I just realized that the 2 GMail Labs experiments “Go to label” and “Quick links” work together, which makes quick links all the more useful. So say you have 2 labels named “Newsletters” and “Notifications”, and one quick link named “ALT.NET” (which finds all the posts from the ALT.NET mailing list). If you summon the “go to label” popup and start typing “n”, it will show all three:

Now, you ask, when should you use a label, and when should you use a quick link?

The main difference is that quick links are only search queries, whereas labels can be both search queries (a filter that automatically assigns that label) or manually maintained containers. If you need the latter, that’s a no brainer. If, however, what you want can be expressed with a search query, you need to choose between labels and quick links.

My method, so far, is based on 2 criteria: complexity and scalability.

• Make a quick link if the search query is simple, and make a filter if it is complex. Typically, finding out all the emails from a specific mailing list is as simple as typing “list:altdotnet” in the search box, so this calls for a quick link. On the other hand, finding the receipts from some company that also sends you various newsletters and announcements can be a bit more complex, so I would make that a filter. The reason for this is that if the search query is complex, there’s a good chance it’s not complex enough. There’s a good chance some emails won’t get caught, because you didn’t think about all the cases or somehow an exceptional case shows up in your inbox. When this happens, you can still tag that message manually and keep going.
• Make a quick link if similar types of containers exist. For example, “ALT.NET” finds all the mail from a specific mailing list. There could be dozen of similar containers if I’m subscribed to a dozen of other mailing lists. I don’t want to clutter my email organisation with dozens of such labels, so I go for a quick link. My labels tend to be generic concepts that won’t scale up much: “Newsletters”, “MailingLists”, “Receipts”, some labels for my different internet identities and/or email accounts, and some GTD-ish labels (“FollowUp”, “Hold”).

I hope this helps.

If you have an iPhone, or any other smartphone for that matter, you will probably by now have set up Google Sync with it so you can synchronize your contacts and calendar.

However, if you’re a bit hasty and follow the simple tutorial that Google provides, you will end up synchronizing  only your main calendar with your phone. It’s easy to miss the fact you can actually synchronize up to 5 (at the time of this writing) calendars. If you go back to Google Sync from your device, you should then be able to select which calendars you wish to synced. This is especially useful if you want to sync your Remember The Milk tasks or your Facebook events.

Note

To get Remember The Milk tasks in your calendar, go here.

To get Facebook events in your calendar, go to your events page, and click “Export Events”, at the top of the page. You’ll get an URL that you can then import in Google Calendar or any other calendar application.

One of my open-source .NET projects, Textile.Net, is now available via Subversion on Codeplex.

A good friend of mine sent me this little “gotcha” a few days ago, so I thought I’d share:

#include <iostream>

#include <string>
void main() {
int a = 0;
int* ptrA = &a;
const int b = 1 ;

const int& refA1 = (ptrA ? *ptrA : 1);
const int& refA2 = (ptrA ? *ptrA : b);

std::cout << refA1 << std::endl;
std::cout << refA2 << std::endl;

a = 42;

std::cout << refA1 << std::endl;
std::cout << refA2 << std::endl;
}

This prints:

0

0

0

0

Turns out I didn’t really know how the “?” operator figures out its overall return type because most of the time I use it with class pointers or strings or something not as complicated as integers with values of 0 or 1 or even (crazy!) 42.

In this case, the “?” operator looks at an “int” and a “const int” and figures, hey, I should really make all this a “const int”! And what better way to make a “const int” out of an “int”? Well, copy it somewhere safe, of course! So you end up with constant copies of “a”. You can print out the addresses of all the variables to see how “refA1” and “refA2” point to new places.

If you remove the “const” from “b”’s declaration, the “?” operator then looks at two integers, makes “refA2” reference “a”’s address directly, and you end up with the following output:

0
0
0
42

Conclusion: watch out when initializing a variable that could either be a constant (earth’s gravity) or a user tweakable value (gravity on the space station in level 3 of your game).