Typo Pad

"Dear" mail client provider,

Could you "pretty please" remove the gratuitous "double quotes" you put around my "name" and the "names" of all the "people" I correspond with?

From: "Humble Self" <me@my.example.org>
To: "Honored Correspondent" <person@example.net>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this atrocity was introduced by Microsoft when they desperately tried to convert their legacy email software (from when completely company-internal systems were the norm) to cope with what was then the new and mysterious Internet.  Regardless of its origins, this convention has no technical merit.  Granted, the old RFC822 mandated the use of quotes if the real name happened to contain special characters, such as single quotes, but in this day and age, the preferred mechanism for ensuring transport-safe strings in email would be MIME encoding.  So (in transport) you would have, say,

From: =?iso-8859-15?Q?Humble_=36self?= <me@my.example.org>
To: Honored Correspondent <person@example.net>
Cc: =?utf-8?Q?=C3=84cc=C3=ABntric_=22weird=22_=E5=81=8F=E5=BF=83?= <centric@cn.example.com>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes

... but any competent MIME-aware client should transparently display this as human-readable, with the MIME jumble decoded:

From: Humble $self <me@my.example.org>
To: Honored Correspondent <person@example.net>
Cc: Äccëntric "weird" 偏心 <centric@cn.example.com>
Subject: "Gratuitous" double quotes

Notice that a double quote in someone's name (as you often see with nicknames) is no longer a problem at all, and you have to have this mechanism in place anyway if you want to cope with names which are not purely 7-bit ASCII, or which happen to contain some of the the rather haphazard set of characters which are significant for the mail transport layer.

Grateful in anticipation of the day when I will no longer need to apologize for my choice of mail client,

"Just me"

Suomen paras työ väli lyönti paikka

Muuan konsultointiväli lyöntiyritys on kovasti kampanjoinut viime aikoina olevansa Suomen paras työpaikka.

Jaa, kehittäjä sen kun päätti että selaimessa ei nyt vain voi käyttää tabeja? Hyvä homma.  Sopii ylpeillä.

(Eikä siellä yllättäen ollut mitään kiinnostavia paikkoja.)

My Bookmarks are Dead, Long Live the New CiteSeerX

Here's a copy of a message I sent via the CiteSeerX feedback form just now:

This new CiteSeerX is nice and all, but I have hundreds of bookmarks to the old CiteSeer which are now broken.  I sincerely hope this is a temporary condition, but even if it is, the deadline for my thesis is in two weeks.  Is there any way I can reconnect those old bookmarks to CiteSeerX pages?

I don't think "hundreds" is an over-estimate, but it's hard to know, because of course, these are not all traditional bookmarks in a single browser's configuration.  I have about a dozen instances of Firefox in various states of tabbed browsing hell, and many of those have some tabs open to CiteSeer pages I need to be able to find again.  I also have more than my fair share of social bookmarks, Linkwad depots and what not. (All of this is part of my struggle to organize some sort of scalable and pseudo-organized memory of sites I want to be able to find again.  ma.gnola and Linkwad are my current bets, but they're probably not the Final Ultimate Solution.) And of course, I have copy+pasted CiteSeer links to various places over the years.

Color me cynical, but wouldn't it be typical if they were to respond something along the lines of "sir," (or "madam;" happens all the time that silly Americans wage a 50/50 bet on what gender a foreign first name sounds like) "we have never supported the use of bookmarks on our site."

(And just to add insult to injury, "Besides, don't you think this new flashy <blink>Ajax</blink> thingy has a lot more, what's the word, usamability?"  But I digress.)

Having said that, the CiteSeer folks have been running a very useful service over the last 10 years, and always been very helpful and forthcoming when I had a comment or a problem. I just really really wish they have a plan for how to allow external bookmarks to continue to work even though they migrate to a new infrastructure.

(Oh, and sorry for not blogging. The reasons should be somewhat obvious. I have my commitments clear, and am communicating to stakeholders via email. Commitments do not include blogging. See you in April.)