Warwick Bruce Chapman

I wrote the following for a friend who was asking about my Google Mail-based integrated mail, calendaring and contacts setup and thought it would be useful to share it in case it is of use to others.

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The following describes how Gmail can be used as the single repository of mail despite us potentially having multiple mail accounts. The various benefits of this approach include: no backups needed, fast searching, no need for sorting or tagging into folders, single place to look for anything, integrated mail, calendaring and contacts accessible from multiple devices, and…

NOTE: Depending on your requirements either a free Gmail or free Google Hosted account (7G mailbox size) or a paid Google Pro Hosted Account (25G mailbox size for $50 per annum) is required to make this all work.

1. Put all your mails in one* place
Firstly, ensure that all mails from your current email addresses are collected in one place – your Google mailbox. This can be achieved either by configuring a forward on your existing accounts to immediately send any mail received by them to your Gmail account, or by using the POP facility in Gmail to pull the mails from those accounts into the Gmail account.

With the exception of my eThekwini Ward 33 email address, the rest of my mail, by far the bulk, goes into my Google Pro account – about 20G of it since 2000 archived and searchable in there – and the only stuff that’s been deleted are the forwarded funnies with large attachments. Everything else is all there.

For the super paranoid, there are tools out there that you can use to backup your Gmail account as well.

2. Use identities to send “as” your other accounts
Secondly, setup identities in Google Mail and use them to send mail from that account “as” your other email address(es). For example from my Google Pro account at thusa.net, I send mail and receive mail as:
xxx @ da.org.za
xyz @ da.org.za
xxx @ thusa.co.za
xxx @ chapman.org.za

Additionally, in the event that someone who should be mailing me on my eThekwini Ward 33 address gets me on any of the above, I ensure I can also send as ward33 @ ethekwini.org so that when I reply to such a mail any subsequent replies are routed to the correct mailbox for council-related issues.

3. Use the shared calendaring and contacts facility

Of massive benefit to me is the shared calendaring and contacts provided by Google. I maintain a council calendar (ward33) and a private calendar (thusa.net). They are both viewable from one another so the appointments inter-mingle, just in different colours. This is replicated on my BlackBerry and other devices and on the Google Mail web interface.

So if I add a contact on my BB while out of the office, it is immediately placed in my Google Contacts, and the same for calendar items, and vice-versa. So seamlessly, two things happen: (1) the contact or calendar appointment is added everywhere, and in the process (2) creates a backup so that should I lose any device I never lose any information. This applies to emails, contacts, calendar items, tasks and more.

4. Ditch fat desktop email programs
For most of the 2000′s I was a devoted Microsoft Outlook user. Even after I switched my primary OS from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu Linux, I still stuck with Outlook.

Eventually I made the switch from the very FAT Outlook client to the lightweight cloud-based Google Mail interface. It was quite an adjustment and forced a new and very productive way of thinking about email – and but I could *never* go back:
- searching is a schizzle, no more filing and folders;
- no more Outlook crashes and corrupt mailboxes;
- no more long waits while Outlook searches through the mailbox;
- no more slowdowns of the PC while outlook searches!

These reasons may well apply to every other local mail client (Thunderbird, Eudora, Groupwise, Outlook Express, …), though they will almost always be more efficient and stable than Outlook.

* If necessary maintain two (or more) Gmail accounts
In my case, as a ward councillor, I have reason to maintain two Gmail accounts, so that when I am replaced in my ward/council role (there are no guarantees in politics), the incoming councillor can take over my eThekwini Ward 33 mailbox and keep the history of the ward, its contact and its issues.

I used this configuration with my previous seat in eThekwini Ward 18 and it has made it very easy for me to hand over and assist the incoming councillor with issues during his first 6 months in office.

This is too technical for me!
Yes, some users will need help setting something like this up and ensuring existing accounts are consolidated into one, and then configuring the rest of the services and adding them to your other devices. But, actually it is all rather simple to do in the end and very simple to keep going.

Try it!

Ciao
Warwick

Discovery Card advertise a 55 day interest-free period, but what are the details? Hard to find. I’ve been provided with some information which is shared below:

The up to 55 day interest free period

When you pay the full outstanding amount on your DiscoveryCard by the due date, you enter an interest free period, referred to as a 55 day interest free period, since there are a maximum of 55 days that any given transaction can be interest free.

For example:

If you make a purchase on the first day of your billing cycle, the statement will close 30 days later following which you have 25 days to your due date. If you pay the full outstanding balance on the due date, then you have enjoyed interest free credit for 55 days for that purchase.

If you make a purchase on the day your statement closes, then you have 25 days to your due date. If you pay the full outstanding balance on the due date, then you have enjoyed interest free credit for 25 days for that purchase.

To be in a 55 day interest free period, and therefore for interest not to be charged to your account, payment must be received for the full closing balance of the statement, before the due date.

We confirm that you need to settle the full outstanding amount on your account in order to enjoy the up to 55 days interest free period. This will prevent interest being charged on your account unless where applicable such as cash ttransactions.

So as examples:
If I buy something on 20 of January, I have just under a month until the next statement, then I have about 25 days to pay the money back without incurring interest.

However, if I buy something on 15 January, I the statement close in the next couple of days and I have about 25 days to pay the money back without incurring interest.

Certain transactions attract interest immediately

Interest will be charged immediately from the transaction date for the following transactions, unless there is a sufficient credit balance in your account to settle the transaction amount:

• Cash withdrawals with the credit card
• Travelers’ cheque purchases with the credit card and certain FOREX transaction
• Electronic funds transfers which result in a debit balance on your account
• All budget facility transactions and balance transfers
• Fuel or fuel-related transactions on the DiscoveryMotor card
• Transfers from the straight facility to the Medical Saving Booster.

Interest rates

Your account was opened in 2005 under the Usury Act. The interest rates applicable to your account [were] effective 26 November 2010. This is as a result of the National Credit Act.

Note: This document was presented at Sakai-SA 2011 in Cape Town, the annual gathering of the Sakai community in South Africa.

The Democratic Alliance’s deployment of Sakai, called Umthombo, started with a beta version of 2.7 during our pilot phase and was launched on 2.7.0. We are currently running 2.7.1 and will upgrade as soon as we can to 2.8 once it is released.

Our implementation of Sakai is possibly unique for a couple of reasons, but of technical interest is the fact that its was not dropped into an existing systems ecosystem. We were thus required to deploy a Directory Service for authentication (we use OpenLDAP) – and getting the directory right has proven more complicated than initially expected.

Managing users globally in a political party is not something I’ve ever done before and it has never been done in the DA before. We have yet to find a tool which will allow us to manage the assignment of attributes containing the constituencies, municipalities and various roles within the party. We are currently evaluating 389 Directory Server (Previously, Fedora DS and Netscape DS) to see whether its administration tool has the flexibility we require. At the moment unfortunately we are administering the Directory using LDIF files which I needn’t say is inconvenient.

The Directory process has resulted in adjustments to the Party’s provincial and national identity workflow processes to ensure that the party has a single, accurate repository of identities for authentication as well as contact lists. We are hopeful that the result of this rationalisation process will be a very accurate directory after the election of our new councillor body after the May 18 2011 Local Government Election. Presently of our ~1500 users, we estimate that only 40% of the details are accurate, particularly the email address.

From an eLearning perspective, our first course was built to facilitate better understanding of the party’s core vision, the Open, Opportunity Society for All. The course is built using the Melete add-on to Sakai, and we don’t particularly like the lack of polish as a result. We are very interested in the work happening with Lesson Builder and would like to drop Melete altogether before we build any further courses.

The other major hosted system in the Party is called VRM or Voter Relationship Management. If you’ve ever received an SMS from the DA, been called by our call centre or had an activist knock on your, VRM is the tool behind that interaction.

VRM is also a Java application running atop Glassfish and their development team have agreed to drop their authentication subsystem in favour of using the Directory we’ve built for Umthombo. In order to facilitate the Single Sign-On, we have proposed the implementation of Jasig‘s Central Authentication Service and we have provisional approval to implement after the election madness is over.

An interesting use of Sakai was to assist in facilitating our Candidate Selection Process ahead of the 2011 Local Government Elections. During the course of the process, almost 5500 nominations were massaged along the process (described by nearly 40 pages of regulations) by over 60 administrators around the country.

Sakai provided:
- the Resources tool for storing PDF copies of manual nomination forms
- the Announcements tool for communication updates to the team of Administrators around the country who made the whole process happen
- the UCT developed SMS tool for communicating with aspirant candidates as their nomination progressed along the process
- the Linktool which facilitated authentication with the Ruby on Rails application which was written to manage the nominations through the complex process

We would like to thank you to everyone who has helped us along the way over the past year. Anthony, Lovemore, Stephen, Psybergate and especially David, your help has meant we are able to use Sakai today. Sakai will become more and more a part of the way the DA operates as a party. We am certain it will be far more than an eLearning platform for us, as its use during the Candidate Selection Process exemplifies this.

See you in 2012.

Tablets are without a doubt the hottest toys for 2011 – at least thus far. Apple lead the way with the iPad during 2010, as they did with the iPod in 2001. I’m going to predict here that unlike the iPod, in 2021, Apple will not still be dominating the Tablet space as they do the portable music space. This will mostly be thanks to an innovation in thinking about software more than it will be about the software itself – the Android project.

As Tablets go, I’d group them into 3 (strictly speaking 4) types that count:
1. Apple’s iPad
2. Android based pads like the Galaxy and Xoom
3. BlackBerry Playbook
(4. Windows-based and other pads)

1. Apple’s iPad is big 9.7 inch, generic and restrictive. It does not and will not have Flash support. It doesn’t have any cameras or expandable storage. The iPad Appstore has a wide range of free and paid applications available but Apple is very restrictive over what Apps they allow. Basically if they don’t like it, you don’t get it (even removing scantily clad ladies from magazines). You will always be beholden to the Apple Big Brother/Autocracy. This is a device made by Apple and software made by them too.

2. Android is an Open project, the software is free and anyone can use and contribute to it. Companies like Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, HTC and Motorola (Xoom) have been using it for their Smartphones for some time now. The 7 inch Galaxy Tab from Samsung was the first device to run Android (software) on a Tablet. The Xoom is another much vaunted Pad released this year. The applications available are growing by the day, and will probably surpass those for iPad in the near future.

3. The BlackBerry PlayBook gets a mention because it looks so awesome. Check it out by searching Google. It runs a ‘new’ Tablet software which will also be the future software for all BlackBerry phones. The number of applications available will be far less than for the iPad and Android but will grow as the uptake of the PlayBook grows. It will possibly not be as massive as the iPad and Android devices but BlackBerry lovers will probably prefer them because they will work well with their phones and enhance productivity.

4. The Windows Tabs are fat and expensive. Don’t bother with them. There are some devices which also runs software like Ubuntu and others. Ingore them and focus on software built specifically for use as a Tablet. Tablets are all about useability and thus purpose-built applications are critical.

1. Purchase a Vodafone SIM, €9.90 (includes €1 credit) and €15 CallNow credit
2. Load €15 credit by keying in *100*Aufladenummer# and press dial
3. Configure Mobile Broadband for “Germany” -> “Vodafone D2 Websessions” (Will vary depending on your Operating System.  Ubuntu below)

4. Connect and on first browse when presented with Vodafone Websessions Screeen, choose 7 day (1G limit) for €12.95

5. Surf away!