A few posts ago I mentioned how happy I was with Slicehost. In the last 85 days, which is my current uptime, I have had 14 minutes that the website was unreachable and 4 minutes that the machine could not be pinged.

If that reliablilty doesn’t encourage you to get a slice account than I don’t know what will.

Being able to find emails that do not currently have labels is a feature that has been requested a number of times and for me would be very very nice. On some of my accounts I have gone through and setup filters for absolutely every type of email I get, but those accounts get less random email. The email coming in is more predictable like friends or certain mailing lists. For my main DIGITAL39 account I get a lot of random email, and a lot of predictable email. I am also using it to archive email from accounts I no longer have. So I looked at my email today and I found out that 4370 out of 8735 (remember these are threaded so it is actually a lot more email) were not labeled. You could go through all of the email and move all of the ones without labels to another label called _FILTER_ or something with a symbol in the front so it will be at the top of the labels list. However there is a better way, which still takes time, but nearly as much.

Create a new label “..filter..” and go into “All Mail”. Click the “All” link to select all of the email and then click the link to select all of the emails in “All Mail”. Label all of the emails with the new “..filter..” label. Once all of that has been done, go down through your existing labels and select all emails and remove the “..filter..” label. After you go through all of these steps you will be able to click on the “..filter..” label and see only email that does not currently have a label.

This doesn’t help for new email coming in, but it will allow you to setup filters for email that has not been filtered or labeled yet. You can easily label incoming mail with this label to make sure you catch new email. One account that I have that has thousands and thousands of emails I have done this with and there is only 1 or 2 emails a week that slip through without a filter.

I spent the evening moving formatting my desktop and moving to Linux full time for my desktop. In some ways this was a difficult move and in other ways it wasn’t. What made it difficult is that there are applications in Windows that I have not found a decent replacement for. An example would be FlashFXP, I have tried other apps, but so far none have given me the feel that FlashFXP did. Another is Photoshop… now I am aware of GIMP, but I am not a fan of it, I am sure over time I would enjoy it, but right now I enjoy the feel of working in Photoshop. Also with the way I have everything setup Windows wasn’t bad. Most of the complaints I hear about Windows are from people who hardly ever use Windows, or haven’t used Windows since 3.11. They complain about things they don’t know anything about or they say they tried to fix a Windows machine for someone and spent X hours trying to get something to work. In some cases it was simply because they don’t have a lot of experience with Windows and it is not fair to blame Windows for that.

I use Linux on my company laptop, so I have gotten pretty used to using it the majority of my day for all kinds of stuff. I found myself coming home and getting on my Windows machine needing to write some bash scripts or integrate with Linux machines better or just little tasks that are, in my opinion, easier in Linux. All the days of using Linux I never said to myself… if I only had Windows, but at home I have countless times said… if this was only Linux.

I do need to continue to run a Windows virtual machine so I have been testing out VMware server and VMware workstation on Linux. Server is free, but does not handle USB and will most likely not support unity anytime soon. Unity will make a lot of things much better, it will allow me to use the few apps I need to without having to be inside the Windows vm all the time.

When I opened the Linux VMware server client it would crash and I would get the following errors.

I had to install gcc 4.3, and run the following commands to get it working