I’ve been using some of the more interesting “cloud” applications recently: Google Apps, Live Mesh and a few others.

I’m really impressed with the capablities and use of these free web applications. It’s a really interesting marketing tool as well: give away the low end product to build user acceptance, and then add a bit more to give value to the enterprise.

My first foray into the personal cloud was Google docs. This product has to be the coolest idea ever: create your documents on a web site, and let them be shared and simultaneously editable. The concept is awesome, and works really well for some documents (most notably spreadsheets). I can share a spreadsheet with any number of people, and they can all edit it at the same time.

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Email client · GMail · Google · Google Apps · Live Mesh · Microsoft Outlook · Personal Storage Table · Windows Live Mesh

I was thinking about this as I drove to work this morning: what is the real business value to Oracle of buying Sun ?

It occurred to me that part of the many benefits to Oracle are the products that help them compete better with the Microsoft offerings. Could this be another in a long line of acquisitions by Larry Ellison in his quest to make Oracle a more successful company than Microsoft ? (more…)

Business · JavaFX · Larry Ellison · Microsoft · MySQL · Oracle · Oracle Corporation · Oracle WebLogic Server · Sun Microsystems · technology · web

If you’re like me, you eventually end up with too many identities. I haven’t figured out how to associate different email addresses with a single account, so I have to maintain several different Google identities.

For example a client invites me to join his Google group using his company email, so I have to set up a new account to access and manage that group. At some point I try to consolidate these to use my GMail identity, but that isn’t always possible (the client may for instance have decided to restrict their group to only allow access by people using their corporate domain addresses for instance).

Eventually though, I do end up with accounts that I’m no longer using (and sometimes I just would like a fresh start). Google actually has a link in their help about deleting an account, but it took me a bit to find it, so I thought I’d post a step by step guide. (more…)

Email address · GMail · Google · Google Account · Google Groups · Login · Search Engines · Searching · web

Step 1 – Simulating an email alias using a Google Group

The last couple of days, I’ve been involved in setting up a new non-profit entity and email addresses for the people involved. I used my hosting service to create a new domain, and set up email addresses that forward to their existing email addresses.

What I realized was that I didn’t have an easy way to set up a email aliases, and I needed a way to forward email to the entire group.

Naturally I thought of Google Groups, which lets you set up a sort of discussion board and file sharing area. My team has been using groups for other purposes, and one of the things we learned was that if you keep the group private, it can become confusing as people add their email aliases to the member list so that they can post from their various accounts.

So for this new group, I decided to set it up to only use the email addresses from the new entity, and allow posting to the group by any email address. By doing this, anybody can send an email to groupname@googlegroups.com and it will get sent to the group, effectively creating an alias.

This also keeps the group relatively clean, since the only addresses that show up in the members list are the ones that are connected to the new domain. On other groups I’ve managed, I end up with people with lots of different entries because they have multiple email addresses which can be confusing.

Without signing in, the group can now send email to “all” with a single email address. Of course that doesn’t take advantage of the file sharing and other group features, so what follows are instructions on how to create a login for a new email address which will allow logging into the group. (more…)

Email address · email-alias · GMail · Google · Google Account · Google Groups · Hotmail · Login

Recently I’ve been doing some web page work again, and trying to push the envelope on my CSS knowledge.

I was at a talk at 360|iDev where Brian Fling was talking about UI design, and he pointed out that your site should work without your CSS. Now while I know this as a design principle, it seems like something that we probably overlook more often than not.

So, out of curiosity, I thought I’d take a look and see what some of my pages look like without their stylesheets applied.

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css · Firebug · Firefox · Inspect Element · Style Sheets · web