Now from home

Yesterday I had an idea for a web app (again!). I decided to sketch it out using Ruby On Rails as a way to experiment what’s outside the .NET ecosystem. Besides, if the idea finally crystallizes, it will fit much better in a Linux box than on a Windows server mostly because I think it will be hard to find a good revenue model.

This post is just a note to myself. I have to admin than I’m totally lost with RoR for now. I’m following several screencasts and reading every beginner’s tutorial I can find.

Following one of those tutorials I got stucked. I checked my config files, checked that I had not misspelled anything but nothing came out.

Finally I saw an error on the server log:

Rendering rescues/layout (internal server error)

That error message was logged 55 minutes ago!! Just restarting the ruby server made my error go away. This is the second time this happens, so I’m writing this post as a reminder. Depending of what files you touch, you could need to restart your app.

I’ve had to disable the Skype add-on because pages with javascript were loading painfully slow. It took me a while to discover that the culprit was Skype, so I hope this post saves you some time.

Firefox v. 3.5.2

Skype Add-on v. 3.3.0.3789

Skype v. 4.1.0.141

A few weeks ago, I posted my intention to move to Gmail all my email accounts. However, there was a problem when sending emails from a non-Gmail domain. Some email clients, like Outlook, add the “on behalf of’” string to those emails.

Fortunately, the Gmail dev team have added the possibility to send those emails using their own SMTP server, so the problem is gone now.

So today I’m moving all my email to Gmail. The process is really simple:

• Sign up into Google Apps for your domain
• Create your email addresses in Google Apps
• Change the MX records for email (Dreamhost even has a button to update them for you)

Because I plan to not use Outlook at all, I need to upload all my existing email messages to Gmail. Google has a tool called Google Email Uploader to do so. It can take a while to upload the email.

Also note that emails bigger than 16 MB are not uploaded.

Everything is going just fine so far.

Microsoft Research has released an application under the name of Project Tuva. It’s aimed to release inspiring scientific videos and content. They couldn’t choose any better than Richard Feynman to start with.

I get hooked to Richard Feynman not too long ago. But since I saw some of his videos, I can help but try to read and see all the material available. He has its own way to explain things, very approachable and fun. If I had too choose two adjectives to describe his talks I’d said inspiring and motivating.

And what about Project Tuva? Well, it looks really nice. They have built a cool interface using Silverlight. It has lots a useful features like captions, timelines, interactive content and a lot more.

Highly recommended. +1 to Microsoft for this!

By the way, it doesn’t seem to work with Firefox 3.5 (at least not for me), it hangs on Preparing content. No problems using Internet Explorer 8.

Because I plan to upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as possible, I’ve thought that maybe it’s time to finally leave Outlook behind and move to Gmail. I’m not totally convinced as there are many features in Outlook that I use extensively. All of them exists on the “Google online only” world but I want to be sure that they will fit perfectly in my workflow before doing a definitive move.

For example, there’s an issue when sending emails from different (not Google) accounts in Gmail.

Gmail allows you to receive emails from multiple POP3 accounts and you can also select from which account you send emails; but there’s a gotcha. When someone receives an email sent by Gmail using a different account, not the Gmail one, they receive something like this in the sender field:

account@gmail.com; on behalf of; Jose [jose@otherdomain.com]

This of course is not what I expect. Google is aware of this situation and they’re trying to fix the issue by sending the email through the original SMTP server instead of using their own. It seems that if they use their SMTP server using an email address from another domain, most emails will end up on the spam folders.

I know it’s annoying, and we’re working to fix this "On Behalf Of"

behavior as soon as we can. As we’ve mentioned in our Help Center [1],

the reason we include your address in the headers at all is to help

prevent your mail from being flagged as spam by your recipients’ email

services. For those who want the technical details, we use the

‘Sender’ field to be consistent with DomainKeys [2], a commonly used

email authentication mechanism. If we didn’t do this, your messages

may get sent to your recipients’ spam folders, which would be worse

than the annoyance the current implementation is causing.

The ideal (but non-trivial) fix is to enable you to send mail through

your own ISP, while still allowing you to use the Gmail user

interface. This is the feature I mentioned above, and the one we’re

working on now.

I’m looking forward to see this problem fixed. I’d really love to manage all my email accounts from a single “online” place.



When I started this blog a few months ago, I planned to write each post in English and in Spanish, so I set up another instance of WordPress in nowfromhome.com/es/. The truth is that I’m not writing anything in Spanish. The few posts that I posted there were just translations from the original posts I wrote here. It makes no sense, specially since I was translating from English to Spanish when Spanish is my primary language!

Besides this, Microsoft has a new Translator Widget to translate web pages in place that does its job surprisingly well. Of course is not perfect but is readable. Check it out in the upper-right corner of this blog.

If you want to add this widget to you blog, you need to apply for an invitation. Once Microsoft sends you the invitation, a widget generator will let you customize it for your site. Then you’ll need to paste the generated HTML code in your site.