Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

I’ve been using Gmail since its inception and I’ve used it (the web interface) as pretty much my sole email interface for the past 18 months. During that same time I’ve been pretty much solely a Mac user and when I recently bought an iPhone 3G I thought it would be an opportune time to revisit the possibility of Apple Mail, Address Book, iCal since those integrate with their iPhone counterparts and synchronize with MobileMe (née .Mac).

Punchline is: a few days into the process I have decided not to use Mail App nor the iPhone counterpart. I am using Apple’s Address Book (with MobileMe synching). As for Calendar App vs. Google Calendar I’d say the jury is still out. Here’s what I’ve found…
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I’m upgrading a project from Rails 2.0.2 to Rails 2.1.

This thing uses Comatose 0.8.1. Unfortunately, Comatose 0.8.1 isn’t compatible with Rails 2.1. Fine, I’ll just upgrade to Comatose 2.0 (uber-alpha) and that’ll work. Oops, Comatose 2.0 uber-alpha breaks Rails migrations. Fixing that breakage requires a patch to Rails itself.

Oh and did I mention that this project of mine also requires a patch to Comatose proper (adds before_filters to the Comatose configuration object).

So I need a patched version of Comatose and a patched version of Rails. “OK” you say, just use Piston to manage those vendor branches. Not so fast. Piston only works with Subversion and the Rails project is no longer hosted on a Subversion repository. The old repository was deprecated after Rails 2.0.2. Rails is now hosted on Github. Oh and so is Comatose.

Never fear, Github support for Piston is coming Real Soon Now™. Until then I’m stuck in limbo. I suppose I’ll do the manual vendor branch thing—essentially manage my own private Subversion repositories for Rails and Comatose.

The fact that François Beausoleil is implementing Piston support for all-Git projects leads me to believe that there is no convenient alternative (to Piston) for vendor branches in Git. Hum, that’s hard to believe. Anyhow, I can’t migrate this project to Git yet so all-Git alternatives are sort of moot.

I was optimistic that the Quick Links feature just released with the new Gmail Labs would scratch my itch for the ability to link to Gmail threads. Well Quick Links itself is pretty raw but I was able to use it to figure out the URL format for a thread to wit:https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=mca2fxr2r24c#inbox/11a5bb2474f4842dI hadn’t seen that ‘zx’ query parameter before and it appears to be not strictly necessary (may be a proxy cache defeater—I removed it and found the URL still worked fine).What is new to me is that whereas last time I tried to revisit such an URL I was taken not to the thread, but to my Inbox, now when I replay this URL I am taken to the thread (as expected!)Now if Gmail would only provide a “Link to this page” control à la Google Maps my life would be complete.