Computers & Technology

Do you use Meeting Maker? Did you know you can create private groups in Meeting Maker?

You can create a group of users, resources, locations, contacts, or other groups you meet with often.

To create a group, start by selecting Favorites from the Edit menu, and clicking New Group button. You will be prompted to enter the Name of the Group, so type in a name and click OK. The new group will then appear in the favorites list. Neat, huh?

You can then add members to the group. Make sure that you're online, because you must be online to add members to a group. To add them to the group, double-click the group on the right side, and then select users/resources from the left side.

This group will then be available for you (and only you) to use, from the Users pull down.

Have you ever been reading an email message in which the lines are shortened and appear cut off? It's as if a hard carriage returns were inserted after eight or ten characters, creating a column of text reminiscent of a haiku poem, in which there are only a few syllables per line.

This problem is due to the different ways of representing text in different programs and contexts. Text as it appears in email can be in one of three formats: plain text, rich text, and HTML text. Plain text messages, in turn, can have flowed and non-flowed plain text. Flowed text is a form of text in which spaces play the role of continuation of paragraphs. Technically it was first defined in RFC 2646, later extended in RFC 3676.

The main point of flowed text is to display text correctly despite of the screen width of the recipient of the message. Depending on the size of the screen (or display window) of the recipient of the message, the displayed text may contain text wrapped in undesirable ways. This is a delicate point, especially in small screens (like a PDA, cell phone, etc). Normally when a text written in a 80 columns terminal is displayed in a 30 columns screen, lines are cut in the middle and the formatting of the message is destroyed. Vice versa, when a message was written in a 30 columns screen and it is displayed in a 80 column screen, the message feels like it was wrapped too early (the effect to which you refer as "haiku"). The purpose of flowed text is to be able to send and receive text that will adapt to the screen width of the display device (window or screen), no matter what device that is, so the same text will look well-formatted in a 30 or 80 columns screen.

The behavior of flowed text is such that resizing the display window also resizes the number of columns of text and the way it wraps. Flowed text will insert a new line only at the end of a paragraph, and as such multiple lines behave as a block. Non-flowed text (fixed column width) will insert a new line at the end of the defined last column, on each line. (Columns are defined as the number -or position- of characters on a line on the display.)

Flowed text will be interpreted correctly by programs and contexts that know about flowed text, as long as the reply quote string is either ">" or "> ". Observe that if you correspond with someone who uses a different quote string than the above mentioned strings and has an e-mail program that is aware of flowed text, then when you quote quoted text in their messages using either ">" or "> ", there's a very good chance that the message will look corrupted in the screen of the recipient, in the sense than the second level of quoting will look mangled.

A conflict arises between programs that understand and use emails composed as plain text (flowed) text, and also understand and use emails composed with rich text format (RTF) or HTML. HTML is quite another mess, but I won't get into that.

For example, Messenger Express (the web-based mail program in NYUHome), uses plain text for composing messages, but does not bother to use the flowed format. Therefore, it inserts hard line breaks at the end of each line. This means that the message may look OK in the composition window, but may and often does look different on differently sized screens (or display windows), displaying what you have noticed as the "haiku" effect.

What can be done about it? Messenger Express will compose messages in non-flowed (fixed width) plain text format, unless you use Internet Explorer for Windows. Other recent mail (desktop-based, not web-based) programs, such as Outlook and Mail, compose messages in flowed plain text format, however this problem still happens because different people reply to messages in different mail programs, some of which may mangle the line breaks upon reply, as explained above. Short of making everyone use the same mail program, to compose messages in the same format, there is very little that can be done about this.

I invite comments.

So you want to connect to NYURoam? Here are some short and sweet instructions. If these don't work for you, please try the "fully tested, supported" instructions provided by ITS at http://www.nyu.edu/its/wireless/.

1. Tell your computer to connect to a network called "nyu". If you use Windows, add it to your preferred networks; if you use Macintosh, select Other... from the AirPort menu.
2. Select the security protocol WPA2-Enterprise. If this protocol is not available, you can try using WPA. (Do not select the option for PSK, as "nyu" does not use pre-shared keys)
3. Tell your computer to validate and trust the security certificates. If you use Windows, you may have to click on the Authentication tab, and select Protected EAP, then configure it to validate (all) VeriSign certificates. If you use Macintosh, simply accept the certificate when prompted.
4. Enter your credentials. These are the same credentials you use for NYUHome and email.
5. Happy browsing!

1. Choose your blog's Settings (Configure> Settings).
2. Switch to Detailed settings, if necessary.
3. Choose the New Entry Defaults tab.
4. In the section titled Publicity/Remote Interfaces, select the sites you would like to ping (notify about updates to your blog).
5. Save your changes.

You can also choose to ping (or not) when composing a new blog entry, if you have the custom options displayed.  Choose the Customize the display of this page link, at the bottom of the new entry screen.

From Microsoft's LiveWriter blog:

One of the less obvious features available in Windows Live Writer is the ability to automatically ping (send a signal) to popular blog aggregators every time you publish something to your blog.  This feature actively pings the servers of the blog aggregators you specify and to indicate when there is new material.

To use this feature in Writer click on Ping Servers in the Options dialog (navigation: Tools | Options | Ping Servers). Then add the names of the servers you want to ping.

You can read the original posting.

Using WLW (Windows Live Writer) you can add tags to your post, and you can automatically ping aggregators of your choice.

NYU's blog service uses MovableType technology, and can also ping some of these aggregator services.  Read more about blog pinging using NYU's Blogs.

Links:

• See how pinging works.
• Learn about aggregators (or feed aggregators).
• Learn about Pinging from NYU's Blogs.
• Learn about Pinging Technorati in MovableType.

There is a Firefox extension that allows you to send a signed or encrypted email from Gmail.  It’s called GMAIL/SMIME.  Once this extension is installed, you must restart Firefox.  Once you restart Firefox, you can then download/import your cert into Firefox, if you haven’t already.  Then you can compose a new message in Gmail and click the signature icon that appears in the compose message toolbar.

Your recipient will get a signed email.