Opera 10 as Hudson Helper

As there's still no Hudson Helper for Blackberry (David: hint, hint!), I've been forced to do my own monitoring in a browser (when not monitoring by email, that is).

Now, with Opera 10 (and its new tab layout options), it's even easier to monitor multiple builds via a single view:

A Week Without Firefox

Last week I fired the Fox and switched to using Opera 9.6. Today, I'm back to Firefox 3.0 because while Opera has a few nice features, it ultimately lags behind FF (for me, anyway) in usability and functionality.

Here's how they stack up:

Opera 9.6's Pros

1. Sidebar notepad feature
2. Speed dial homepage
3. Minimalist UI with sidebar (incl. a handy notepad app and the usual suspects (transfers/downloads, history, bookmarks). For web dev, there's some handy extras like Links (a list of all the links in a page) & Info (page metadata)... but then FF also provides these via a different UI
4. Ability to do "g keyword keyword2" to search Google for those keyword(s) (Firefox just does this without the "g")
5. Mouse gestures
6. Single "Wand" password manager login for entire session (rather than per-window - see Firefox Cons below)

Firefox Pros

1. Awesomebar searches within history allow minimal typing like "hu ec ve l ar" to pull up a long URL like https://build.eclipse.org/hudson/view/Athena%20CBI/job/cbi-ve-1.4.x-Ganymede/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/
2. Ability to create keyword associations for bookmarks, so that "b 272403" will load https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=272403
3. Tons of plugins/extensions, including: mouse gestures, Twitter, Delicious, Tab colouring & detach/merge, ...

Opera Cons

1. Location bar only works with URLs and sometimes page names. Way more typing needed than in FF
2. No ability to undo the closing of a tab
3. Cannot reproduce FF extensions in Opera; Delicious and Twitter integration are not nearly as good; no tab colouration, single view of downloads, no Tasktop support.
4. Cannot store username/password pairs for in-page login forms (only browser-level ones). Repeatedly having to log in to JBoss Hudson every few hours is a royal pain.
5. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
6. Lame icon with a dropshadow. Retro, sure, but c'mon, they've had that for AGES, and it's just lame.

Firefox Cons

1. Memory bloat
2. Crashes unexpectedly but previous session can be recovered.
3. When reloading a saved/crashed session, every single page requiring access to the password manager pops a login dialog; sometimes I get to enter my password 7 or 8 times, or hit ESC repeatedly to lose those tabs.

I also briefly tried Firefox 3.1beta4, but as none of my extensions work there yet, it's not much better than Opera at this point. It's supposed to be better on memory, and has new bells and whistles being added to the Awesomebar. It's also supposed to be implementing a lot of functionality I get now from the above extensions, such as better tab management.

So, ultimately, I'm back to Firefox 3.0.10.

Blackberry Bold + MidpSSH + Mutt = Mail Over VPN

Got a new Blackberry Bold 9000 for Xmas. Typical of Rogers, I was overcharged for it, and all the freebies I had quoted to me on the phone have yet to arrive. I'm told I'll be credited back the surcharge, but I won't see that until February.

Anyway, customer service infractions aside, setting up Gmail, TwitterBerry, Facebook, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and of course Blackberry Messenger was a snap. Tried to use the internal mail client for Gmail but it doesn't respect my filters so I get the flashing light notification for every bit of spam, rather than just the interesting mail I want to see.

Setting up IRC was a little tricky, but thanks to Opera Mini and mibbit.com, I can more or less check Freenode channels on the go. Not ideal, but tolerable.

But the real challenge was getting access to my corporate mail, since we're not running a BES server, and thanks to all the supported options, there are over 5,000 possible ways to configure Cisco VPN access on a Blackberry. I'm not that patient.

Instead, I decided to try using MidpSSH 1.7.3 to connect into my laptop (which is already connected to the VPN), then use Mutt 1.5.18 to connect over IMAP to the mail server. Because I'm connecting to a local IP within my home LAN, I set the SSH session's Connection Type to WiFi, rather than Default, BES, or TCP/IP. In order to avoid having to key in a password every time I connect to the laptop, I set up an SSH key and shared that with my laptop.

If I want to have this solution work when I'm not at home, I'll have to expose my laptop to the outside world, and connect using Connection Type = Default to that public IP address instead of my more secure internal one. Still, it's a step in the right direction.

Incidentally, this tip might help, if you're having network access problems:

Options > Advanced Options > TCP > APN: "internet.com" (no username or password) [1], [2]

Now I just have to teach myself all the keyboard commands for Mutt. I tried using MidpSSH on my previous phone, a SonyEricsson W810i, but it's nearly impossible to do anything without a full keyboard.

If you're thinking of doing something like this, here are some handy links for setting up Mutt to connect to IMAP and to send mail via SMTP.

Is there a better way to VPN over BIS for IMAP mail? If so, feel free to share your solution here or via email with nickboldt(at)rogers(dot)blackberry(dot)net.