That’s funny, folks are talking about their favourite cover songs, and here I was about to blog about one of my favourite albums of all time – coincidentally a cover album – For the Masses, which is a tribute album to Depeche Mode. Four of my all time favourite covers are on this album;

Here’s the rest of my favourites, in no particular order;

(wow, complete performances at Youtube or last.fm for all of them, that’s pretty cool)

I had saved my email, both sent and received, since 1996, kept safe in a series of mbox files which I’ve diligently moved from hard drive to hard drive as I’ve upgraded my PC. Of course, it wasn’t very accessible there, and it certainly wasn’t integrated with the last four years of mail kept in Gmail (well, half in GMail proper, and the other half in Apps). So I was happy to read, albeit belatedly, that Google had added email migration to Apps.

I knew what had to be done, so I dug into the documentation looking for a way to have it inhale those mbox files. As well as the obvious POP/IMAP support, they also supported an Atom interface, which is great and all the rage and everything, but come on, is the low hanging fruit solution here not for me to just email the mbox files? Anyhow, without that option, it turned out that the simplest route was just to install dovecot and have it serve up each file as an IMAP folder … which took all of 5 seconds to configure. So I pointed Google at the server, and it spent the next half-day or so chugging through files.

I’m now a happy man, as the last 12 years of much of my communication with the world is now searchable.

AppEngine is to Amazon Web Services as HTTP is to SOAP.

Needless to say, I’m a fan.

Once again I’m happy to be a part of the program committee for the DOA conference. I’ve found the quality of papers there to always be quite high … yes, even some of the Web services ones often have something to contribute (I can forgive one wrong assumption 8-).

The CFP for DOA 2008 has just been posted. Please consider submitting.

Opera’s surely been feeling the heat from WebKit given that it’s basically taking over the world, including mobile. So here’s a thought: why don’t they abandon their own rendering engine, Presto, and adopt WebKit? Then instead of being “that other browser”, which developers are loathe to bother testing for, they’d be the best (from what I’ve heard of Safari) WebKit based browser out there. Seems a no-brainer to me.