Gather valuable feedback on your designs, artwork, photos,… by simply waiting. Just waiting. For free.

A nice new web 2.0 application, fivesecondtest, provides a platform for images to be “reviewed” by the public (stored at Amazon S3 of course). It’s dead simple: you upload the image and wait. After some time people will have reviewed your image and marked what drew their attention in the first five seconds they saw your image.

Whether it is a screenshot of your site, a fresh mock-up, a (stock) photograph,… you name it and it gets reviewed. All without creating an account or leaving any personal information.

Be sure to review some too!

Edit: use of Calibri font makes it look nice on Windows.

After getting rid of my Windows Live address, I started to move my domain e-mail to Google Apps (GMail).

Before I moved to Google, my domain e-mail (strictlyphp.com/strictlyphp.be) was handled by my hosting company and I also maintained the e-mail address my ISP provided and the GMail account I checked once in a while.

This has certainly wasted many hours in the past.

Google Apps to the rescue: you create an account, add your domains, point your MX records to Google “et voila”. After everything is set up, you can access your e-mail just like a regular GMail account. This means that you can set up POP3 or IMAP access from within your preferred e-mail client and you can set up your account to fetch messages from external accounts (the ISP account and the regular GMail account I already had in my case).

I had only one difficulty actually: the choice between POP3 and IMAP. I first picked IMAP but I soon realised this was not the optimal choice if you process many messages and maintain many folders. Because it is a synchronization protocol, it is not optimal for offline usage and is of course slower than an offline storage (which is the case for POP3). POP3 on the other hand is not ideal for multiple clients or multiple locations, but you at least don’t need to be connected to search your mailbox.

Because I fetch mail from my laptop, desktop and mobile, the Google Apps mailbox is configured to keep a copy of each message which is unnecessary and can become rather large. There seems to be no solution though: a setup with the setting “leave a copy on server” while fetching e-mail doesn’t work with Google.

Like you may have noticed, you can also not merge your existing regular GMail account with Google Apps and I wouldn’t recommend deleting it either, since the Apps accounts aren’t fully compatible with all Google services which you currently access with your GMail account.

If you doubt about Google Apps in terms of e-mail, maybe the other applications can convince you: Calendar, Mobile, Contacts,… Possible downtime may be the only drawback, but the Premium account (50 USD per year per user) with a 99.9% uptime guarantee provides an answer.

Once in a while (not that much actually, but enough to write something about it) I get a question from friends or family, newly graduated or experienced, about what their next career move should be.

Not that I know that much about it, but let’s assume you want to find the appropriate job/hobby related to IT for yourself.

When I was at school we basically had to choose between development (programming) or networking. A fairly easy choice that, as we realised later, would define the rest of our life. Luckily our school provided good guidance (just kidding).

With the Internet and everything around it evolving at warp-speed, the options you have are far less obvious.

Of course you should still look at yourself and think about whether or not you like to do development. But let’s say you do. In that case and in my opinion, the language you pick is not that important. Although at school they probably still divide classes that way, it is good to realize you will have to switch between languages someday (possibly multiple times, who knows). And as Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer) says: it’s almost a requirement to keep an eye on multiple languages/technologies.

While you should not be guided by the salaries mentioned, the IT Jobs Watch provides multiple views on the current job market. One basic fact that you could derive from this list is what sector/language/tool is becoming increasingly popular (in the UK, but probably everywhere). While that may not be the optimal choice (and I’m not even saying you should base your choice on this!), it may as well play a role in your decision process.

Note: if you are interested in the salaries mentioned, there are far better opportunities for you!

In an attempt to simplify things, I’ve eliminated my Hotmail address (which I mainly used for Windows Live Messenger) and created a new Live account based on my Gmail address.

Since I have used the Hotmail address for more than 10 years, it’s a bit of an emotional moment. Bear with me.

But, back to business. If I didn’t add you already, feel free to add my new me: sam.hauglustaine(at)gmail.com.

In case you switch Windows Live Messenger accounts often: it’s possible to import and export contacts.

Up next: link my MX records to Gmail and use it as my single inbox.

When you want to use Google Reader in offline mode so you can catch up with posts when you are not connected (yes, that happens!) you may not be able to follow the instructions stated in the Help (Dutch).

Google tells you to simply click the synchronize icon at the top right, next to “Settings” but no icon appears after you’ve installed Google Gears. Switching you preferred language to English instead of, in my case, Dutch solves that.

Since it acts the same across browsers I assume it’s a small bug for all languages except English?

Edit: Google Reader’s offline mode seems to be buggy since December last year.