The Philosophy of Undo

Undo is one of the greatest philosophies introduced by computer operating systems. Undo is an action that tends to remove the effect of the previous action, and roll the system to a previous state which exists few seconds or few minutes ago.

Undo is a man-wish, since all people wish to have Undo button to change actions they do in their life. For example, A defeated football team wish to have Undo button in order to undo the match, and review their faults. A failing student, wish to press undo with the exam to re-do, and many many more examples. If we think in Undo, it’s related to a fault action which we want to roll back and re-do it.

In computer world, undo is implemented in many ways, from simple undo for some typed words, to undo of the whole system state and database.

The simple form is that u open a text editor, write some words, and then press undo and what u typed will be cleaned and rolled back. in this type, the undo information is stored in computer memory, and hence if we close the application, and re-open it again, the undo information is reset. also, undo information memory is limited, so we cannot for example, restore words typed few hours ago. Some advanced applications provide larger memory for undo like Microsoft Word, and it depends on sessions. It stores undo information for the whole session since application is open, and this helps in restoring information several hours ago as long as the session is open.

A more advanced is the revision systems for software code. At this undo system, the whole tree of code is saved under a certain name (tag). We can rollback to such tag anytime we want.

Another example of undo is the System Restore implemented in Microsoft Windows, which allows us to restore the system state to a previous date.

The previous two examples depend on a saved undo information, which are saved to computer storage, and then restored when required. For example, we can roll to a certain code tag after weeks from creating it, since the tag information is saved.

Of course, the ideal undo is just a computer term, since we cannot rollback our real time to re-do actions again.

Is Gmail good for Business?

Gmail is a wonderful email client, with a smart interface and pretty intelligent terminology in accessing email. But the question is: Can we use Gmail for for our business? This is an important question that I issued after trying to use Gmail with my business email acount.

We all know the feature that appeared in most web-based email clients is that we could bring other email accounts into the existing email using POP feature. This is an encouraging feature, and of course with a nice client like Gmail. I tried to add my business accounts into Gmail, and I configured automatic filtering for incoming emails.

Another point forced me to do this is that I don’t use my notebook all the time, and hence Gmail is an ideal solution, since it’s a portable email client with huge space (about 7GB), and wide set of features like chatting, labels, filtering, etc…

After sometime, I discovered some issues that caused me NOT to use Gmail for business, and find another client like Outlook or Thunderbird.

Actually, there are two important points that I discovered:
1- I received an email from a business partner telling me: “Why do u send me emails from ur Gmail account?”. It was very strange question since I was sure that I selected to send the email from my business email. Another message cleared things out, my partner told me that his Outlook says in the FROM field “xxxxx@gmail.com on behalf of xxx@xxx.com”. It was a big shock for me. After some search, I found that Gmail puts some information about the gmail account used in sending messages inside the email header, which outlook and some clients parse, and hence he display the on behalf message !!!

2- the second this is that if u receive big number of emails from partner, which explains something, the conversation is marked as read when u read the first message received. If ur partner sends u two successive messages, u may miss the second message, since the thread is marked as read, and hence u may miss messages. Someone may say, I will take care, but I assure that I missed more than 4-5 messages since I used Gmail in my business.

As a conclusion, Gmail is good, but for home and friends, specifically, for low-frequency emails, not for business.

Google Reader

it’s very easy. Just sign-in to google reader, and add
RSS u like, it will show the articles under this feed. There are some
good points:

1- The articles are ordered by date and displayed
as a list, u can scroll down to read such articles. once u scroll an
article, it’s automatically marked as READ, and removed from the unread
articles (This is a really nice feature). U will not need to mark the
article as a read after reading it.

2- Scrolling articles makes u read most articles very very fast.

3- As an option, u can email the article to someone.

4-
As an option, u can share article with someone. U just mark the article
as shared, and it will appear with the one who u r sharing with.

5- An an option, u can mark the article as starred, if the article is important.

6- An an option, u can keep certain item as unread if u want to read it later.

7- U can import feeds.

8- U can search for feeds online using google reader.

9- U can add preset feed packages, for example, there are
Technology package already collected by Google, which is a package of
RSS feeds related to technology.

[How To] Create Folder using keyboard shortcut in Windows

Simply:

Alt+F+W+F

Using Helpers in Rails Applications

What is a helper

Helper is a module containing methods that assist a view. Helper methods are used to generate HTML, XML or Javascript. So, the helper extends the behavior of a template.

Each controller gets its own helper module. If the controller is named BlogController, then Rails will look for the helper BlogHelper in the file blog_helper.rb. However, this is generated automatically using the controller generation script.