It seems a lot of people have already written a lot on the etiquette of video meetings, so in this little post, I’ll try to contribute with some of the technical tips which doesn’t seem to be covered as much.
While wifi seem to work fine mostly, it can cause issues. If you have the option to use a wired connection for you device used for videomeetings, do so. It will have less latency then any wifi-connection and improve the experience.
No, your servers should (probably) not have a facebook profile, nor should your servicebus have a twitter profile, but as the work tools change and evolve, you should probably consider updating the stream of status mails to more modern “social media” used at work.
When you’re in DevOps you probably get a steady stream of emails from various systems checking in. It may be alert emails, health checks or backup completed emails. It’s been more “fun” getting these mails with the rise of unlimited mail storage and powerful email-search tools should you ever need to find something in the endless stream of server-generated mails.
As mails bounch around some email programs (I’m looking at you, Microsoft), seems to encrypt package forwarded mails in attachments with the extension .eml.
While Mozilla Thunderbird should be able to read them (as should Evolution), it requires you have the mail application available on your machine, but I haven’t - I’m doing just fine with GMail in the browser. So far the best solution I’ve find - assuming it’s trivial non-sensitive, personal files - that an Online viewer seems to work pretty well. My preferred solution is the free one from encryptomatic. It handles the mails quite nicely, it restores the formatting to something quite readable and even handles embedded images and attachments within the eml-file.
I’ve been exploring todo lists for a while, but so far not found the ideal solution. I did however get a mighty step closer after Schack told me about a firefox plugin called Quickfox Notes.
Before introducing Quickfox notes, let me spend a second on my daily workflow in broad terms. I usually have Firefox running 8+ hours a day. Either browsing the web, doing web development or just by habit. I work on several machines - A few Linux laptops and an iMac at home. As I use several machines, I’ve been a huge fan of bookmark synchronization. I tried Mozilla Weave for a while, but their lack of PowerPC support (on an other Mac), eventually made me switch to FoxMarks - which is now called Xmarks. Xmarks has worked flawless since day one, and it’s one of the very first plugins I always install along with firefox on any machine I use.
Suppose you got an important mail, but by accident deleted the message – and to make matters worse, you also decided that emptying the mailbox was a pretty neat idea. Is then time to Panic?
Well it might, but there is a chance you might be able to undelete the message – and quite easily if you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine. Here are the few steps, which has helped recover a lost mail or two… First close Thunderbird. Then located the mail directory (on Linux it’s located in the subdirectory .mozilla-thunderbird in you home directory – on windows most likely somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings*\Application Data\Thunderbird – In there you’re looking for the “Local Folders” directory.