abe hassan | blog

getting used to google apps

At SAY Media we've decided to start using Google Apps. I'm super excited about this -- I've been advocating for it for a long time. I switched over today, and holy wow, I was not used to this. My workflow involves two major things: making copies of messages, and automatically BCC'ing myself. Neither of these works the same way in Gmail, but I finally figured it out.

Making copies of messages just doesn't happen in Gmail. Instead of five copies of a message being in five folders, you have one copy of the message and it's in a bunch of different labels. So when you delete it from one place, you delete it from everywhere. Un-labeling is what I want, instead. Figuring this out solved a bunch of my initial workflow issues. (Bonus tip: "sent mail" is really just a filter of all mail with my From address. Really, every filter/tag/folder/label is just a search on top of "All Mail".) So deleting a message anywhere will delete it everywhere.

Automatically BCCing myself isn't a feature available in the web UI. I was a little surprised at this but I wasn't going to go for the GreaseMonkey route. First I tried creating a filter for all messages matching me as the from address; I was going to tag them into the Inbox label, but that's not possible either. Eventually I found a really gross workaround: if the action is "Never mark as spam", that's equivalent to "Mark this into my Inbox". Hopefully that doesn't break.

With those modifications in place, I can go through my email the way I'm used to. I just need to remember to "archive" a message instead of "delete", and I'll be good to go.

 

 

ETA: Also, if I'm in the Trash, I can't just un-Trash something if I want to undelete but keep it archived. I have to assign it a label, then go back and remove that label. Ugh.

everything will be alright

"Everything will be alright" is not the same as "everything will stay the same."

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Need to get this tattooed on everyone I ever interact with.

fallacies of distributed computing

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn’t change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogenous.

via lonesysadmin.net

A good list to always keep in mind. :)

transferring google apps domain away from godaddy

For the last two months I've been picking away at trying to figure out why I can't transfer my Google Apps domains away from GoDaddy. I hate that the Google Apps signup process uses them by default, and I've been trying to figure out how to transfer them away. (In my case, to DNSimple.com). Every time I tried to transfer away, I'd get this cryptic rejection email even though I hadn't objected to the transfer:

The transfer of [your domain] from Google Apps to another registrar could not be completed for the following reason(s):

Express written objection to the transfer from the Transfer Contact. (e.g. - email, fax, paper document or other processes by which the Transfer Contact has expressly and voluntarily objected through opt-in means).

It looks like this is happening because domain privacy is enabled on the domains. It's particularly annoying because you can't disable domain privacy from GoDaddy's shitty web UI, because it was registered with Google Apps. (Clicking the "Manage" link just redirects you to the Google Apps front page instead of DBP, even.)

To get around this, the steps to transfer-out the domain are roughly:

1. Log into the Google Apps control panel, go to Domain Settings -> Domain Names
2. Log into GoDaddy ("Advanced DNS Settings") and disable Domain Locking
3. Go to Domains by Proxy and first retrieve your username by looking up your domain name (using the email address you have on file for the domain, ie, the one used to register with Google Apps); then reset your password using that username.
4. Log in to DBP and cancel domain privacy. If this is enabled, GoDaddy will prevent you from transferring out.
5. Wait for domain privacy to be disabled, then go back to GoDaddy, and request authorization code.
6. Use that authorization code to transfer to another registrar.

(Bonus points: when Google Apps sends you an email confirming the transfer-out, the link in the email is broken and the phone number in the email is missing a digit.)

This was a nightmare. Each piece of the process was articulated somewhere on the Internet but nothing had them all in one place. Hopefully writing this blog post will help some other hapless soul out there trying to escape GoDaddy's gollum arms.

 

being pre-digital

Imagine what this is like in a fully digital environment instead. Of course, they'd know everything about your medical history and payment ability from a quick ID scan at the entrance. And you'd know the doctor's availability before you even walked in, and you would have been shuttled to the urgent care center down the street if there was an uneven load this early in the morning. No questions to guess at the answer (last tetanus shot? Allergies to medications?) because the answers would be known. The drive to the pharmacy might be eliminated, or perhaps the waiting time would be shortened. If this accident or illness is trending, effecting more of the population, we'd know that right away and be able to prevent more of it... Triage would be more efficient as well. The entire process might take ten minutes, with a far better outcome.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

This blog post has been rolling around in my head for weeks now, because it's so ridiculously true. It's embarassing, almost. There's seriously no reason for paper recordkeeping anymore.

Tablets are the new clipboard.

The Onion called this out in their own way: Quick-Lube Shop Masters Electronic Record Keeping Six Years Before Medical Industry. So sad, how much needs to get shuffled around.

I'm also noticing it while on jury duty (two weeks so far, and counting). The amount of paper that's being shuffled around is insane. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And we're hearing things like, "we'll get you all a copy of that 55-page exhibit tomorrow". Why can't you just zap it to an iPad? Instead of spending 5 minutes looking through depositions to find the right page and the right line number, why not just use something where you can cross-link questions to reference material?

I wonder, almost, how much this would destabilize what we know of our society. Imagine the efficiencies if a court, or a doctor's office, or even girl scout cookie sales, ... if any of those went digital. I wonder what we'd discover. I wonder what jobs would stop being so stressful if recordkeeping wasn't a problem. If appointment scheduling was self-serve. If...

And that's why I sorta hate a lot of the Silicon Valley wank. Yes it's great that we're enabling people to talk to each other, but there's so many other industries that are in need of just a thorough beatdown. Not to revolutionize what they do, just to change how they do it. If we took all our talent and put it towards making cab dispatch, taxes, insurance claims all easier, we could change the world.

the problem with amortization

What's happening is obvious: you're paying extra to subsidize something else. In order to have a clean lobby or repaired runway or a life-saving but little-used machine on hand, institutions charge some people extra and spread it out over some of their larger costs.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

One of several interesting posts from Seth Godin in the last couple weeks. We spend more on the things we pay for (products, services), in order to get the things we're not directly paying for (rent, staff, etc). And, by doing that, we're masking the cost of those indirect fees. I find this fascinating to think about in the sense of operations.

For instance, at SAY Media, my team hosts/runs/manages multiple services -- internal and external facing. And there's a lot of shared services: the base cost of the datacenter (before we put the first machine in there), the cost of the network equipment, the cost of monitoring services, the cost of the ops team's staff ... the list goes on. None of those costs are allocated to any particular product; they get the benefit of the shared infrastructure.

But imagine if we went nuts and allocated every little detail of everything -- down to the bandwidth and power costs to each particular product. If a product's GM knew how much he was spending on bandwidth, or power, or staff, and was held responsible for those costs, then they get the ability to make better global decisions -- should we have a developer spend time minifying their JS/CSS to save on bandwidth costs, or should they build a feature that customers have been asking for?

This sort of awareness ties into a perpetual struggle for sysadmins and development teams: the cost of up-front work versus ongoing maintenance. "Spend two days debugging and fixing a memory leak" versus "Restart it once a night until forever". I don't believe that one side is inherently better than the other, but I do believe that it's easy to discount the cost of ongoing maintenance. Unless you explicitly take on the up-front work, you're implicitly choosing the ongoing maintenance. It feels like it costs nothing. And even when it's considered: up-front costs are known, ongoing costs are more nebulous, and so it's easy to believe that up-front costs are more expensive. 

Knowing what gets amortized can scare a lot of people, especially if they weren't aware of it before. But it also puts them in a position of power and control, to make the right decisions in a more global context. And assuming that's understood, I find it hard to be upset with any outcome because I'll know that any cost or inconvenience to the ops team (or any other team) is actually understood and accepted -- as opposed to happening by default.

stop using "we" at standups

Stop using ‘we’ at standup meetings. Don’t say “We need to stop skipping tests”. Directly address the people that need to change; if this seems too confrontational for your meetings, do it in private

via swanson.github.com

rise of the popped-collar programmer

Once you’ve gone down the road of letting anonymous people on the internet convince you that having cool war stories with cutting edge technologies you can tell on Hacker News is more important than shipping software that works and is easy-to-maintain, you’ve lost the objectivity and pragmatism needed to be an effective software developer.

via www.aaronstannard.com

the romantic image of an uber-programmer

The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”

via www.johndcook.com

Old post but I like this gem. :) Related to this tweet of an Einstein quote:

"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it." - Einstein

yelp's sec filing, on open source software

Some of our solutions contain open source software, which may pose particular risks to our proprietary software and solutions.

We use open source software in our solutions and will use open source software in the future. From time to time, we may face claims from third parties claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the open source software and/or derivative works that we developed using such software (which could include our proprietary source code), or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license. These claims could result in litigation and could require us to purchase a costly license or cease offering the implicated solutions unless and until we can re-engineer them to avoid infringement. This re-engineering process could require significant additional research and development resources. In addition to risks related to license requirements, use of certain open source software can lead to greater risks than use of third party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or controls on the origin of software. Any of these risks could be difficult to eliminate or manage, and, if not addressed, could have a negative effect on our business and operating results.

via www.sec.gov

Oh boy.