm
  6. Explosions in the Sky – Your Hand in Mine

For more, see the previous Acts of Volition Radio sessions or subscribe to the Acts of Volition Radio RSS feed.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session 28
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by Steven Garrity

Winning bidder: stevengarrity – Sweet!

 

Secret to a Successful Marriage

by Steven Garrity

One of the many secrets of a successful marriage is to have a relationship in which one partner does like black jelly beans and the other does not.

 

Tango Icons for Gtk-Stock

by Steven Garrity

Today the community behind the Tango project re-drew over 190 icons from the Gtk toolkit behind the Gnome Linux desktop. The old icons were showing their age and they now match the style defined by the Tango project.

Gtk Tango preview

I participated just enough to be able to pretend to have been helpful (or maybe slightly less than that). It was fun to watch such talented and helpful people at work.

 

by Steven Garrity

Great slides from a presentation on the many aspects of web design by Dan Cederholm

 

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by Steven Garrity

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The <Video> Tag

by Steven Garrity

Brendan Eich, the Canada-loving technical leader of the Mozilla project, has written a piece on The Open Web and Its Adversaries and given a presentation on The Open Web. In addition to a general overview of what it means to have an open web, the post mentions work that Opera and Mozilla are doing with the WHAT working group to create new HTML tags for <audio> and <video>.

The basic idea (still in the early stages, I gather), is to create <audio> and <video> tags that would allow audio/video playback in the browsers without relying on a proprietary plugin (like Flash, in the case of YouTube). Browsers implementing the tags would be able to use any video format, but all browsers would support a base format of Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis.

Theora and Vorbis video and audio compression formats that are free, open-source, and unencumbered by patents. I’ve written before about the importance open formats for media.

If Firefox and Opera were able to leverage their combined corner of the market share and force Microsoft to implement such a setup in Internet Explorer (or if they did so eagerly on their own), it would be a great step forward for media on the web.