It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

Just as a warning: Don’t expect me to either implement SPF or Sender-ID.

Both have just been accepted as experimental standards by the IETF. But both also have problems and therefore I don’t want to implement them.

For SPF it’s mind boggling that it has been accepted as standard. It essentially breaks the ability to forward mail: If you send me an email to one of my old adresses, they are sent to my current one with a .forward. That will not work anymore with the current SPF implementations, because the mail seems to be coming from the old server, instead of your mail server. And of course, you also lose the ability to roam freely with your laptop and use any mailserver you are entitled to use as a guest user, because those are not in your SPF DNS records.

Sender-ID seems to `solve’ the first problem of SPF by adding a PRA header (Purported Responsible Addres), which essentially says: “From Sender on behalf of From”, where the PRA encodes the Sender part. This seems like a nice idea, except that Microsoft patented this idea and then sent it to the IETF as standard. And since Microsoft has not taken an official stance as to whether they will enforce this patent, and my mail will probably pass through the United States, I’m not going to take any chances.

And Microsoft is now also pulling a monopoly-like stunt: If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message

Today I stumbled upon SafariStand. Among other things, it implements something that comes close to find as you type in Safari: When you start typing, it automatically pops up the search menu with the term you want to find.

SafariStand also implements some other useful stuff: live source editting (with syntax highlight), site-alteration, “_blank”-target in new tabs[*], etc. It seems to be a pretty good app, although it could use a bit better preference interface.

[*] The university where I work uses a moronic custom built CMS. Everytime I’m searching for some form I need to print and fill out, I end up with 4-5 windows open.

The last week I have been using the Getting Things Done methodology. I must say that it has been very enlightening and makes it much easier and more pleasing to do stuff. The first few days after I initially cleaned up my head, and put it all on todo lists, I felt liberated. And I could also focus better on the things I was doing and I also noticed that I could be much more creative, just let my mind wonder about things, not inhibited by thinking about things I had to do.

Now that I look back on the first week, I realize that I got a lot more stuff done by applying the “2 minute” rule: everything that you are processing from your inbox that takes less than 2 minutes to complete, you have to do right away. This rule not only helps with getting small things done, but before, a lot of those things were lingering in my mind, bugging me from time to time, but I didn’t do them. So in effect, I wasted more time thinking about those things than actually was needed to get them done. Getting those things done not only cleared my head, allowing me to better focus on things that take longer to complete, but completing those small tasks also makes you feel better and more confident.

Finally, I never thought that it would help to write down things I want to achieve in the future. But it really helped me to see where I want to go and how the things I’m currently doing are related to that.

Anyway, I am happy with the improvement I’ve made so far, but I am going to reread the book and see what kinds of things I missed out, because I have the feeling that I missed a lot of stuff on the first pass.