Think about it.  How much has email changed in the last twenty years?  Not a lot, if any.  The most revolutionary features are GMail's labels and Gmail/Outlook's server-side email rules/filter settings.  To me, this is ridiculous.  I was born in 1991, played around on the internet when it was on dialup, and had a free Juno account when I was old enough.

Since then I'd moved through Yahoo, Hotmail, and finally rested on Gmail.  But all-in-all, everything is still pretty much the same.  It was because of this that Gabor's idea to scrap IMAP really intrigued me.  I wanted this.  Google and Microsoft had both come up with newer, proprietary synchronization standards, and creating a new, open protocol would be the way to usher in a new age of compatibility and extensible feature sets.

Since this initial bit of intrigue, I've spent some time working on protocol documentation whenever I can get a bit motivated and have some spare time to do so.  I continue to push my creativity and find new things to throw in to the protocol, ideas that wouldn't have to be there when the first part hits, but that its extensibility would make possible.  Ideas such as receiving push notifications from web services, that could also be synced to mobile devices through the protocol, or using OpenID as a base and creating a new single-login/password system that uses your email address., or even ideas such as being able to query an email server for a person's contact information, and store/update it in a syncable address book.

Once we leave the defining bounds of IMAP and proprietary protocols like Exchange, we can really start work on building something terrific that would allow a flood of innovation that email has never seen before.

Unfortunately, my voice is small - and is very largely unheard.  I can't even get Gabor, the original creator of this idea to @mention me on twitter regarding it anymore, and so I've been stuck working on it by myself.

So yes, this is a call to action, and I do so hope that you'll oblige me.  I need help revolutionizing email.  I can't do it all on my own, and the protocol being open is the important part.  I need other people's ideas, not just my own.  I need their thoughts and their knowledge.  I'm only a college student after all, and as much as I'd like to do this all by myself and use it as my claim to fame - I'd much rather just be a person that helped start and organize it and get things moving.

So please, join me in discussing my ideas, submitting your own, and if you feel like it even work on defining the protocol!

Please join the discussion on 'MSAP' at Google Groups.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas.

Now if you use Google Voice, you can use this to your advantage with the simple addition of just a few seconds to the call.

Continue Reading for Instructions on how to Outlook up to dial through Google Voice

First, you’ll want to go to your contacts and open up the Calling Dialogue.  Do this by clicking More > Call > New Call…

You should get a dialogue that looks something like:

You’ll notice immediately that it has been around for ages.  What we want, though, is “Dialing Properties.”  Once that pops up, you’ll (probably) want to create a New… location.

Name it something like “Everywhere” and give it the area code “999” or another area code that is never used.

Now that that little bit is out of the way, we can get to actually creating the dialer.  Go to the Calling Card tab and click New…

Give it a name like “Google Voice.”  For your account number, enter your ten digit Google Voice number, and for your PIN, enter.. your Pin.

Go to the Long Distance tab and enter the following rules:

1. Dial the account number.  (Button: Account Number)
2. Wait for 4 seconds. (Button: Wait for Prompt…, click “Wait for a specific length of time:” and then enter the number 4)
3. Dial * (Button: Specify Digits…, enter the asterisk)
4. Wait for 4 seconds.
5. Dial the PIN number. (Button: PIN)
6. Wait for 4 seconds.
7. Dial 2 (Button: Specify Digits…, enter the number 2)
8. Wait for 2 seconds. (Button: Wait for Prompt…, click “Wait for a specific length of time:” and then enter the number 2)
9. Dial the area code and number. (Button: Destination Number…, make sure “Dial the area code” is selected and “Dial the country/region code” is not.)
10. Dial # (Button: Specify Digits…, enter the pound sign: #)

Click OK and make sure that Google Voice (or whatever you named it) is selected as the calling card.

Click OK, OK, and then feel free to make any calls you want using your Google Voice number. 

Oh Apple, has anyone told you lately that you’re CRAZY?

If you don’t, or if you just picked up on my blog, that very incredibly awesome something was called Google Voice OMS – It allows you to send text messages through Outlook using your Google Voice account, without having to pay a third party company per-message.  Essentially making this very awesome feature in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 FREE.

At first, I didn’t want to Open Source it.  I wanted to keep it for awhile and sell it to Google or something if it caught on – but there seemed to be so tiny of a reaction to the post that I published it on Github.  Do you guys seriously not like it?  I asked for SSL Hosting or Donations three months ago and I haven’t received a single cent to pay for the cost (nor an offer to host).

Not that there was really anything left to add to it, but I’ve pretty much just let the project die.  Nobody’s approached me about funding it, or providing hosting for it, and definitely not Google although it would be the best thing in the world to kick-start Google Voice for Businesses.

And I was even thinking of doing something cool like seeing if I could create a twitter client replica of it.  But you know what?  Never Mind.

One of the first things quickly and easily noticed is that it uses its own Window customization.  This really isn’t such a big deal for me.  Sure, it’d be nice if it could do the whole aero thing and fall back on this, but this looks pretty cool, so I’m not really going to fault them for this.

Next is actually mostly a good thing.  Steam has this very nice jumplist for Windows 7, something not a lot of other programs have really taken the time to integrate just yet.  You can see video games I have recently (attempted to anyway) launched from Steam, their own quick links to important parts of their client, and an optional (disabled by default) ability to change your current status from the jumplist.

The one problem I have with this jump list is that the tasks have no icons.  You could easily find some sort of icon for each of their little tasks.  A shopping cart for Store, a generic user-like figure for community, etc etc but there is nothing there.

Then of course, there is my ultimate pickle with Steam.  As I’m sure you can tell from the above screenshot – Steam has NO PRESENCE in the Windows Games Explorer.  This is awful!  The Games Explorer has been around since Vista, and yet Steam has yet to embrace it.

There could (and should) be (at the very least) a high resolution steam icon under Game Providers.  It’s not very difficult to make, and the “News” feed you see from Games for Windows LIVE is a simple RSS feed.  They could either populate this with the news from their site, or just a list of new releases, creating a steam:// URI (if it doesn’t already exist) to open up links in their own client.  Instead, they don’t even touch this.

As for games, I don’t know if they show up in the Explorer or not.  I don’t have any spare cash lying around, so I haven’t been able to check for myself – but somehow I doubt that the games appear there (though, I could be wrong – can anyone vouch for this?).

Hopefully, these issues will be addressed in a future version of Steam, and embraced by Rival companies. (I’m looking at you On Live.  Yes, I expect this from you as well).

What are your thoughts on the matter, anyway?

Either way, I’ve made my Windows 7 (RC) box Blue Screen on me twice – so I’ll share with you how I did it.  Make sure to leave your own Blue Screen of Death stories in the comments below.

BSoD #1 – ATI TV Wonder

My first BSoD is brought to you by the ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB PC TV Tuner, and yes – it is a very long name for a product.  Aren’t you thankful I didn’t put “Diamond” in front of it?

Over all, this was an excellent product that I’m VERY happy I purchased from woot.com at a price far below its stock value.  It was pretty much plug-and-play (I didn’t run the CD at first because, well, my Sony DVD drive has crapped out on my Laptop and will only read DVDs now.  What the hell, Sony?)  What was interesting about this device (and ultimately lead to the BSoD) was that Skype recognized it as a video source (read: Webcam) and decided I might want to use it.  I thought that was fairly cool, but didn’t dabble any more into it (until later, right before my crash).  So, while I had this thing plugged in and made Windows Media Center scan for channels, I decided “Well, I’m bored – I wonder what happens if I open this thing up in Skype too?  I got my answer with some weird looking static, and then a Blue Screen.  Congrats,  Navarr!  This was your first ever Blue Screen with Windows 7 (RC even!).  And that was the last of that.

BSoD #2 – Lexar 4GB ExpressCard SSD

This is another small device I found for cheap on the internet, and purchased immediately because – well, it could be used with the Windows 7 ReadyBoost and I wasn’t using my Express Card slot on my laptop – I didn’t have any use for it. 

It normally works pretty well.  I’m not sure if the problem I’ve been encountering is Windows, My Computer, the Card, or it simply becoming loose but every now and then it will unmount and remount – so it may just be loose.

Either way, this happening over and over again while the device was dedicated to ReadyBoost has, of course, damaged the file system.  After doing this enough times, eventually my computer Blue Screened on me – once.  It hasn’t seemed to happen again.  I’ve since repaired the file system and got it working again, but I’m not sure how long it’ll stay.

Final

So those are my BSoD Horror Stories for Windows 7.  Do you have any of your own?  Has Windows 7 ever crashed for you?  Tell me all about it in the comments!

If you’re a regular reader to my blog, I’m sure you read yesterday’s post about how Google Voice could gain a head in the business world.  At that time, my dream of connecting Google Voice and Outlook via OMS was far from completion, with the only work I’d managed to accomplish being a simple reading over of the related technologies.

Well, late last night a certain gear clicked in my brain, and I spent the entire night awake and coding PHP on a local XAMPP server.  But my end result was fruitful – I finished successfully coding an Outlook Mobile Service that allows the delivery of SMS through the Google Voice system.

Here is a video showing it off:

I’m not yet prepared to release the source code for this, though.  (Messy, Messy, Mess! as Double D would say).  There’s a lot in my mind about it, it took a lot of work and I’m not ready to see forks and duplicate services pop up.  (Sorry guys =S).  Be on the look out for follow up posts that describe some of the technologies I had to learn to make this possible.

Oh, also – If you’d like; Help sponsor this project (I can’t afford to make it public ATM) with either Free (VERIFIED) SSL Hosting for a subdomain of a domain I own [contact me], or the money to make it public using my current host ($62.40/yr) [donate through my host].  I would be most appreciative if you could offer either of these to get this thing up and running!

Now, I don’t like going downstairs to use the best non-laptop Macintosh.  Its hooked up to a High Definition Projector system, and it is simply a burden to try to get anything code-wise with it done, without either sitting up close to the screen, or using Apple+ to make it larger, so, I did what any geek would attempt to do.  Get Apple’s Screen Sharing system working with my Windows Box.

I have to be honest with you.  It was a hassle and it was definitely NOT worth it.  Regardless of client side settings, VNC was incredibly slow over the Local Network.

However, as some of you may wish to try this yourself, I’ve included the instructions after the break.

Hi all,

I actually registered on this forum just to post this solution. I hope it will make many others happy!

Motivation for going through these hoops:
I needed to access the desktop of an old OSX machine every now and then from a windows VNC client. Details of that machine are:
Dual G5 OSX 10.4 without monitor/keyboard.

Important:

- Remote Desktop had never been enabled before on that machine.
- SSH access however was available.

So how do you turn on Apple Remote Desktop / VNC Server on a machine where it never ran before? That part was easy to find on the net: SSH as an admin user onto the OSX machine. Then execute this command:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent

Try to connect with your VNC client now. If it works, good, you're done. The above command takes care even of restarting the Remote Desktop Service when the computer is rebooted.

But if you're not so lucky (like I was) and the connection fails with a message like:
- "Server did not offer supported security type" (tightVNC)
- "No matching security types" (realVNC)
- "Incompatible Version" (UltraVNC)

you're stuck. What happened in this case is that the VNC password has never been setup properly. Follow these simple steps while still logged in as admin user to set up a default password ("pass" in our case):

- Switch off RDP:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -stop

- Go to the Preferences directory:
cd /Library/Preferences

- edit the following files using vi (if you're not familiar with vi, be very careful to follow the instructions to the iota!):
sudo vi com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist

Put the following lines into this file (hint: copy them from here rather than typing them). Instruction for vi newbies:
- copy the text below into your clipboard
- set focus to the ssh window
- press the 'i' key. This puts vi into text insert mode
- paste the text. If you're on windows/cygwin, click to top left of the cygwin ssh window -> Edit -> Paste
- press the 'Esc' key
- enter the keystrokes ':wq', colon tells vi you are about to enter a command, w is the command for write, q for quit.

ARD_AllLocalUsers

LoadRemoteManagementMenuExtra

ScreenSharingReqPermEnabled

VNCLegacyConnectionsEnabled
- edit the file sudo vi com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd
press the 'i' key and type enabled, hit return, 'Esc' and ':wq'

- set the default VNC password to 'pass' by editing this file:
sudo vi com.apple.VNCSettings.txt
and copy/paste this string (the encoded password) into that file: 6755221D8BA8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA

- Now the files need to have their ownerships and access rights configured properly. Do this by executing the following commands after each other:

sudo chmod 644 com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist
sudo chown root:admin com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist

sudo chmod 644 com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd
sudo chown root:admin com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

sudo chmod 400 com.apple.VNCSettings.txt
sudo chown root:wheel com.apple.VNCSettings.txt

Now stop and start the Remote Desktop Server, or reboot the machine:

To just restart the Remote Desktop first stop it:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -stop

Then restart it:
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users admin -privs -all -restart -agent

or, alternatively, reboot the server:

sudo shutdown -r now

Connect to the server and enter your password we set to "pass" above. Set the password to something else by opening the System Preferences -> Sharing -> Apple Remote Desktop -> Access Privileges and set the password in the "VNC viewers may control the screen with password:" to something else.

:apple:ED

Hope this helped!

Cheers

Balt Indermuehle

(taken from: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-380251.html )

Why you ask?

Simply because a single simple hardware revision (“upgrading” your computer for example) can make it lose it’s mind.

Would you like to know the modifications I had to make to my computer to get “You may be a victim of software fraud” and “Activate Now” popping up all the time since the first time I activated with a serial code provided from Microsoft?

I had to make one: Attaching a second IDE hard drive that’s less than 20GB.

That one IDE hard drive freaked Windows 7 out like there is no tomorrow.

Luckily, since the Beta is free; I have another key; and have re-validated my version of Windows 7 as genuine.

All of the Windows Live programs that I’ve tested (excluding the hopefully nowhere near finished Windows Live Movie Maker) also now have high-resolution icons to represent their programs (instead of just the old 32x32 pixel images).

You have to admit though, Windows 7 looks beautiful.