The common wisdom is that marking things with tags or labels (so you can later search for them by tag) is better than organizing them hierarchically into folders.

For one thing, having a strict folder hierarchy means that the thing you are saving for later search and retrieval lives in one named place, and is thus forced to fit into one defined category. Applying this notion to an email message, you can put it in your FAMILY folder, or in your FRIENDS folder, or in your WORK folder. But if the message involves friends, family, and workmates, where do you put it?

Tagging your email—or to use Gmail's vocabulary, "applying labels" to your email—alleviates this problem. That email message could be tagged with all three labels: FRIENDS, FAMILY, and WORK. This doesn't mean that Gmail would keep three separate copies of the message in separate folders. One message would simply have all three labels associated with it. And when you searched for any one of those labels, that message would appear in the search results. (Moreover, if you did a more restrictive search for all three labels together, that message would similarly appear in the results.) The idea that a message can have multiple labels associated with it really does add flexibility to the process of organizing your saved emails.

Even though Google recently added IMAP support to Gmail, that didn't mean mail was being physically organized into folders within their filesystem. We have to assume Gmail is still keeping one copy of a message on disk, and that a request for the messages in the "FAMILY/DAD" folder simply presents all the messages that have that label. The "hierarchy" is virtual. Anything less would be ungoogly...

Google's mantra is "search, don't sort". For Gmail, this mantra might be phrased as "search by labels, don't organize into limiting hierarchical folders." Google is (or should be) justifiably proud of this break from traditional hierarchical thinking about storing email.

The problem is that people don't seem to "get" labels or grasp what the inherent advantage is in not organizing things into folders. They WANT folders. They ask "when will Gmail support folders?" (A lot.)

Folders, after all, mimic the structure of a computer's filesystem. When you save a file, you try to put it in a place where you can find it later: in a directory or folder under your "Documents" (or "My Documents") folder, within a "Pictures" folder, maybe within a folder labelled "Family Photos". You know which folder it's in. Granted, programs like Apple's iPhoto deliberately obscure the underlying filesystem hierarchy—you're not supposed to care anymore which folder a file is in, or even what its name is, you just need to know how it's tagged to find it and look at it again in the future. Knowing that you saved a photo as "C:\Users\me\Photos\ArizonaTrip\GrandCanyon\DSC97854.JPG"? How 20th century! That's for geeks and control freaks!

The idea that "you don't have to organize your files yourself—your computer will do it for you" anticipates in many ways the technodystopian nightmare world in which computers gain more and more control over our lives, where we serve the computers rather than them serving us. (Of course that could never happen...) But it also "validates" the slobbish approach to computer usage. "I was right to just drop all my files in a single folder called STUFF and let my operating system's search engine find things for me. So screw you, anal-retentive folder-based organized people!" Yeah, right.

So what happens to the John Connors among us who fight back, who WANT to organize their mail into folders? Who demand that Google provide support for folders in Gmail?

Apparently, for better or worse, they get their way: coinciding for all intents and purposes with its "coming out of beta", Gmail is now promoting the fact that "labels are more like folders now." In a big way.

The push seems to come from statistics that show only 29% of Gmail users are making use of labels. ONLY 29%? Think about how many features Gmail has. What percentage of users use themes? Keyboard shortcuts? Filters? Fetching email from other accounts? 29% seems like good penetration for a Gmail feature.

But apparently it's not enough for Google. They see Gmail actually losing ground to other services like Yahoo Mail, and they see lack of folder support as a primary reason for this.

Frankly, in my own admittedly unscientific limited survey of people I know who use Yahoo Mail instead of Gmail, their primary reasons revolve around Gmail's performance and their dislike of "conversation view" (which is not an option like many other Gmail features and cannot be turned off). The drag-and-drop folder capabilities weren't a critical part of their decision.

The recent addition of a "Move to..." button foreshadowed Gmail's new attitude towards label functionality. A message could be now "moved" into a "folder" in one step, even though under the hood the message was being archived (removing it from the inbox) and a label was being applied to it. Instead of getting people to understand the advantages of labels over fixed hierarchical folders, Google elected to retreat into framing labels as "just like folders". Instead of being a leading-edge email interface, Gmail becomes an also-ran, touting not advanced original functionality but the ability to do what the other email interfaces can do. (They probably would have gotten a lot more mileage and gained a lot more traction providing the capability to disable conversation view.)

But Gmail's new attitude towards labels has another negative side effects. For one, the capability to have your labels displayed on the right-hand side is now gone. This angered a large number of Gmail users, who have grown to depend on this feature. Others complained that the changes broke Folders4Gmail, a GreaseMonkey script included in the popular Firefox extension Better Gmail, which displays multi-level labels (e.g., "FAMILY/DAD") as a nested hierarchy. How ironic that making labels behave more like folders would make them behave less like folders. On the positive side, labels are moved up to a position of prominence in the left margin, but even that was confusing—only your "most-used" labels appear there by default. (After deeper investigation, I found out you can pick and choose which labels appear in that position of prominence... but in alphabetical order, not a priority order of your choosing).

The drag-and-drop capability seems to have been lifted right out of Yahoo Mail. You can now drag a message from a displayed list onto a label in the left-hand margin, the Gmail equivalent of dropping a message into a folder. You can even do the reverse: dragging a label from the left-hand margin onto a message. All well and good: but if you can drag a message into a folder, shouldn't also be able to drag it out? Label removal by dragging a label off of a message seems a reasonable capability, but no sign that anything like it has been implemented.

These changes to Gmail seem motivated more by a desire for greater market share rather than by a drive towards technological advancement. Labels are much more flexible for organization and searching. It's a pity Google felt they needed to take a step backwards by saying "yeah, OK, these can be like folders, too, whatever." This is a failure resulting not from the feature's original design but from Google's inability to promote it and educate users about it.

• Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more (Official Gmail blog)
• The evolution of Gmail labels (The official Google blog)
• Gmail's labels are more customizable (GoogleSystem blog)
• "So When Do We Get Folders in Gmail? (GoogleSystem blog)
• Gmail Gives Labels the Folder Treatment (Lifehacker)
• Gmail Leaves Beta (Official Gmail blog)

FULL DISCLOSURE: I used to work for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal as a software architect, and I keep in touch with former colleagues who still work there, as well as several other former colleagues who now work at the NY Times.

As an iPhone user whose commute each morning includes a one-hour train ride, I've found that the NYTimes iPhone app is a great way to catch up on the news on the way into work.

The other day, the Wall Street Journal released its own iPhone app. They already had a Blackberry application, but iPhone users had been clamoring for their own custom way to access the Journal from their devices. I downloaded the new app as soon as I heard about its existence. It's pretty cool, offering the features one would expect from an app that provides mobile access to newspaper content. Now I can easily read Walt Mossberg's columns and all the cool All Things Digital articles. There's just one thing: the app's resemblance in terms of layout and organization to the New York Times iPhone app is... uncanny.

Not that I don't like the NYTimes app—I do. I just expected something different from the people at WSJ. Perhaps my expectations of how an app should display newspaper content on a mobile device are skewed by my experience with the NYTimes app. Or perhaps the iPhone SDK only offers a limited set of options for these sorts of applications. Still, there are striking similarities between the two apps:

• Both start up with the paper's name (in appropriate typeface for each publication) in the center of the screen, with the name moving to the top as soon as the app is fully opened. The Times is white lettering on a black background, the Journal is black lettering on a tan background. (The Times app animates the movement and shrinkage of its name as it changes position.)
• Both display a toolbar at the bottom of the screen (immediately underneath an ad) with five buttons linking to various sections covered by the app. (For the Times, it's Latest News, Popular, Saved (to retrieve articles you marked for later re-reading), a Search button and a More button to reach a list of more sections; for the Journal, it's What's News, Markets, Editors' Picks, Saved and a More button—sadly, no search.)
• The screen displayed by pressing the More button in each app looks almost identical: a list of section names preceded by small icons, each of which can be pressed to view content from an individual section. An Edit button in the upper right displays another screen, containing 16 section icons on a black background, any of which can dragged onto the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to replace one of the default buttons (except the More button, which of course you must have in order to access these More/Configure screens). Aside from the section names and the icons, the one major difference here: the Journal displays headings that say More and Configure, while the Times' heading say More Sections and Configure Sections. (I feel a little like David Pogue sarcastically "explaining" how Vista is not ripped off from Mac OS X, it's not I tell you...)

One place the Journal's app shines: it provides links not just to articles but to video and podcasts as well. The first edition of the WSJ app also has email and article "saving"—Times app users had to nag the paper to provide that functionality in a recent app update. However, one thing the Journal's app lacks is enough information in the list of articles displayed on a given screen. The Times app displays both the headline and a brief description, along with a photo if available, while the WSJ app shows just the headline and (sometimes) a photo. Also, the Times app has a Search function while WSJ's does not.

I still have to ask: why do these apps look so much alike? And what's perhaps more important: is there a hidden danger that they might be confused with each other?

You might say to yourself "no, don't be ridiculous, it should be obvious which is which." Given the known slants of each publication, it probably should be. But imagine waking up groggy one morning, picking up your iPhone and going into shock as you ask yourself why Peggy Noonan is suddenly calling Obama our greatest president ever, slowly realizing as your eyes unblur that you're actually reading Maureen Dowd. (I'm sure there's a reverse scenario to complement that one.)

Looking for an alternative to apps provided by these long-lived journalistic institutions, I decided to download the USA Today iPhone app to see if they did things any differently.

Sure enough, as one might expect from an upstart, they do. In fact, it appears they use virtually every UI widget in the iPhone application development arsenal. The app opens much like the other two described here, with the words "USA Today" emblazoned in the middle of the screen, followed by a main screen displaying headlines. There are five buttons in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen once again, but they don't appear to be configurable anywhere in the app. USAToday's app substitutes enhanced navigation tricks for configurability.

However, in addition to the toolbar buttons, other widgets like horizontal scrolling menus are used to present subcategories. The toolbar buttons represent broad areas like Headlines, Scores and Weather, and supplemental widgets display appropriate subcategories: for Headlines, you see Top News, Money, Tech, etc. For Scores, you see NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. For Weather, an "accordion" widget allows vertical selection of weather for your current location, weather for other "favorite" locations, and national weather maps. Similarly, under Pictures, the accordion widget displays sets of thumbnails for categories like Day in Pictures, Day in Sports, Week in Weather, etc. (Pictures are displayed using the typical iPhone photo album paradigm, using both arrow keys and cover flow "flicking" for navigation within a set of photos. The captions for photos can be displayed or hidden with the press of a button.)

But wait, there's more! Within each subcategory (e.g., Headlines-->Tech), you can choose a section (e.g., "Products") as the default. If you're beginning to think that this sounds as deeply nested as Amazon's ill-fated (and oft-parodied) home page of multi-layered tabs that looked like the steps of a Mayan pyramid... perhaps you're right.

There's a lot more flashy stuff in the USA Today app. Which is exactly what you'd expect from USA Today, which made its name as a bold colorful alternative to stodgy monochrome publications like the Journal and the Times. Some of it is just flash, while some of it serves a useful purpose, presenting content in an well-structured, navigable fashion. While I wouldn't want to see the Times or the Journal mimicking USA Today's look-and-feel, they could learn a thing or two from some of the advanced techniques that USA Today employed, to make each of their apps a little more distinctive. Perhaps I'm being hypercritical, in that there are only a certain number of ways to present this kind of information, meaning that there are bound to be similarities between these apps. Nonetheless, in all of these apps there is naturally room for improvement, and some of that improvement can take the form of thinking outside the box, to offer unique branded presentations worthy of each publication.

• New York Times iPhone app
• Wall Street Journal iPhone app
• USA Today iPhone app

It is no small irony that conservatives, whose agenda is supposedly to make us all to live in the past, don't remember what the past was actually like. Take, for example. the sudden interest amongst the "Whiny Right" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Lately, conservative pundits have been bringing up this book as a prescient window from the past into today's economic predicament. According to them, if we only followed the precepts Rand laid out in this book, the real source of our economic problems would just go away, and we would have a perfect laissez-faire capitalist society run by selfish people who only give a damn about themselves. And that, of course, would be good (according to them), because all of those outside of that group of people are just "moochers" who unjustifiably take the "wealth" these people produced (i.e., from the Ponzi schemes and the tangled mazes of fabricated fictional financial instruments they created).

There's just one problem with this sudden rise in cheerleading for Ayn Rand from the Whiny Right: Rand's doctrine was what these people followed during their stay in power over the course of the last thirty years! We did follow those precepts, and this is where they got us.

Even before Obama was sworn into office, the Whiny Right was already posturing about their love of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article back in January entitled Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years. He mentioned that during his stay at the Cato Institute (a libertarian spin farm posing as an "objective"--no pun intended--source of economic wisdom, with a bias against economic regulation as deep as the Institute for Creation Science's bias against evolution), they would call those who hadn't yet read Atlas Shrugged "virgins". (Perhaps this was meant to indicate that they hadn't yet been mindf--ked.) Moore opined that "if only Atlas were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster." But in stereotypical conservatives-can't-remember-the-past fashion, he forgets that the book was "required reading" for people like Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, who might be considered the... shall we say architects (Howard Roarks?) of the economic debacle we are in today. In other words, reading Atlas Shrugged is not what will get us out of this mess, it is the very thing that got us into it.

(Of course, when Moore appeared on The Colbert Report during the "Doom Bunker" segment last week, he admitted that if something, somehow, were to prove that his ideas on economic policy and doctrine were wrong, "I would have to rethink everything I believe in." As Colbert noted, we can only pray that never happens... but there really isn't any need to when dealing with Whiny Right, is there?)

To use a metaphor of sorts, imagine that an expatriate from a foreign country--say, Russia--detested how food was made in her native country, had her own ideas about such things (for argument's sake, we'll call her "Rachel Raynd") and fled to come to America. Once here, she wrote a cookbook (entitled "Atlas Sauteed") describing the "right" way that food should be made, complete with recipes and photos of her completed creations. Millions of people bought the book (and also bought large SUVs and/or pickup trucks in order to carry the huge tomes back home), and praised it. The pictures inside the book "proved" that these were great magnificent delicious recipes. But when several prominent chefs decided to serve food based on the recipes in the book, thousands of people suffered severe food poisoning and became extremely ill. Not heeding these somewhat obvious warnings, the chefs continued to prepare food according to these recipes, and many more became ill. When a government agency ("No, no, please no!!!!") came in and shut down the establishments using these recipes, the proprietors became enraged--"Why are WE being punished because other people got sick?"--and announced their idea of a solution. There was a cure for what befell all those sick people. Where would we find this cure? Why, in the back of that same cookbook! (In fact, in the last 60 or so pages, in which chef Jean Gaulte decries the notion that the illness of the people he fed is his concern--these, after all, were not productive people who created meals, these were simply the people who paid for and ate them. Mere human beings, not chefs like him!)

What is the allure of this book? Rand is a horrific author, even more tediously verbose than... well, than me. Her capabilities in constructing an engaging narrative and producing poetic metaphor are severely limited. (How much "metaphor" can you squeeze out of "A = A"?) Her philosophy is derivative and unoriginal, and most of those she cribs from would spin in their graves if exposed to her work. And that philosophy is not conveyed to us through action (as a good author would do) but through plodding speeches offered up by her flawless heroic fictional characters.

So why do conservatives see this book as a bible, a primer on how society should be organized? Perhaps it is the same set of factors that leads fans of Lord of the Rings (et al) to show up to movie premieres (or for that matter, to work) in full costumed regalia, to take on the names of their favorite characters... in other words, these Randroids are just another set of nerds who believe their pet favorite fantasy fiction (which is all Atlas Shrugged is) is real! Good fantasy and science fiction work because their stories may be fictional, but they resonate metaphorically in the real world. Atlas Shrugged simply pretends that the fantasies of the author are reality. It is a pathetic eugenic fiction vainly attempting to rationalize the notion that society can be divided up into productive people and "moochers", and that only members of the former group are "deserving".

Isn't it funny how the advocates of this philosophy all happen to imagine themselves, objectively of course, to be the productive, intelligent ones who are taken advantage of by the other worthless moochers who just don't work as hard as they do? How did that happen?)

Poking fun at Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Stephen Colbert's segment on the subject last night, Rand Illusion, was dead on, mocking the book's ridiculous conceit about the "people who make society work" (you know: the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the politicians, and the pundits) going on strike and creating their own island nation--a nation, as Colbert describes it, "of self-interested, Type-A, me-firsters who will never suffer the indignity of working in the interests of anyone else". Matt Ruff also parodied Rand's philosophical ideas in his book Sewer, Gas, and Electric.

But the most poignant mockery of Randroidism comes from Douglas Adams, best known as the author of the five-book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". In one of those books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Adams describes a race from the planet Golgafrincham, who had a similar idea to the one in Atlas Shrugged, only in reverse. They decided their species could be divided up into three groups: the "A" group being the brilliant (self-proclaimed, of course) leaders, scientists, artists and so on, the "C" group being those who worked, who did and made actual concrete things of value, the "B" group being everybody else--the hairdressers, management consultants, TV producers, insurance salesmen, telephone sanitizers, etc.--whom the wise "brilliant" people objectively deemed useless. And the brilliant people "invented spurious tales of impending doom" conveyed to the masses leading to an announcement that everyone would need to leave the planet, and that the three designated groups would be gathered onto their own respective "arks", with the "B-Ark" leaving... er, shall we say, "first". Thus the remaining people of Golgafrincham, having "rid themselves of the useless third of their population, ... stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich, happy lives... until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone."

Maybe such a scenario, or a variation of it, really is in our best interests. Perhaps, if the self-proclaimed brilliant deserving people did go on strike, did stop inventing specious manufactured ways of "creating wealth" from vapor, we would be the better for it. And perhaps if they did go off together to an island and form their own nation based on their social and economic "principles"... it would be the best season of Survivor ever!

But if they bring their guns with them, it probably wouldn't last more than a few episodes.

• Colbert Nation - Tonight's Word: Rand Illusion
• Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years (from The Wall Street Journal)
• Ayn Rand entry on Colbert's Wikiality web site

If you're an Apple watcher, you may recall that at MacWorld earlier this year, anticipation was high that Apple would be announcing an update to the Mac mini. The mini had been unchanged for almost two years, so consensus was that it was overdue. The web was rife with speculations, rumors, and predictions with everyone positive that a new Mac mini would be announced. But... nope, didn't happen.

As a big fan of the mini, this was discouraging. But this week, with only moderate fanfare, Apple announced upgrades to several of their Macintosh product line, including the iMac, the Mac Pro, and the Mac mini.

Apple claims that the new Mac mini is "the world's most energy-efficient desktop computer". This is good to know, because this makes the mini even more appropriate for a purpose near and dear to my heart: using it as a home server. Since servers generally are left powered on 24/7/365, they need to be as efficient as possible when it comes to power consumption and energy management. According to Wired (which has referred to the mini as "Apple's red-headed stepchild", given the way Apple still doesn't seem to know how it should be marketed), 22% of Mac mini owners are using the box as some kind of home server (either a specialized media server or a general purpose server) and another 18% use it as part of their home theater system. I'll be talking more about how you can use the Mac mini as a home server, and why you would want to have a home server in the first place, in an upcoming blog post.

So, looking back at all the speculation in January, how close were all the Mac-psychic-wannabes in predicting what the new mini would be like, even if they were two months off on the announcement date?

The post on Wired's GadgetLab blog listed numerous items they were "sure" would be part of the new mini. They were wrong (as were most people) about the use of aluminum "unibody construction" as we saw in the latest MacBooks. They were wrong about the price dropping (it stayed the same). But they were correct in saying that "some internal parts will be PVC-free" and that Apple would "tout this as the greenest Mac ever". They were also correct about the use of the NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, except that this is true for all versions of the new mini, not just of the higher-end configurations. But the difference between the high- and low-end configurations turns out not to be processor speed, but the size of the internal hard drive (starting at 120GB for the low-end going up to 320GB) and the amount of memory (starting at 1GB RAM for the low-end, with 2GB for the high-end, going up to 4GB as an option for both configurations). The low-end configuration, however, now comes with a double layer SuperDrive (as opposed to the combo drive which did not write DVDs at all), making it a much more viable option. There seems to be enough flexibility in configuration options for you to make your own choices balancing processor speed, hard disk size, and memory, according to your own needs.

As always with Apple-watching, there were new rumours presaging these recent announcements. Just a couple of weeks ago, a video surfaced purportedly showing the soon-to-be-released new Mac mini. In the spirit of "fool me once... fool me twice", cries of "Photoshopped" rang out, but on close examination now, it sure looks like the new mini.

• MacWorld: Where did the mini go? (from my blog, The Voice of Rosen)
• Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009 (from Wired's Gadget Lab blog)
• New Mac mini revealed in video? (from Engadget)
• The Mac Mini: Apple's Red-Headed Stepchild and How Do You Love the Mac Mini? Let Us Count the Ways (from Wired)
• Apple's page on the new Mac mini

Don't say I didn't warn you. Three months ago, I posted a blog entry entitled "Gmail gives you options... perhaps too many". covering the complexities of using Gmail alongside various experimental features made available by Gmail Labs and the popular Firefox extension Better Gmail. Some of the scripts included in Better Gmail provide functionality redundant with (or in conflict with) features offered by Gmail Labs.

My point was that when dealing with a base service, a set of experimental features provided by a "labs" division of the company providing the service, and a third-party add-on for Firefox that aggregates independently written Greasemonkey scripts, conflict was bound to arise and users need to be careful how they configure this functionality.

Google recently made changes to Gmail's HTML and CSS layout which broke a number of Better Gmail's scripts, including my favorite, Folders4Gmail (which displays hierarchically named labels in a collapsible tree view), "Add Row Highlights", and others. I first experienced the problems when I updated Better Gmail 2 to a new version (0.7.3). The thing I noticed immediately was that the hierarchical label display was gone. But it seems that the new version was probably not the culprit: I just happened to update right after Google's layout changes.

But fear not: an entry today on Gina Trapani's blog (she's the editor of Lifehacker and the one who compiled and packaged the Better Gmail scripts), Smarterware let us know that the people behind Better Gmail are on the ball. Gina worked with Arend von Reinersdorff (who wrote several of the Better Gmail scripts) to package a "quick fix-it version" that repairs the problems associated with some of Better Gmail's functions, including Folders4Gmail. Not everything is fixed, but at least the people behind this extension are aware of the issues and are working on correcting the remaining problems. The link to download the latest version can be found on Gina's blog and on the Lifehacker web site.

• Gmail gives you options... perhaps too many (from my blog, The Voice of Rosen)
• Better Gmail 2 Fixes Now Available (from Gina Trapani's blog, Smarterware)
• Post on GetSatisfaction on the problems with Better Gmail
• Firefox add-on page for Better Gmail 2
• Lifehacker page for Better Gmail extension for Firefox

Some time ago, I recall a news item or blog post announcing that someone had just begun working at Microsoft Research. One of the comments in response smirked "Well, in that case, I just wanted to say 'Welcome to Apple!'"

The implication would seem to be that "research" at Microsoft consists of copying recent innovations from Apple. But that would be a gross misstatement. It takes years for Microsoft to copy Apple's ideas, so use of the word "recent" is inappropriate. Sometimes it takes "five years and 50,000,000 lines of code" (according to David Pogue) for Microsoft to play catchup with Apple. Not to mention that when they do "catch up", they often don't get it quite right.

One place where Windows takes a major hit is in comparison to the software Apple provides built in to every Macintosh. iLife is a suite of products that includes iPhoto (for photo manipulation and organizing), iMovie (for editing and compiling video), iDVD (for putting iPhoto slideshows and iMovie videos on disk), iTunes (for collecting and organizing music), and GarageBand (for making music of your own). Windows, on the other hand, includes... Windows Media Player... er, Microsoft Picture Manager, Sound Recorder, and... everything else you have to buy or download yourself.

While there have always been excellent software offerings for recording your own music on a Windows PC, there has been nothing that compares to GarageBand as a free, built-in software program that works for a variety of people, ranging from complete novices singing along with their guitar or piano to semi-pro part-time musicians who know the ins and outs of sophisticated recording. You can do traditional recording from live instruments and vocals, use a MIDI keyboard to access a rich library of built-in software instruments, or play DJ by combining and remixing the gigabytes of available sound loops.

Here is a department where Microsoft has been striving to catch up. And their efforts have produced a new beta program from their research division, called Songsmith.

In a nutshell: Songsmith is a software equivalent of an old-school home organ or gimmicky MIDI keyboard that comes with a variety of preset rhythm patterns and song styles like "Samba", "Jazz", "Funky", or "Rock". Pressing down a key triggers the pounding of the chincy MIDI drum set so that you can start singing along. Songsmith does this DIY "songwriting" one better—you can start the drums in a given style and tempo and sing along without pressing a key at all (you don't even need a keyboard). On playback, the software will overdub the appropriate chords in the chosen style automatically. And the result sounds like... the cheap vapid devoid-of-soul-or-talent crap we've grown accustomed to listening to on the radio. Only a little worse because most likely you can't sing in tune and/or you lack the more sophisticated pitch-correction algorithms used in modern recording. Still, you have to wonder whether Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and 8 out of 10 American Idol "winners" have had access to a VERY early release of this program to create their hits.

In case you aren't already laughing, here comes the funny part. Microsoft Research produced a cute (?) video ad to promote this program. The "plot" is simple in a sitcommie sort of way: daughter uses Songsmith to just sing her own impromptu songs, Daddy the advertising executive with no creativity whatsoever (forgive the redundancy) witnesses this and appropriates his little girl's computer to write a song for his going-nowhere advertising campaign for glow-in-the-dark towels. In a local coffee shop, he wows the other patrons by singing and "composing" a song right on the spot. Another laptop-using patron who seems to be a "real" musician downloads the program to write a new song to impress his bandmates. He adjusts the sliders to the appropriate levels of "happiness" and "jazziness" and out comes a song. (I assume you would reduce the happiness and jazziness levels to zero to produce a song in the style of, say, Soundgarden or Social D... if they too were talentless robots with no souls.) Meanwhile, Dad the ad man wins the day at the office competing with other ad-men whose only resources are charts and presentations generated with... er, Microsoft Office, I assume. Yay, Dad! Yay, Songsmith!

The irony is... when you look at the daughter's borrowed laptop you see a flurry of cutesy stickers—one of which is clearly strategically placed dead center to hide the presence of some sort of fruit underneath. Yup, the amazing "Glow in the Dark Towels" ad was created on... a MacBook! Yay... Microsoft?

But OK, let's be fair. Long before GarageBand, Microsoft tried its hand at this kind of software, and while the results may not have produced music that was any more soulful, at least the underlying process seemed more interesting.

Microsoft Music Producer was another beta program from Microsoft Research released back in 1996, intended to work with Windows 95. Like Songsmith, you could adjust various parameters like style and tempo. Unlike Songsmith, however, it did not support vocal input (meaning you couldn't sing along with it), and it did not produce audio file output (though it could export a MIDI file). But MMP offered much more control over the various parameters and many more choices. The styles were numerous, not just "jazz" and "funk" but "New Orleans", "Fusion", "Debussy". "Modernist" and many more. You coupled a style with a "mood" ("demented", "cheerful", "striving", "mysterious") and a choice of band composed of various combinations of general MIDI instruments. You could also move the individual instruments to wherever you wanted within the stereo spectrum, and control their relative volumes in the mix. For its time, it was pretty cool, and if you were curious you might have wondered about the underlying compositional algorithms that distinguished "Debussy/Mysterious/Dream Sleep" from "Modernist/Abstract/Pianos", or "Chase/Striving/Synth" from "Appalachian/Cheerful/Mountains". (Paul Copeland's web site contains MP3 samples showcasing the results of various combinations of MMP settings.)

The beta for the original MMP program expired back in 1997 and the program was pretty much lost to the ages. But an enterprising hacker archived the program and found a way to patch it to ignore the expiration date. The information is preserved on the MusicMachines.net web site, so all you enterprising antique software collectors and digital music adventurers can take a shot (if you follow the instructions carefully) and hear what Microsoft managed to produce back in 1996. The intent was to provide custom royalty-free "original" music to accompany multimedia presentations, and presumably not to create American Idol audition tapes, hit singles, or advertising jingles, but just tweaking the settings and playing around with the program can produce some interesting results.

• Songsmith page at Microsoft Research site
• How-to video on using Songsmith
• Microsoft's video ad for Songsmith in which the song is produced using a MacBook
• Microsoft Songsmith Ad Is Today's Best Thing Ever! (Cult of Mac)
• Digg.com hits for "Songsmith ad uses a MacBook"
• Microsoft Songsmith Takes on GarageBand (Electric Pig)
• Samples showcasing the results of various combinations of Microsoft Music Producer settings from Paul Copeland's web site
• Instructions on resurrecting Microsoft Music Producer from the MusicMachines.net web site
• MP3 of output from Microsoft Music Producer using Modernist style, Hopeful mood, and Pianos (settings displayed in above image).

If the flurry of blogospheric activity was any indication, it was a near certainty that Apple's announcements at Macworld today (delivered by Phil Schiller rather than that other guy with the turtleneck) would include a new revamped version of the Mac mini. The signs were all there: no updates to the unit for a rather long time, hints dropped in leaked Apple documents about a new design that flaunted major hardware enhancements including upgraded video capabilities, talk about media server functionality, even the usual "look, here's the new design" teases (almost always wrong, but a sign of things to come nonetheless).

Even macminicolo.net, a web hosting company specializing in colocated Mac mini's, posted its own "state of the Mac mini" address, confirming (supposedly) most of what we have been hearing.

But the only certainty when it comes to Apple announcements is that there is no certainty, and that predictions are rarely close to the mark.

In the "uncertainty is a certainty" department, Apple came through—in the sense that all the anticipation about a new Mac mini seems to have been for naught. To me, that's a major disappointment. The mini, originally marketed as a way to get people with older Windows PCs to reuse their old KVM peripherals (keyboards, video monitors, and mice) on a new lower-cost Macintosh, is a powerhouse in so many ways. Even without KVM peripherals attached, the mini makes a kickass headless server (if you set things up right—more on this later), providing file sharing, printer sharing, remote access (SSH and/or VNC), and all the other services you get with a Mac. And you get all this with a real general-purpose computer under the hood, not a "network-attached storage" limited-access gizmo or (heaven forfend) a clunky Windows box. (If it isn't obvious, I'm a big Mac mini fan, and I use one as my home server.)

Still, at least they didn't announce that the mini was being put out to pasture. The Mac mini is apparently "not dead yet", but sadly, it's not "getting better" either.

• Don't Cry Billy, I'm Sure Santa Will Bring You a Mac Mini After Macworld (John Paczkowski's Digital Daily column on All Things Digital)
• Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009 (Gadget Lab blog from Wired)
• Mac Mini Buyer's Guide complete with rumor history from MacRumors
• Macworld's summary article on this year's keynote address
• State of the Mac Mini from macminicolo.net

Hans Moravec, robotics researcher at Carnegie-Mellon and outspoken futurist, is known for his somewhat eccentric attitudes towards the evolution of robotic intelligence. He sees the notion that robots will eventually supplant human beings in both intelligence and power as not only inevitable but desirable. In interviews, he speaks with seeming glee about the extinction of humanity and its replacement by superior robots—whose makeup, he notes, will be inspired by the truest essences of what we are.

Interviewer: You call these future machines our progeny, our "mind children". When all traces of biology are gone from the beings that will eventually dominate the Earth, won't we, for all intents and purposes, be extinct? Our mind children may be superintelligent, and physically superior to us, but could they really be considered alive, and somehow descended from us?



HM: Unlike biological offspring, which are made by chemical processes just like those that make bacteria, robots will be consciously shaped by our uniquely human minds, by thoughts more representative of who we are than the unconscious biochemistry in our cells. The first generations of robots will start with our values, skills and dreams and take them much further than our old form possibly could. They will certainly be descended from us (from who else?). Sure, the medium which carries information from generation to generation will have changed from DNA to something more versatile. But, as in the case of the transition from vinyl records to music CDs, it is the tune that matters, not the platter.

Granted, Moravec hopes that we will direct the evolution of robots so that they will be "tame", so that "their most basic motivation [would be] to support us ... like dutiful children caring for aging parents", but we've all seen enough movies and read enough books to know how that always works out in the end.

Which is why the ongoing research at Bristol Robotics Lab, creating robotic heads that simulate emotional responses when speaking, is particularly disturbing. Are they moving towards making Moravec's transhumanistic future a reality?

You know that years from now, the army of robots hellbent on destroying humanity will look at this video as their inspiration, believing this head to be their leader and savior, following his orders to vanquish us and become our digital overlords., meaning that they won't seek to destroy us all, but

Here's an alternate story line for the Terminator movies: the robots in the future trying to destroy us are crushed by an uprising of humans led by one man. To prevent this from happening, the robots go back in time and, instead of killing the man and/or his mom, they convince him that robots are really cool and that they should supplant us and make us extinct as we outlive our usefulness. That man: Hans Moravec.

• Scientists Add Emotions to Robotic Head (deviceguru.com)
• Link to YouTube video of robot head speaking
  (plus more of the robotic head talking here)
• Bristol Robotics Laboratory web site
• Moravec's book Mind Children
• Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Google Book Search)
• Interview with Hans Moravec
  (and another one)

Like the dog in Devo's song "Freedom of Choice", sometimes we are faced with too many choices. The plethora of options available for Gmail users may be a prime example of this.

Gmail has always been a leading-edge (if not bleeding-edge) interface for dealing with email. It was one of the earliest email interfaces to use AJAX heavily. Following the Google paradigm of "search, don't sort", you don't put email items into folders, you give them labels (not unlike tags for blog posts). This falls inline with the non-hierarchical paradigm that says things don't necessarily belong to one category, or have a single position in a complex hierarchy. You can attach multiple labels to an email and you can search for it using either label (or both).

Gmail also displays your email not as individual messages but as conversations. An exchange between you and another person (or group of people) having the same Subject line shows up as one line item in Gmail. While other services give you a "threaded" mode as an option, with Gmail it's not just a default, it's the way you view email. This is something you either love or hate (sometimes both).

The point of all this being that Gmail is an acquired taste, but once you've acquired that taste, customizing Gmail the way you want it to work becomes an obsession. And Gmail stepped up from the start with tools to do that customization. A flexible filtering system that can label, forward, or trash messages based on the From address, To address, subject or body content. The ability to gather messages from other POP and IMAP accounts, both to read them using the Gmail interface and to respond to them using the addresses associated with those other accounts.

Clearly, though, this was not enough. Gmail users wanted more. And they got it. Sometimes from the people at Google, sometimes not.

People began writing Greasemonkey scripts that extended the capabilities of Gmail for Firefox users. Gina Trapani, editor of the Lifehacker blog, compiled the best of them into a packaged Firefox extension called Better Gmail. Then in late 2007, Gmail announced an updated version of their interface, and Better Gmail and the scripts it includes were updated to work with that new interface. In the meantime, Google has continued to add new capabilities to Gmail, many made available as experimental features through Gmail Labs (including the one that supposedly prevented "inebriated emailing"). Most recently Gmail added one more bit of functionality, themes.

With functionality available from such a wide variety of sources, conflicts and confusion are sure to arise.

• For example, Better Gmail offers "skins", but be careful using them if you select one of Gmail's new themes. I had to disable the Better Gmail skins function in order to prevent my selected Gmail theme from looking all messed up.
• Similarly, Gmail now provides a Settings option that forces your browser to always connect to Gmail via a secure (https) connection. (A great idea, by the way, especially if you plan to connect from public wi-fi spots.) Better Gmail also provides this option. You should only need to enable it in one place. Presumably Gmail's Settings panel is the better place.
• Gmail Labs provides a calendar widget that displays a summary of your Google Calendar entries in a small box in your Gmail sidebar. But Better Gmail provides the ability to display complete email, calendar, and Google Reader content as collapsible panels stacked vertically in the Gmail window. The latter approach displays the full calendar (day, week, or month view), but I've found that when using two-finger scrolling on my MacBook to move down the page to view the calendar content, the day/week/month being displayed is advanced simultaneously. It's easy enough to click the Calendar link at the top of the page to switch over to viewing your Google Calendar, so you may want to use this with discretion.

Between native Gmail features, Better Gmail functions, and Gmail Labs magic, these are the pieces I use:

Settings : General : Browser Connection

At the bottom of this panel, select the "Always Use Https" option to make sure your browser always opens Gmail using a secure connection. Setting this option here in this panel is better than the "Force Encrypted Connection" option in Better Gmail, because the former establishes this setting for all browsers on all computers you may connect to Gmail from, not just for Firefox on this computer.

Settings : Accounts

From this panel, I configure Gmail to retrieve POP mail from other accounts (including an old AOL account we rarely use anymore). I also use the "Send Mail As" feature so I can send or respond to messages using a "From" address associated with my personal domain (as well as that old AOL address). This means I can read and respond to all my mail in one place. (If you're going to use Gmail to send mail from multiple addresses, it's a good idea to enable the "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" option.)

Settings : Labels and Settings : Filters

Labels give you a way to categorize and organize messages. Filters set things up so that the right labels are applied to them automatically as they arrive in your inbox.

Better Gmail : Folders4Gmail

Yes, I know I said that Labels are not folders, but if you happened to have serendipitously set up "hierarchical" labels (e.g., "SHOPPING/BOOKS" and "SHOPPING/CLOTHES"), Better Gmail's Folders4Gmail feature will present these multi-layered labels as collapsible entries in a hierarchical tree.

Gmail Labs : Forgotten Attachment Detector

In the spirit of "inebriated email" prevention, this feature looks at the text of the email you're about to send, and if words like "I'm attaching a file" are present in the text but you haven't actually attached a file, Gmail prompts you with a warning message. This has come to my rescue too many times to mention.

Gmail Labs : Advanced IMAP Controls

Labels are not folders, labels are not folders, labels are not folders... well, OK, it turns out that if you access Gmail using IMAP via an external email client, you'll find that your labels actually are represented as folders. (Messages having more than one label appear in each corresponding folder, although Gmail maintains only one copy of the message.) If perchance you don't want all of your defined labels to show up when using IMAP to access Gmail (e.g., on a wireless device like an iPhone or Blackberry), enable this option and you can choose which ones appear. (Of course, make sure IMAP Access is enabled in the Forwarding and POP/IMAP panel.)

Settings : General : Keyboard Shortcuts

Turn this option on to enable keyboard shortcuts that let you take action with a single keystroke (e.g., "r" to reply, "g" to go to a specific label, "c" to compose a new message, "*" to select messages). Gmail Labs also offers a feature to customize your keyboard shortcuts.

Better Gmail other options

• General - "Show Collapsible Calendar and Reader" is the previously mentioned method of displaying email, calendar, and Google Reader content as vertically stacked collapsible panels
• Messages - "Show Row Highlights", as the name implies, highlights the currently selected row, while "Attachment Icons" includes an icon representing a particular kind of attached file (Word document, PDF, zip file, etc.) included in a message.
• Compose - Includes a variety of options for automatically displaying an editable subject, Cc, and Bcc line when composing an email.

Again, the one thing worth avoiding is using Better Gmail's skins with Gmail's themes. Choose one or the other.

• Code changes to prepare Gmail for the future (Announcement of new interface for Gmail)
• Article about updated Gmail interface on Lifehacker
• Introducing Gmail Labs (The Official Gmail Blog)
• Better Gmail Firefox extension updated for new Gmail interface (Lifehacker)
• Download the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension
• Gmail Updates Its Look, Adds Themes (Lifehacker)

Google announced a new version of their Google Mobile app for the iPhone a week ago, touting two new capabilities: basing searches on your current location, and allowing you to enter search text using your voice.

The problem was, Apple hadn't yet approved the app for download, and it wasn't available via the iTunes "App Store" when the announcement was made.

Could this lack of coordination between Apple and Google have something to do with Google's recent introduction of the iPhone-rivaling Android phone? Just a thought (or a conspiracy theory)...

Well, the kinks were all worked out and the wheels (and palms?) were all properly greased, so on Monday (11/17/2008) the voice-enabled Google Mobile app for the iPhone was made available at the App Store.

As a test, I channeled Kramer and said "Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie?" into the phone. On the first try, it didn't quite recognize what I said, but on the second try it did, and found several references to the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer pretends to be the Moviefone guy.

The verdict: it's a fun party trick to demonstrate to your friends how frigging cool your phone is—much like identifying a song by holding the iPhone up to a speaker using Shazam, or shaking the iPhone while running the UrbanSpoon app to find local restaurants. But the accuracy of the voice recognition is variable, something Google acknowledges. Still, for a first release, the functionality is pretty good.

One complaint is that the app seems to have trouble recognizing British accents. Oh well, those people should just learn to speak English...

• Google Mobile App for your iPhone
  (Google's official page for the new version of their iPhone app)
• Post about new version of app on Google's official blog
• Google Groups discussion about why the app was unavailable after it had been announced
• Google App For iPhone With Voice Search Finally Available (eFluxMedia)
• Concerns about voice searching with a British accent

John Lennon had produced some rather experimental stuff during his tenure with the Beatles, and fellow Beatle George Harrison released a little-known album called Electronic Music while still with the band (years before what most people remember as his debut album, All Things Must Pass). But apparently Paul McCartney, known for being the more conservative songwriter in the band, had his adventurous side, too.

McCartney (wasn't he the guy in Wings?) recently told the BBC that he has a master tape of a long lost Beatles track, called Carnival of Light, which had been recorded for an electronic music festival in 1967. He described it as having been inspired by the aleatory electronic music of composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. McCartney said that he told his bandmates to "just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around. So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it." Yeah, a bit of echo always helps.

McCartney said he had wanted the track to be included as part of the Beatles Anthology albums, but the other surviving band members nixed that idea. He will need approval from Ringo and from Lennon's and Harrison's estates to release the track now.

My guess is that this is going to sound less like "I Am The Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever", or Abbey Road's side-two medley, and a lot more like a cross between "Revolution 9" and "You Know My Name, Look Up The Number".

• 'Mythical' Beatles song confirmed (BBC News)

Shazam, the cell phone application that listens to music playing nearby and tells you which song it is (sometimes) has come to the iPhone. It's kind of cool to be able to point your iPhone at a speaker and find out the name of the song you're listening to.

There are limitations. Shazam will not listen to you attempt to sing some song you have vague memories of and figure out what it is. It works by comparing soundbytes to its extensive audio database of songs, and your karaoke-ish attempt to render a song is probably not in that database.

But how extensive is this database? How likely is Shazam to recognize a song?

I tested Shazam out on tunes I already knew, to see if its database was as good as mine.

Here are some songs of varying levels of obscurity that Shazam nailed outright:

• F U Right Back (Frankee)
• Jerry Was a Race Car Driver (Primus)
• Sometime Around Midnight (Airborne Toxic Event)
• Fast Cars (The Buzzcocks)
• Mole from the Ministry (Dukes of Stratosphear, an XTC side project)
• Maiden Voyage (Herbie Hancock)

Some successes were kind of surprising. It identified "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin—not the original version from Led Zeppelin IV, but the one from the BBC Sessions album, from just the first five bars, correctly naming the source. It distinguished between two different versions of Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (also known as "Theme for Lester Young"). It also recognized "So Long, Mom" by song satirist Tom Lehrer (though it took two tries).

Some near misses: it identified the demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from the Beatles Anthology 3 as coming from the "Love" album. (Granted, the Love remix used that demo as source material.) Other songs were recognized only after multiple tries. Comedy tracks were recognized—usually not the track itself, just the artist and album.

But a number of songs were missed entirely, including "Alligators Getting Up" (Curve) and "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger" (Firesign Theatre). "Girl of My Dreams", a classic punk song by Bram Tchaikowsky, wasn't recognized at all (although "Blank Generation" by Richard Hell and the Voidoids was). And "Strands of Rain" by progressive goth grunge band Eleven was confused with both "Non Stop" by Start Trouble and "Rock N Roll Dream" by Crooked X.

Still, this app is a lot of fun. Holding your phone up in the air somewhere where the muzak is actually offering up something interesting (this happens more than you'd expect nowadays) really does tell you what the song is more often than not. But the part of not being able to sing into it—believe it. Take it from someone who tried singing "Ah-oooooooo, werewolves of London!" while "Sweet Home Alabama" played on the radio in hopes of confusing the app. It didn't work.

• Shazam web site
• Shazam for iPhone

Just a few years ago, I looked at those tiny Sony VAIO 10"-screen subnotebooks and thought "I've got to have one of those!" Were it not for the prohibitive price (close to $3K), I might've actually gotten one. Even a 12" or 14" laptop was clumsy to use on a train or plane, and cumbersome to carry around if you weren't already lugging a briefcase or backpack. These sweet little laptops were just the right balance between a full-size laptop and a tiny PDA or smartphone whose interface was too difficult to write anything complicated with. But they never broke through in the U.S., which may be one reason the price stayed so high.

Enter the ASUS EEE. ASUS had made inroads as a manufacturer of motherboards and other PC components, but its introduction of its own line of subnotebooks came as somewhat of a surprise. The EEE caught on with a wide variety of people, not just techies who just had to have the latest technological gadgetry. Students found it great for taking notes in class. (Celia's original EEE 900 goes with her to class daily.) Travelers loved the fact that it didn't cramp their style in a cramped airplane seat. And, as a New York Times reader pointed out, it's small enough to fit nicely into a woman's handbag. Plus, with a starting price of under $400, the price was right, too.

The EEE's success in these markets was surprising—in part because it proved that your average computer user was not put off by an alternative (i.e., non-Windows and non-Mac) operating system like the version of Linux the EEE initially came with. It also caught established computer manufacturers caught off-guard, though Acer, HP, Lenovo, Dell and others have been playing catch-up producing subnotebooks of their own.

But ASUS has not stood still, updating their line several times over since the introduction of the EEE 900. Their latest innovation is the S101, which they tout as a stylish "melding of fashion and functionality" that's "slimmer than most fashion magazines". Recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Forbes magazine attest to the fact that small subnotebooks are big news.

• Mini-Laptops Fuel PC Sales Growth (New York Times)
• Attack of the Netbooks (Forbes.com - also check out their slideshow of available netbooks)
• Eee PC's Grab For Students (Forbes.com)
• Sweetly Disruptive Technology (interview with Asus' chairman at Forbes.com)
• Netbooks Come Into Their Own (Walt Mossberg on All Things Digital)

A great example of just how good Jon Stewart is: here he is verbally sparring with Bill O'Reilly on last Thursday's Daily Show. Demonstrates why it's important to let conservatives speak their minds: they give you such great openings to respond to.

Of special note: Stewart decimating O'Reilly's idea of what is "traditional" in this country, by noting that our traditions represent not a fictitious Ozzie and Harriet mythology but "a progression of individual freedom".

O'Reilly's final gaffe in the interview, not really political in nature: he referred to a little toy bear that Jon gave him (to assuage his fears about the dangers of an Obama presidency) as a "panda". Basically proving that Stewart's admonition was correct: he—and those like him—really do need to get out more.

• Uncut interview with Bill O'Reilly on The Daily Show

Here's a way to get better Gmail on your iPhone.

No, not the Better Gmail add-on for Firefox—which is wonderful in its own right, but doesn't help you much on an iPhone (which, for one thing, doesn't run Firefox).

Here's the problem in a nutshell: I tried using the Mail application on my iPhone as my means of reading and sending Gmail, but I found there was one major issue: it used my gmail.com address (which I don't normally use) rather than my personal address associated with my own domain—what Gmail calls a "custom address".

In a nutshell: when you use the Gmail desktop interface, you can choose a default address (it doesn't have to be the gmail.com address). That default address is your "From" address in sent email unless you specify otherwise. (If you have a number of custom addresses, you can also tell Gmail to set the From address in replies to whichever one the mail was explicitly addressed to.)

The point of all this being: the Mail application on the iPhone was unusable for me, because it kept sending email with what I considered the wrong address. (It was correct in that replies to the email would indeed be directed to me, but it was not what I wanted recipients to see in the "From" line.) For this reason, I switched to using Safari to access the web-based mobile version of Gmail.

This was an acceptable compromise until last week, when suddenly for no apparent reason I could not send replies to emails that had been sent to me. Gmail produced an absurd message that said "Some addresses in the From field were not recognized." First of all, you're only supposed to have one address in the "From" field of an email. (So why "some addresses"?) And second, "From" addresses aren't just pulled out of thin air, they are pre-vetted by Gmail before an email can be sent. Gmail can only set your "From" address to an established address that you've already set up and verified.

In other words, you can't just decide you want to send email as "w@whitehouse.gov" or "alaskagov@yahoo.com", you have to prove to Gmail that you actually own the referenced email address, via a series of tests and confirmation messages. (See the Google support article for details.)

Needless to say, this problem where Gmail insisted that your "From" address is somehow wrong has been rather annoying. Although intermittent, it naturally seems to crop up at the worst possible time (when you need to send a critical response to someone immediately from your mobile device and can't wait until you arrive at your office or at home to send it).

Then I came upon a note on Gmail's What's New page. Apparently I could configure the iPhone's Mail application to use not a preconfigured Gmail account, but a custom IMAP account that established my personal-domain-based email as my "From" address. It's not at all difficult, you get to use a custom address as your "From" address, and the annoying unfounded error message is a thing of the past. (So far...) The feature has actually been around for over a year, but this was the first time I tried it. Sure enough, email sent by me using the iPhone Mail app now has the desired "From" address. As of yesterday I switched from using Safari (to access the mobile Gmail web site) to using the iPhone Mail app.

(According to the latest entries in the thread, the "bad From address" problem is still occurring to some people and the issue is still unresolved.)

• Google Groups thread on Gmail error message: "Some addresses in the From field were not recognized."
• What's new in Gmail? (Gmail new features announcements page)
• Video showing how to set up Gmail IMAP for the iPhone

By now, everyone knows that Colin Powell went on NBC's Meet the Press program this past Sunday and endorsed Barack Obama. And by now, everyone knows (or ought to know, assuming they've been listening) that he vocally decried the Republican smear campaign against Obama, which seek to associate him with anything that might diminish him in the eyes of the American public. Be it "palling around with a terrorist", or being a "socialist", or (apparently worst of all) being a Muslim.

The Muslim thing has being going on for a long time now. Mass emails and robo-calls from the McCain camp "inform" people that Obama is a Muslim. Of course, he isn't, as everyone also ought to know by now. But Powell made a critical point in his interview on Meet the Press: he noted that whether or not Obama is a Muslim shouldn't matter. The issue we really need to examine is why the Republicans assume that associating Obama with being a Muslim is considered "disparaging" in the first place.

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

The American people, or at least the Republican base, are apparently expected to associate being a Muslim with being a terrorist and being anti-American (or, as Sarah Palin and apparently other Republican cronies would put it, not a "real" American). As Gleen Greenwald said in his post on Salon.com, "There has been much condemnation over the Obama-is-a-Muslim line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false ... not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true."

This bugged me as well: why hadn't anyone come out and said this sooner? Why didn't anyone else note how this was a pathetic "When did you stop beating your wife?" gambit (or in this case, "When did you stop facing Mecca to pray?"), borne of typical conservative animosity towards not only non-white non-Christians, but towards their own base as well.

Reprehensible and dangerous (and abominable) though it may be, this is historically the way conservatives get elected (and maintain power) in this country: by fomenting fear and perpetrating prejudice. Nixon and Reagan were certainly swept into office using this tactic. Joe McCarthy built his power base on the notion that it was "patriotic" to harass people for not adhering to a status quo party line. Rush Limbaugh, naturally, whined about Powell's endorsement saying "of course it is about race". (And of course his endorsement of McCain is about race, too, isn't it?) Likewise, Pat Buchanan whines about how ungrateful and ungracious Powell is in "turning on" his party and says pretty much the same thing. It is important to them that the fears and prejudices trump the underlying issues, because especially now, in the midst of a misguided war and a mismanaged economy, they cannot win on the issues. If it's not race, it's this vague generalized contempt for the "un-American" attitudes of people who aren't a part of "real" America. (Will we have to listen Ann Coulter whine yet again that investigations into such so-called un-Americanism by Joe McCarthy and company were actually a reasonable course of action—and that McCarthy was actually railroaded by Communist influences—as this attempt to tar people who disagree with Republicans as "unpatriotic" and "un-American" is rationalized?)

But it's not like race isn't working for them, to some degree. Recall the "crazy lady" at the McCain rally who told McCain how worried she was about Obama. "I understand he's an Arab," she said, showcasing the level of misinformation apparently present among those small-town "real" Americans who don't need facts to inform their decisions. "No," McCain quickly retorted, "he's a decent family man." (Watch Aasif Mandvi, correspondent on the Daily Show, explain how it is actually possible for someone to be both!) Sadly, McCain's (mis-)statement belies the fact that ultimately the use of racism isn't just a "tactic" (or do I mean strategy?) they use to win an election, it's part of what they actually stand for.

All this brouhaha of late about whether people in parts of Pennsylvania are racist, with McCain accidentally saying that he "couldn't agree more" with that assertion. Perhaps that wasn't a gaffe at all.

Perhaps it was his earnest hope.

Special thanks to Don Hopkins whose Facebook note on the subject pointed me to a number of these sources.

• Video of Powell endorsing Obama (from NBC's Meet the Press)
• Colin Powell condemns the ugliness of the Republican Party (Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com)
• Aasif Mandvi on the Daily Show responds to McCain's saying that Obama is not an Arab, "he's a decent family man".
• I understand he's an Arab: "Crazy lady" talks about Obama at McCain rally
• Huffington Post article on the endorsement

My blog post from about a week ago about Google's new feature in Gmail, Mail Goggles, drew a few comments from friends on mine on Facebook, but that was dwarfed by the media attention it got from... well, all over the place. It seemed everyone was talking about "drunk email" (or "inebriated emailing" as I like to call it), and whether or not this was a useful feature or the single stupidest thing ever developed by a programmer.

First, Chelsea Handler on her late-night talk show Chelsea Lately brought up the subject in one of her panel discussions. Then the veritable New York Times published an article on the subject (which—perhaps surprisingly—managed to get onto their Most E-Mailed list). The even more veritable satirical rag, The Onion, chimed in with one of their American Voices person-in-the-street insets.

Strangely enough, the Onion's contribution to this discussion appeared in the print version of the paper last week, but did not show up online until over the weekend. My theory: the Onion's internal editorial content management system prevented a drunk editor from publishing the bit until Sunday morning, when she was sober and could do math.

• Goggles for Google: New Gmail Feature Prevents You From Sending Mail You Would Later Regret (from my blog)
• Drunk, and Dangerous, at the Keyboard (New York Times)
• Gmail Offers Drunk E-Mail Protection (The Onion)