A great speech by one of the greatest persons of this world, listen carefully what he says, you will see the world differently.

A quick and wonderful visual introduction to Bangladesh. Give a thought to stop by to my beautiful country next time when you are in South Asia. You won’t regret!

Anyway, as always my Apple Time Capsule and Machine played its role, so I could get hold of all my emails from Time Machine backup with in a few minutes by replacing two folders, /Library/Mail and /Library/Mail Downloads and by replacing the com.apple.mail.plist file residing in /Library/Preferences. Well, you can just replace /Library/Mail folder or even only the .mbox files in the /Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder.

So, I got my emails back and only needed to sync GMail IMAP with my local Mail.app by sending all my local emails back to the GMail server. However, while I tried to sync I faced some problems – even though my local Inbox and Sent folders had all the emails, as soon as Mail.app syncs with GMail IMAP all the local emails are deleted. There are some solutions addressing this problem that are discussed here. However if you have a large number of emails then creating folders and copying back and forth at realtime won’t just work. I did the following to sync local Mail.app to GMail IMAP, i.e., pushing all my local emails to GMail Server:

1. Disconnect from the Internet.
2. Restore Mail.app Backup.
3. Create two new local folders under any MailBox other than GMail.
4. Move all the messages from local GMail Inbox and Sent folders to these newly created folders.
5. Connect to the Internet and Sync with GMail.
6. Disconnect from the Internet.
7. Move back all the incoming emails from newly created folder to Gmail Inbox.
8. Connect to the Internet and Sync with Gmail. It will take quite a while depending on your connection, for my 12 K emails it took almost 4 hours.
9. Disconnect from the Internet again.
10. Move back all the outgoing emails from newly created folder to local Gmail Sent folder.
11. Connect to the Internet and Sync with Gmail. Again it will take a couple of hours or longer.
12. Finally, rebuild the MailBox Database for a sanity check by quitting Mail.app and running the following command from Terminal.

    /usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum

Anyway, until now I had huge confidence on Google, especially knowing their redundancy mechanisms, I guess that time has changed.

The first one is a notification plugin called Herald written by Erik Hinterbichler. Before I have used Mail.Appetizer and GrowlMail for pop up mail notification. Both of these plugins are great, in particular the Mail.Appetizer but unfortunately with every update they stop working. Herald seems to be a bit more tolerant to apple updates.

The second plugin Letterbox, written by Aaron Harnly rearranges the Mail.app interface into three vertical columns (perhaps inspired by Microsoft Entourage), so that the message pane is on the right side of the message list. If you use a widescreen monitor you would really find this useful.

If you know the URI of a Web resource, the technical framework proposed by Memento allows you to see a version of that resource as it existed at some date in the past, by entering that URI in your browser like you always do and by specifying the desired date in a browser plug-in.

Memento primary aims at making web-archived content easily discoverable. Rather than finding out which archive to look for e.g., Wayback Machine, or similar ones, Memento tries to unify the access to past contents via the original URL. However, I do not think that we browse the web like the way they have assumed, i.e., remembering the date when I visited a certain page. Our web experience is primarily search and re-search centric [Have a look at Jamie Teevan's work, in particular her UIST 2007 paper]. I asked Herbert Van de Sompel of Memento, that how such temporal association of web content will improve our fundamental web interaction : search. He mentioned that they are currently looking at content based searching issues in the project and we can expect to have some answers to these questions soon.

If you are interested you can have a look at their technical presentation -

The blog is powered by WordPress and I used the fantastic OneRoom theme from Web-Kreation, of course with a touch of my own taste. For my web, I basically rewrote the skeleton, and switched to JQuery from Prototype. Looking at the code simplicity and design, I have to say that the hype of JQuery is well justified. It is beautifully designed, with clean and well structured APIs. It took me literally no time to put the framework and plugins together to get the minimal AJAX feature and running those eye catching effects. I have used three of them in the site ( FishEye Dock Menu, Overlay Image and Slider). Really brilliant in simplicity!

These days I don’t have enough time to write dynamic Web 2.0s, but looking at these awesome tweaks I am really tempted to squeeze in some more time to play around.