Gee! Mail!

I've been using GMail for a while now, and I do really like it. It's pretty much replaced YahooMail as my "public" e-mail address. (The one I use for mailing lists, registering for websites, etc.)

Anyway, I've pretty much invited all my direct friends and family who I thought would be interested, and I have three invitations left. So in the spirit of Ernie the Attorney, if you're reading this, don't have an e-mail account, and want one, drop me a note and tell me your favorite thing about my blog.

First three respondents who aren't spam bots get the invites... :)

Update: All the accounts are gone... thanks!

Wireless MP3s

Ernie the Attorney has been going on again about his AirPort Express, and the other day Scheherazade was talking about her wireless MP3 music solution, which made me start looking into what's available.

I do love iTunes and I run it on both my PC and Mac, so I did think about the AirPort Express. I was really disappointed that it doesn't have any kind of remote control, though. I know, my place isn't that big, and I have a laptop with wireless, but you know, I don't *always* want to have to fire up or walk to a computer to listen to music. Sometimes, I want to plop down on the couch, and turn on the stereo with a remote, and change the song on a whim, all with a remote. The AirPort Express's lack of remote is a *huge* oversight in my book.

Anyway, here's what I'm looking for: a way to stream MP3s from my PC where they are all stored directly to my stereo. It must be wireless, it must have some sort of remote control, and ideally, it would cost under $150, but I'm willing to go up to $200 to make life easy.

I started doing some research and I've found these offerings:

• Omnifi DMS1
• D-Link DSM-320
• Roku SoundBridge M1000
• SoundBlaster Wireless Music
• Apple Airport Express

I'll be looking into all of these in more detail, but in the meantime, if you know of one I've missed, please let me know.

Windows Tabula Rasa

I'm in the market for a new laptop. I had a Dell 4150 that I absolutely loved, but it was heavy. Well, not by conventional standards, but by my stringent laptop standards. I have a huge brick of a machine for work, it's a loaded Dell, which weighs nearly 8lbs. I was considering using that, but the idea of lugging it back and forth to school/home/work, well, that isn't appealing.

So I've been debating about a Sony PCG-TR* but I waffle back and forth. Then I had this idea about a tablet PC... I thought, maybe the convenience of changing the form factor, combined with the svelte design would be cool. As luck would have it, we have two table PCs at work for evaluation, so I checked one out this weekend.

At first, I was really impressed with the versatility of the table, but honestly, the mystique wore off pretty quickly. After you get over the "cool" factor of being able to flip the screen around to any orientation, the little roughness around the edges of the OS start to grate.

There were lots of minor annoyances, which might have been specific to the particular model, so I won't go into those. There was one major annoyance that would keep me from ever getting one: I type nearly 5x faster than I write.

The handwriting recognition for the Windows XP "Table" Edition, actually works pretty good. But honestly, unless you type painfully slow, it's just quicker to type. And yes, it was cool to lay in bed with my wife, surfing the web with nothing more than a pen, but that doesn't make it worth paying a premium for a feature that is nothing more than "cool". I guess the tablet isn't for me. I think that if you were in the position where you made a living off of presentations (the thing would rule for PowerPoint warriors) then it might be worth it. Otherwise, it's a cool idea that isn't quite there yet.

Thank God for Comment Filters

Last week I made the jump to MovableType 3.0, and so far I'm very happy with the decision. I host a couple of blogs for friends, and I think the 3.0 interface is really great. Not that operation of MT was complicated before, but it's even easier now.

However, the best feature, bar none, is comment registration. I had noticed an increase in comment spam before the upgrade, and I was wasting a lot of time deleting comment spam. I don't know if the increase in spam means an increase in visibility for the blog, but I sure hope so. No matter, with MT 3.0, registered users can post comments to the ol' blog without my intervention, but all other comments are caught before they go live. That let's me stop the "Penis Enlargement" comments on my posts before the go live. That alone is worth the price of the upgrade.

An Upgrade

Well, I made the jump... I've upgraded the site to MovableType 3.0. I did it for a couple of reasons:

1. I think the folks at Six Apart deserve some hard earned $$$ for building a very nice, robust blogging system, which I have enjoyed for a long time without paying them anything.

2. I needed better comment spam protection.

3. I just like futzing around with the site.

So there you have it. MT3.0. So far it's been a painless upgrade and smooth going on new features. I'll let you know if I run into any problems.

The IE Switch

Wow. If ever there was confirmation that I'd done the right thing, switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox, this would be it: a CERT Vulnerability Note about IE, which actually lists as a security fix, using a different browser!

For those who may not know, CERT is the Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which issues security alerts about the most pressing computer security issues. For them to have released this about IE is a major indication that Microsoft needs to address these browser security issues post-haste.

Leaving IE...

I was a dedicated Netscape user for many years, until finally, several years back, Internet Explorer eclipsed Netscape in functionality. Then I finally broke down and switched, but it's always bothered me. However, recently, I discovered there is hope...

I just installed Mozilla Firefox 0.9, and, frankly I'm blown away. Not only does it seem to render pages faster than IE, but it has more features (hooray for tabbed browsing!!) and extensions and themes! So now I have a browser that not only blocks pop-up windows, but also filters out on page ads! Thanks to a little extension called AdBlock. And honestly, I have only discovered a handful of sites that only work with IE (mostly due to Active X stuff) and they are sites I can either live without, or fire up IE just for dealing with those sites.

Oh yeah, and since Microsoft doesn't seem to care about making IE safe from a number of different security flaws, I'm glad not to use it. I'll report more later, after I've been using Firefox for a while.

Bloglines

Well, after taking Kleio's suggestion, I signed up for Bloglines.com, which is a web-based News Aggregator. So far, I do like the service... of course, I have a few suggestions:

1. When in the folder "Tree View" it is really annoying to have everything marked as read just by clicking on the folder name. It's instinctive to click on the folder name to expend the folder (since it is underlined as a link) and when that marks everything as read, well, it pisses me off.

2. It would be very nice to not have everything automatically be marked as read... when I open a subscription. Sometimes I want to skim entries, but come back later to really read them, and I don't want to "Save" entires, or use a pulldown to make them visible again. If you had a preference to be able to set "Mark As Read" to default to off with a "Mark Read" link, similar to the "Mark Unread" link in the Blog Title box, that would be really great. I think it would suit both styles of readership equally.

3. Nothing against the color scheme but it would be nice to customize it.

4. Making the "Saved Items" folder searchable would be the bomb.

5. It would be really cool if I could export an XML file with my saved entries.

I think that they are 95% of the way to my dream news reader... and if they go the distance and are able to add features like the ones I've suggested, I would gladly pay for this type of service.

Radio Woes

I would really love someone to build a better news aggregator. If I weren't already up to my eyeballs in projects, I'd do it myself. I no longer use Radio for my blog, because it's a memory leaking, bloated application that slowly brings most systems to a halt. I just got tired of rebooting. However, the news aggregator feature is just about perfect. It can run as a web accessible service, so I can access it from anywhere, and on any machine, and it keeps track of things I've read. These are two features I've grown to love, and that aren't included in most other news aggregators.

After bouncing some ideas off Ken, he had another great suggestion, along the lines of GMail... why throw out RSS articles at all? Hard drive space is cheap, it would be cool to archive them, and make them searchable. Here's my dream news reader:

- Cross Platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) - Accessible via the web (password protected, of course) - Keeps all articles grouped by site, and ordered by date/time - Tracks "read" articles and doesn't display them after they are deleted/archived - Archives "read" posts, for searching later - Supports RSS (.9x, 1.0, 2.0) and ATOM

I would pay for that news aggregator... I really would, and I think others would too.

Update:

Kleio pointed me to an new service called Bloglines which is an on-line news reader, and has many of the features I was asking for... I've signed up for an account, and I'm going to be giving it a try this week. I hope it's cool!

Drool.

Apple Introduced a Dual 2.5GHz G5 today. Liquid Cooled. How drool worthy is that?!

Design Eye for the Usability Guy

Anyone who works with the web will most likely know the name Jakob Nielsen. He is the defacto usability guru for the web, and on his site useit.com he spouts off advise about making the web more usable. Ironically (apparantly, irony is not Jakob's strong suit) useit.com is one of the ugliest, most un-user friendly sites in the history of the web.

Enter Design Eye for the Usability Guy... five designers offer some tips for how Jakob can make his site less of an eyesore, which is long overdue, and preserve usability ala his rules. Thank god... maybe more people would care about usability and follow Nielsen's guidelines, if it weren't so damn painful to read them in the first place!

My Annoyances

Okay, I know it's a little late to grip about this now... but I hate, and I mean absolutely hate, the whole "My Computer", "My Network" and "My Documents" thing with Windows. It's so condescending... I'm not a child, I'm very capable of organizing my files into the directory structure that I want.

So one of the first things I do is remove this functionality from Windows:

1. Go to the Start menu
2. Select Run
3. Enter regsvr32 /u mydocs.dll
4. Click OK

Now if you delete them, they won't come back! There's also another annoying one, if you install Adobe Acrobat, the application creates a "My eBooks" folder which the above trick won't fix. I wasted a good deal of time looking for a preference in Acrobat to disable this. Guess what? It doesn't exist.

Instead, to stop this "feature" you need to go to the Acrobat directory and delete a plug-in:

1. Go to your Acrobat Directory (usually C:\Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat x.x)
2. Go to the Plug-ins directory (Acrobat\plug_ins)
3. Delete or re-name the ebook.api file

That should do the trick. Microsoft, Adobe, and other vendors should be ashamed for treating their customers like idiots. You can also visit TweakXP.com for some more great hints on dealing with XP annoyances.

Voluntary Collective Licensing

The EFF has published a "Let the Music Play" whitepaper which outlines their suggestion for Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing. It's a very well reasoned and workable idea. So the music industry will reject it out of hand. But it's worth a read, because to me, it's the most reasonable suggestion I've heard to solve the "filesharing" issue.

JVC HD Camcorder...

Last night at the MCAI meeting, JVC was on hand to do a presentation about their new "consumer" High-Definition video format, tentatively called HDV. To make a long story short, the have basically taken an HD resolution signal and compressed it in the camera using MPEG-2 compression, to create an MPEG-2 Transport Stream which gets recorded onto a standard Mini-DV formatted tape. Pretty nifty, overall, but there are a few drawbacks:

• The compression is done in hardware, so you don't get a true HD signal, you get an MPEG-2
  
• You need a special HDV Deck (or to use your camcorder for editing) and the format is not widely supported.
  
• The cameras are only 1-CCD (more on that later)
  

JVC has two cameras out, the consumer GR-HD1, and the professional JY-HD10. Price aside, there are two really critical differences:

• The professional unit allows you to generate color bars
  
• The professional unit has XLR inputs
  

If you don't know why those are big deals, the consumer level camera is for you. Otherwise, go for the professional unit.

The camera can record in SD at 480i or 480p, compressed w/MPEG-2, it can also record in standard DV format, or in HD at 720p, also MPEG-2 compressed. JVC boasts that it can playback 1080i, but it can't record in 1080i.

The camera is also only a 1-CCD chip. For a one chip camera, it does take a very sharp, crisp image that doesn't blow out too badly on highlights and it doesn't crush blacks horribly. JVC claims to be using layer technology on the CCD to eliminate the need for multiple CCDs (like the Foveon chip) however, they either need to license the Foveon chip or do a better job implementing the technology, in the SD range, any 3-CCD camera I've seen produces a better image.

Of course, the technology is not designed to be a replacement for higher end HD Cams (like the Sony HDWF900 or the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam) but I think it falls a bit short on the lower end.

The camera features are extremely limited. You can do far more tweaking on a Canon XL1s or Sony DCR-VX2100 both of which compete with the JVC on price point.

Frankly, I think the "HD" aspect of it is a bit gimmicky, and if what you really want is a great looking NTSC picture, pass on this one. If HD is really what you want, don't jump into it with this JVC. The HDV standard is being adopted by other vendors, and there might be some announcements at NAB in April. I'd be very interested to see what Sony and Canon plan for the format (they are both supposedly developing with it). If you're a die hard early adopter, or have a clear project that justifies it, the JVC is okay, but I have a feeling in a year we'll have a lot more camera to choose from.

JVC HD Camcorder...

Last night at the MCAI meeting, JVC was on hand to do a presentation about their new "consumer" High-Definition video format, tentatively called HDV. To make a long story short, the have basically taken an HD resolution signal and compressed it in the camera using MPEG-2 compression, to create an MPEG-2 Transport Stream which gets recorded onto a standard Mini-DV formatted tape. Pretty nifty, overall, but there are a few drawbacks:

• The compression is done in hardware, so you don't get a true HD signal, you get an MPEG-2
  
• You need a special HDV Deck (or to use your camcorder for editing) and the format is not widely supported.
  
• The cameras are only 1-CCD (more on that later)
  

JVC has two cameras out, the consumer GR-HD1, and the professional JY-HD10. Price aside, there are two really critical differences:

• The professional unit allows you to generate color bars
  
• The professional unit has XLR inputs
  

If you don't know why those are big deals, the consumer level camera is for you. Otherwise, go for the professional unit.

The camera can record in SD at 480i or 480p, compressed w/MPEG-2, it can also record in standard DV format, or in HD at 720p, also MPEG-2 compressed. JVC boasts that it can playback 1080i, but it can't record in 1080i.

The camera is also only a 1-CCD chip. For a one chip camera, it does take a very sharp, crisp image that doesn't blow out too badly on highlights and it doesn't crush blacks horribly. JVC claims to be using layer technology on the CCD to eliminate the need for multiple CCDs (like the Foveon chip) however, they either need to license the Foveon chip or do a better job implementing the technology, in the SD range, any 3-CCD camera I've seen produces a better image.

Of course, the technology is not designed to be a replacement for higher end HD Cams (like the Sony HDWF900 or the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam) but I think it falls a bit short on the lower end.

The camera features are extremely limited. You can do far more tweaking on a Canon XL1s or Sony DCR-VX2100 both of which compete with the JVC on price point.

Frankly, I think the "HD" aspect of it is a bit gimmicky, and if what you really want is a great looking NTSC picture, pass on this one. If HD is really what you want, don't jump into it with this JVC. The HDV standard is being adopted by other vendors, and there might be some announcements at NAB in April. I'd be very interested to see what Sony and Canon plan for the format (they are both supposedly developing with it). If you're a die hard early adopter, or have a clear project that justifies it, the JVC is okay, but I have a feeling in a year we'll have a lot more camera to choose from.

Multiple Protocol IM for OS X?

Now that I'm using my Mac more and more (Thank god for OS X!) I'm trying to find decent replacements for the applications I actually use regularly under windows.

One of those apps is Trillian, which is an Instant Messaging (IM) client that supports multiple connection protocols (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, and Jabber). Trillian's not perfect, but I have some friends that use AIM, some that use Yahoo, and some that use ICQ, and Trillian allows me to run one client and chat with them all.

So far, I've found Proteus and Fire for OS X, but I've read both are shakey... I guess I'll find out. What I really wish is that the fine folks at Cerulean (who make Trillian) would see fit to do an OS X port. That would be sweet.

Drool...

LaCie has announced a 1TB drive... :) Of course, it's currently $1299, but I remember when the first 1GB drives hit the market at $1000... three years later, we were all buying 30-40GB drives for $200...

Microsoft Sez, "Don't click on links"

Wow. Apparently, rather than fix the security holes in IE, Microsoft would just rather you not actually click on links:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Why not just recommend avoiding browser security problems at all by watching TV instead??!

Scoble is Wrong

Protect your investment: buy open. Scoble has written a weblog entry about, among other things, iTunes DRM and Microsoft DRM, and whether you should get an iPod. Scoble works for Microsoft, as do a number of good, sharp, ethical people that I know, and I know him in passing, and he seems to be a good guy. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me say that I think that this blog entry of his epitomizes the sloppiest, worst thinking about digital-media in the field today. From [Boing Boing]

The above is snippet from a post Cory Doctorow has written in response to this post by Robert Scoble. Unlike Cory, I don't know Scoble, even in passing. However, having worked for a company that was acquired by Microsoft, I can say that Cory is right about one thing: the vast majority of Microsoft employees are both highly intelligent and ethical folks. Cory is right about another thing: their intelligence and commitment doesn't mean they are right, in fact, they are often incorrect as Scoble is in this case.

In his article, Scoble falls victim to Microsoft's own internal marketing. The gist of which is this: Microsoft's digital rights management protocol (WMA) will be adopted by more OEMs/vendors. Therefore, there will be more devices on the market (portable audio players, car stereos, rocket jet packs, etc.) that can play music which uses WMA vs. other technologies such as ACC (Apple's DRM Solution).

The problem is that Scoble is missing the big picture here, which is what Cory pointed out. The true "choice" consumers should be able to take advantage of shouldn't be linked to a company at all. Neither Apple nor Microsoft should win in this battle of DRM. What should be created is either a consortium of vendors (ala DVD standards) or better yet, and open standard that anyone could implement. In spite of what Scoble seems to believe, consumers do not win when any one company controls the methods by which they can use their media. Cory raises the example of Betamax vs. VHS. Just for a moment let's forget all of Microsoft's past business transgressions, and assume that they are the most consumer loving, benevolent company on earth. Even if that were true today, that does not mean that it will always be true. In fact, history has shown it's not likely to be true as DRM becomes a more important part of our daily lives. If you need some examples of that, think back to Unisys and .gifs or take a look at SCO and Unix. Even though more companies might someday adopt the WMA DRM solution, that does not mean that it will always offer more choice for consumers.

There really is only one way to ensure true freedom of choice for consumers. Freedom to choose where and when they play the music they have rightfully purchased. That is to remove DRM from the hands of any one single company which could (reasonably be foreseen) to use a monopoly in DRM to their competitive advantage. Make it an open standard. Allow anyone to implement it. Period. Create an industry consortium of vendors committed to furthering and developing the standard and simply give away (or charge a nominal fee) for vendor licensing. That would allow a true, open playing field for device manufacturers and software developers, without being locked into any proprietary systems, and would, in the end, be the only way I can see to offer consumers real choice. But I don't really think choice is what Microsoft wants to offer consumers anyway.

The Latest Worm/Virus: MyDoom

It's worm time... and because in my family I'm "the computer guy" I am being asked by many people how to deal with it. First, if you are getting lots of "Message Undeliverable" or "TEST" e-mails from people you don't know, they are probably the worm. Here's some good rules of thumb:

• NEVER OPEN ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW
  
• BE WARY OF OPENING ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DO KNOW
  

Attachments are how these worms/viruses spread. But let's say you are infected, how do you recover? Three steps:

1. Get some virus software. There are a number of virus protection applications available. Norton AntiVirus from Symantec is one. McAfee's VirusScan is another. Both are fine, personally I use McAfee. VirusScan On-line is reasonably priced at $29.95 and since it's "on-line" it's very easy to keep up-to-date. Get it, install it, run it... and keep it running.

2. Get rid of the Trojans/Spyware. Yes, surfing the web can infect your machine. Ever visit a site and get a pop-up offering to install cool cursors for you? Spyware. Visit a site offering to change your homepage to a great new search engine? Spyware. Okay, so you've got it, now get rid of it. Visit LavaSoft and get Ad-Aware. It will scan your system for Trojans/Spyware and it will also keep itself up-to-date. Get it, install it, run it... and run it again periodically.

3. Keep your operating system up-to-date. These viruses and worms propigate by exploiting security holes. So if you use a Mac, be sure to periodically run the Software Update. For Windows users you should take advantage of the Microsoft Windows Update. Visit the site regularly and keep your machine up-to-date.

There is never any perfect way to ensure you will never get a virus, but if you follow the steps I've outlined above, you'll be a lot safer than most people. And if everyone kept their machines up-to-date, worms and viruses like this new stupid MyDoom would have a lot harder time wreaking havoc on us all.

Blog Spam

Recently, Ernie the Attorney disabled comments from his blog. Fortunately, I don't have a visible enough profile to make comment spam a problem. But I did do some digging for possible solutions.

The easiest option (and one that many people take) is to simply disable comments entirely. Personally, I think that is a bit drastic. It kills one of the very features that attracts me to blogs in the first place: exchanging ideas. And even that is not foolproof... if you're using MT, you'll still need to disable the scripts that allow comment posting, or you could still be victimized.

A nicer, more community friendly solution (I think) is to require registration before posting comments. I don't think this discourages legitimate posters, but it certainly stops spam bots.

There are also some creative/scripted options out there. Check these links for more info:

• Jay Allen has the MT-Blacklist for MT users.
• Dive into Mark has some thoughts on ridding spam, and many links to some practical solutions.
• James Seng also has an MT-plugin to help stop spam.

Of course, nothing is fool-proof. But short of approving every comment post (who has that kind of time?!) or disabling comments altogether, registration seems like the best option to me.

ZIPDeCode

ZIPDeCode is a very cool Java app that displays the location of a zip code, visually. Try it. It's very cool.

Treo 600

Well, I got my Treo 600 a little over a week ago, so I've been using it and getting to know all the features. I have to say that this is hands down, the best phone/PDA combo I've ever used. It is a triumph of industrial design.

I thought the loss of the cover would bother me, but have screen protector, will travel. And I certainly don't miss the rocker on the side of the unit, which has been replaced with the awesome "four way" rocker, that allows you to just about everything short of typing with only one hand. Menu navigation, quick dialing, it's all a snap.

The keyboard is smaller than the 300, but honestly, it's still very usable for a chiclet keyboard. I can thumb almost 30 wpm. :)

There are some drawbacks, which are actually a little silly:

The camera has no flash
The screen isn't high-res

Considering how much obvious thought and effort went into this design, to leave those two things out seems really stupid, actually. The are the only things stopping this from being a perfect combo for me. I'm not sure what they were thinking.

But overall, I love the thing, and would recommend upgrading to anyone with a 180/270/300... and if you are considering a cell phone/PDA combo, the Treo 600 is definitely one to take a very close look at.

Apple Can Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

Okay, I love my Mac. It's actually not even my primary machine, my laptop (PC) is due to some software issues for client compatibility. However, ever since I bought a Mac two years ago, I've been singing the praises of the Mac to anyone who'll listen. OS X is a fantastic operating system, no doubt about it. Final Cut Pro is simply amazing, and I hope it gives Avid the slow and painful death they deserve. DVD Studio Pro 2 is an amazing piece of software too. I think Apple is back, baybee...

However, when I bought my Mac, it came with OS X 10.0, which was useless and buggy as all get out. With 10.1 we saw major improvements, and I was satisfied. But then Jaguar came out. I'd owned 10.1 less then a year, and now I was forced to pay $130 for the "ugrade". I was pissed then, and I'm pissed now. Yes, Jaguar was full of great features, and I love it as an OS. But not having an upgrade price for users who've owned the software less than a year is just plain insulting. I suppose it's not surprising, coming from a Steve Jobs Apple, but Microsoft has more respect for users at this point! Here we are, another year later, and another $130 full price OS upgrade. For a .1 release. I read the reviews, I know Panther offers some cool new features, but once again, Apple is telling me "As a loyal Apple Customer, who purchases upgrades for our advanced software, like FCP and DVDSP, we think you should bend over and take it on our OS." This is getting ridiculous. So I'm not upgrading. Apple can bite my shiny metal ass.