Life in the Cloud

OK, so suddenly I find myself with the urge to blog a bit about my changing computing habits. If reading techie stuff makes you want to tear out your own eyeballs and pin your eyesockets with two large needles, you should quit reading this now.

So. First off--the title. I'll explain it in a bit, but right now I just want to talk about what's behind it. Lately I've been moving a lot of my personal data online. I mean stuff that I'm used to keeping on my own computer, I'm uploading it for various reasons. For backup being just one of them.

Gmail--The Beginning of the End of an Era
It all started with Gmail of course, with its humongous 1 gigabyte of storage space. We quickly started using it to store our documents and such, a kind of freestyle file manager. And by now this has been going on for some time.

Google Docs
Then Google introduced Google Docs, the lightweight office suite which lives entirely on the web. It too stores files, albeit only documents, presentations and spreadsheets. But if you're whipping up a bare-bones document (assignment, proposal, whatever), and want to share it with friends and co-workers, it's excellent.

Google Notebook
Now we also have Google Notebook, which allows you to manage any textual info you might want to save for later use. These include bookmarks, and regular notes wherein you can keep stuff you've written but aren't sure what to do with it, stuff you need to remember, like an itinerary, or stuff you can't afford to forget, like your passwords. And of course, all of these are available from any web browser that can go online. I've found it very useful to have access to these notes both when I'm at home and at work.

Google Reader
I'm also using Google Reader, which just seems to be getting more and more powerful every few months. At this point I'm hard pressed to decide which is my favourite Google web app--Gmail or GReader. But I digress. If you're not a heavy (and I mean prolific) web surfer, you're probably not sure what exactly Google Reader is. A site that lets you read books, maybe?

Nope. It's a site which collects articles from websites you specify, and shows all new articles in bold highlighting. It actually shows all articles within its own page. This is incredibly useful because it saves you from having to hop around among a dozen different sites that you like. Instead you stay in Google Reader and read one article after another, skimming past the ones that don't interest you and digging down into the ones that do.

Once you pass over and read an article, it's changed back to non-highlighted. So you can always easily tell which articles you've read and which are new. You can `star' articles, like in Gmail, to keep them in a special folder in case you want to look at them later. You can `share' articles, which adds a link to the article on an automatic `blog' GReader creates for you, and which your friends can access once you give them its address.

I'll admit I'm a moderately fast reader, but GReader literally lets me read or skim through thousands of articles every month, no joke. So if you're someone who has to or wants to keep track of some kind of news, GReader will give you a considerable boost. And these days, keeping track of any kind of news is a snap thanks to search engines like Google automatically giving you continuously updated feeds of the search results. For example here's a feed on news about Jamie Lynn Spears. If you add this feed to GReader, it'll show the news headlines, and short summaries, as items almost as soon as they're posted onto the web. (Tip: don't do it, for your own sanity.)

Once you start using GReader and learning more about feeds and just how many kinds of information they can track, you'll be well on your way to becoming a true web guru.

Flickr
Now owned by Yahoo, and still offering a boatload of free storage space for photos, Flickr is probably the best photo storage site on the web. I've been uploading photos to it left and right. The only limitation for the free service is that you can upload a maximum of 100 MB each calendar month. Shouldn't be a problem for the occasional uploader.

Honourable mention: Google's Picasa Web Albums, a slick photo sharing app that lets you do one thing for free that Flickr doesn't: organise photos into albums. Free Flickr lets you create a maximum of 3 `sets', which are its equivalent of albums. But you can get around that by `tagging' all photos which would go into the same album with a common tag, and then doing a search for that tag.

OK, that is a bit cumbersome. So why do I recommend Flickr over Picasa Web? Because the latter has an absolute storage limit of 1 gigabyte, which feels rather irksome in these days of unlimited storage. But then again, who's going to use up a gigabyte of storage, right? Hmm....

Expensr
Last but not least, a gem among web apps. If you've ever had to manage money, you might have found yourself asking, Where did all the money go? Expensr tries to answer exactly this question, by making you keep track of all your expenses. It's free and it's fully on the web--once again, you can access it from any device with a proper web browser. (Forget the PC--I've heard people are using their Wiis to surf these days.)

If you take a few minutes to sign up and set up the accounts, you'll be rewarded in just a few days with a day-to-day visual analysis of your spending habits--as a pie chart showing where the money goes, and a bar chart showing how much goes each day. The site is new, but it looks promising. Some of the community-based features are intriguing. You can `tag' yourself as `in my twenties', `in my thirties', `in college', `renting', `a smoker', and so on and compare yourself anonymously to others in these categories.

The Cloud
Now, you might be getting a sense of how much you can put online just for the sheer convenience of it. Nowadays this data space is being called the cloud, and cloud computing seems to be headed for the big time, with Google and a select few others poised to be in the epicentre. And given the quality of their web offerings, I feel pretty good about that.

Getting my.monash email in your Gmail inbox

Yup, it's actually possible to send and receive my.monash (or any other uni/workplace) email from your beloved Gmail account. Here's how:

Receiving (mail into Gmail)

When someone sends mail to your Monash email address, you can have the Monash mailing system forward it to Gmail. Sign in to Monash Webmail (https://my.monash.edu.au/email/webmail.html) and choose the Options link from the row of links at the top. In the Options page, choose the Forwarding and Delivery link from the left side. There you can specify that email should be forwarded to your Gmail address and then deleted (so it doesn't take up any space in your Monash inbox).

Sending

You can compose and send emails from your Gmail account which will appear to be from your Monash address. To set this up, you need to be signed into both Gmail and my.monash. In Gmail, go to the Settings page, then go to the Accounts tab. Click the Add another email address link, and a window pops up asking for the name and address. Enter your my.monash name and email address here, click Next Step, then Send Verification. Keep the small window open because the Monash email site has a bug which makes it show Web page links incorrectly. In other words, you won't be able to verify that you own your Monash address simply by clicking the link in the email that Gmail sent to your Monash address.

Now go to your Monash inbox, open the message from Gmail, and copy and paste the confirmation code in Gmail's verification window. Hit Enter, and Gmail adds your Monash address to the list.

Try It Out

Compose a message in Gmail, and choose your From: address from the drop-down box. The person who gets the message will see the Monash address, and when they reply to it, the message will automatically come to your Gmail inbox. When you reply to this reply, the new message will automatically have your Monash address in the From: field. And so on.

Bayesian multi-category classification in Gmail?

What this would do is something like what POPFile does for email clients like Thunderbird or Outlook or whatever: automatically categorise incoming emails based on keywords they contain. POPFile is trainable and it's supposed to reach a pretty high accuracy after a couple of weeks. POPFile doesn't actually put your emails into different folders in your email program; it just marks them as belonging to one category or other (say `Work', `Family', `Junk', `Stamp collecting', etc.). Then you set up your email program so that it puts these emails into different folders, or deletes them, or forwards them, or whatever.

What POPFile does

OK first of all, you're asking why would you want some software like POPFile to classify emails for you when you can just set up filters in your email program to do that based on who they're from, what the subject is, and so on? The reason is your email client's filters are static: they do not learn about new family members who are sending you email, nor about new correspondents from your workplace, nor about new junk mailers you have to deal with all the time. In fact, programs like Thunderbird already have Bayesian filtering to deal with this problem of continually-changing junk mails -- it's just that POPFile goes one step further, to try to identify your mails as belonging to arbitrary categories that you set up.

The idea is, once you've set up POPFile to recognise email from your family, from your work, and from your stamp collecting buddies, it will correctly identify these different types of emails, say, about 99.99% of the time. The rest of the time, which is presumably a piffling amount of time, you'll be telling POPFile something like `no, this isn't junk, it's just my little brother, mark it as ``Family'' '. And POPFile will continue to learn, using the Bayesian statistical analysis.

So the end result is, you can set up your email programs to put email marked `Work' in the right folder, and so on, without having to worry about updating your filters all the time.

Now here's my question: why should email program users get these benefits exclusively? Why can't we have something like this for webmail users? Specifically, Gmail users (like me, and it seems half the world nowadays)? Maybe we can. It boils down to three things: Gmail's JavaScript functions, POPFile's statistical categorisation methods, and Firefox's Greasemonkey extension.

What Greasemonkey does

Basically, Greasemonkey allows you to customise Web pages in Firefox in almost unlimited ways with a little JavaScript programming, using that page's Document Object Model and any JavaScript functions defined in it. Check out http://persistent.info/archives/2005/03/01/gmail-searches for an idea about just how powerful Greasemonkey is, and what it can do to Gmail.

I've tried out the above hack, and it actually does work, with a few hiccups. Furthermore, I've tried programming Greasemonkey scripts myself and I can tell you it's a really powerful way of customising websites which you love to make them even more useful. There are actually a ton of scripts people have written out there, and the best place to get them is userscripts.org. Check it out.

POPFile for Gmail?

OK, now we know we can extend Gmail's functionality in amazing ways with Greasemonkey hacks like the one above. Essentially, Greasemonkey is giving us the means to program a user interface for the new Bayesian classification classification features we want in Gmail. Greasemonkey scripts are written in JavaScript. Now I'm pretty sure the `business logic' of POPFile, which is currently written in Perl, can be ported to JavaScript without too much trouble. The end result: an interface in Gmail that tags incoming messages and quickly allows you to check for and correct mistakes, training it, and bringing the convenience of automatic Bayesian classification to Gmail. Anybody up for it?