Why can’t we all just get along?
Why can’t we all just get along?
It was a friendly meeting today, but not without the usual competitive spirit between the Mozilla camp and the Microsoft camp.
Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already approved by the standards working groups, in a different way, and then says their implementation is the standard. Sounds like something Hillary Clinton would do, until you realize that the Mozilla guys do it too. Basically everyone does it, when they feel the competitive technology is implemented by someone smaller or less significant than themselves. And since this is a very immature business, everyone feels that way about everyone else, so it’s something of a miracle when interop happens.
It has always been thus.
When Netscape, the company that spawned Mozilla, wanted to implement a format for content syndication in 1999, they did it outside of the W3C because they were sick of the dirty politics bigger companies that felt more significant had been using against them. There was prior art, but they trampled it, because (you guessed) they felt more significant than those that came before.
The trick is to get over that feeling, and to adopt something specifically because it comes from someone you feel superior to.
Be the change you seek.
I pointed out to Mike that three real religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, religious causes that great wars have been fought over, for 2000-plus years, are just forks of the same religion and bible with emphasis placed on different characters, they are basically compatible. Isn’t that amazing?
In tech, where wars are between nerds who drink Jolt and read Microserfs, and couldn’t fight a real war if our lives depended on it, why can’t we at least agree to use the same names for elements of our XML that do the same damned thing?
Something to think about!
End of editorial. 
Let’s see — I’ve had my iPhone since June 29, so that’s…
number (clock.now () - date (”6/29/2007″)) / (60*60*24)
270 days. In that time apparently it’s been downloading all my non-spam mail from Gmail, and now periodically interrupts me to say my mailbox is 92 percent full, would I please delete some of my mail.
I finally had a minute, on the BART the other day, to look into deleting mail, and it appears to be an onerous process to do for thousands of messages. First you tap the mail message, then tap the red minus sign, then tap the Delete button. They want to be sure you’re sure (no Undo).
Problem is — I only use the Mail app to send pictures to Flickr. On the rare occasion that I want to check email on my iPhone, I just use the excellent mobile version of Gmail. So I never want the email from the Mail app.
So I guess I have two questions:
1. How to mass-delete all the mail that’s filling up 92 percent of the allocated space.
2. How to tell the mail app that I don’t want it to fetch mail. (This is probably something I’m paying a fair amount for, btw.)
Any suggestions would be most welcome. (And I suspect the iPhone Nazis out there will use this as an example of my ineptitude for years to come. Have fun!)
Bonus: The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.
PS: I’ve tried deleting the account and adding it back. No luck. The mail is still there.
PPS: Apparently mass-delete is new with iPhone 2.0.
Rackspace goes ?Mosso? for developers
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