Alpha Males and Doing the Right Thing

Interesting and damn accurate.  I do think there is a whole category of "Psuedo Alpha Males" who talk the talk but fail to do the right thing. [_Go_]

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PointCast Revisited

Scoble has some interesting thoughts on why PointCast failed:

John Robb says that infrastructure costs is what killed PointCast. Screw that. That's buying into the Poincast spin. Listen, let's go back to 1996, when Pointcast was interesting. That was at the beginning of the Internet bubble. They could have gotten enough cash to last forever. What really killed Pointcast? They tried to lock in their customers. For one, you couldn't copy and paste text. For two, you couldn't tell your friends to visit a specific page. [_Go_]

I'll give you another: Internal Bandwidth.  We used to have this puppy pretty widely installed back in 96 at Dataware and the thing was a bloody pig.  Our networking guys put a pretty quick end to it due to its inefficient use of bandwidth.  They could have done a much more intelligent use of resources and made it succeed.  I don't disagree about the lock-in but there was a huge internal reaction in IT against Pointcast and that really hurt it.

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Interesting: Vertical App Style Blogging Tool ?

An interesting concept indeed:

About: This program is a Web log utility for a single developer. Its main purpose is to allow an employer to keep track of the work that's been done on a daily basis. It provides a detailed search engine, reviewer, and mailer plugin for mailing logs by hand. It can be setup to automatically update with cron. [_Go_]

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Mime Email Message Class was Updated

Although I like PHP Mailer a lot, I guess I should check this out:

About: The MIME Email message class composes and sends email messages. It features user- definable headers and body parts, MIME encoding of text and HTML body parts with user-defined character encoding using quote-printable, support for attachments with automatic content type detection, support for multipart/alternative and multipart/related messages (for HTML messages with embedded images), encoding of message headers with user-defined character encoding using q-encoding, definition of the error delivery address setting the Return-Path header, and several sub-classes for sending messages by different methods: PHP mail() function, sendmail, qmail, SMTP. It also includes support for sending personalized bulk mail by replacing the message parts that differ for each recipient.

Changes: Message bodies are now cached between successive deliveries to halve the time required to bulk-mail. Support was also added for creating and sending persistent bulk mail campaigns (which are stored in disk files). [_Go_]

And as good as this looks for legitimate uses, it looks really good for generating spam campaigns.  In particular messing with the encoding mechanisms is a good way around spam filters.  Sigh.

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The OSCOM Blog !

Wow.  OSCOM (Open Source Content Management Conference) now has a blog!  And the conference date has been changed to 28 May to Friday, 30 May, 2003.  [_Go_]

Bias Note: I did turn in a proposal for a session.  It is still being reviewed.

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A New Approach to Computer Book Publishing

Marco over at PHP Arch is talking about a new approach to computer book publishing, focusing on online books that cover detailed aspects of PHP (think about a mini book just on GD).  [_Go_]

Bias Note: Marco did ask me if I want to be an author in this series but I haven't made any committments or even thought about if I'm really interested.  I do think that Marco has a good idea here and one that is long overdue.  I'm tired of books that try to cover everything and leave out what I need.  If I get a review copy when it comes out then I'll review it here.

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Inbox Buddy 1.004 Ships !

Note: This is long so I'm putting the bias statement right at the top:

Bias Note: Blah, blah, blah, founder, blah, my product, blah, blah, economic relationship with the company, blah, etc.  You know the drill.

Sings of an old software guy: When you write PRODUCT_VERSION_SHIPS_! and it doesn't fill you with that tingly feeling.  Sigh.  Now don't get me wrong or anything -- I'm very, very pleased that it has shipped but it doesn't feel the same way it did in '87.  Or '91.  Or '97.  Getting old I guess.  And I know, pity party for me now ;-)  So, anyway, what did we do to it?

Inbox Buddy 1.004 is a series of fixes and enhancements that rolls in the 1.001, 1.002 and 1.003 versions + the 1.004 changes.  What's that you say?  You didn't get Inbox Buddy 1.001 - 1.003?  For the bulk of our users, these were available if you only had a specific problem addressed by one of these versions.  So here is the complete change list:

1.001 --------

• Fixed View Installation for installs on D: drive
• Fixed remembering of values set in the Reminders dialog
• Fixed classification of email addresses when Report Spam is used
• Fixed classification of unclassified when Reclassify is used
• Added debug file c:IBinitialerror.log when the default.XML or components.XML is loaded and there is an error

1.002 --------

• Changes Components.XML to use a comma delimited list for supported queries

1.003 --------

• Enhanced Spam Filter

1.004 --------

• Enhanced Spam Filter
• Ability to reinstall Inbox Buddy views into an existing Inbox Buddy installation
• IMAP Support throughout the product
• Multiple PST support
• Sorted list of folders in the Spam Directory dialog
• Ability to use Inbox Buddy views in folders other than the Inbox; requires re-installing your Inbox Buddy views

Q & A

Q: I'm an existing user.  How do I upgrade?

A: Just download from here and install over your existing version.  No need to uninstall (actually you shouldn't).

 

Q: Do I lose any of my settings?

A: No.  Inbox Buddy 1.004 doesn't overwrite your existing training.

 

Q: Hm... I'm still concerned about losing some of my settings.  Comments?

A: Copy the file default.xml from program files inbox buddy to some other location for safe keeping.  It isn't necessary but that's a good safety step if you are concerned.  This is also a good way to backup Inbox Buddy if you ever need to.  Or a way to move your Inbox Buddy settings onto a laptop if you run two machines for mail.

 

Q: How do I get support?

A: Go to our discussion forums.  We've been following the model of companies like UserLand and trying to push the bulk of our support onto our discussion forums since it preserves the knowledge for future users. 

 

Q: Do you still offer support other ways?

A: Yes.  You can email support AT inboxbuddy.com of course.

 

Q: I've actually purchased Inbox Buddy, is my serial number preserved?

A: Number 1 -- thank you for purchasing.  Number 2 -- Yes.  Just don't uninstall and your serial number is preserved.

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