Tech

There is a nice plugin for Jenkins that lets you dynamically add capacity by spinning up EC2 instances on demand and then terminating them when the job queue expires. This is a great way to save money on an AWS based build infrastructure. Unfortunately, the plugin documentation is really light and there are a few gotchas to look out for. Security Groups This field only accepts comma separated security group IDs, not names. This is frustrating because other fields in the plugin take a space separated list (e.g. labels) ...

Be careful what you search for. Another reason to use duckduckgo. Facebook Is Using You

High Tech Prison Break

Sure enough Gmail is live in the app store. Unfortunately its not an entirely native application. Most of it is a native wrapper for a web view of the mobile site. We get push notifications(except that their broken right now), address book integration, and the ability to attach photos, but the interface is a bit laggy and still won’t format an html email to fit the screen. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Google usually releases products publicly before they’re ready and then slowly improves them. Link to the app store below. ...

This would make me quite happy if it’s true. Native gmail app for iPhone!!!

Yesterday I determined a compromise. I’m going to keep using iCloud for contacts and calendars. Google sync makes a mess of contacts, iCloud “just works.” I’ll keep using Gmail for my main email. I’ll access it through Apple Mail on the desktop and the iPhone’s built in mail app. Here’s how I set it up to avoid duplicate messages and other craziness. Log into Gmail’s settings and navigate to the labels tab. Here you can control which labels show up in IMAP. What I did was hide all mail, starred, and important from IMAP. ...

I’ve used Gmail or several years and have really enjoyed the experience. It’s not without its quirks however. Anyone who has ever used Gmail with an IMAP client can attest to how wonky things can get. The way Gmail’s All Mail folder functions causes lots of duplicate messages to show up. If a message has a label it will appear in both a folder for that label as well as in the All Mail folder. If you search for a message in the client multiple copies will pop up. The Gmail experience on the iPhone is also annoying. You can setup up Gmail through IMAP just like a desktop client, with all of the duplicate messages, but you can’t get push. That means I have to set my phone to poll the network at a certain interval. This is bad for battery life at high settings and means that messages don’t show up right away. The other option is to set up Gmail though Google sync as an exchange server. You can get push with this option but deleting a message will always archive it. I don’t want to archive all the junk newsletter messages I get. To delete a message with this setup I have to select it and then manually move it to Gmail’s trash folder. ...

I love Apple and the products they create. I always had an interest in gadgets but was too busy playing guitar and trying to keep an old Dell laptop working to take it much further than that. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago and bought my first Macbook Pro that I fell in love technology. There is something in the design of Apple products that makes them a pleasure to use, and that is thanks to the vision and genius of Steve Jobs. ...