Well, RIMM / Blackberry broke the Google MAIL Messages Integration in their BIS service, but the GMAIL plug-in works as described (and that is GREAT). Here is what I found.

If you have a working GMAIL account on your Blackberry, think twice before proceeding.

Once you’ve re-add the GMAIL account using the default Blackberry method (fill in the e-mail address and password, then Blackberry figures out the rest). So this mode is what some service providers are calling “G-IMAP”. Also, this seems the only option if you are adding the accounts from the handset itself. Once you have “synced up” (activated) the account, your GMAIL INBOX messages can be found in the “email address” icon and the Blackberry Messages (which is what it should do). However, your GMAIL ARCHIVED messages (those that “skip the inbox” via a GMAIL filter automatically) will also show in your Blackberry Messages (all messages folder, the “M” button), which is NOT what it is suppose to do. That is a problem for me, as I have a lot of e-mail that I filter away from the INBOX and do not want to see on my Blackberry.

So, I decided to try setting up the account and force it to use the old IMAP setting. To do this you must be adding the e-mail account from the BIS web interface from your service provider; go to add another e-mail to the Blackberry, but this time, I leave the password field blank so that it would now ask me for the server settings. On the next screen, put in “imap.gmail.com” for you server settings. Again, Blackberry figures out the rest of the settings. Let us now call this “IMAP” setup, which it is (and it does NOT use the new Blackberry GMAIL plug-in). However, Blackberry decides that for this particular IMAP server (imap.gmail.com), it should check “All Mail” and not the “INBOX” folder. Once again, we face the same situation with GMAIL ARCHIVED messages showing up in the “Messages” folder on the Blackberry.

Now, for a work around. For the “IMAP” setting configuration we just did, we can go and change the IMAP server name to “gmail-imap.l.google.com” (which is a CNAME for “imap.gmail.com”). Save your settings. Your GMAIL account is now back to the way it should work (before Blackberry decided to make its non-standard changes and break the GMAIL integration). NOTE: this does not use the Blackberry GMAIL plug-in, so in order to “mark as spam” or “change labels” you need to install the Google GMail App.

I’ve spent over 4 hours on the phone today explaining first to T-Mobile, then to a RIMM Blackberry customer service, then a Blackberry tech at RIMM, and then finally another RIMM Blackberry tech who had “access to a RIMM Blackberry Analysis:”. They kept saying it was my Blackberry configuration that was wrong, like my BIS Filters were set incorrectly (which were set correctly) and that my “Service Book IDs” were incorrect causing the problem. To top it off, they say that because I kept deleting the account and recreating it, my “Service Book IDs” will keep changing and resulting in blah blah blah.

Finally, I got him (Don) to agree to try it out on a handset himself. So Don was adventurous and said he had no problems with his GMAIL working on his Blackberry. He went ahead and deleted his GMAIL account from his Blackberry and recreated it. Then he want to his GMAIL account and created a filter (for all messages with Subject:archive, “skip the inbox” and “marked as read”). Now I had him send a test message with the subject “archive” from another account to his GMAIL account. He now saw that archived message showed up in his Blackberry Messages “as opened”, which should not have happened. He said “Ah, I see what you are talking about now” and went to talk to an Analyst.

So now Don tells me, it seems to be an isolated case with my account and that he would look into it further. Gave me a case number and said that I should call back in a few days for status updates. What!?!?! I told him that he should “Google” it and see how many other cases of this problem there are. He said he would keep the ticket open for the next 5 days. Oh my goodness, Research In Motion really wants some more bad press?

Damn, must we provide them the code too? All they have to do is fix their “special code” (probably one conditional statement) which pertains to “imap.gmail.com” and no other servers. Most likely they have something that says if the IMAP server is “imap.gmail.com” then check “All Mail” folder instead of letting it check the standard “INBOX” folder like all other IMAP servers it checks.

If you have experienced this issue with your Blackberry, please add a comment below and/or a URL to your forum posts.

Upon further investigation, I find that whenever I reloaded a NewEgg page, especially if it was a page with lots of images, several of these TCP sessions would open up again. So I decided to look at the source code of the NewEgg page.

Doing a NSLOOKUP on the hostname c1.neweggimages.com gave me a very interesting result.

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: a200.g.akamai.net
Addresses: 24.29.138.176, 24.29.138.186
Aliases: c1.neweggimages.com, images10.newegg.com.edgesuite.net

The IP addresses 24.29.138.176 and 24.19.138.186, both are residential RoadRunner cable modem dynamic IPs according to NYC RoadRunner; reverse resolving to cpe-24-29-138-176.nyc.res.rr.com and cpe-24-29-138-186.nyc.res.rr.com, respectively. It struck me very odd that Akamai would use such home-grade dynamic broadband connections to provide their expensive edge-of-network services.

A few minutes later, I did another NSLOOKUP and the IPs changed, as it should with the Akamai service to spread the traffic around their servers.

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: a200.g.akamai.net
Addresses: 209.107.209.91, 209.107.209.122
Aliases: c1.neweggimages.com, images10.newegg.com.edgesuite.net

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: a200.g.akamai.net
Addresses: 77.67.91.72, 77.67.91.122
Aliases: c1.neweggimages.com, images10.newegg.com.edgesuite.net

And as I am writing this blog entry, c1.neweggimages.com now resolves to:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: a200.g.akamai.net
Addresses: 24.29.138.172, 24.29.138.162
Aliases: c1.neweggimages.com, images10.newegg.com.edgesuite.net

Once again traffic routed back onto RoadRunner residential service in NYC (reverse resolving to cpe-24-29-138-172.nyc.res.rr.com and cpe-24-29-138-162.nyc.res.rr.com). Looks like Akamai is using a lot of residential IPs within the NYC RoadRunner network.

As a result, some of these residential IPs do not work all the time, causing the NewEgg (and now BUY.COM) pages not to load and just hang.

Would you pay Akamai to basically host your images at someone’s home using a cable modem?
I know I would not pay premium dollars to get stuff hosted at a home. I like the redundancy of a data center.
 

I just upgraded to Firefox 3.5 and realized that Microsoft snuck in (spyware-like installation, without user acknowledgment) an extension to Firefox 3.0 that is not compatible with Firefox 3.5, that extension is the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0.

Microsoft has released a newer version of that extension, version 1.1, which is compatible with Firefox 3.5. However, Firefox 3.5 cannot automatically update to it, you have to do it manually and can be found here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9449

Well … being that I want to use Firefox and stay away from Microsoft’s browser and plug-ins, I wanted to find a way to remove the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 extension, since you cannot just click “Uninstall” like all the other extensions I have in Firefox. Besides, why would I want to keep an extension installed that I did not install myself? Would you knowingly keep a piece of spyware running on your computer? Heck no!

So digging around, I found clues on how to remove it. Here is a script that I wrote to remove the extension from the computer and remove it from Firefox. However, I still had to manually remove the additional information Microsoft added to the Firefox UserAgent header.

@echo off
echo Removing dotNET Assistant Extension files …
rd /s “%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension”
echo.
echo Removing dotNET extension from registry …
REG.EXE DELETE “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\Extensions” /v “{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}” /f
echo.
echo.
echo MUST manually remove the UserAgent setting from each Firefox profile …
echo.
echo you can manually delete this line from each prefs.js:
echo user_pref(“general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet”, “(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”);
echo.
echo or do it from “about:config” within Firefox
echo.

However, this code did NOT work for all of my workstations. I found that in those cases I needed to manually remove an entry from the registry, so I created this .REG file:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions]
“{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}”=-

Finally, to remove the added text from the UserAgent header in Firefox.

One way to do this is to simply open the prefs.js for your Firefox profile and remove the line which reads:

user_pref(“general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet”, “(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”);

Or you can … in Firefox, type “about:config” into the URL box and you should see this:

Now in the filter box, type “useragent” and you should see something like this:

Right-click on the “general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet” line brings up a menu, select “Reset”.
Now close out of Firefox completely and restart it. You are now done.
 
 
Reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963707
 

Google for some reason started to blocking access to everything Google today. It is really preventing my clients with China offices from doing their work. Especially since they use Google Apps for their e-mail. When will China join the rest of the world and realize that the network is now global for many companies.

China must have done something with their Great Firewall to even block proxy traffic. My client has a proxy server in the US which they use in Firefox. Even that was blocked today. It results in a message saying that the “network was interrupted”.

Anyone know of a way to prevent that (blocking of the proxy, that is)?
 

You should give it a try. It may be interesting to see how branding affects perceived search engine results.

NOTE: the programmer is working for Microsoft, but claims this side project has nothing to do with Microsoft. Hmmm… I wonder why bing.com is one of the search engines it queries. The other two being Google and Yahoo.
 

Then goto http://adblockplus.org/en/subscriptions and add the following lists (at the bottom of the list):

• EasyPrivacy+EasyList
• Malware Domains
• MySpace Junk Filters

Watch this 80 minute video. It is worth every minute of it. It blows your mind as to what Google is doing. Top it off, they are going to make this thing open-source and make it available for free for everyone to use. For more information on the Google Wave API, goto http://code.google.com/apis/wave/.

The self-created text UI (user interface) that they showed during the last 10 minutes of the video is awesome! I just love the efficientcy of text UIs, it gets the job done (of course not for photos or other visually/graphically required stuff).

Personally, I would love to be able to develop this new Google wave platform. Cannot wait until it is opened to everyone.

Real-time message conversations, better than threaded. Not just e-mail like or IM-like, but it is like a textual and visual conference via your browser and the Internet. It shares photos in real-time. It links (actually integrates) to social networking sites. It can do so much integration it makes wave the new Office suite. Microsoft look out!

Their translation robot is great, especially for multilingual companies. The spell checking extension robot is so good that I think that it would make people even worse spellers. Now this is really something that would tap the power of high-speed broadband and fast processing computers to good uses.
 

Download links below are for the United States English version of Internet Explorer 8. Click on a link below to download for the operating system of your choice:

• Windows XP (32-bit)
• Windows XP (64-bit)
• Windows Vista (32-bit)
• Windows Vista 64-bit
• Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 64-bit
• Windows Server 2008 (32-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 64-bit

If you want to download a localized versions of IE8 (other languages, etc), you can download them from here.

I needed these standalone installers for a client who wanted to upgrade all their workstations to Internet Explorer 8. Personally, I still prefer to use Mozilla Firefox.
 

Just the thought of Google’s search technology and current relevant content (stuff people are Twitter’ng about) could mean a mega-advertising revenue stream for Google. I think if Google buys Twitter, we can possible see Google serving up ads in our Twitter feeds. It would be on of the most immediate direct-to-consumer model for marketing relevant ads. I predict that if this happens, the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) would jump on the news.
 

Well some simple editing of the plugins’ code can make it look like this:

First … we modify the CSS stylesheet for the Sociable plugin. Change the first line in …/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.css

Next … we modify the code of the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget plugin and the ShareThis plugin; changing DIV and P tags to a corresponding SPAN tag.

To make it easier for you here are their respective Unix patch files:
addthis_social_widget.php.patch and sharethis.php.patch.

NOTE: whenever you update these plugins, you must modify the code again (unless the authors alter their code).

Enjoy!