No iPhones in Sherman Oaks

My mistake — iPhones sold out THIS MORNING in Sherman Oaks.

Blogging from inside the Sherman Oaks Apple Store

A tableful of iPhones is being mobbed by geeks three deep, sweating over each other like a pen of sweaty hogs. iPhones are still available and being sold (I guess $500 gadgets don’t move as easily as Nintendo Wiis)sold out this morning. I’m with the 3-year-old, so we’ll be playing “Dora the Explorer” in a minute.

But just think how many grubby germs will be on the glass faces of those iPhones on that table. I’m sure somebody on “CSI” will be lifting prints off of an iPhone any day now.

10,000 people want Gmail to go IMAP (and why you might want to try AOL Mail)

Gmail users pretty much know that if you don’t want to use the Web interface for Google’s free e-mail service, you’re limited to POP access, with which all of your mail is downloaded to the client computer and deleted from the server (or, at your option, left there for you to delete later).

But while Googling for infomation on Gmail and IMAP — the protocol that allows all of your mail to remain on the server — I found this petition, signed by 10,000 geeky types, calling for Google to offer IMAP with Gmail.

The page, well worth a read, describes what POP and IMAP are and why Gmail and Yahoo Mail should offer it. Also, the author spends much time describing the functionality of one of my favorite mail providers, fastmail.fm, which offers IMAP service. Fastmail.fm‘s free accounts are Web-based and IMAP only, and the company isn’t shy about telling you why IMAP is better than POP.

From this page: A 2004 (but still relevant) Washington Post story on why IMAP beats POP.

And a commenter here recently informed me that AOL Mail offers IMAP connectivity. In fact, it looks like AOL offers both IMAP and POP.

A reason for AOL to exist (besides AIM)? I’m thinking so.

The word is that it takes more servers — and more money — to offer IMAP, but I wonder if not needing to download all the spam that clogs e-mail accounts these days via POP makes up for the larger number of connections to the server by those using IMAP. And since Web-mail users are basically connecting via IMAP anyway, what’s the harm in actually offering it as a choice.

I know what the answer is, at least for Yahoo Mail: They can’t show you ads when you’re not using their Web portal.

Massive disaster averted: iPhone will play nicely with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

The horror — HORROR, I TELL YOU — in the enterprise about the iPhone’s former inability to access e-mail from the now corporately ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers has been addressed by the fine folks in Redmond:

The update is expected to address the many issues Exchange 2007 users have been having, including with Mac Mail and the fact that when they access their mailboxes on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 server, certain IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) clients cannot open the bodies of the e-mail messages, which triggers an error message.

This fix is important as the iPhone will work with Exchange Server via IMAP4, Keith McCall, chief technology officer of Azaleos and a former Exchange executive, told eWEEK.

“Exchange 2007 has had some difficulties with the IMAP4 protocol implementation, which are at least partially expected to be addressed with Exchange 2007 Rollup 3. We are currently testing these fixes to see that they do address the issue with Mac Mail,” he said.

For the rest of us, that means that iPhone users will be able to access e-mail with the IMAP protocol, meaning the mail remains on the server and won’t be tied to the internal memory of the iPhone. So you can access your e-mail with the phone, then access it again with your desktop e-mail client.

Does this mean that Yahoo (and maybe Google) will be offering IMAP service to their e-mail users? Both currently offer the POP protocol, in which all mail is downloaded to the device itself and then either erased from the server or kept there (to be dealt with via a Web interface). I’ve tried using POP mail while keeping messages on the server, and it’s a pain in the ass. When I see an e-mail, I want to either keep it or delete it right then and there — so that’s why IMAP, especially in this age of total connectivity, is the way to go.

Your hard drive is going to die, DIE, DIE!!!!!

Robin Harris of the ZDNet blog Storage Bits writes an obituary for his 160 gigabyte drive, which spun its last spin on June 27:

I declared the drive dead at 11:43 am, PDT, this morning, and disconnected the power for the last time.

Here’s the meat of his post, the advice you, me, Bobby McGee and everybody else should heed:

Lessons learned: your disk drive will fail

Archiving to a hard drive? Big mistake. Archive to two hard drives. They’re cheap.

The drive was just about three years old. The Google data suggests three years is a good time to retire a disk. I think I’m going to follow that advice from now on. I was just relieved that I got everything off in time.

Listen to me, people, follow this advice. I don’t think I own a hard drive that’s less than three years old, maintainer of old, cheap crap that I am. All the more reason to man up and do these multiple backups.

Archive to two drives — that’s the way to do it. And get the largest drives you can get for a reasonable price. That way you can, if possible, partition the drives and back up multiple PCs to each drive, keep the two drives in DIFFERENT places. And it doesn’t hurt to keep a THIRD or FOURTH copy of your essential data (pictures, files, e-mail) on writable DVDs or CDs (all the more reason to add a DVD writer to your system).

Especially in this age of digital photos, with the old-school negatives becoming a historic remnant (and did you ever reprint an old photo anyway? But I digress), it’s more important than ever to guard those image files and make sure you don’t lose your family’s photographic history.

The next book I need: ‘Linux System Administration’ by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic

“Linux System Administration,” one of the newer books in the category from O’Reilly, is another must-get on my list. My recent book acquisitions include both the No Starch and O’Reilly “Linux Cookbook” volumes, plus a fourth-edition “Linux in a Nutshell” that I got used for a couple bucks.

Those O’Reilly books are truly worth their weight in the proverbial gold — and they’re damn heavy, so that’s a lot of weight.

From what I’ve seen — and you can see a lot at the O’Reilly site — “Linux System Administration” really helps you get things done, with lots of step-by-step to take you through setting up a server, handling mail, doing backups and bash scripting — all the things you’d need to know if you were suddenly thrust into the position of acting like a sysadmin.

I can’t vouch for the many suse- and Red Hat-focused books out there, but “Linux System Administration” focuses on Debian due to its stability and freeness, and it’s a book that many of us need, whether we can admit it or not (and I’m admitting it big time).

Ethical dilemma: Should I continue to use the Linspire-sponsored freelinuxemail.com?

Given Linspire’s recent “intellectual property” deal with Microsoft, by which MS agrees not to sue Linspire or its customers over so-called patent violations in Linux (and leaving the rest of us out to dry), should I continue to use the freelinuxemail.com service sponsored by Linspire?

First of all, I love the service — run by fastmail.fm — because it offers the IMAP protocol, has a super-fast Web interface and in the case of freelinuxemail.com (as opposed to the plain fastmail.fm version) comes with outgoing SMTP service for free (fastmail.fm wants you to either pay for SMTP or use your ISPs server).

All my mutt experiments during my Month on the Command Line were done with freelinuxemail.com, and while I’m not currently using the service, I still have the account there.

But given Linspire’s recent actions, I’m feeling a bit squirrely about using the free e-mail. I’m a longtime user of Yahoo Mail, and I’ve never seen a conflict there — if, as a so-called “journalist,” I didn’t actually use this stuff, how could I write about it?

But the Linspire thing has got me thinking. If I want IMAP mail, I could stick to the service provided by my ISP, DSL Extreme (which I pay for), I could upgrade my own fastmail.fm account, or find another provider entirely.

It’s a dilemma. What do you think I should do?

AntiX spin on Mepis in ‘pre-final’ stage, should be ‘final’ in early July

AntiX, the Fluxbox-based, 128 MB RAM-friendly version of Mepis is now in its “pre-final” stage, with a final release from its maker anticapitalista expected in early July, according to the developer himself on the Mepis forum.

As I’ve said, AntiX is promising — and will probably leap right over Fluxbuntu in polish, usability and functionality. The only drawback is that it doesn’t run in 64 MB of RAM. But for those with 128 MB or more, AntiX is, thus far, a great Linux distro.

Anticapitalista’s post tells you where to get the “pre-final” ISO (and gives the login and password you need for the FTP site).

I consider AntiX a step up from the other Fluxbox biggie, Damn Small Linux, because AntiX offers the quick desktop environment of Fluxbox while providing the flexibility of apt and Synaptic for adding apps to the system. It won’t run on the low-spec systems that DSL excels on, but for those with mid-level hardware (128 MB and above), AntiX is poised to become quite a player in the distro field.

‘Debian Für Dummies’

This is not a joke. This is a real book, “Debian Für Dummies,” written in German and coming to Amazon on Sept. 7, 2007. The authors, Jan-Marek Glogowski and Florian Maier, have been posting blog entries to the book’s page on Amazon.

What’s next, “Debian Does Dallas”?

Seriously, given the dearth of Debian books (and no, Ubuntu books don’t count), I sincerely hope “Debian Für Dummies” makes it into English. I’d rather see an update of “The Debian System,” but the author’s Web site (down at present) says that it’s not coming any time soon. No clue about an update for “Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible.”

Is it too much to ask, a Debian book updated to cover Etch?

Working for Microsoft security one of the worst jobs in science

The magazine Popular Science and Popsci.com have released their annual list of The Worst Jobs in Science for 2007.

It is worth mentioning that working for Microsoft as a security team member is ranked sixth in the list, just slightly better than Whale-Feces Researcher or Forensic Entomologist.

The bottom-10:

Number 10: Whale-Feces Researcher
They scoop up whale dung, then dig through it for clues

Number 9: Forensic Entomologist
Solving murders by studying maggots

Number 8: Olympic Drug Tester
When your job is drug testing the world’s top athletes, there’s no way to win

Number 7: Gravity Research Subject
They’re strapped down so astronauts can blast off

Number 6: Microsoft Security Grunt
Like wearing a big sign that reads “Hack Me”

Number 5: Coursework Carcass Preparer
They kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that schoolkids cut up

Number 4: Garbologist
Think Indiana Jones— in a Dumpster

Number 3: Elephant Vasectomist
When your patient is Earth’s largest land animal, sterilization is a big job

Number 2: Oceanographer
Nothing but bad news, day in and day out

Number 1: Hazmat Diver
They swim in sewage. Enough said.