Archive for May, 2006

Since my last foray into mobile email, I’ve given a few different email clients a go:

• MovaMail - Mobile Mail
• Pegasus (nothing to do with the old Pegasus Mail Client)

MovaMail

MovaMail is an interesting mail client because rather than contacting your mail server directly, they have a proxy that strips out excess headers and attachments and compresses it before downloading to your phone. This makes it very quick and lowers the costs of data transfer. An interesting idea but you have to be comfortable with another company having your mail server login details as well as processing your mail. Their FAQ tries to alleviate some fears:

Q. Is my email information secure? A. Yes. Your account information is encrypted, and stored on our servers which are in a secured network centre with restricted access. Your account is password protected as well. Please note that in order to retrieve lost passwords you must provider your mobile phone number so that lost passwords can me sent to your phone via SMS.

Q. Is my information secure with Mobile Mail? A. Yes. Data security is a high priority to us. Your password is stored encrypted on our servers. Our servers are located in a secured facility with access only by authorized personnel.

Q. What is you privacy policy? A. We are firmly committed to respecting your privacy. We do not share your information with any third party without your prior consent. If you have any questions, please review our privacy policy.

Overall I quite like the client, there are only a few annoyances. First the text is quite small, but that does have the advantage of allowing you to see more. If you have a larger inbox, each time you want to access the next ‘page’ of headers, it contacts the server, it doesn’t cache the headers. It’s impossible to change the mail server settings once you’ve entered time, so make sure you get them right or you’ll be in for a lot of tedious typing.

Pegasus

Pegasus is definitely the more attractive of the two clients:

and has a lot more features, e.g. attachment viewing. The Pro version has a push option so you don’t need to check the server, and streaming, which apparently saves on data transfer. The interface is better than Movamail and I really wanted to like it, but I couldn’t get it to talk to my mail server, it always hung on the connecting screen, so I can’t really say a lot more.

Both clients support SSL, but I couldn’t get it to work. I assume it’s the same problem as I had with the internal client where I need to install the SSL certificate. Further research suggests this is only possible via Bluetooth or IRDA, neither of which I have setup on my laptop, in fact I don’t even have Bluetooth on my laptop, so this is going to be a struggle if I want to use email on my phone on a regular basis.

Movamail and Pegasus are commercial software, to be honest I don’t know if I’d use my phone for email enough to warrant buying one after the trials end. On the odd occassion I need to check my mail, the built-in client is good enough, but for someone who uses their phone as their main email client, both these programs are worth a look.

The title is a bit misleading. I’m not actually looking for a search engine written in Java, if I was I’d head straight to Nutch. What I’m looking for is a search that just covers Java articles and tutorials. The company I work for has software to build vertical search engines, in fact I wrote most of it, so I really should be eating my own dog food. But you know how it is, the cobbler’s children never have any shoes, so while I wait for some servers to free up I decided to have a go with similar systems that are freely available on the web.

The two sites I’m trying out are Rollyo and Swicki. Both sites let you specify a list of web sites and search across them. The sites I used for my test were:

• On Java
• IBM Developer Works (just the Java section)
• java.net (just the articles)

Rollyo

First up is Rollyo. It’s very simple to setup the search engine, I won’t bother going into the specifics because anyone could figure it out. Rollyo is actually backed by Yahoo! search, what soon becomes clear is that it’s just a site restricted search in Yahoo. Two of the sites on my list actually cover many things and I just wanted a sub-directory of each, Rollyo searches the whole site, which is not what I want.

My test search is concurreny deadlock detection. The first two results are of the same page, there are plenty of other duplicates, and I get non-Java results back, e.g. ‘DB2 for z/OS: DB2 Universal Database concurrency‘. So far not so good. A few more searches turns up similar results. Restricting the set of data I want to search, and getting rid of duplicates is basic functionality, Rollyo fails on both counts and won’t get any more of my time.

Rollyo - Java Articles

Swicki

Next up is Swicki. First difference, they have their own crawler, which means that have a lot more control over the data. Second is they are community focused, i.e. a group of like minded people contribute sites to the search engine, rather than you building it up yourself. Setting up the search was simple, and I didn’t have to create an account either (although I did so I could keep my search engine). Swicki also says you can search just parts of sites and you don’t have to do any special configuration either, just make sure the directory is included in the URL.

So how did concurrency deadlock detection fair this time? A lot better than Rollyo. There were plenty of relevant links, no duplicates and Swicki actually covered more sites than I selected, but they appear to be relevant so that’s fine with me. Was it perfect? No because some database deadlock information crept in, which I wasn’t interested in. But since they control the data set (remember they crawl the web themselves) you can personalise the system. They claim it learns from your behaviour, but I haven’t used it enough to verify that claim, but what I can see is that for every result you can promote it, or the site, and delete the result or the site it comes from. So over time the results will get better.

So first impressions are good. I’ll have to use it a bit longer to see if it does learn. I’ll try to stick a search box to it on this site, but since I didn’t make this design and I’m not great with CSS, it might be a while, in the meantime, here’s the link:

Swicki - Java Articles

I came across this the other day, it’s now possible to use Google to find out what films are showing at cinemas close to you. If you punch ‘movie’ into the search box you get another box appearing above the results asking for your location:

Enter your location and it brings up a list of current releases at the cinemas closest to you. If you want information on a specific film you can enter:

movie: [movie name]

into the search box and it’ll bring up the cinemas, the show times and a link to a map. It’s much better than all the other film searches for London, give it a go.

I came across a post on the Guardian’s tech blog called Are You Europe’s Cleverest Coder?. Google and TopCoder are running a competition in Europe for the first time. It sounds like a laugh and with a top prize of €2,500, it’s definitely worth having a go, but unfortunately I’m away during the qualifying rounds.

One thing that does bother though is the label ‘Cleverest coder’. To be fair it is the Guardian’s title, and isn’t used by the competition. Why do I have a problem with it? Well the score is based soley on time. Okay, that’s not strictly true, your program has to pass the tests first, otherwise you get 0, but the discriminator is the time you took, i.e.:

Total points awarded = Where PT is the time spent coding a problem, TT is the total time allocated for coding all problems, and MP is the maximum points available for that problem.

In my experience, the program that was written the quickest is rarely the best, hence I wouldn’t label the winner of this contest the cleverest coder. But I’ll have to take a look at the actual competition before I criticise it too much.