Bjørn Stabell 白熊

GMail started rejecting my password when I accessed it through POP from Mail.app. This isn’t the first time, and since I remember how difficult it was to find the solution the first time, I thought I’d document the solution in a blog post for all eternity.

Certain activities will trigger the “you may not be human” alert at Google, causing them to lock your account for non-web access. Very annoying especially since non-web access doesn’t give you any user-friendly error message, and since your account continues to work through the web, you basically suspect your mail application is at fault.

The solution is to go to Google’s UnlockCaptcha page and do the captcha test there. I found this solution on Andrew Escobar’s site.

A while ago I discovered that by setting an HTML INPUT tag’s type attribute to search, Safari on OS X would show the OS X search widget instead of the standard boring HTML input field. Andrew Escobar has a good introduction and an example screenshot:

This search widget is extremely user-friendly and space-efficient; there is no need for a “Go” or “Search” button anymore.

It also downgrades gracefully to a normal input field for other browsers, but this is unfortunately not enough:

• There’s no placeholder text explaining what you can search for
• There’s no magnifying glass or special styling giving a hint that this is a search box

Taken together it means you have to add explanatory text and a “Search” submit button after it for people to understand how to use it, destroying the user-friendliness and space efficiency and offered by the Safari widget.

I’ve noticed that more and more sites were using the Safari search widget without any “Search” submit button, so I figured they must have found a way to make it cross-platform. I spent some time on facebook.com today and noticed they had the Safari search widget… and… sure enough, for Firefox and IE a nice JavaScript version!

I decided to do some reverse engineering…

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Getting MSN display names to appear in Adium wasn’t as easy as I’d first thought. Here’s the recipe I found to work:

1. Preferences -> Appearence -> Contact List -> List Layout
   Make sure “Show Status” is set to “Beside Name”.

2. Preferences -> Appearence -> Size to fit horizontally
   Turn off. Automatic Sizing doesn’t care about the status message.

3. Preferences -> Appearence -> Width
   Set to 250px to ensure there’s space for the status message.

4. Preferences -> Advanced -> MSN -> “Show display names as status messages”
   Turn this on.

5. Restart Adium.

You can set your own MSN display name in Adium like this:

1. Preferences -> Accounts -> select account -> Edit -> Personal
   Then edit the “Display name” field. Changes take effect immediately when you close the window.

Stuff expands to fill the space available for it, or so the saying goes. I needed more hard disk space, and after some Google’ing, this is what I found:

• sudo port clean --all all
• Remove printer brands you don’t need from /Library/Printers (~2.0 GB)
• Remove Garageband (~5.0 GB?)
• Remove iDVD (~2-3 GB?)

There are also programs that will strip your universal binaries (you don’t need PPC binaries if you’re on an Intel Mac) as well as unnecessary language support.

I didn’t end up running the programs or removing Garageband or iDVD, but I still managed to free up 4 GB relatively easily.

Everyone in Exoweb has seen this already, but for all you others out there, I thought I’d share This was the (or one of the) April Fool’s joke at Exoweb:

Subject: Our colorful future To: all at exoweb

Hi all,

We had a final office renovation meeting Saturday where we went through the final list of changes that has to be made before people move in. It was mostly minor stuff, except one:

We didn’t feel the colors in the office were exciting enough, and we all felt we should go for one strong color across all rooms. A long discussion ensued where the options were hot pink, pitch black, and flurescent green. Kelly, speaking on behalf of the ladies, was pushing for hot pink, whereas Holden thought the green would counteract the greyness of Beijing, and Darren and I thought black would contrast nicely with our computers, which we’ve decide will be all white in the future.

In the end Kelly won out (maybe because she also promised she’d get all the ladies to wear pink boots from now on), so we’ll do everything in hot pink.

Kelly is talking to the furniture company to see if we can get pink desks, chairs, and partitions, and Holden will see how much Wuye will ask for to have us paint the outside walls on the 5th floor pink too. We also decided to make our exoweb logo pink, so we’ll have to find a way to make the pink logo stand out on the otherwise pink walls. Attached are 3d renderings by Holden showing the office in it’s pinkness from different angles. The last image shows the pink logo wall with the pink logo on it.

This is going to add significantly to the costs, and will take another 3 weeks to complete.

Sorry for the delays, but hope you can understand it’s so that we can all have a nice place to work.

I believe Vivi and Rena are going to HK, and are taking orders for those of you that want to accessorize with matching “Hello Kitty” products; see http://www.sanrio.com/ and ask them nicely to bring back some.

Mrrrreow!

Bjorn

I caught this very interesting announcement on the Django Developer group:

I like Django, and my unique experience having grown up in a fishing village should make the ideal candidate! If it wasn’t for the fact that I hate cod…

I wasn’t expecting to see Google go so far as to branch into seafood. No industry is safe anymore…

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Customer service is still in its infancy on the web. Here are some ideas how to make it better.

A lot is different between doing business online through websites versus offline in a shop or office. For one, customers to a large extent help themselves. The only trace we have of customers are lines they leave in the web server and web application log files. If we don’t look, it’s easy to forget they’re there altogether.

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In Joel’s post on customer service he lists 8 steps to remarkable customer service. They’re nothing really new, the same old exceeding expectations and service recovery stuff, but since they’re something I also really believe in I thought I’d chime in.

For products that are sold online, websites often does such a good job at selling the product that customers end up using the product without ever talking to anyone in the product company. When we have problems, however, we don’t want to waddle through more than a few pages of information; there’s just no substitute to having a real person guide you through troubleshooting and fixing problems.

Fog Creek isn’t just the only one to realize the importance of good human customer service; Godaddy’s founder, Bob Parsons, says one reason he pulled out of the IPO was that he realized his values were at odds with his advisors, and a key difference was their view on customer service: his advisors’ wanted to cut costs while Parsons wanted to expand.

Customer service is practically the only human contact point left in this online world, and as such it’s more important than ever.

“Let’s head out for a coffee”, my girlfriend Ivana said, thereby setting in motion an incredibly journey on this, the first day of 2007.

As usual, we caught a cab outside of our apartment building, Heqiao, heading first to Pacific Coffee at Fortune Plaza. They were, as many other places on January 1st, not working today. We continued in the same taxi to our second most favorite coffee shop, Sculpting in Time out by Lidu.

Finally inside SiT, Ivana made a face of terror, “where’s my phone?!”. That would be her Sony Ericsson 810c which her company had finally, after 3 months of waiting, awarded her for coming up with the winning names for their conference rooms. She’d just gotten the phone two weeks ago and was deeply in love with it.

We had neither a fapiao, the driver’s number, nor the license plate number. About the only thing we remembered was that the cab was from a taxi company called 海-something, which means sea-something, and that it was white and green… or… wait, maybe it was green and yellow?

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As a software/data guy I always dream of abolishing physical boundaries so everything can be in software, virtualized. Besides a computer and a place to sit, what do you need to work?

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