2008 Apr 3, 9:00
With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.
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Composition
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I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the
activity. I talked about activities previously.
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Search
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I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the
comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.
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Monitor
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New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed
means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom,
click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites
bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get
new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.
activity gmail search howto google ie feed rss opensearch 2007 Oct 19, 4:10FTA: 'This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that he received by e-mail. His e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display
Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacr
encoding charset unicode language humor article 2007 Jul 13, 8:30I bought an external backup drive a few weekends ago. I've previously setup a
Subversion repository so I decided to move everything into the repository and
then back it up. So in went the contents of all of my %USERPROFILE% and ~ directories with a bit of sorting and pruning. Not too much though given its much easier to dump in everything and search for
what I want then to take the time to examine and grade each file. What follows are the notes I took while setting this up. It takes me a bit of time to look up the help on each command so I figure
I'll write it all down here for the benefit of myself and potentially others...
Setting Up the Backup Drive For Linux
I first changed the filesystem on the drive to ext3. I plugged it into my USB2.0 port and ran fdisk:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Useful commands I used to do this follow mostly in order:
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m
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help
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p
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print current partitions
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d
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delete current partition
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n
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create new partition (I used the defaults)
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w
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write changes and exit
Then I formatted for ext3.
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
I made it easy to mount:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
# added line to end:
/dev/sda1 /media/backup ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0
I setup the directory structure on the disk
mount /media/backup
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users/dave
sudo chown dave:dave /media/backup/users/dave
After all that its easy to make a copy of the Subversion repository:
mount /media/backup
cp -Rv /home/dave/svn /media/backup/users/dave/
umount /media/backup
Next on the agenda is to add a cron job to do this regularly.
Subversion Command Reference
On a machine that has local access to the Subversion repository you can check out a specific subdirectory as follows using the file scheme:
svn co file:///home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html
Note also that although one of my directories is named 'dave@deletethis.net' Subversion requires the '@' to be percent-encoded.
Other useful subversion commands:
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svn help
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help
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svn list file:///home/dave/svn/
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list all files in root dir of svn depot
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svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/
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list all files in svn depot
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svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/ | grep \/$
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list all directories
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svn status
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List status of all files in the working copy directory as in - modified, not in repository, etc
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svn update
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Brings the working copy up to date wrt the repository
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svn commit
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Commit changes from the working copy to the repository
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svn add / move / delete
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Perform the specified action -- occurs immediately
Setting up Windows Client for Auto Auth into SVN
When using an SVN client on Windows via svn+ssh its useful to have the Windows automatically generate connections to the SVN server. I use
putty on my Windows machines so I read the directions on
using public keys with putty.
putty.exe dave@deletethis.net
cd .ssh
vim authorized_keys # leave the putty window open for now
puttygen.exe
Click the 'generate' button
Move the mouse around until finished
Copy text in 'Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:' to putty window & save & close putty window
Enter Key passphrase & Comment in puttygen
Save the private key somewhere private
pageant.exe
'Add Key' the private key just saved.
Checking out using Tortoise SVN
On one of my Windows machines I've already installed Tortoise SVN. Checking out from my SVN repository was really easy. I just right clicked in Explorer in a directory and selected "SVN Checkout...".
Then in the following dialog I entered the svn URI:
svn+ssh://dave@deletethis.net/home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html/
Note again that the '@' that is part of the directory name is percent-encoded as '%40' while the '@' in the userinfo is not.
Windows Command Line Check Out
On my media center I didn't want to install Tortoise SVN so rather I used the
command line tool. I setup pageant like before the only
difficulty was getting the SVN command line tool to use putty. With the default configuration you can use the SVN_SSH environment variable to point at a compliant SSH command line tool. The trick is
that its interpreted as a backslash escaped string. So I set mine thusly:
set SVN_SSH=C:\\users\\dave\\bin\\putty\\plink.exe
The escaping solved the vague error I received about not being able to create the tunnel.
backup technical personal windows svn linux subversion 2007 Jan 19, 9:15I've moved my homepage to server-side scripting. Previously I've mentioned that
I was using client side scripting to interpret and sort my
livejournal and delicious entries together. Now I'm using
PHP and
XSLTs to process and sort my livejournal,
delicious, flickr, and librarything entries. See
my homepage for the finished result.
LibraryThing is pretty cool despite being pretty niche. Its like flickr but for books. I display a random sampling of the covers of books I have listed in
librarything on my page. I've also hooked the display of the covers of my book up to the corner image. Now when you hover over the cover of a book a bigger picture of its cover appears in the corner
of the webpage. Also, flickr entries in the main section how have the same on hover behavior.
This may not be the best use of my time, but its still fun.
librarything xslt delicious homepage flickr technical php livejournal script 2006 Nov 27, 3:09This topic includes an example of how to write a script that obtains data through Microsoft Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP) either synchronously or asynchronously. The concepts demonstrated in this
example provide the basis for writing client or middle-ti
msdn development programming reference microsoft http javascript script 
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