Arrived safely in the UK early this morning with no hassles from customs thanks to my shiny new visa. Somewhat ironically I also got my first serendipitous travel event from Drupal: The problem of course being that this was my reminder to change my home location from Brisbane to London so I actually miss Andrew by a week. Never mind, he’s heading over here next anyway. For those who are interested in my travelling around Europe and general personal life, my wife has taken to blogging a lot over at “The Suttons”.

I woke up this morning to discover that I can no longer access my GMail account (using Google apps for your domain) via IMAP. It just returns an error saying that IMAP is not enabled for your account. The IMAP option has even disappeared from the web interface, now only allowing you to enable POP access. The same is true for a second Google Apps for your domain account that work uses.

Symptoms You have a NetGear FVS124G router providing VPN. You use IPSecuritas to let Mac users log into that VPN. VPN has worked in the past. VPN is no longer working and you haven’t changed any settings (in our case there was a power outage and the modem configuration didn’t come back as expected initially then was fixed so all the settings were the same as they used to be). In the IPSecuritas log you get a message stating “inappropriate sadb message passed.

I had a very interesting conversation with our product manager yesterday centred around ensuring the development team is always working on the highest value functionality for our clients (and thus the business). One of the key messages I took away from the conversation was the distinction between estimates of cost for development work and estimates of value. So what exactly do I mean by cost and value? Cost is generally fairly simple to measure, it’s the amount you have to pay for the resources used to actually develop a function.

I’ve recently noticed that having auto-save functionality no longer makes me feel “safe”. Previously, if a program automatically saved every 5 minutes or so I was completely confident that I could never lose more than 5 minutes work which seemed good enough. Now however, I want more than auto-save, I want version history. If I can’t go back and find a previous version then I can’t be confident that the next time I save it won’t corrupt things and I’ll lose everything.

Daniel Jalkut has an interesting piece on the perception people have that simple software should be free. It’s a perception that I actually share – it annoys me when people ask for money in exchange for really simple applications. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort that goes into software, it’s just that I’m a make the world a better place kind of guy. I believe simple things, which cost effectively nothing to reproduce, should be released for free on the basis that you both give and take from such a system.

We’ve found a cheap little NetGear router that can roughly load balance and fail-over between our two internet connections to hopefully get a little bit more speed. Of course, the simplest thing to do is to set it up so that from the inside it looks just like the old modem and then on the WAN side set it up to look like a client using that old modem as it’s router.

For some time, we’ve had an Arabic translation in EditLive! and the editor pane itself fully supports bidirectional text, but we’ve never updated the UI to flip over to a mirror image when a right to left language is in use. Java actually has pretty reasonable support for this via the ComponentOrientation property in AWT (and inherited through to Swing) but there are a couple of annoying limitations: It applies on a per component basis, so there isn’t a single place you can apply the orientation and be done with it.

So the iPhone roadmap looks very promising. The enterprise functionality is really impressive and places the iPhone extremely well as a mobile device for corporations. The SDK has a lot of power and seems to have access to pretty much everything you’d need (there’s already an SDK for access to the dock connector). Even things like instant messaging and VOIP will be allowed, though obviously the carriers don’t want to deal with all the traffic from VOIP so it’s just wireless but that seems quite reasonable to me.

All the hubbub about flash support on the iPhone highlights an interesting “gotcha” that many people fall into: there’s a world of difference between having something running and having something you can actually ship. The funny thing about software development is that it is generally much quicker and easier to solve all the “hard” problems and create the software you need than it is to polish off all the little loose ends that turn code into an actual product.

You know if there’s one thing more confusing and less documented in programming than character set encodings, it has to be time zones. For example, here’s the package tracking log for my new monitor: Date <td> <strong>Time</strong> </td> <td> <strong>Location</strong> </td> <td> <strong>Event Details</strong> </td> </tr> <tr> <td nowrap="nowrap"> Feb 26, 2008 </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> 04:29:00 AM </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> SWANSEA WEST GLAM GB </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> Arrival Scan </td> </tr> <tr> <td nowrap="nowrap"> Feb 25, 2008 </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> 10:30:00 PM </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> SWANSEA WEST GLAM GB </td> <td nowrap="nowrap"> Departure Scan </td> </tr> </table> </td> Now either they picked up the package at 10:30 PM last night, drove around and around the block all night and then returned it to it’s original location at 4:30 this morning, or someone messed up with time zones.

I think one of my best purchases in a long while has been my fancy new iPhone. It was originally a major splurge just because it was cool but it’s so functional and easy to use that I’m using it constantly and looking for ways to get everything on the iPhone. My email has always been IMAP so that got on there pretty quickly and it didn’t take too long to find newsgator’s iPhone rss reader that syncs with NetNewsWire so now my feeds are on it as well.