Monthly Archives: October 2008

iPhone Puzzle Games

PuzzleManiak €3.99 – includes a lot of Nikoli puzzle games (in fact most of the ones from here are in there), all are randomly generated with different difficulty levels and includes a daily Web Challenge where you compete against other’s times. Worth it alone for Slitherlink.

Vexed €0.79 – Good port of the Palm OS game including all level-packs.

I’m still looking for a version of Sherlock (Windows) or Hercule (Palm OS) for the iPhone…

Richard Morgan – The Steel Remains

Fairly short book, and about 3 quarters of it feel like exposition (although there’s plenty of things happening) and build-up, but it covers a lot of ground; a fair amount of it in flashbacks. Nevertheless, it ends in a nice, satisfying climax. It’s fairly unflinching in both its violence and sex (homo- as well as heterosexual).
If you like Morgan’s SF books, you’ll enjoy this as well.

Apple’s MobileMe and timed-out IMAP servers

As I was trying to clear out the folders of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to on my mail account (Apple’s MobileMe, née .Mac), I ran into a bit of a problem: I couldn’t delete any messages from some of the folders; it always failed with a timeout error from the server. These folders were usually quite populated (e.g. ~19,000 messages from cocoa-dev). After contacting support chat, and trying many things both in Mail.app as well as MobileMe’s web-app, my case got escalated.
As it turns out, nested IMAP folders are the culprit! It doesn’t matter if the folders in question are at the top-level, just having any nested folders in the account seems to trigger the “slow path” that leads to the problem.
Now my folder structure is a mess with oddly prefixed folder names, but at least it’s flat, and I can work with my emails again.

TL;DR version: Don’t nest folders on MobileMe’s IMAP servers, stick to a flat hierarchy.