I don’t have the answer yet, but I want to build a service that allows somebody to schedule email to be sent at a certain date or time. Most importantly, it should come from their existing email address and integrate with any existing email service.
The point of this post is to gauge any interest, either by comments or (more likely), hits from google. I’ll outline my plan for anyone interested.
An individual signs up to the service through a short two step form. Step 1 asks for their email address and a password to use with the site. On submission an email is sent to the address given to verify that the person has the ‘right’ to email from that account.
Once confirmed there would be two ways to send email at a scheduled time from your own email address.
Method 1
Log in to the site and use a simple email form, similar to any other webmail service. One would be able to specify a list of recipients, the subject, message and any attachments followed by the all important send date.
Method 2
Using your prefered email application, you compose the email and send it to an email address (delay@mail.com for example). In the body of that message are some parameters that tell the service who to send the email to and at what time. I was thinking something like:
(test@mail.com, test2@mail.com : 2pm 1st Decemeber 2007)
followed by the rest of the message. The beauty of this method is you can write the message in thunderbird, outlook, gmail or whatever else you use, and still delay the time the email is sent out to recipients. It’d even work from a blackberry.
Concerns
Put simply, spam and spoofing. There would be the verification step, but I wonder whether this would be possible to bypass? Plus the email would be sent from a server I hosted, not the domains reverse dns IP. Perhaps the mail would be frequently makred as spam?
If this sounds like a service you’d like to use please leave a comment. I don’t want to spend too much time on it if I’m the only person that will use it! 
Just switched over to Ubuntu as my primary OS and been working (hard) get to get everything working properly. Still worth it thought.
Anyway, one of the more difficult problems was getting 5.1 sound out of the sound card in Ubuntu. The motherboard has a built-in 5.1 sound card, the realtek ACL662. Some people have little trouble enabling surround sound but there seems to be an issue with this card. I managed to find a solution by merging a few ideas together.
Here are the steps I took:
- By default, Ubuntu is only set to run 2 sound channels (left and right). To enable 6 channels (5.1) we need to edit the sound config file. Theres an excellent tutorial for doing that here. But put simply, edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and uncomment the line
"; default-sample-channels = 2", changing it to "default-sample-channels = 6"
- The most important part for this card. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and add
"options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-dig" to the end of the file.
- Restart the machine.
- Open sound preferences (System > Preferences > Sound)
- Make sure that the ALSA mixer is selected.
- Bring up the sound mixer.
- Hopefully, the “Front, Center, Surround & LFE” sliders will be available. If not try to add them by clicking on Properties.
- Make sure all sliders are on full.
- Still on the mixer, go to the ‘Options’ tab and set ‘Channel mode’ to ‘6ch’.
- Ok everything and close the mixer.
- To test, at the command line try
"$ speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav"
Hopefully that’ll do it. If not, there are a tonne of other guides if you search for “Ubuntu 5.1 sound”. Checkout the forum post that helped me find this solution here, at the Ubuntu forums.
If options 7 and/or 9 aren’t available to you, I’d guess the fix hasn’t solved your problem.
I ordered a few cables to get both my PC and powerbook hooked up to my old creative extigy sound card, hoping I could then listen to either through my 5.1 speaker set.
I’d used the extigy on the mac before, and it certainly does detect it and play sound. Unfortunately I hadn’t paid much attention to the rear speakers. It turns out creative never released any drivers for the mac, so not only can I not get proper 5.1 surround sound, the CMSS feature won’t work either.
So that was a waste of time and money, considering I can get the same sound from a normal stereo cable. Apparently the newer macbooks (hopefully mine included) have optical audio out, but I’m not sure I want to buy the cable to find out?
As a “sort of” fix, I’m going to play music using parallels running Windows XP. I don’t think I’m ever going to get away from Windows for good. 
We’re building a CMS at work and one of the requirements is a half decent file manager. Having seen how easy the wordpress upload tool is, we wanted to replicate it. Clients don’t want to sit there having to individually select and upload 50 files from a folder!
There are a number of options available to do this:
- Using a flash (swf) file to perform the upload
- Using a java applet to perform the upload
- Using an HTML file input box to create a hidden array of file input boxes
My issue with #3 is that you still have to individually select all the files in a folder before clicking upload. If you want to upload 50 files, thats 100 clicks and a case of RSI. So, I ignored #3 entirely.
Ideally, I wanted solution #1, but I found a lot of answers to solution #3, followed by #2. In the end I tried out four different solutions, all open source.
SWFUpload
By far my favourite, and the one we ended up using, this is the same tool wordpress use for their image upload plug
in. It is the most difficult to configure, but its got the most flexibility. SWFUpload uses a .swf file for the actual file uploads, which get posted to a script you specify in the setup. There are then a load of javascript callbacks that allow you to track the progress of files and update your page with the results. All in all, very impressed.
Check it out and download it here: http://www.swfupload.org
There are also demos at: http://demo.swfupload.org
UPDATE: I stumbled across a blog post with a tutorial for creating your own flash file, incase you don’t
want to use SWFUpload. It looks pretty simple, so check it out: Multiple File Upload Using Flash
Read the rest of this entry »
Somebody just mentioned that the Blackberry application store launched yesterday and so I had to try it out! So far, it looks promising, but have hit a number of teething problems.
Yesterday I was unable to browse the store on my phone because I was in the UK. Today I’m able to browse the store, but unable to download Shazam, an app that I could download yesterday.
I’m also a little worried that, as it grows bigger, it will be harder to find the application you are after and with only IE support if you want to view it on your computer, that sucks.
Hopefully we’ll see a load of updates over the next few days!