For the most part, email sucks. Information is hard to find (although Google desktop helps a lot) and attachments are various and painful. Threading mostly does’t work. “Your mailbox is exceeding the storage limit” is a ridiculous waste of my time.

The pain has only become more acute as I’ve moved to a Mac – opening the various MS oriented formats makes the machine groan and brings tears to my eyes.

Email is still the dominant form of communication, and generally the de-facto to-do list. There must be a better way to deal with it.

Here’s a recent example: I get lots of resumes emailed to me in various formats (btw, I’m hiring for the Yahoo Java Platform team, contact me if you know Java super stars). I need to keep track of these along with our comments and assessments of the candidates. Email is absolutely terrible for this.

So I setup a little program to grab the resumes, convert them to html, and turn each candidate into a blog post on an internal blog. Comments on each post document our interactions and evaluations, and categories serve to categorize the candidates and next steps.

It works very well – no need to worry about threads of emails, resumes in multiple formats, etc.

This has me thinking – it’d be nice to have a system that does this for all my email, converting it a web accessible form, say a wiki, with all attachments converted to html. Threads would be combined and put into a unified page. Throw in Google Desktop or other desktop search and you’d have a nice and accessible archive of your emails that you could maintain as you switch laptops, operating systems, etc.

The online app world is part way toward this – Gmail with Google docs, for example, gets you part way there. But for obvious reasons I don’t really want my internal email living on Google servers. I need something internal, probably something that lives on my own server.

I have the email processing part already, it’s pretty straight forwards. Word to html conversion works well with “abiword –to=html”. I don’t have a solution for excel and powerpoint conversion yet. OpenOffice seems promising, and I’ve spent some time playing with it in the past, but it’s not well setup for commandline conversion. Batch conversion seems a fairly obvious thing; I’d like to see command line arguments for OpenOffice to do the conversions, ala AbiWord.

Anybody know if there’s already an email to wiki system out there? Ideas or interest in this?

Daniel asks:

Why doesn’t this surge of Web 2.0 foster more interest for Computer Science? …. Algorithms, data structures, and so on, must be in the picture, but they are a very minor component of the work. Learning the programming skills is overall not difficult. Designing something beautiful is the whole trick. Also, you have to leverage the social network.

I think Web2.0 does foster growth of CS on at least 3 fronts:

Scale. Web2.0 involves lots of users with lots of interactions. We’re seeing applications push to scale horizontally in quite interesting ways. I think this is moving parallel computation in pragmatic, valuable directions that past academic exercises haven’t done.

Data. The sheer amount of data generated, stored, and analyzed by these apps is tremendous. It’s also tied directly to the profitability of the companies. The real applied science going on is very exciting. One can argue the same is true of Web1.0, but Web2.0 is more interactive and more data intensive.

Programming Languages. The past few years have seen the rise of higher level languages. There’s more awareness and usage of previously niche languages than ever before. Javascript, Ruby, Groovy, Smalltalk, Erlang, Scala, the list goes on. This is actually tremendously important – the concepts embedded in and exposed by these languages are getting permeated into programmers’ everyday lives, bringing more variety and getting us close to the science. How many people know functional programming or closures 3 years ago versus today?

My sense is that Web2.0 is contributing to the growth of computer science in very practical ways. In any case, it’s possible to have much more interesting conversations with the average programmer than it was 3 years ago.

Flickr has launched a new and greatly improved slideshow. Check it out. The feature comparison from the Flickr blog:

Old Version — sucks
New Version — rules!

You wanted bigger photos!
You wanted to see titles + descriptions!
You wanted to see your photos on a black background!

Joe Gregorio has a nice post on creating a test stub for httplib2 via monkey-patching. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get my head around Guice and Java dependency injection in general.

There’s something about dependency injection that bothers me – it seems like a hack to work around compile time type checking. I’ll admit I don’t know nearly enough about dependency injection to make an intelligent comment, but that’s my initial impression.

Anyway, Joe’s monkey-patch seems related to what dependency injection wants to do.

I’ll think some more, maybe I’ll come up with something coherent to say.

Wordpress admin was hanging when accessing comments, which led me to several thoughtless actions, one of which was deleting lots of spam comments from the database (via sql). I had 3 comments waiting in the moderation queue that are no longer there. Apologies if your comment was lost, please resubmit.

Over the weekend we were invited to our friends’ new place. Our friends both happen to be professional chefs.

This is my advice to you: if you get invited to a party at a chef’s house, drop everything else and go. If you’re not invited, show up anyway.

Their place was great, and the people were very interesting. But oh, the food.

Robbie was kind enough to email me the recipe for his mango chipotle grilled shrimp. I’ve had a lot of grilled shrimp, but this topped them all.

Another of my favorites was the grilled pineapple with pepper. I was very skeptical – I love fruit. I’m a huge believer in respecting the structural integrity of fruit. Fruit salad is an abhorent concept to me.

But this pineapple was excellent. It’s basically a long skewer of pineapple with a medium splash of red pepper, lightly grilled. I must’ve had 6 or 7 skewers.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a personal chef or catering in the San Diego area, give Robbie a call. Highly recommended. Nice guy, excellent food.

News.com has an interesting article on user feedback forcing the Hotmail team to abandon its fancy new Web 2.0 email interface and bring back the “classic” interface. In short, the users disliked the slowness of the new interface and liked the old way of doing things (eg. selecting messages by clicking a checkbox instead of keyboard and mouse shortcuts.)

This actually makes perfect sense; if my wife were a hotmail user she would certainly be one of those calling for the classic to make a comeback, as she has done with Yahoo Mail.  I’ve actually moved back to the classic mail interface myself since the new interface seemed to give my laptop a hernia each time I used it. I don’t really care about the new features because it’s just too slow and painful to use the core features.

Take a careful look at gmail. The interface is actually not very complicated. In fact it’s really quite simple and fairly ugly. People care about usability much more than they care about fanciness.

Dion Almaer has created a nice unified interface for the excellent Google TechTalk series. These are technical talks presented at Google, placed on the Web for all to see. Generally well worth watching, with some real gems in there.

He’s calling it Tech Talk Showcase, and talks about how he built it in his blog post.

I’ve been keeping an ear open for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) news. It’s a very interesting and ambitious project – to provide $100 laptops for children in developing countries. The effects can be tremendous; see the Poor kids + computer = educated kids post.

I’m convinced more and more that they will reach their goal. Consider, for example that, that they recently announced the OLPC will cost $175 and will run Windows in addition to its native OS. Consider further that the price of regular laptops have been dropping steadily – here’s a laptop you can buy at Fry’s for $400.

All they have to do is continue work on the project for another 2 years. The price of regular laptops will have fallen to $200 by then, and they can declare victory.

This is not really intended to be a snarky comment. I think the project can be a success by simply making One Laptop Per Child a real goal and pushing towards it, forcing the mainstream to follow. They’ve been doing some very interesting and innovative work on the interface, applications, and power consumption on the OLPC, but they’re also dragging the rest of the industry towards paying attention to this unaddressed need.

I have a talent for making things ugly. My friend summed it up nicely when looking at one of my recent projects: “cool – that looks so web 1.0 retro crappy, did you do that on purpose?”

Let’s pretend I did. Anyway, I ran across The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams and gave it a read on the train today.

This is really a very good book. It explains visual design concepts very simply with plenty of examples so even a visually illiterate person like me can pick things up. I followed the examples and tried some of the techniques on a small project I happened to be hacking on, and the results are distinctly better.

I’d recommend this book to everyone – visual design is a relevant skill for almost anyone these days, since we all create documents and presentations. It’s a short read and well worth your time.