Ok, I thought I would bite the bullet and transfer to Google Apps.  It’s going to take a while, so I had planned to do little pieces at a time.  Unfortunately Google don’t make it as easy as it should be.

Firstly, I’ve been trying to move my contacts over to Google Apps from Google Mail.  There is a built in export/import feature which works great.  However, contacts are not exported/imported with pictures.  This is annoying, very annoying.  Ok, just save the pictures from the Google Mail account somewhere and attach them to the contacts in Google Apps.  Nope, not possible, you can only change or delete existing contact photos, no way of getting them saved.  Rubbish.  Google Mail has built in groups too called Friends, Family and Colleagues.  These don’t get ported, despite my having assigned contacts to them.  Rubbish.

Ok, I was willing to sacrifice the groups and re-apply the photos manually, that’s not too problematic, though it will take up a lot of time.  Moving on to calendars….  Again there is an export/import feature which leverages the ICS format to do its magic and seems to get things done, although Google tells me 244 out of 259 events were imported.  No clue as to what happened to the 15 it had a problem with, or why.  Again, I thought I’d skip past that, I’m sure they weren’t important.  I need to setup sharing so that Mrs Tom can see what I’m up to, so I added her account in as able to share.  Boom, there it is, except, what’s that?  She can only see my free/busy information.  That sucks massively – when we both use separate GMail accounts this works perfectly.  The long and the short of it is I think I’ll have to stick to using Google Mail for my contacts and calendar, because Google Apps is both a pain in the arse to migrate to, and doesn’t give me quite what I need.

Rubbish.

I’ve been using FastMail for the last few years to look after my personal email.  I have several domains where I receive email and they all go to one fastmail account.  It’s always had everything I need, with a nice snappy web interface and IMAP access which I can use to collect mail on my iPhone.

Recently however, I’ve become more and more invested in Google, using Google Calendar and Google Contacts to keep track of my diary and maintain my address book.  This works great for me, as I can synchronise these things with my iPhone via push notification (meaning that if I update a contact on my phone the changes are synced to the Google “cloud”), and if I really want, to my desktop PC, albeit in a rather non-elegant way.

For example, these things recently meant that when I had to recently reset my iPhone (due to some problems I was having at the time which turned out to be hardware and didn’t actually need a reset), to get my calendar, contacts and emails all working on the phone again all I had to do was configure the accounts on the phone and magic, contacts and calendar items appear and mail starts being delivered again.  No backup/restore nonsense.

I’m searching for an “all under one roof” solution I suppose.  My buddy Chris used to use FastMail (that’s how come I do now, he recommended it) but now uses Google Apps, and is a real Google convert (he even has the crappy G1 Google phone, the fool).

The key features I suppose I need are mail, contacts, and calendar.  Mail and contacts I really want in one place because when I write a mail, I want to be able to select the contacts from within the app I’m working from.  What brought this home to me as being inconvenient recently was when I sent out an invite for a party.  Because my contacts are in Google, I selected them in my Google Mail account and copied/pasted them into FastMail so I could send the mail.  That is ever so slightly madness – I just shouldn’t have to do that.

So, mail.  FastMail does a great job with its IMAP implementation and the web interface is pretty neat.  Because it’s IMAP it lives with folders, whereas Google uses labels – I’m coming around to the idea of labels, it seems to make sense.  Also, if search works properly, I shouldn’t really need to worry about “filing” emails.  I think Google has search fairly well covered.

FastMail has a neat feature which I like, and to be honest, if Google had this I might not even be considering which way to go.  I get spam.  Everybody gets spam.  To help me track where my spam is generated from (so I can call the company up and call them names, ultimately to no end of course), I assign a unique email address to every company I deal with.  E.g. – all my WordPress mail goes to wordpress@mydomain.com, my Amazon emails all go to amazon@mydomain.com.  This works really well, as now when I get any junk mail I look to which address it’s been sent, and then I can decide how trustworthy a company is based on that and therefore whether I’m likely to deal with them again in the future.  If I need to deal with that company, I’ll email from that same address so as not to confuse matters.  This is the deal breaker – Google doesn’t let me do that – easily.

In Google Mail you can sort of do this, but you have to define the email address first (no need in FastMail) and then prove that you own it via a verification process involving them sending an email to that address, and you confirming via a link.  Why, Google, do I need to prove to you that I own amazon@mydomain.com when we went through a verification process for mydomain.com when I signed up for Google Apps, proving I own the whole damn domain?

Email filtering, either via filing into folders or applying labels is pretty much tit for tat.  Both do it, so this is not a problem in either system.

Contacts then.  FastMail sucks at contacts.  It uses, as most email implementations seem to, a proprietary contacts system that you can’t sync with anything, easily export to/import from anywhere.  This is annoying, and email providers the world over take note – you really suck at this.  Why can’t we all use some joined up working to allow us to easily sync contacts (and calendars) across all platforms without me doing anything smart.  Don’t Make Me Think.

Google, also sucks at contacts (you didn’t see that coming did you?).  It is totally lacking in detail.  I need more fields Google.  Where they win though, is that you can at least sync with your iPhone (or Android phone, if you must).

Calendars, well FastMail doesn’t do calendaring so this is another Google win.

Oh yeah, I should mention that FastMail costs me money, and Google Apps is free.  This doesn’t bother me so much, as it’s not expensive, but it is a consideration.

Reading this back, I’m leaning towards Google, if it wasn’t just for that darn outgoing “from” address thing.  What I’ve also just noticed to my annoyance is that it I export my contacts from my Google Mail account and try to import them into my Google Apps account, the pictures are lost.  This is stupid Google, fix it – it’s from Google to Google dammit!

Ideally someone at Google will read this, think “oh, how could we have been so stupid, this Tom chap is so correct” fix things, make me president of Google and we’ll all live happily ever after.  You never know.  Ok, you do.

I just put Windows 7 on my laptop at home, and it was a breeze.  Not only is the installation for Windows 7 almost a pleasure to work through, but the whole process was made all the more simple for the fact that I have recently purchased a NAS device for my home.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is in essence a hard disk with a network connection which means that all your data is stored on the network, just like it is (or I hope it is) in your office LAN environment.  In the office, such a device is usually a server, or in many cases today one of these NAS devices.

The difference between a home NAS and an enterprise level NAS is all in the specification.  A company server or NAS will have multiple disks in RAID systems protecting against an individual disk failure, and access speeds will be high, creating a highly available system.  Most home NAS devices are single disk systems, meaning if that disk fails, you’ve lost everything.  I should point out now that this is no different almost all PCs – people generally buy a huge disk for their PC and store everything they have on the PC.  Well the same applies, if you lose your hard disk in the PC, you’ve lost your stuff.  As it happens, if something is going to fail in your PC, there it more chance that it will be the hard disk than anything else.  Note to all – always have a backup!

I wasn’t going to put all my stuff in the hands of some single disk punk NAS drive and risk having it all go bye-bye – do you know how long it takes to rip 150 CDs into iTunes?  Nope, if I was going to have a NAS it needed to be at least two disks in what is known as a RAID 1 system – a mirror.  In a RAID 1 you have two disks, and they mirror one another – whatever is written to one is written to the other, and when you read data you can pull pieces of it from either disk which can speed up data retrieval times.  The only downside is that you need two disks, and you only have the capacity of one of them.  Another note here, there is another system called RAID 0 which is not really RAID at all (the ‘R’ in RAID stands for redundant).  Here data is written across both drives which means that the total capacity both disks combined is available, but if you lose one disk you’ve lost the data on both of them.  RAID 0 is sometimes known as striping too.

Back to my system….  I went for an Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B from RAIDSonic.  This is an empty drive enclosure which takes two disks.  To fill it up I went for two Seagate Barracuda ST31000340NS 1TB hard disks – lots of capacity.  Once everything arrived I took it all home and set about putting it together.

The drive enclosure is secured with a few screws just to keep the lid on, so I popped those off.  Inside there is a basic circuit board and the connectors for the two SATA disks to plug in.  What is also inside is a temperature sensor, which once you have installed your first disk (or only disk – you don’t have to have two, but why wouldn’t you, right?) you tape to the top of the disk.  Then, once the second disk goes in you have a temperature sensor sitting in between the two drives.  This tells the system whether or not to power the fan.  To be honest, I think in my device the fan is pretty much on all the time judging by the light humming coming from behind the sofa, unless the cat has climbed the evolutionary ladder and taken up humming.  The hard disks push into place in between four rubber fixings which form part of the screw attachment fixing – you screw through these rubber rings and into the mounting holes in the drive itself.  This ensures that the drive isn’t subjected to too much shock if the enclosure is bumped about.  All clever stuff.

Once I had the disks in I fired the little blighter up and connected via the web interface to the management console.  The device initially has an IP address which is fixed (I think, this is from memory from a few months ago, please correct me if I’m wrong).  You hook up a laptop straight into the ethernet port on the device and away you go.  Setup is a doddle, there are loads of options on the thing but the essentials are getting the storage right,  I told it to create a RAID 1 system and format as FAT (for my Windows systems) and let it get on with it.  If you poke about in the interface you can have it manage your DHCP, be an iTunes server, a Twonky Media server, a printer server (it has a USB port for attaching said printer), an FTP server.  To deal with file and FTP access you can setup users and groups to grant access to users, and even grant quotas.

Although the speed of access is nowhere near 100Mb, it’s still very usable for the home and dare I say it small office environment.  In my house everything is wireless, so I’m restricted by the bandwidth available via the wireless connection anyway.  Overall I am very pleased with my NAS and now much more comforted that I have loads of space, and some redundancy built in too.  And you know what, a few weeks after I got this up and running, one of the drives failed.  If that had been a drive in my PC I would be screwed, but I just shut the NAS down, took out the dead drive, packaged it off to Seagate (the Seagate drives has a 5 year warranty) and they sent me back a new one.  When it arrived I popped it back into the NAS and it went off and rebuilt itself.  Cool huh.

The title of this post suggests there was more to my joy of this solution than just the NAS itself, and that is correct.  Usually when I rebuild a PC or laptop there is always something I forget to backup, my profile, favourites or desktop items.  Not now.  As well as making sure everything I need is on the NAS, I now use many “cl0ud” based services to supplement this, which also has the benefit of making certain stuff I need available wherever I am in the world.  I use FastMail for my email which provides IMAP access through Outlook if I want it, or a web interface if I’m travelling, Google for my contacts and calendar (and secondary email account) which I can sync to my iPhone (which means if I lose my iPhone I don’t lose all my calendar and contacts too), Delicious for my bookmarks, together with the Firefox extension plugin which enables my Delicious bookmarks to take the place of the Firefox ones.  I even have my iTunes library now on the NAS.

This all meant that I didn’t hesitate in bombing my laptop and putting the new release candidate of Windows 7 on my laptop to play with – I took a quick look for stuff I might have saved to the desktop and blew it away.  And I lost nothing.  I’m going to do the same with my desktop PC soon too.

By the way – Windows 7 rocks, try it out.

Yesterday I noticed that WordPress 2.7.1 had been released, and keen as I always am to take advantage of updates and fixes in software (as I write this I’ve noticed that the auto draft saving thingy now displays the right time, yay) I applied it straight away, before toddling off to work.  Later in the day I took a look at the old blog stats (as I tend to constantly do, hoping for some Google love, or just love generally to be honest) and noticed that the site didn’t look quite like what it oughta.

The upgrade had of course made adjustments to files within the theme that I was using and replaced the files with updated versions.  My CSS was gone, and my header image had vanished.  Nothing looked quite right.  Initially I panicked and thought that I would never remember all the little changes that I had made and sulked.  Later, I started to work my way through and slowly the site came back to life.  Hopefully now is all restored as it was.

If I hadn’t have customised the view of the theme then I guess things would have all gone swimmingly, as basically things defaulted back to the out of the box look.  I’m now hoping to find some magic plugin that will dump my WordPress install into source code control in case I cock it up like that in the future.

Teach me for blindly installing updates I suppose.  I’ll know next time.