The fallacy of marketing via the rumour mill

25 January 2010 - Filed under Life Outside Work

The drama over the may-or-may-not-come-into-existence Apple Unicorn Tablet is REALLY spiralling out of control.

OK, so Apple is finally announcing the Tablet… What’s the problem?

• Report: Apple tablet could earn $3 billion in a year
• Apple 2010 Earnings Will Likely Be Affected by Tablet
• More Hints at Apple’s Desire to Hold ‘iPad’ Trademark for Tablet Device

All this still remains 100% rumour plus speculation, and Apple hasn’t said a thing, not even a T in the Tablet. Apple surely has a knack of keeping secrets till the last minute but this is an extreme form of marketing solely via the rumour mill with absolutely no substance. I’m not saying Apple necessarily intended for such speculation and public interest to snowball out of shape like this, but it makes me wonder if Apple is holding this “Come see our latest creation” event largely because the company is “forced” to do something about it. Could it be that Apple is walking into its own trap?

Drawing interest is certainly good, but manufacturers should look beyond free advertising. The problem with letting analysts and pundits craft a product for you particularly over a period of many months and years, and letting them prophesy your success thanks to the non-existent product, is that it runs the risk of a fall-out when the expectation-turned-fact is ultimately not met by the reality. Another problem is that any element of surprise is long gone; the best you can do is to not disappoint people. Perhaps that’s a lesson Apple can learn from Google’s surprise announcement (and delivery) of the Nexus One.

Given that not everything Apple has announced became a success, I’d say the outcome of the Apple Tablet saga hinges on two factors:

• Is Apple able to profitably manufacture a new product that packs features and value-for-money that are not met by its existing products?
• Beyond the initial wow, will people open their wallets because they actually need the 10-inch Tablet themselves?

As I said before, my personal view is that Apple’s latest creation will be a service, not a 10-inch tablet that carries a US$1,000 price tag. All will be revealed on 27 January.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-25  ::  Jess

30 years of wishing you the best of good-buys

13 January 2010 - Filed under Life Outside Work

I just learned that Paul Kangas of Nightly Business Report, a PBS production and my favourite television (now over the Internet) programme, had his final appearance as co-anchor on 31 December, 2009, marking the end of his 30-year career on the show.

I have been a fan of both Paul Kangas and his co-anchor Susie Gharib since I started watching the programme in 2006, first on delayed satellite service on SBS in Australia and now via online streaming. To me, NBR continues to be a great source of learning as well as business news and insights. Programmes like NBR make public broadcasting a great service for all including international viewers.

Having begun his NBR career as “stockman” in 1979, Paul Kangas is famous for his ever-consistent closing remark at the end of each night’s show: “Wishing YOU the best of good buys.” As complimented by the NBR team and long-time guests on the last show with Paul Kangas, 30 years of serving the public as the face of an internationally renowned television programme is a truly awe-inspiring achievement, one that deserves a standing ovation even by remote casual viewers such as myself.

Obviously, this is not the end of anything. I don’t know how old Paul Kangas is, but he has just gone onto a new chapter of his life, something I am sure is consistent with his personal mantra:

Good, better, best -
Never let it rest
Till the good is the better
And the better is the best.

Nightly Business Report, meanwhile, moves on with a new logo, a new face, and most significantly, a new signal music – one that I think I will have some trouble getting used to.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-01-13  ::  Jess

2010 tech predictions

23 December 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work

It’s time for 2010 tech predictions. Although there is no shortage of “authoritative” predictions for the new year such as ones published by Newsweek, I’d like to add some “lighthearted” ones of my own like I did last time. But before I get to the new ones for 2010, let me briefly reflect on how my 2009 predictions went.

• [2009-1] “Blu-ray succumbs to a decade-old technology called DVD”: Largely true, I think. The Blu-ray shelves at local JB Hi-Fi stores don’t look any bigger than they did a year ago. DVD, ripped DVD playable on VLC and portable devices, and streamed media will continue to eat into the yet-to-be-mainstream Blu-ray market share.
• [2009-2] “Affordable mobile broadband renders many government-led infrastructure initiatives irrelevant, including Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN)”: Largely true. At least the original single-supplier A$4.7B NBN plan did not take off. ICT infrastructure upgrades and expansions seem to be led by individual telcos and not governments.
• [2009-3] “Browser war: Firefox and Safari win, everyone else loses out”: Mostly wrong. Microsoft Internet Explorer did not lose out as much as I thought it would. Apple Safari did not gain as much as I thought it would. In fact, Google Chrome appears to have taken over Safari to position itself as one of the three most used browsers globally. I have never used Chrome, but I find this quite surprising.
• [2009-4] “Microsoft announces Windows 7, keeps selling Windows XP throughout 2009″: True. Back then, it was all speculation. In hindsight, it was a no-brainer.
• [2009-5] “Virtualisation comes to everyone’s desk”: It’s happening, but I feel that the statement itself was somewhat premature. At work, virtual desktop infrastructure is gradually becoming reality. At home, 64-bit operating systems and virtualisation-capable hardware (6-8 gigabytes of RAM, in particular) are finally within the reach of the average consumer.

Enough of 2009. Goodbye, old predictions. Hello, new predictions.

In 2010, the world will see the uprising of an anti-Google movement.

With more and more people asking, is Google the new V?, there is growing sentiment against everything Google. Both mainstream media and individuals will openly express concerns about the rate at which Google is veering off its core ad-selling business into organising (and ultimately wielding control over, as one might argue) the world’s information. Indeed, the implications will get many people and states genuinely worried, a view that is likely to develop in the near future into a widespread resistance much the same way open-source proponents feel about Microsoft. It may not be a highly organised movement, but concerned individuals will look for ways of doing everyday business without letting Google take charge. Google-free will be the new gluten-free. When the EU is done taming Microsoft and Intel, it will have to deal with Google one way or another.

In 2010, the non-existent Apple Tablet will remain a vaporware.

There is a truly wide range of views and rumours about the existence of the Apple Tablet. I personally second the opinion of CNET’s Molly Wood (as of 10 December 2009) that an e-book-capable 10-inch touchscreen device to be released in March/April 2010 with a US$1,000 price tag sounds pretty unreal. I see two reasons for this: 1) Apple cannot possibly take the plunge into the US$200-per-device e-reader market because it doesn’t do low-margin products; 2) No matter how popular and invincible the iPhone/iPod touch lineup appears to be, Apple still needs to spend all its energy into growing the pie for the iPhone/iPod touch platform. Anything half-baked like the rumoured Apple Tablet that is neither a handheld device nor a full-featured high-margin computer, will simply be a shot in the foot to Apple. What is more likely to happen, however, is Apple cutting a deal with major book publishers and magazine publishers that will make e-books and magazines more readily available on the iPhone/iPod touch. Perhaps 2010 will see the iTunes Store sell e-books and magazines alongside music, movies, TV shows, and audio books.

In 2010, ACTA will be ratified and become a household name.

If you haven’t heard of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a few minutes of fact-finding might do you some good. In short, the yet-to-be-signed ACTA is an international treaty that empowers or complements country-specific laws designed to crack down on Internet piracy such as the three-strikes laws in France and New Zealand and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States. The scope of ACTA is quite broad; one of the parts that make people most uncomfortable is a provision to “force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide information about suspected copyright infringers without a warrant.” ACTA may also “empower security officials at airports and other international borders to conduct random ex officio searches of laptops, MP3 players, and cellular phones for illegally downloaded or ripped music and movies.” All ACTA negotiations are secret, but enough has been leaked. ACTA will be concluded in 2010 and will have a significant impact on the way people obtain, consume, and share copyrighted media and software. Even without ACTA, somebody spent two days in jail and almost faced up to three years in prison for taping three minutes of New Moon as part of a birthday celebration.

I’m thinking three is enough.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-23  ::  Jess

Blog post number 102

14 December 2009 - Filed under Undecided

Without me knowing, the number of posts on my blog has passed the 100 mark. I thought I’d gather some current analytics just to mark a small personal occasion.

• 102 posts over 532 days = 1 post every 5.2 days on average
• Gap between posts ranging from 0.5 days to 42 days
• 5 categories, 2 of which have not yet been used
• 64% of posts on Life Outside Work, 34% Tech Notes, and 2% other
• 37 tags
• 24 “how-to” posts
• 17 political posts
• 22 rants of various natures
• 119 pictures, illustrations, and icons
• 41 comments and pingbacks on posts
• 36,399 messages from spammers and stalkers since tracking began

And here are some statistics on the No-frills theme for WordPress blogs that I developed:

• Registered 360th of 1,088 total
• 4,641 total downloads
• Approximately 65 downloads per week on average
• 5 ratings, averaging 4 stars

Hopefully I’ll be able to do another roundup at the 200 milestone.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-14  ::  Jess

Having fun with XSLT in SharePoint, 2007-style

12 December 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

I have been wanting to write about SharePoint 2010 for a while, but decided to hold off until I have had some real first-hand experience with the new beast. The first hurdle: getting hold of hardware that is beefy enough to run it. I remember when Windows 95 debuted; all the PC magazines were going “4MB of RAM won’t cut it… you really need 8MB of RAM to be able to run this thing.” Times have changed, units have changed, but the numbers remain the same. 4GB of RAM won’t cut it. You really need 8GB of RAM to be able to jump on the 2010 (Office 14) bandwagon.

Nonetheless, SharePoint Server 2007 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It will still be around for a long time. SharePoint Server 2007 configuration and development will remain a big market, as would 2007-to-2010 upgrade projects over the coming years. There is still much to be explored and documented in the realm of SharePoint Server 2007.

Simple problems, no cowboy solutions

From my perspective, one of the notable improvements in SharePoint 2010 over 2007 is the extensive use of the XSLT list view (XLV) Web Part. It sounds like the XLV Web Part has struck a balance between the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and the Data View Web Part (DVWP) while removing many of the unnecessary quirks along the way. It comes down to being able to do seemingly mundane things in SharePoint lists such as:

• Showing the file type icons (Word, PDF, etc) and file sizes along with the titles of documents fetched by a site collection-wide query
• Filtering out all announcements that have expired, and not letting any cowboy change that behaviour
• Hyperlinks linking directly to the resource when clicked, and not the content item that in turn references the link only to require an additional mouse click

The question is, how do you do these things in SharePoint Server 2007? Using the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is only a partial answer because the out-of-the-box CQWP doesn’t support the requirements given above. And these are all real-life problems that I have had to solve. This is where a little bit of XSLT knowledge helps. Now that SharePoint 2010 uses XSLT even more extensively so much so that XSLT is now the default way of showing information in lists, it will definitely help to make friends with XSLT.

Preparation

There are some common preparatory steps before playing with XSLT in 2007 CQWP’s:

1. Create a Content Editor Web Part with the correct initial parameters.
2. Identify the missing information and find out the internal name(s) of the column(s).
3. Export the CQWP, open it in a text editor, and add the identified columns to the CommonViewFields node.
4. Upload the modified CQWP into the Web Parts gallery, delete the original CQWP, and replace it with an instance of the modified CQWP.

To get you through this part, there is a step-by-step guide on the Microsoft ECM blog. Usually, the tricky part is finding the internal name of the field (column) to add. Once you’re past this stage, it’s time to open SharePoint Designer and do some XSLT’ing. Navigate to /Style Library/XSL Style Sheets and open ItemStyle.xsl. First, add this namespace to the root node (xsl:stylesheet):

xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime"

You only need to do this once. Then, duplicate the Default template node (xsl:template) and give it an easily identifiable name without spaces. Also change the match attribute so that it contains the new name, in this pattern:

<xsl:template
name="MyNewItemStyle"
match="Row[@Style='MyNewItemStyle']"
mode="itemstyle">

Now you’re all set for action.

Solution 1: Display file type icons and file size information

The CommonViewFields node of the Web Part should contain the following:

File_x0020_Type,Text;
HTML_x0020_File_x0020_Type,Text;
FileSizeDisplay,Computed;
File_x0020_Size,Lookup;

Open ItemStyle.xsl and create a new xsl:template node. In it, add a new xsl:variable node as follows:

<xsl:variable name="FileTypeIcon">
  <xsl:value-of select="@File_x005F_x0020_Type" />
</xsl:variable>

To present the icon, insert the following code immediately below <div id=”linkitem” class=”item”>:

<xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test="string-length($FileTypeIcon)!=0">
    <div class="image-area-left">
      <a href="{$SafeLinkUrl}" target="{$LinkTarget}">
        <img class="image" src="/_layouts/images/{ddwrt:MapToIcon(
        string(@HTML_x005F_x0020_File_x005F_x0020_Type),
        string(@File_x005F_x0020_Type))}"
        alt="Type: {@File_x005F_x0020_Type}" />
      </a>
    </div>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise>
    <div class="image-area-left">
      <a href="{$SafeLinkUrl}" target="{$LinkTarget}">
        <img class="image" src="/_layouts/images/icgen.gif" />
      </a>
    </div>
  </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

What this does is look up the file extension and load the corresponding icon image in the 12-hive. If no extension is given, then it resorts to the generic icon (icgen.gif). The icon is placed to the left of the document title.

Next, do the file size. Place the following code immediately below <xsl:value-of select=”substring-before($DisplayTitle,’.aspx’)”/>:

<xsl:if test="string-length(@FileSizeDisplay) &gt ; 0">
  <xsl:if test="number(@FileSizeDisplay) &gt ; 0">
    (<xsl:value-of select="ceiling(number(@FileSizeDisplay)
    div 1024)" /> KB)
  </xsl:if>
</xsl:if>

This places the file size in KB to the right of the document title. Note that in the actual code there should be no gap between the &gt and the semicolon following that.

Save the XSL file and switch to the browser. Open the Web Part, go to the Presentation pane and apply the new item style.

Solution 2: Force the filtering out of expired announcements

The CommonViewFields node of the Web Part should contain the following:

Expires,DateTime;

Open ItemStyle.xsl and create a new xsl:template node. Wrap the entire content of the template (but excluding the xsl:template tag itself) with this xsl:if condition:

<xsl:if test="(normalize-space(string(@Expires))='') or
(number(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(
string(@Expires),2057,'yyyyMMdd')) &gt ;=
number(ddwrt:FormatDateTime(
string(ddwrt:TodayIso()),2057,'yyyyMMdd')))">

…

</xsl:if>

Again, remember to remove the space between the &gt and the semicolon following it. The code turns the Expires date into a yyyyMMdd string and compares it with today’s date in yyyyMMdd format. You can replace 2057 (UK English) with 1033 (US English) or any other locale ID, but that doesn’t matter because things get converted into yyyyMMdd in the end anyway.

Save the XSL file and switch to the browser. Open the Web Part, go to the Presentation pane and apply the new item style.

Solution 3: Link to the resource’s URL directly

This is particularly useful when querying lists of URL’s. The CommonViewFields node of the Web Part should contain the following:

URL,URL;

Open ItemStyle.xsl and create a new xsl:template node. Locate the line that begins with <xsl:variable name=”SafeLinkUrl” and replace it with this line:

<xsl:variable name="SafeLinkUrl"
select="substring-before(@URL,',')" />

That’s it! Save the XSL file and switch to the browser. Open the Web Part, go to the Presentation pane and apply the new item style.

Conclusion

XSLT programming is certainly able to polish up a Content Query Web Part. Hopefully, SharePoint 2010 will make all of this a more trivial, less painful experience.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-12-12  ::  Jess

Click to Flash: The best thing since sliced sushi

9 November 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

Despite its currently dominant position in the market, Adobe Flash is not the most universally accessible platform when it comes to the delivery of interactive content. Ceteris paribus, I’d say Adobe’s share in the world of rich internet applications will draw a downward curve over the coming months and years. The first reason is competition: Microsoft is exercising its ubiquitous influence to push Silverlight, while everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon of the upcoming HTML 5 standard that comes with built-in video capabilities that can render Flash irrelevant overnight. The second reason is that Adobe seems to have forgotten that to the user and to the vendor, the use of Adobe’s products is a choice, not a postulate. If I were a vendor faced with a choice of content delivery technology for 2010, I would have a hard time articulating the merits of Flash over Silverlight or HTML 5.

Flash and PDF for open government?

On a related note, Adobe recently copped the flak for failing to demonstrate full accessiblity while trying to promote just that. Ars Technica reported:

The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible.

Adobe has set up its “Adobe Opens Up” website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can’t help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible. [And here's what it means.]

All I want is the salmon in that sushi roll

But here’s my real rant: Because Flash is today’s dominant technology, it’s also the most abused one that causes the most annoyance. I am talking about the dozens of Flash animations that appear on a single Web page, directly and indirectly obstructing my viewing experience when all I’m trying to do is read a news article. 99 percent of the time, Flash elements on a Web page is a waste of bandwidth and a waste of processing power; it doesn’t seem ideal for the age of resource-hungry netbooks on flaky mobile broadband connections. Besides, most Flash-powered advertisements are overkill when a plain image or animated GIFs would do. Flash-powered navigation without the ability to fall back on a plain-image substitute is equally stupid. It comes down to this: I don’t want Flash unless I specifically choose to play a video clip that I want to view.

Then I found Click to Flash, a free browser add-on that prevents Flash elements from loading automatically. Now anything that’s made of Flash looks like this until I specifically choose to view or play it:

While this is certainly the most useful piece of software I have come across in a while, there is a catch: It only works on the Mac.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-11-09  ::  Jess

The Lost Symbol: Praise the god you didn’t know existed

27 September 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work

Unlike Carly Palmer, I couldn’t finish the 509-page book in 2 hours and 34 minutes. Having finished it, however, I don’t think it’s possible to say what the Lost Symbol, after all, exactly was – because, well, it’s much more than just a symbol that had been lost. It’s actually a phrase, an idea, a god, the Truth. The Truth of the highest degree of understanding. Rather than painstakingly advancing (both time- and money-wise) to the 33rd degree of the Masonic hierarchy of secrecy, the author offers a ritual-free shortcut to the Truth in a 133-chapter book – most chapters are only 2-3 pages long, by the way – whose teachings can be absorbed in as little as 2 hours and 34 minutes.

Okay, because it is admittedly a cheap ticket to the Truth, it does not come packaged with elaborate information on the hidden treasures or the answers to the conspiracies in history around the world. If you’re into that sort of entertainment, National Treasure does a much better job; that movie has got it all: history, Freemasons, and the secret treasure. But The Lost Symbol does an elegant job of articulating the core idea of the Second Renaissance: the Great Architect, the God of the Enlightened, is plural, and is actually each one of us who believe and invest in the power of the mind. The Good News is that this works regardless of the cultural, ethnic, or religious background we come from, as suggested by the various key characters in the novel.

I appreciate the historical fact and the depth of the author’s research presented in The Lost Symbol. The book richly and correctly points out that the New World, now known as the United States, was indeed founded by the Freemasons according to their ideals and spirit. Still, I do not subscribe to the convenient generalisation of the different religions and what they stand for. Nor do I believe that the exponential advancement of the science of the mind (“noetic science”) will produce scientifically irrefutable answers to ALL of the questions the mainstream sciences could not conquer. Wasn’t it almost 80 years ago that Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians in history, scientifically proved that not all truths, while observable, are provable?

No matter what the Truth is or what degree of understanding the reader reaches, there are clear winners emerging from the irrefutable success of the book: The Institute of Noetic Sciences, the tourism industry of Washington D.C., and Sudoku.

Update: An independent review of The Lost Symbol on Amazon contains a secret code that sums it up in two words.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-09-27  ::  Jess

Snow Leopard: Taming the new cat

11 September 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

My first ten days with the new cat has been a bumpy ride with a few scratches here and there along the way. I must say I kind of saw it coming when I was greeted by the grumpy face of the feline on the packaging. This, incidentally, draws a stark contrast with the “happy” cat in the Windows 7 ad.

As I would with any new operating system, I did a clean installation from scratch as opposed to an upgrade. I generally have some reservations about the idea of upgrading to a new operating system while trying to leave all applications intact, particularly from a stability and compatibility standpoint. Anyway, here are my positive and less-than-positive findings of Snow Leopard, the sixth reincarnation of Mac OS X.

Shutdown faster than sleep

I am not sure if Snow Leopard boots up considerably faster than Leopard (some people say that is the case), but from what I have seen it definitely shuts down a lot faster than Leopard. The screen takes about two and a half seconds to go completely dark when I press Control-Option-Command-Eject. Interestingly, this means that it takes less time to shut down the computer than to put it to sleep – especially in my case where Snow Leopard has to dump 6GB worth of memory contents onto the hard disk before it can “safely” go to bed. If you are impatient like me and want to reduce the time it takes to fall asleep, by the way, run this command in Terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Intelligent Disk Utility

Disk Utility reports the time left to complete disk permissions repair more accurately than Leopard did. A small usability improvement with a great impact.

Menlo the new charm of Mac OS X

I work with text editors a lot and I like Menlo, the new default text editing font in Snow Leopard. That said, it’s a subtle change whose magnitude is nowhere near that of the transfiguration when Consolas came to Windows to replace Courier New.

Font smoothing issue

As widely reported, the way Snow Leopard does font smoothing is quirky and this is a major problem identified by many laptop users who hook up an external monitor to their computers. To make Snow Leopard behave the way Leopard did, people have to execute this command in Terminal:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

And the trick is not to touch the Appearance settings in System Preferences. Don’t go near the checkbox that says “Use LCD font smoothing when available”.

Office 2008 woes

I could not install Office 2008 with the traditional method of double-clicking on the installer icon because it kept asking for Rosetta – what the…? Intel-only OS running on Intel hardware requiring Rosetta? For the first time ever, I had to install Office from Terminal with this command:

sudo installer -package /Volumes/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/Office\ Installer.mpkg -target /

The part that follows “/Volumes” is the name of the mounted disk or disk image. After executing this command, install all updates and run Word to complete the rest of the installation process.

More Office 2008 woes

The page up/down keys don’t work in Word 2008 (update level 12.2.1). They just don’t. This certainly has potential to grow into a major annoyance. Users don’t care if it’s Apple or Microsoft at fault. All other text-editing applications that I have tested worked just fine.

Is it wrong to say there’s no place like 127.0.0.1?

I installed the latest version of MAMP (1.8.2) on Snow Leopard to run a WordPress blog. And then the blog refused to run, citing a database error. After a few minutes of stabbing in the dark, I learned that any reference to “127.0.0.1″ in the WordPress config file had to be changed to “localhost”. While it certainly is weird, this particular quirk may be the fault of the new MAMP alone and not Snow Leopard.

Focus, Mac OS X

If automatic login is disabled and the login window is set to show both the Name and Password fields, the user must give the Name field a mouse click before they can enter their name. Somebody forgot to put auto-focus on the startup screen. Fix it, Apple. Update: Sometimes the auto-focus is on; other times, it isn’t. Hopefully the 10.6.2 update will make it always on.

Fan noise

Compared to Leopard, Snow Leopard on my early 2009 MacBook is generally noisier. The fan seems to kick in much more frequently even when there is no heavy load on the CPU. I don’t know if this is Grand Central Dispatch in action. Update: On second thought, this seems to be related to my choice of screensaver. I have switched to a plain picture slideshow to see if it makes a difference. Update 2: Yes, that was it. Choose the Beach screensaver and everything will be fine.

Browser font going bold

In Safari and OmniWeb, certain portions of text on certain Web pages (such as the front door of Google) come out bold when they should be regular. This is a moderate annoyance that may be related to the font smoothing issue. There doesn’t seem to be a magic Terminal command to fix this just yet. Solution found: For some strange reason, the new Snow Leopard installation was missing some of the must-have regular-weight fonts plus some others. In my case, they were: Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Arial Black, and Arial Rounded Bold. To restore these fonts, log on to another computer and locate the .ttf files and copy them over to /Library/Fonts of your Snow Leopard system.

Application compatibility

I have had to replace a large portion of the applications I use daily with fresh releases compatible with Snow Leopard. The rule of thumb is to go to versiontracker.com and check for a Snow Leopard-compatible update before installing an application. Alternatively, refer to the community-driven Snow Leopard Compatibility List wiki. As of 11 September 2009, I am eagerly waiting for Snow Leopard-compatible versions of TrueCrypt and Onyx.

I am generally happy with Snow Leopard, although some of the issues mentioned above remain unresolved after the release of the first update (10.6.1).

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-09-11  ::  Jess

Mac and smartphones: Can we just get along, soon?

24 August 2009 - Filed under Life Outside Work

Smartphones are selling like hotcakes and in a couple of years time from now virtually all mobile phones will be smartphones at least throughout the developed world. It seems odd, then, that the various smartphones and Mac OS X don’t seem to get along very well with each other. When it comes to synchronising stuff (calendar, contacts, photos, etc), and more importantly, transferring general files (say, Office documents, PDFs, and zipped archives) between the device and the Mac, there is no widely recognised standard solution provided and supported by Mac OS X other than the proprietary iTunes support for the iPhone/iPod touch. Or is it that the smartphone manufacturers think Mac users and smartphone-worthy business users are mutually exclusive?

I believe I speak for a lot of Mac users when I say that all we want to do is be able to move stuff freely between the device and the Mac so that the gigabytes of storage that comes with or is added to the device doesn’t go to waste. But both Apple and the various smartphone manufacturers make this annoyingly difficult if at all possible. Let me categorise my observations:

• iPhone: First up, Apple’s own iPhone (and iPod touch) – Mac OS X does provide fantastic native synchronisation support for these devices through iTunes, but only with certain types of media files such as music, photos, and videos that can be played on the iPhone/iPod. It is not possible to use the device as portable USB storage for general files. There are two workarounds: do it wirelessly (slow and only works for small files) or jailbreak the device (a practice not endorsed by Apple; more headache than it’s worth). Does this mean 32GB of storage have to be all music and podcasts? Frustrating.
• Windows Mobile: Smartphones that run the Windows Mobile OS work fantastically with Windows-based computers via ActiveSync. But there is no ActiveSync for Mac. There are a couple of generic third-party apps that I would not want to pay for, and there is no software solution officially supported by either Apple or Microsoft. Two workarounds: Use Bluetooth (again, shaky wireless performance and reliability), or create a Windows virtual machine and run ActiveSync in that. But seriously – firing up a virtual machine just to be able to transfer files is overkill, burdensome, and downright stupid.
• BlackBerry: BlackBerry currently does not support Mac. RIM has been telling Mac users to use a third-party application that has made a lot of people gripe. A few weeks ago, the company announced that BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac is finally coming in September 2009. But what took the king of business smartphones so long to get to this stage? People’s responses to that announcement reveal their long-standing frustration.
• Nokia (Symbian): Nokia does offer Mac software for download, albeit still in beta, i.e. “a work in progress… For this reason, Nokia does not give any guarantees or warranties concerning its use, and our customer care is not able to assist you should you encounter any problems during its installation or use.” Well, it’s difficult to understand why the dominant player that sells almost half of the world’s smartphones is still making baby steps when it comes to supporting a significant segment of their user base. Besides, the range of Nokia smartphones doesn’t score highly on the sexiness scale – perhaps with the exception of the prohibitively expensive N97.
• WebOS, Palm OS, Android, and other ghettos: I don’t know much, but haven’t heard anything about Mac support on these devices.

All in all, Mac users of 2009 are still a minority group in the business world. Will Snow Leopard begin to bring disruptive changes when it debuts – possibly as early as 28 August – with native support for Microsoft Exchange?

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-08-24  ::  Jess

Getting physical with Windows 7 – rather unexpectedly

23 August 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

When I said “as a corporate customer of Microsoft products, the probability of me installing Windows 7 on a physical machine any time soon is infinitesimally small” less than a week ago, I spoke too soon. That’s because, err, I am now running Windows 7 on my ThinkPad T61 laptop at work. This is my third Windows 7 installation (the previous two installations were virtual machines dating back to the Release Candidate days) and I can now call myself an early adopter of Windows 7.

I think I’ll have to begin with a bit of a preamble here. Because the things is, I had never planned a switch to Windows 7 this early, particularly when the official product launch is still two months away. Nevertheless, my little saga began with a few well-meaning keystrokes on a late Friday afternoon. Ever since a good friend of mine reminded me to ponder “what would Jesus do?”, I have been looking for a simple, effective, affordable solution to “save” my stuff. A few months ago, I wrote a simple DOS-command script that synchronises certain folders from one portable hard drive to another and vice-versa. It contained a sequence of del and xcopy commands, and it worked particularly well for me because I frequently share all kinds of files between Macs and PCs. The long story of Mac-PC harmony can be found here, which also explains the reason for the del command.

Anyway, that was my little trustworthy, free (as in beer), personal backup solution capable of keeping the contents of my two main portable hard drives in sync AND free of clutter. It’s that free-of-clutter part that betrayed me when I casually ran the script not realising that I had only one of the two hard drives plugged in. The script could not locate the source drive, got confused, and instead of aborting with the help of some artificial intelligence – which I wish I had embedded – it erroneously went on to delete the critical hidden system files that live in the all-important C drive. My data was intact, but with no way of recovering the deleted system files, my Windows installation was instantly nuked beyond repair. That’s right, my backup solution turned rogue and nuked my machine. It’s the most creative thing I have ever done at 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon. I was now faced with the task of recreating a Windows installation in order to be able to work on Monday.

Luckily, I did have a Norton Ghost backup image of the initial state of the Windows XP installation. Restoring that would have been the natural course of action, but a colleague of mine with a great sense of humour suggested that I took this opportunity to try Windows 7. That got me thinking and I quickly asked myself, where’s the fun in going back to a nine-year-old eight-year-old operating system? So, in the spirit of getting the most value out of the MSDN subscription we pay for, I made an executive decision to try 32-bit Windows 7 on a physical machine for the first time. Besides, I was dying to see Windows 7 Aero, which I couldn’t experience in my Windows 7 virtual machines. Therefore, my cunning plan was: install Windows 7, and if the NVidia Quadro FX 570M (or was it the NVS 140M?) on my T61 can do Aero and if I get all the hardware drivers configured perfectly, then keep it; otherwise, silently and begrudgingly go back to Windows XP.

Give me Aero and I’ll keep Seven

So, here’s where the real review of Windows 7 begins. The installation process itself was as quick and painless as how it was with virtual machines. This time, though, the first challenge came with hardware device drivers. Windows 7 recognised all devices except the display, the fingerprint reader, and an “unknown” device. Needless to say, there was no Aero either. But first things first – I turned off System Restore and User Account Control (UAC) before I did anything else. Then I downloaded the latest Windows 7 Quadro display driver from NVidia and the fingerprint reader driver for Windows 7. While the fingerprint reader driver installed without problems, I did not have much success with the display driver. After downloading numerous alternative driver packages and even trying some of the modified .inf files, I found a simple solution: just launch the NVidia driver installer in Windows Vista compatibility mode. Right-click on the executable and follow the “compatibility troubleshooting” instructions.

Then Windows 7 gave me Aero. While I was certainly excited, there was one more obstacle to overcome. After some research, I began to suspect that the remaining mystery unknown device was related to ACPI Power Management. Got the driver from the Lenovo Web site, and it worked like a charm. A fully-functioning physical Windows 7 installation at last. I’m keepin’ it. Mission accomplished.

One thing I noticed in Windows 7’s Windows Explorer is that as I click on the names of folders in the right hand-side pane to drill down to a certain location, the tree view on the left hand-side stays collapsed. To me, that feels a bit inconvenient and counter-intuitive. I’m not sure if there is a way to tweak that behaviour.

Analyse. Defragment. Consolidate.

After installing the must-have Office 2007 applications as well as all available Microsoft updates and patches (about 30 of them in total, mostly related to Office 2007), I started looking at the maintenance side of things. Windows 7 requires the same common tasks such as running disk cleanup from Windows Explorer, clearing the %temp% directory and the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download directory regularly. I was, however, impressed with the new defrag utility in Windows 7. It goes through the three stages of analysing, defragmenting, and consolidating the contents of a drive while clearly showing the progress. The process is then repeated three times, resulting in a total of four passes of analysis-defragmentation-consolidation. Gone are the Windows XP days when I had to manually run defrag three or four times continuously against the same drive just to make sure things were nicely consolidated in the end. Less mouse clicks is always good.

Remember the smell of a fresh installation

Physical installations of Windows don’t have the luxury of being able to take complete snapshots at the click of a button. And I prefer not to use the incremental System Restore feature which bloats the Windows installation worse than a swollen tummy. And I can’t use Norton Ghost 2003 with Windows 7. But the Ultimate Edition of Windows 7 comes with the ability to make a backup image of the entire system drive. This is not a new feature and I have used “Complete PC Restore” in Windows Vista before. Because I want to be able to return to the good healthy initial state of Windows 7 if need be and because I don’t want to repeat the process of activating software and configuring devices drivers, I ran the built-in system backup utility. I chose to burn the image on DVD as opposed to a hard disk partition because Windows compresses the image on the fly when DVD’s are used. As a result, Windows managed to fit 18GB of C drive content into just two 4.7GB blank DVD’s. It also prompted me to create a separate bootable Windows 7 system repair disk at the end, which I did. The entire process of creating an emergency kit took less than an hour.

The best way to do everyday backup?

While it can be refreshing, I don’t enjoy spending time on recovering from disastrous consequences of user errors, mine included. So what’s going to happen to my DOS-command backup script that has proved to be as dangerous as it is useful? I could delve into Windows PowerShell and spend an indeterminate length of time developing a cleverer solution with layers and layers of safety locks. Or, I could invest in a copy of Second Copy, which at this moment sounds like a very reasonably priced solution for Windows. In the Mac world, there is always free iBackup, which does the job brilliantly.

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2009-08-23  ::  Jess