JasonMorrison.net

I ran across a confusing issue in Gmail and I’d like to share what I did to resolve it.  It seems that Gmail won’t show you the original sender of a forwarded email by default in many cases.  Here’s how I found the issue and what I did to correct it.

My wife and I have a shared blog that automatically sends out updates to subscribers via Feedburner.  Feedburner is a great service if you have a blog, and you can use it to subscribe to my feed and get updates when I write on this blog as well.

When friends and family reply to an email from Feedburner, it goes to my email address and I need to forward it to my wife so she can read it too.  I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client so it’s easy to set up a filter to do it automatically (look under Tools –> Message Filters).  But when the forwarded email showed up in my wife’s Gmail inbox, it showed only me as the sender - with no mention of the original sender, so she couldn’t tell who was replying to our blog.

Gmail does let you see the original full text of the message - there’s a little down arrow next to Reply with a menu that includes “show original.”  Email headers are hardly user-friendly, though, so that’s not a very good solution.

It turns out that Gmail shows the name of the forwarder, not the name of the original sender, on forwards that are sent as an attachment.  If the forward was sent inline it’s easy to see the original sender in the body of the mail.  By default, Thunderbird sends forwards as attachments and I think Outlook has a similar default… in any event this is pretty common behavior.

To fix it from my end I went in Thunderbird, to Tools-> Options and selected the Composition icon.  Under the General tab, I changed Forward Messages to “Inline.”  This does the trick.

It would be nice, however, if Gmail made this a little more apparent in the user interface.  Maybe saying something like “[forwarder name] forwarding from [original sender name].”  Or it could be worked into the way conversations are viewed as threads.

This may not be a very common issue, so it might not warrant a change to Gmail, but it’s a small enough usability tweak that it might be worth it.  Hopefully you found this post helpful.

This site is just a humble blog where I write a bit about programming, design, usability, and other topics I’m interested in. It’s nice that I get some readership and few few good comments now and again but I don’t have any real financial stake here, and I’m definitely not interested in trying to spam anyone, send them spyware, etc. So imagine my shock when I noticed that my blog comes up with a warning, “This site may harm your computer.”

This comes up in various places including Firefox 3 and Google searches.  Obviously no one is going to follow a link to my site with such a disclaimer. So where did it come from and what did I do to clear my sites good name?

The disclaimer comes from the findings of StopBadware.org, an effort that I had heard about in the past but hadn’t really looked into. It sounds like a great idea - it’s very difficult for users to investigate every single link they might click on, and some spyware and adware is hard to see before it’s too late. So Stopbadware.org is a sort of neighborhood watch for the web.

How did my site end up on the list? There are a number of possibilities, so the first step is to check StopBadware.org to see what they found. Follow this link to search for your URL. Make sure you search for your root domain, in my case jasonmorrison.net. Some subdomains or directories might show up with a report while others are still considered clean. This confused me for a while.

Once you see the details there it’s time to hunt for problems. If you have anything more than a simple, static site this can be more difficult than it might first seem. My site uses Wordpress and allows user comments. A bad link to show up in a comment, or someone may have hacked the site using a known vulnerability. It looks like it was the latter in my case, but I’m getting ahead of myself. How do you find the bad link?

There are lots of tools to find incoming links to your site, but I’ve only found one so far that checks outgoing links, at Bad Neighborhood. Don’t blindly rely on this tool, but follow up on any links that you don’t recognize having put there yourself. I found a link in the middle of a post from a month or so ago to some spammy German site.

How did the link get there? I don’t think my site was hacked wholesale (or if it was, they were very subtle about it). More likely someone took advantage of my laziness as upgrading Wordpress and used a known security exploit.

Now that we’ve found and removed the offending link and plugged any known security holes, it’s time to try to get the stigma removed. Follow the link to the StopBadware.org request for review page and fill out a request. If the badware report came from one of their partners, you may have to follow up with them as well. I’m still waiting to here back on my review, I’ll post an update when I know more.

Hopefully this has been helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments below.

The group photo - that awkward assembly of a group of friends or colleagues trying their hardest not to look like they are posing while they violate each others’ personal space.  For a long time I thought it was impossible to take a good group photo, or at least it required huge amounts of creativity in choosing a setting, angle, or lord help us, props.

But I stumbled on a technique that is quick, easy, and seems to work more often than not.   I’m not necessarily claiming I invented it, but I will happily share it with you.

Step 1:  Tell the group the to act like it’s the worst day of their lives, and take a picture.

I know, it sounds like exactly the wrong thing to do.  You want to immortalize smiles and togetherness, not hatred and melancholy.  So here comes step 2…

Step 2:  Now tell the group to act like it’s the best day of their lives.  Take the picture, upload it to Flickr or whatever you use, and bask in the many kudos you will receive.

The key is that step 1 gets everyone loosened up, so that they’re willing to ham it up for the final photo.  It also gives everyone a good emotional contrast to gauge how happy to be in the happy photo.  No more sneers or unsure half-smiles.

Here’s a case where it came in handy - the setting was a restaurant, with bad lighting and a big yellowish wood background.  The camera was held by a random waitress.  Once in a while you’ll get a server who’s studying photography in art school, but not always, so this tip is a great way to make sure you get a fun photo.  First, everyone is sad:

Then, they are insanely happy!  Doesn’t it look like we were having a good time?

Keep in mind that the sad photo doesn’t have to be convincing - note that two of the people here are having a hard time keeping a straight face.  We don’t want great acting, we want to shake everyone up a little.

And it works!

How do you take a good picture on a gray, rainy day?  Again, we use the procedure.  Saddest day of their lives :

Happiest day of their lives!  Smiles despite the miserable weather.

Go forth and use the technique.  I’ve created a Sad vs. Happy photo pool in Flickr.  Please share any shots you take to it.

Have you tried it and it worked?  Didn’t work?  Got a better idea?  Leave me a comment below.

I do a bit of amateur photography.  I’m not very strong technically and I don’t have particularly good equipment, but I enjoy finding interesting angles and compositions.  I’ve been putting up photos on Flickr for a while to share them with friends and the public.  I also have an account on Panoramio with some photos that show up in Google Earth.

No matter the particular photo site used, sharing photos online has been a great experience.  I’ve had a number of encouraging comments on my photos and people have emailed me to ask if they could use a photo in a report for school or a pamphlet for their non-profit.

When I signed up with Flickr I noticed they had options to add Creative Commons licenses to photos by default.  I’m more than happy to let people use my photos for noncommercial purposes, so why didn’t turn on Creative Commons licensing from the start?

Part of it was the number of options available.  Creative Commons licensing allows other people to share your work but it’s not the same thing as releasing the copyright or putting photos in the public domain.  You have some options:  do you want people to be able to make money off your work, or do you just want it available for non-profits, educational, and personal use?  Do you want people to be able to alter and remix your work or just present it as-is?

So I was a bit struck by the paradox of choice and decided to skip ahead and start uploading photos.  In retrospect, that was a mistake.

There’s a great page at the Creative Commons site that explains the options.  I am going to license my photos with an Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc) license.  That license covers my default attitude about my amateur photography - everyone is welcome to use my photos for non-commercial purposes, so long as they give me credit. This is, of course, in addition to fair use rights that people already have.

Another important point:  it doesn’t mean people can’t use it commercially, they just have to contact me and get permission.  Depending on the use, I might put a price on it.  And I can always sell prints or make products myself.

I might even switch over to allow commercial use as well, if I can get over my delusions of being the next Ansel Adams.

The abuse and incessant extension of copyright might not seem like a life-or-death issue, but it’s one of those issues where technology and public policy are inextricably linked.  It’s like the problem of software and business method patents.  There’s a great story by Spider Robinson that illustrates what happens if taken to extremes.

So take a look at the licenses and consider applying the appropriate copyleft to your work.

When we moved into our new house, it quickly became apparent that we would need to do something to warm up the master bedroom. It was the coldest room in the house, and November weather in Cleveland is a pretty good motivator.

So I started trying to think of ways to warm up the room. Traditional methods of insulation were out of the question in the short term - the large open attic above was too big of a project to do at the time and we couldn’t use something like blown-in cellulose insulation because our stately Tudor duplex had knob-and-tube wiring. I came up with this fast, cheap, easy-to-build project instead. You can use it to decorate your room and even save you a few bucks on your heating bill.

Here’s a sneak peak at the end result:

It’s basically a frame with some stylish fabric stretched over like the canvas in an oil painting. It’s backed with mylar which means it acts as a radiant heat barrier, keeping you toasty.

Here’s what you need:

• Some 1×2’s - buy whatever is cheapest (and not warped) at your home improvement store.
• Wood screws - maybe 1 1/2 inch to 2 inch.
• Cloth - something that would look nice on the wall. Pick out whatever you like, it should be a little stretchy.
• Aluminized mylar - better known as space blankets. Order it online or buy it at the store - it should be a dollar or two for a large sheet.
• Duct tape (of course)
• Some tools: A staple gun (and staples), tape measure, drill, screwdriver, saw.

So first, a tiny little bit of theory. Heat moves in three ways - convection, conduction, and radiation. Your house is losing heat in the winter because of these three along with air infiltration - drafts of cold air from windows and doors. Most insulation does it’s job by preventing conduction (by putting air pockets between materials) or by stopping convection in air pockets. Infiltration can be combated with storm windows, weather stripping, and vapor barriers.

Insulation is measured by R-value. This project will only help a little bit when it comes to convection or conduction - the main point here is to reflect radiant heat back into the room. So don’t ask about the R-value - like other radiant barriers, that’s not really the point.

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If you are a web developer or designer in the Cleveland area, I highly recommend dropping by the Cleveland Web Standards Association meetings. They just launched a new website, including a great aggregation of local web development blogs.

I started going to meetings last year and I have to say it’s a great group of people that host some really interesting discussions and speakers. And I’m not just saying that because they let me give a presentation a few months ago.

At the last meeting Eric Meyer took some photos - one makes me look really important:

In the other, it looks like I dozed off in the middle of the discussion:

Oh well. The group screened the film Helvetica, which is the best movie I’ve ever seen about a typeface. I’d recommend it for anyone who has an interest in design, typography, or even 20th-century history.

Since I’ve moved out of town I won’t be able to make it to too many meetings in person. I want to set up videoconferencing, anyone have any recommendations for web cams, software, or services? I’m looking for something that is extremely easy to use, since my parents want to be able to do video calls too. I’ve heard some good things about Skype. Any thoughts?