Yahoo Mail versus Gmail: feature comparison

I've been a long-standing user of Yahoo Mail.  Gmail was a different way of thinking so I was hesitant to use Gmail.  Now that I'm using both their web clients and also accessing the accounts in Zimbra, I'm starting to see each of their advantages and disadvantages more clearly.

	Yahoo Mail	Gmail
Conversations	Not available with the web client although Zimbra does try to collect email into conversations, but sometimes does not associate the correct emails together	Yes, available.  With more use, I've grown more accustomed to it.  Will continue to evaluate.
Search	Yahoo's search is no slouch.  Searches attachments and allows you to further filter by folder	Haven't used enough to judge but I remember when my wife searched her Gmail (in 2009?), PDF attachments weren't peeked into; could be fixed by now
Contacts	Recently (as recently as early 2010), access to Contacts seems to be unstable such that addresses that are in my Contact are deemed to be missing and direct access to the Contacts list is occasionally not available	So far, seems stable
Folders versus Labels/Tags	Folders; simple to understand and use but can have limits since a piece of mail can only exist in one folder at a time	Now that I am using Delicious social bookmarking, starting to understand the power of tags as a piece of mail can now have multiple tags.  More flexible but can be more "work" to organize
Synchronization with phone	Not available with my Windows Mobile phone as far as I know	Yes, via ActiveSync for Windows Mobile so able to sync mail, contacts and default calendar.  For other devices
Open to other email clients	Other than Zimbra, don't know of any other clients	Openly uses standards such as IMAP and SMTP so any email client that understands these protocols can access Gmail
Security	Only on login	By default, uses a SSL connection (i.e. https) through-out.  Although that doesn't mean you can send/receive confidential information as others might be using less secure email clients
Archiving	Equivalent to moving to a folder (can be viewed as both tagging and archiving)	Explicitly available

Essential free software for Windows Mobile 6

From a user point of view, Windows Mobile is a shameful, embarrassing interface.  Possibly because of its stylus-based roots, the touch interface for its native applications are especially awkward to navigate.  Fortunately the crappy base applications that come with WM 6 can be supplanted by these free ones:

• The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) - replaces the dreadful native Windows Media Player.  Excellent touch screen interface and handles most media formats.  Discontinued but I've never had a problem with version 0.72RC1
• Total Commander - the native File Explorer is OK for single-handed use but Total Commander has much more functionality as a file system utility.  However, because of so many widgets on its interface, a stylus is recommended although touch use is acceptable
• S2V - I can't say enough bad things about the native Pictures & Video app:  it's slow, very stylus-oriented, and generally useless. On the other hand S2V is touch-savvy, slick (like an iPhone app, despite how much I dislike Apple's closed philosophy) and responsive. S2V also works well with the hardware navigation controls so single-handed use is great
• Google Maps is a no-brainer to have available on your phone
• Skyfire - mixed reviews on this web browser.  It requires you to be online even to see your bookmarks as Skyfire stores them on its server.  However it is otherwise full-featured, and gives you a PC web browsing experience on your WM phone.  Yes, you can watch YouTube videos with it.  Just remember to be connected online before you start up this app as it otherwise won't stop trying to get online with a cellular connection (persistent bugger).  Conversely, I find Pocket Internet Explorer suitable for most web browsing on the phone because it is mindful of the limited WM screen real estate.  So in this case, Skyfire is not a complete replacement for Pocket IE
• Pocketxpdf - is a 100% replacement for the OEM Adobe Acrobat Reader.  Again the OEM app is stylus-dependent, non-intuitive, doesn't take advantage of WM's "right click" functionality, and generally seems to be programmed by a junior developer who has never touched a mobile device.  While PocketXpdf takes a little bit longer to load a PDF, once loaded, it is relatively fast to zoom in and out, responsive when panning around with your finger, and generally the user's view is very customizable.  I am now able to truly browse my course/conference materials on my phone
• WM users should also evaluate Microsoft's My Phone for backing up their phone contents online.  "My Phone" could also be viewed as a replacement for a Windows PC to sync to, if one is using Ubuntu exclusively as their desktop operating system, e.g.  WM users, beware of this Microsoft travesty:  Lost contacts while trying to sync on laptop 

One more tip is to re-configure your Buttons to launch your frequently used applications with a press of a hardware button on your device.  My HTC has a myriad of buttons so I've got them launching S2V, Total Commander, etc. with just a click.

Alternative use of Linux Live CD: to fix Windows installation

Somehow, either because of my installation of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, or because I accidently removed a driver, my XP installation on my desktop computer was refusing to start up.  Just prior to loading Windows, it complained about something like "a corrupt or missing file C:\WINDOWS\INF\BIOSINFO.INF ...".  According to Google results, this can be repaired by booting from the XP installation CD and running the Recovery Console.  Unfortunately I could not provide the administrator password the Recovery Console was looking for.

However, although I don't actually have my desktop dual-booting, I could use my Ubuntu 9.10 install disc to run Ubuntu from the CD.  Ubuntu is able to access my XP partitions, and thus I could copy the BIOSINFO.INF file from the XP install CD to the C:\WINDOWS\INF\ folder!

Zimbra Desktop and managing your free webmail accounts

Zimbra Desktop is useful for aggregating your various webmail accounts.  You know those email accounts that you check so seldomly?  Zimbra can help keep track of them.  Assuming Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail are the leading free webmail providers, Zimbra has support for all of them.

As far as I know, it is the only desktop software that is able to sync with a free Yahoo account.  There is no problem with Gmail since Google openly allows POP and IMAP access to Gmail (Zimbra also has a pre-configured Gmail set-up for convenience).  Finally, Microsoft does seem to allow Hotmail access over POP; here are the settings to use.  One annoying thing for Hotmail in Zimbra is that your mail is deleted from the Hotmail server's mailbox after you've downloaded from the Hotmail server to Zimbra, and folders you may have created in Hotmail are not sync'd to Zimbra.    

You can also add your work or ISP mail accounts to Zimbra Desktop as long as you know the POP or IMAP and SMTP settings to use.  Zimbra itself is a decent email client so it's ideal as a one-stop-shop for your email.

Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 9.10

About a week ago, after booting into Vista, the keyboard and touchpad on my Acer laptop stopped responding.  Editing the Bios settings or using the Ubuntu Live CD, the keyboard/touchpad worked fine so it wasn't a hardware problem.  After trying to dual boot Ubuntu and Vista, I arrived at a Grub "No filesystem found" error.  May be due to the OEM partitioning which was consuming a lot of hard disk space unnecessarily too.  So it was quite easy to resolve to do a clean install.  The Ubuntu Live CD allowed me to access the Windows partitions to back up the little data I hadn't already backed up.

1. Loosely following the instructions here, I first ran Gparted and created one primary partition for Windows and one extended partition for Linux.  In the extended partition, I created two logical partitions, one formatted ext4 for / (root), /home, etc. and one formatted linux-swap (2 GB) for swapping.  Note that unlike the instructions described at ubuntuguide.org, I did NOT require a small partition for storing Grub files
2. Since I have a valid MSDN license, I downloaded Windows 7 Ultimate and burned a DVD with the .iso image.  During the Windows 7 installation, I choose a "Custom" installation, which allowed me to choose which partition to install Windows into.  Yes, this Windows 7 installation does play nicely.  Also, with a clean install, Windows 7 takes a little over 15 GB in hard disk space, compared to the OEM Vista installation.  This is because I don't have the OEM hidden partition containing the recovery media, nor the Windows XP Embedded partition, nor the Acer OEM software, none of which was really that useful. 
3. After testing that Windows 7 was installed properly, I ran the Ubuntu 9.10 CD.  By default, the Ubuntu installation ignored the two partitions that I had already created for Linux purposes.  Instead it proposed to create a fourth partition for Ubuntu exclusively.  However, choosing the manual/advanced option, I could specify where to mount each partition (i.e. for root and for swap purposes) so that the partitions that I created earlier could be put to use.

Now Grub starts initially and allows me to choose to boot into Ubuntu (default) or Windows 7.  Also, no problems with the keyboard/touchpad in either OS.  New life is breathed into my year-old Acer laptop!

Virtual PC 2007, Vista Home Premium and Linux distributions

Wanted to have access to a Linux environment on my Vista laptop. Although Virtual PC 2007 is not officially supported on Vista Home Premium, I gave it a try and so far it appears to run fine. Attempted to install Ubuntu 9.10 within Virtual PC but there were some display problems and eventually it appears that it started Ubuntu in the demo mode. That is, not installed to (virtual) hard disk. Moved to the second most popular Linux distribution according to DistroWatch which is Fedora 12.  This had display problems after the initial boot-up.  So came to Open Suse, which I have installed before without problems.  The current version, 11.2, also installed without too many problems (two seemingly corrupted files?).  Access to internet and Gnome GUI desktop environment within virtual environment.

Nitro PDF Professional ver 6.0.0.29

Discovered some quirks when converting from PDF to Word document:

• something like "01/2003 - 06/2003" was converted to "0112003 - 0612003"
• some weird things happening with the footers and page numbering (footer appeared off the page and page numbering skipped 4) but eventually after completing editing, numbering seemed OK