Going to iPhone Tech Talks, Rome

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Apple confirming my registration for the iPhone Tech Talks in Rome, on 19 November 2008, so I’m glad to announce that I’m going. Hopefully the event will be useful for a newcomer to iPhone development, like myself. Plus, Rome is a wonderful place and it will be a pleasure to be there again!

When I get back after the event (and NDA forbid) I’ll share as much as I can. If anyone else who’s reading this is attending the event, let me know!

During my trip and on the day of the event I’ll be posting updates via my iPhone which you will be able to read on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Your life in 2GB of e-mail

Last night, I woke up after a bad headache around 1 am. My headache was gone, so was my need to sleep. I convinced myself not to get up, so I went on and on swirling around in my bed until 5am. Being unable to sleep, I was thinking about new ideas regarding my website, as well as future services I would like to develop and deploy (maybe this was the reason I couldn’t sleep!).

During this process of mentally designing and organizing my new website, I remembered something I had long forgotten: Google Apps For Your Domain. I don’t want to use Google start pages or Google Chat, but why not use gmail for my e-mail addresses? I decided that I had watched enough distant lights of the passing cars through the highway (plus the night train passing by — the railroad is parallel to the highway at the area I can see from my window), so I got up and opened an account to Google Apps for my domain.

Delegating your e-mail addresses to Google is simple: all you have to do is delete the existing MX records from your domain, and add the proper MX records for the Google servers (all found in the instructions). Then you just wait for the service to get ready (from the side of Google). In less than one hour, I could log-in to my e-mail account through a subdomain on my own domain (e.g. like webmail.karageorgakis.com), in a gmail-like interface. Nice! But why should someone do this in the first place?

Web space

The #1 reason that may come to most people’s minds is web space. Yes, 2GB of storage per e-mail account is a nice feature. It does sound like a lot of storage for a free e-mail account (like gmail), since the service appears to be quite generous to provide (practically) every Internet user with that much of space. But having a hosting package of 100GB to host my e-mail accounts, space is not a problem. I could as well not delete messages for a long long time, until my space was full. So, web space is nice, but not the most useful reason for moving your mail to Google.

Search functionality

The second characteristic that comes to mind after web space, is Google’s search functionality, and this is what they’re really good with. If there’s anyone on our planet that can provide us with smart mechanisms to search through any data, and come up with fast and accurate results, then it’s none other that this search giant. How many times did you strive to find that colleague’s e-mail that was sent months (or years) ago, through vanilla plain search provided by Entourage (or Outlook, for Windows users), with no effect? Google mail makes this efficient and simple at the same time. Most gmail users are (or should be) already familiar of the way one can search e-mail in gmail.

First of all, in the simplest case, you type a word and hit search, and there you go: instant search results of all mail that contain occurrences of the word either in the subject, sender address or body of the message - no need to specify where it should search for the word. You can always fine grain your search by using the proper modifiers, like “from” etc. By combining all these modifiers, the user is capable of limiting the search results to just those few (or just the proper one) messages he was really looking for. Most of us, however (not excluding myself) do not remember all of the search modifiers gmail provides, simply because we never really need them —plain search does the job well. But if we need to go deeper, Google mail gives us the power to do so.

World-wide accessibility

One other advantage of using Google mail for your e-mail, is accessibility. Sure, every hosting package comes with some sort of webmail, but I have not yet found one that’s as accessible and efficient as Google mail. It is supported by all browsers. And please, don’t tell me about Safari not supporting all the features — who is using Google chat anyway when we all use MSN Messenger? Plus, it’s always a benefit when you find yourself strangled in a place with no computer and in need of accessing your e-mail with your mobile phone. I’m sure that most webmail apps don’t work well (if they work at all) through a primitive phone browser (by primitive I mean almost all phone browsers, with the exception of the iPhone and maybe Nokia’s latest one which I haven’t used yet). Google mobile mail scores very well in this area.

It’s a time machine!

It’s spacey, it finds what you need and you can use it from almost everywhere in the planet. But there’s something more subtle that’s equally (or even more) important, that may not come to mind instantly. It’s none other than time invariability in your e-mails. With enough web space to keep all of your important (and fun) messages, you rarely have to delete any. This means that messages that have been sent to you yours ago, are still there.

Back to last night’s oddysey: after I set up my e-mail accounts and forwarding, I could now access all of my e-mail addresses through just one: my gmail address. I have to admit, though, that my inbox was quite messy, so I had to clean things up. Being obsessive-compulsive in keeping things in my life neat and tidy, I cannot help but feel the urge to apply this obsession in electronic stuff too — like files and e-mails. So I went on to either label, delete or archive messages, starting from the end of the mailbox, all the way to last minute’s message. The dawn was greeting me with faint sunrays, reminding me that I should get back to bed before the new day comes for good. But an obession is hard to beat: I had to clean up my inbox, and so I did.

It stroke me when I found out that I was looking to a brief history of my life throughout the past few years! Google-mail time for me was starting back when I was in Chania, Crete, finishing my master’s. A lot of correspondence with my supervisor and colleagues about my thesis. Messages to friends, describing how sad I was to leave Crete, after getting the master’s. News from my cousin, Paulina, while at her journey through Europe with InterRail — Paris, Madrid, Lisbon. Old jokes friends have sent to me and I had forgotten, old projects I was working on, some were successful, some where never finished. But what really stroke me the most was my girlfriend’s e-mail while I was at the basic training camp, when I joined the army, kept inside there for 24 days with my mobile phone being the only window to the outside world.

I reached the last message, phew! That took some time, but it was fun! I never thought that the process of cleaning up my gmail inbox would indeed be an epitome of the last years of my life! Some messages were pretty useless, but I felt the need to archive them; they shall have sentimental value sometime in the future. Who knows how much longer I am going to use my gmail address? Will it be forever? I doubt that Google will ever stop the service, and it’s highly improbable that it will stop being free — at least for the basic version. As long as the service is provided and I don’t quit this account, more and more details of my life, ranging from important steps in my career to silly “hello” messages, fragments of my real life will continue to get imprinted in the non-material time machine that’s called web space (or call it cyberspace if you like).

Nothing’s absolutely free…

Unfortunately, having a time machine like this comes with a cost, not in currency, but in privacy. An e-mail account is not a stronghold or an absolutely safe vault in which you can store valuable information. It’s not that hard for some third-party to have access to it, and this means access to all of this information: who you really are, who you’re hanging out with, what you do; what worries you and what makes you happy; where you are at any given time and your plans for the future, details about your everyday life like phone numbers and real addresses; it’s all in there.

What would happen if someone had access to all this information about us? The time machine that e-mail accounts constitute, is all the missing information that our blogs lack, the “glue” that could give insight about our lives, reveal all those things we tag “personal” and even expose our darkest secrets. Can we really imagine the power that is in the hands of those, who have all this information about thousands of people’s lives? And do we know, how they are going to use it?

No, we can’t imagine, and we don’t know. But does it really matter, when we are willingly posting on the Net so much information about ourselves, our lives, our contacts and our social networks? When we upload photos of ourselves and of our friends and families? When we boast about the music we like to listen and the movies we enjoyed the most? Perhaps, we should be less afraid of what others could do with the information that doesn’t belong to them, but begin to shake our heads about the information we are willingly and knowingly giving them day by day…

A new life, a new (web) home!

I am very glad to announce that I am done for good with the obligations that were devouring hours (or even days) of my everyday time. And I like it!. This (positive) change shall be reflected in my online presence too. For quite a long time I was longing to find some time to spare on deploying my own website/blog; but time was a leisure. Now that my life is back in it’s normal mode, I have begun the process of doing new things, and finally finishing all the unfinished tasks, and this site is one of them.

The outline of the plan is this: re-shape my company’s workflow, services, identity and re-design it’s website, and also design and deploy this very site. I have decided to opt out of the hosting business (too much of a hassle for so little profit), so I had to find a new home for my websites. This new home would be the host for this site, my company’s website as well as future websites and/or services I shall deploy.

After doing some research into the market field of web hosting globally (not only in Greece), I decided to go with (mt) Media Temple. The offer sounded superb: 100GB of storage, 1TB of traffic, RoR support (in a container), SSH access, grid infrastructure (eliminating the disadvantages of shared hosting) and other features, all for almost 150 euros per year? I’m in! This is the first site I have moved into MediaTemple, which by now (only some hours after the account has been activated) seems to run smoothly. A more detailed article about moving into MediaTemple will follow shortly (in the next couple of days hopefully).

So, my dear visitors, please bare with me while I am in the process of materializing my inner thoughts into this website. I have decided to make incremental changes to it, instead of just waiting for the final edition to publish, so you may be witnessing changes happening (hopefully) quite often. I am confident that the final version will be good enough.

Take care,
Panagiotis