Jimmy Z

There are a lot of fun tricks that you can do with your gmail. Here’s a quick one for starters.

Your gmail address can have dots anywhere in the address and it will still make it to your account! So, say that your email is firstname.lastname@gmail.com, sending emails to the following will still make it to you inbox:

first.name.last.name@gmail.com
f.irstname.l.astname@gmail.com
firstname.lastnam.e@gmail.com
firstname.lastname@gmail.com
f.i.r.s.t.n.a.m.e.l.a.s.t.n.a.m.e@gmail.com

Why is this cool? Because you can freely give a variation of your email address and not worry about getting a ton of junk mail. If you begin getting junk, then set up a filter to skip your inbox and delete it.

Another trick is that you can add a tag to the end of your name as well.

firstname.lastname+nospam@gmail.com
firstname.lastname+jobfair@gmail.com

That way, you can filter mail coming in, and you can put some context to it. Only downside is that some forms will incorrectly block these addresses as invalid email addresses.

Also, you might need to remember which email address you gave away if you are required to use the email address for sign-in purposes.

I just got word this week that the LDS Church is opening up an API for their new FamilySearch. I believe this will open up a whole array of innovative family history/genealogy applications. Never before has there been an API which would allow developers to gain access to such powerful genealogical resources.

It’s amazing to see how the innovations and changes that happen in the world seem to come together to help the church in moving the work forward. Richard Miller and the rest of the team at the More Good Foundation have been keeping up with the latest web trends and have been using new technology to help move the work along. It’s cool to now see the technical department of the church grab hold of some of the web 2.0 principles and put them to work.

Update: I’ve been developing for a few months now with this new FamilySearch API, and I’m loving it. I’ve got an Open Source Ruby API wrapper project hosted at Google Code.

You may have noticed that I recently added a CAPTCHA to my blog. My blog was getting flogged by spam comments that were making it past my Akismet Spam filter. I decided to install the reCAPTCHA wordpress plugin.

Why reCAPTCHA?

ReCAPTCHA is a system developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHAs to digitize scanned books! The plugin will give you 2 words to verify that you are a human and can in fact identify the words correctly.

How does it work?

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Source: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.htmlÂ

I believe this is innovation at its finest. The guys and gals over there at Carnegie Mellon should really be commended for this effort.

If you post a comment, you can feel good about contributing to a greater good.

I finally made it into the Beta of Grand Central! So far it seems really cool. I have 5 invites that I can give away to the first people who comment on this post.

If you haven’t heard about Grand Central, it’s a service that gives you a new phone number that you can use to route calls to any of your other phones. It offers Spam call filtering, a cool online voice mailbox, and click2call features.

One of the coolest features that I’ve seen is being able to seamlessly transfer a call from one phone line to another. So, say that someone calls you while you’re on the road, and you’re just getting home. You answer the call, begin your conversation, walk through your front door, press your * key on your phone and your home phone then rings. You pick up your home phone and continue your conversation on your land-line without using up more of your cell phone minutes!

It appears that most of the features will remain free after the Beta period, except for the click2call features, which will end up charging a per-minute fee.

Who else wants a Grand Central account?

I came to my blog today and saw that my first post showing was May 25, and I though, “Oh snap! I’ve been hacked!” Which is what Phil Burns thought he had experienced earlier this week when his blog’s database rolled back to April.

Then I realized I just hadn’t written anything since then and time has blown by too fast. I guess that means that I’ve been really busy.