Looking at this from a slightly different perspective, Google is saying that if you just make your site SSL available, then you can continue to have your referrers. And that is ultimately what people (read marketers and SEO folks) want anyway. To oversimplify a bit, making one’s site available over SSL is as easy as going to GoDaddy or the like and buying and installing an SSL certificate on your web server.

But what does having this certificate really do? It allows a website to be loaded in a secure, encrypted environment. It also allows the browser and the user to validate that the site is who they say they are according to a set of authorities like Verisign or Thawte. These are the folks whose job it is to verify that the certificate is being issued to a valid company (note that I said valid, not necessarily reputable as it’s not the job of certificate authorities to determine reputation).

And on a more technical level, as a user, SSL certificates keep traffic between you and the website you are interacting with more secure. Looking at this via the OSI model for networking; since all HTTP traffic happens at the application layer (layer 7), when SSL is not present, everything happens over plain text communications and can be sniffed. SSL, which is a network protocol, occurs at layer 6 (the presentation layer) and therefore can encrypt and decrypt all the communications that happen at layer 7 (if used).

So if we all bit the bullet and added SSL capabilities to our sites, the net result would be a more secure internet from a user perspective. There are plenty worse things that Google could be doing than forcibly making the internet more secure.

Related posts:

1. 10 More Tips Towards Securing Your Linux System
2. What Does Web 2.0 Mean To You?
3. Custom Google Maps Marker With YM4R_GM

And for the record, I am not trying to mimic or one up something like commandlinefu.com. Just providing things that work well in my world.

The Google Buzz account is here.

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1. Getting a Random Record From a MongoDB Collection
2. The Next Step In Browser Evolution
3. Why Idea People Should Twitter

Some people say its the looks. The new feel of the internet with crazy CSS and rounded corners and a lighter more airy feeling. I don’t think that’s it.

Some people say that its the AJAX layer that has been added to the internet. This refers to the layer of interactivity a page web page can give you. I don’t think it’s this either.

But this is a technical blog, so one might be expecting a technical answer, right? Well, it’s not always technical. In my opinion, the term Web 2.0 basically encompasses 2 ideas:

1. Search
2. Low barrier to entry

I heard an interesting quote a while back (that I don’t know who said it), “The internet is like a library where all the books are strewn on the floor.” This is a reference to the internet of old with lots of unindexed and unsearchable pages. Yahoo! was around, but had very little of the internet indexed. Then along came the “big bad” Google and indexed much of the web and made is massively searchable. All of a sudden, the average person could find what they need. Not only could they find what they needed, but they could also find what they want. And best of all, they could find it quickly. And human nature is always, I want what I want and I want it now.

But that’s not all that happened. The other big ticket item is that not only could the average person find what they want quickly, but they could contribute. They could contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia, their photos to Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Picasa, and their ideas to blogs, micro-blogs, and podcasts. And to circle back to reason number one; it’s all indexed, searchable, and easy to find. Now there are many search engines and many methods for people to share their ideas and find others who share their views and opinions.

All these ideas bring the world closer together. That, in my mind, allows a major version number bump. What does Web 2.0 mean to you? Do you think that the version number bump is premature or unwarranted?

Related posts:

1. Google Securing The Web One Discrete Monopolizing Push At A Time
2. Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful
3. The Next Step In Browser Evolution

First thing is to find a custom icon that you want to use. You can just Google for custom Google maps icons. I chose to use their default icon, just in a different blue. (You can download it here so you are working with what I am working with for this example). The next thing I did was to use the Google custom markers web site to find the proper config options for the icon.

The Rails code is just used to create Javascript. That is why it’s a good idea to run the image through custom markers website to get the Javascript output. Ym4r_gm just turns the Ruby options specified into Javascript. There are more options available, but this is the bare minimum necessary to create a separate icon. All you need to do is use the option names given to you by the custom markers site and “Rubyify” them in GIcon.new (note: this is slightly harder than it sounds).

A few things worth nothing about this code in order to better understand what it’s doing.

If you don’t have the icon_size set properly, then your icon will look funny when the map renders. The icon_anchor and info_window_anchor are just coincidentally half of 32, this is not always the case. And that last item in GIcon.new is what is going to be the Javascript variable name. For sanity’s sake, I chose to keep the Ruby variable name and Javascript variable names consistent. The Variable.new line creates a ym4r_gm icon object in Ruby to be passed to the :icon parameter of the youarehere marker.

The rest of the code is similar to your regular ym4r_gm map icon stuff.

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1. One Time Modal Windows With Rails and Fancybox
2. Google Securing The Web One Discrete Monopolizing Push At A Time
3. Getting a Random Record From a MongoDB Collection

First thing that you’ll need to do is grab yourself a copy of Larch. I did this simply by typing and it installed everything nicely, but click the link to the repository on Github if it doesn’t work for you.

Immediately I dove in and ran it. And immediately I hit my first problem:

The fix for this issue is that SSL needs to be available (or installed as a library) to Ruby. Since I have Ruby built from source, it was just as easy as what’s below. I have removed the output for readability.

Now that we have SSL installed, let’s try it again.

Whoops, another stopping point. If you are receiving the above error, then you need to make sure that your dovecot installation is set up for maildir. What this error is saying is that your installation doesn’t support folder that are folders and mailboxes at the same time. If your current dovecot installation is setup for mbox, you will need to convert it. That is beyond the scope of this post, but add the code below in the /etc/dovecot.conf if it’s not already there.

I have been happily and successfully running Larch ever since.

Related posts:

1. Backing Up Gmail/Google Apps to a Dovecot Server
2. Mail::IMAPClient
3. Email::Find

1. Create 2 accounts in Apple Mail: Gmail and the Dovecot account
2. Sync the Gmail account to your local computer
3. Copy everything to the Dovecot server

This works, but I have to use a slow connection (my home connection) and I have a lot of accounts to do this for, so I would much prefer to script this. The problem is that I have been trying to get this to work with either imapsync or imapcopy. Neither seem to work properly.

According to the documentation, I have the proper version and it should work with GMail. I tried all the supported –authmech1 possibilities. I found an article saying that Google doesn’t accept the word AUTHENTICATE when authenticating, but then imapsync wouldn’t work and it claims it does. So, when trying imapsync, this is what it looked like (some of the security issues have been blocked to protect the innocent):

My attempt at imapcopy was closer to successful, but still not what I needed. I ran into some Dovecot errors (at least I think that’s what it is) that I am not sure what to do with.

So if you have any idea what to do here in a more intelligent manner than I am stuck with, please let me know in the comments. Thanks.

Related posts:

1. Transferring Email From Gmail/Google Apps to Dovecot With Larch
2. Mail::IMAPClient
3. Creating a Slave DNS Server on Bind9

Well the solution, as is turns out, is pretty simple. Just go into your browser’s cookie repository, find and delete the cookie that calls itself GASO. And poof, the overlay is gone.

Related posts:

1. Transferring Email From Gmail/Google Apps to Dovecot With Larch
2. Thoughts on Blog Posting
3. Custom Google Maps Marker With YM4R_GM

As some of you know, Adobe Air is a desktop application that can interact with internet applications. The catch here is that since its a desktop application, it has access to the same elements of the physical machine as any other desktop application (USB ports, printers, sound/video out ports, etc). Browsers don’t yet that kind of access to a computer. They are limited to the user space in which they are run in. All the sound and video you hear and see is sent through 3rd party applications within the browser. What if the browser could control those elements of your machine? What if your entire computer experience was now internet based. Google is already trying to push this with software as a service (GoogleDocs), but keep extending this idea. What if your media center could be controlled via an internet application?

Eclipse IDE is now at a point at which you can your code as its running and change function calls at the opcode level to avoid recompiling your program over and over. Eclipse has grown to the point where its almost like an OS in its capabilities. In that same vein, Google’s new browser now controls its individual tabs and sandboxes each tab in order to have task level control over potentially runaway web applications.

So what I am trying to say here? I’m glad you asked. I believe this browser is the next step towards ubiquitous computing in the sense that 1 application to control your internet (or whole user) experience. AppleTV for instance is a set of specially designed hardware that can be interacted with over the internet. By allowing applications, such as Air (and potentially soon Chrome) to internet directly with the hardware attached to the computer, you are are negating the need for that specially designed hardware. One piece of hardware can be designed to do it all in terms of the interactive experience. Google is stepping to the plate and pushing forward for just this type of innovation. Keep an eye on the features of Google Chrome to come. If it becomes integrated any deeper into the desktop, it will open up a new age of ubiquitous computing.

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1. What Does Web 2.0 Mean To You?
2. My First Drobo Experience
3. Exploring AppleScript with Alfred Shortcuts