GMail feature request: help me keep track of replies.

Scenario:

1. I sent out email to many people via BCC.
2. I get a bunch of replies to this email.
3. I want to reply in kind to these incoming messages, but GMail doesn't show which received messages I've replied to.

Suggestions:

1. Give the option of the standard threaded discussion via. While GMail's interface is better in most scenarios, there are cases where a tree is better.
2. At minimum, give some indication that I've replied to a message. With many messages stacked in a thread, I can't figure out which I've replied to and which I haven't.

You have until next Friday, or I'm going back to Hotmail.

I bet if I wait long enough, Microsoft will give me $.05 for every email I send.

IE8, Standards, and Joel is Scary Brilliant

By Joel, I mean Joel Spolsky. Not only does he have great taste in presidential candidates, but he's a person everyone in technology should be reading.

It's good to have idols, I think. I dream of having the perspective and wisdom to write like this.

The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It’s the difference between conservatives and liberals, it’s the difference between "idealists" and "realists", it’s a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees.

Of course he's talking about how IE8 will handle web standards when so much of the world expects IE to work the way it has always worked. Is there a solution? According to Joel:

There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, "The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly." This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It's a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

His Martian headset analogy is just a bit forced, but totally forgiven. The write-up is brilliant and fascinating.

Like Joel, I'm going to sit back with some popcorn.

...it will be really, really entertaining to watch...

DreamHost Rocks!

I've been all over the map with hosting services. Each has it's own cool features and things that are annoying.

I've finally found one that (almost) has it all: DreamHost.

For $10 a month (paid yearly):

• 5120 GB per month bandwidth. No, that is not a miss-type. Put another way: 5.120 TB a month. (Now, being realistic, the box it's hosted on would probably melt before you hit that mark. It's almost like offering 50,000 minutes on a cell phone plan when there's only 44,640 minutes in a month. But at least you won't get charged for a Digg hit or something.)
• 500 GB of storage. Again, not a typo. 0.5 TB.
• As many domains as you want. You have to buy the domain names, but you can host 'em all on one account.
• As many MySQL databases as you want. Size comes out of your 500 GB of storage so make 'em as big as you want.
• Shell access. We're talkin' SSH. (Well, if I could figure out the damn certificate thingy.) I'm using 'ln -s' to create symbolic links for the first time in 6 years. Reminds me of college...
• The deal-maker: SVN. For those that don't mind (or prefer) OSS source control, this is it. I use it for all of my code and personal writing--all things I want to backup, sync reliably across machines, and keep version history on. I'll post later on my love of Tortoise.
• Oh, and they're carbon neutral. It's almost silly.

I said almost above. What's the catch?

Well, there's not a huge number of easy-to-install software packages. They don't use cPanel/Fantastico like a lot of Linux hosting shops. The interface they do provide is very clean and one can manually install most things, but it's kinda nice to do a click-and-install for Drupal.

That's my only nit, actually. Everything is super fast. I'm super happy.

Check 'em out.

But Kevin, this is a Linux hosting package. Where's the Windows Server 2008 package?

Sigh. The world is so much larger than the Microsoft stack of technologies. I love VS as much as anyone, but getting a broad skill set is important, right? Plus the OSS web community is insanely strong. The content, energy and enthusiasm are amazing.

Full disclosure: Yes, the links provided are for a referral program. Yes, I get a kick-back if you sign-up. No, I would never pitch anything just for the kick-back.

I've had plenty of services offer kick-backs that I blinked at--that I never felt strongly about. This is proof I have no subtext. These guys are that good.