I just upgraded to the recent ITunes 6.0.1 (3) today. Its already crashed just navigating my song collection.

Twice, its also failed to play songs via my Airport Express even though I can ping it. A reboot of my airport express solves the problem. Fortunately you can do that remotely with the AirPort admin utility, as the Airport Express is behind a large TV and not accessible.

Now I just have to explain the workflow to my wife. I don’t quite get ITunes yet – I can’t figure out how to browse by album rather than song (although you can sort by album), so I can’t explain that part. But I can muddle through and select some songs to play, I am sure Lisa can too.

Then select the output as “Living Room” and play songs. If ITunes fails to connect, start AirportAdmin utility. Open Base Station. Click Restart. Wait about a minute. Try ITunes again. Its still simpler than hunting through a CD collection, right?

ITunes, like IPhoto, is a buggy app that crashes a lot. These programs are far more unstable than typical Windows Apps like Picasa or Media player. Grr.

Stuff on the Windows platform is just going to get more and more stable as products are written for DotNet. As long as Apple and third party developers keep down the Objective C path, their apps are going to crash a lot while Windows programs get more and more reliable.

To Apple: Itunes,IPhoto, and AirPort should just work. If they don’t, why ship it?

Technorati Tags: Itunes, IPhoto, AirPort

One of the things I have the most trouble doing in Microsoft Outlook and on my PDA with Pocket Informant is creating a new task and remembering to assign the category before I close it. Unfortunately, the task becomes difficult to find at that point.

I pretty much want all my tasks categorized for my GTD system. I’d like a warning message if I attempt to create a task without at least one category.
GTD

Technorati Tags: GTD

I made a comment at a get together with some friends recently that I thought Outlook was a good email program and an exception in the office suite. One of my friends retorted “Outlook is not that good an email program”. Here is why I think its better than pretty much everything else out there (I haven’t tried Lotus notes or evolution though).

• With some patience, tasks sync to PDAs. My @errand and @home list are always with me as I roam.
• With some patience, contacts sync to PDAs, and assigned categories like Services, friends, etc. which I find useful.
• Tasks can be categorized, perfect for GTD since they can be assigned @work, @home, @waiting, etc.
• Email messages can be converted to tasks.
• Later releases of Outlook don’t seem to be prone to viruses. With older versions, it seemed it was easy to be tricked into opening what you thought was an image and turned out to be malware.

I am disappointed the email program that comes with the mac doesn’t do any of the above.

Outlooks main negative productivity feature, email annunciation, can be easily disabled. Support for exporting/importing vcards is lame. Using x.509 certifications for secure email is either confusing or problematic or both – I have trouble getting this working and so does everyone else. Also, if you encrypt a message to someone else, you can still decrypt it with your own key, which is a serious privacy concern.

Word frustrates me. Authors waste a lot of time trying to make documents with consistent formatting in Word. The templates and style methaphor is broken (and for some strange reason emulated by Open Office). Living With the Beast has several pointers and links to alternative suggestions for living with Words styling mechanism.

I think people waste so much time formatting word documents because of its style mechanism that there is considerable opportunity for productivity and GDP growth by using a better tool. Microsoft or an incumbent could make a lot of money and deliver a lot of value selling an upgrade or new tool with a modern styling mechanism – perhaps something similar to CSS. This would increase productivity more than any feature added to word since 1997.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Outlook, Office, CSS

Technorati Tags: GTD, Outlook, Office, CSS

Omar Shahine posts a helpful workaround to turn off audible notifactions occur when a contact goes online in messenger. This quotation of Mr. Omar is very illustrative though of the usability of Windows Mobile, and I think gives insight into how the development teams meet market requirements:

Here are the registry keys you’ll need to add to your device:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65E-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: Contact Online"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65F-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: New Message"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

Its nice that there is a registry key on my Pocket PC that can be used to meet a key use case of instant messaging. Its disappointing that this very basic use case wasn’t delivered by the development team (though someone obviously thought of it or there wouldn’t be a registry key) and included in the very first release. Instant messaging is hardly a new concept.

I don’t have Mobile 5 yet, but I am doubtful it comes with a registry editor or a shell. So this becomes a can of worms, downloading bits of shareware and open source of the internet to get the device working. Thats great if you are a programmer or serious system admin. I’ll be more inclined to just not use messenger on Mobile until I don’t need a registry editor to make it work.

Technorati Tags: PDA, PocketPc

Tried to install cygwin today with hopes that I can run an SSH server. I tried FreeSsh (unreliable) and OpenSSh For Windows (couldn’t make it work at all).

So I tried to install cygwin today. Install was weirded, man wouldn’t work, etc. Deleted all traces including registry settings, reinstalled the same way, and it worked.

Hopefully, I can install and use an SSH Server now.

Technorati Tags: cygwin, SSH

I thought I would try a Mac Mini in the hopes of getting something easier to use compared to my PC. Its been pretty hit and miss.

I generally like using it better than my PC. There are a lot of quirks though.

Installing and uninstalling applications is generally much more simple than windows. You want to uninstall something, you just drag it to the trash. No “add/remove programs” that may or may not work or apply to various programs. It seems to “optimize disk space” after installing something big – probably a disk defrag? That was one thing that annoyed me with windows, the user has to initiate the defrag disks manually – why? On my windows box I have batch files scheduled to defrage the disks regularly. Thats beyond most folks, who just find their windows machines get slower and slower (for a variety of reasons, including registry inconsistencys) and end up flattening their boxes or simply reinstalling windows.

IPhoto crashes a lot , which leads me to wonder if it was written in a derivitive of a language like C (i.e. Objective C, C++, etc) that doesn’t protect against incorrect unsafe memory access the way modern languages like Lisp (1962), Smalltalk (1970s), Java (1990s), C# etc do. Writing in unsafe languages like the C derivitives guarantees unvoidable programmer errors will cause nasty failures like crashes, substandard reliability and frustrating user experience.

Aside, no commercial program I have ever used crashes as much as Quicken for the PC. It crashes on me about every 10 minutes when I am entering data or downloading information. I haven’t run it on the Mac because the instructions to convert PC quicken files to Mac quicken files are too onereous – I’d probably break something.

IPhoto is OK for basic album management, keywording and captioning. I would have stayed with ACDSee, but the upgrade costs to version 8 are too high – I can’t see an annual upgrade costs of $50 a year. Picassa is probably just as good or better than IPhoto and available at a reasonable price, so don’t switch to mac to get IPhoto. A lot of IPhoto users are unhappy with it.

As far as I can tell, the Mac address book doesn’t allow categorizing contacts, a must-have feature for me, so I can’t use it (and therefore can’t use the Mac mail program). I am switching back to Outlook on my PC today, as I need to read email, categorizes contacts, categorize tasks, convert emails to tasks, and sync to my PDA. I use the task lists mirrored in outlook and my PDA for next-action lists for my Gettings Things Done system, ditto for the calendar, and like to search my contacts by key categories (friends, services). I could probably buy a license for Entourage and a 3d party program to sync that up to the PDA but its cheaper to use the PC.

ITunes is clumsy. I generally like to listen to albums or playlists I have made up. It is hard in itunes. To play an album, you have to select each track in the album individually each time you want to listen to it, check them, and play. There is no navigate by album feature (though you can sort songs by album & artist for what that is worth). With a playlist, you seem to have to select the playlist, then select the songs in the playlist you want to play (why? – isn’t that why they are in the playlist), then press play. A lot of mousing around. I’d rather just select the playlist itself and press play.

ITunes works fairly well with airport express (it does crap out occasinally, maybe its to far from my router) so I can play songs on my stereo in the living room. Thats cool. Far cry from my nasty experience with the Hauppauge MVP which seemed to reboot every 4 minutes give or take – maybe it has to do with my wireless network. Who knows – the MVP is too hard to debug and the user interface is too clumsy to bother (my PC had my songs organized in folders of artist/album. The MVP doesn’t present that well). This was a reply from Hauppauge tech support when discussed the problem of attempting to select albums from a list of 100 or so:

If you’re using it with 100s of songs or movies, there are mods publicly
available that will give you a hierarchal tree showing standard folders.

so I thought I’d try ITunes & airport express (which you can run on a PC as well).

I like having a unix shell and the ability to run most unix programs without running linux. The shell is more natural/less clumsy than cygwin and I was able to run gnucash.

Remote desktop to access my PC works well, though I wonder if the window size is limited (nowhere near full screen on the mac) to deliberately provide a substandard experince compared to using remote desktop on a PC. Eventually I will try VNC instead.

USB things work well, Skype and Adium work well. F9 is cool.

And its quiet! I can’t here it. The only time the fan has turned on is during movie processing. I am tempted to dump my PC in the crawlspace where I can’t here it and just access it through remote access.

Technorati Tags: IPhoto, Lisp, Smalltalk, C#, C, Quicken, ACDSee, Mac, Outlook, PC, PDA, ITunes, linux, Adium, Skype, BNC, junkheap, HauppaugeMvp

I bought a Dell Axim X50 running Windows Mobile 4.21 in 2004. I figured I was very late to the PDA game (late majority) and thought all the wrinkles would be out. Was I every wrong. I have been very unimpressed with the Axim and Windows Mobile because:

• I have had the device hang a few times with no clear reason (pretty sure the battery wasnt run down) and lose all its settings and data. That is spooky, I rely on it for my calendar and contacts when I am out and about.
• ActiveSync is flaky. The device may connect to activesync on the PC, no error messages displayed but nothing is synchronized. Sometimes I have to reboot the PocketPc a few times to get it synchronizing, or initate and cancel a logout from windows xp. If I can get it to sync, sometimes tasks I have dismissed reappear (this happens less now I sync to only one PC). Or I get an “Information Type Not Synchronized Error” with no hints as to what peice of information, file, etc. note is causing the error. Am a missing an appointment on my PDA? I don’t know. Anyway, don’t try and sync a Pocket PC right before you have to catch a bus.
• The PIM user interface is horrible. There is so much wrong with it I am just going to leave it at that. You can purchase a tolerable user interface called Pocket Informant which works on the same databases. Still, I make unavoidable mistakes (the PDA is tiny and its easy to check the wrong thing) that are hard to recover from.
• I tried backuping up the device and then attempted to restore it after a firmware upgrade. Contrary to instructions, doesn’t work.
• You can’t sync to both your Outlook calendar at home (so your family can see your calendar) and at work with exchange. Try it, especially if you have dozen meetings with different people booked at work. I think filming someone trying to add their missing contacts into outlook when syncing at home would make an excellent episode of Angry Dad. Make sure you know how to end-task outlook before you start.
• Your contacts lose a lot of information when they sync from outlook (i.e. photos in your contacts. Further, you update the contact on the PDA and sync it back, and that info is gone from outlook.
• If you draw or use certain audio codecs in the note fields of tasks, and try and sync to a PC, you get some hexadecimal error message (from my experience in software development, I can tell its a COM errror code). The note never syncs.
• The wireless user interface is confusing and wireless function unreliable. You enable wireless, you never know if you are going to get some sort of “no wireless card installed” message. Its tricky to get the VPN working (I am pretty sure you can’t – at least to windows xp pro. I found I could get a connection to my PC, but it would break as soon as I tried to actually use it with terminal client or file explorer). Sometimes when you have a VPN configured but not enabled, https links won’t load. I totally don’t get the VPN configuration interface – specifying what is my home and work network etc. It is bizaree.
• No obvious place to look when things fail – most things fail silently so you don’t know they are broken. Why won’t my wireless work? Why doesn’t the VPN work – it shows it connected. Why did my device lose all my data even though the battery wasn’t run down? I can’t tell. I can’t find an error log. Most things just fail silently – no error messages, stuff just doesn’t work. If you do get an error message, it will probably keep popping up.
• Offline reading of web pages is flaky, and you need IE on a PC for this to work (everyone I know uses Firefox). Mark a page for offline reading and it may or may not be available when you attempt to read it while disconnected. You can’t seem to browse to a page with Pocket IE and mark it as something you would like to read offline.
• Pocket IE Crashes a lot. Try http://decafbad.com/blog/

John seemed to get a lot more value of his old monocrhome palm before he upgraded to a newer one than I get out of my 1 year old Pocket PC. Several people who have asked me about my Dell Axim X50 bought Palm OS devices instead. I would next time too, I have been tempted to discard the X50 as an expensive mistake.

I do like having my photos, calendar, contacts, and task list portable and synchronized to a PC.

I just wish the X50 met my basic use cases:

• wireless and network connectivity I can understand, and doesn’t get totally fubared as you switch from home to public networks. Built in SSH & VNC would be nice.
• offline reading of web pages I was looking at online with it, or pages I was looking at with firefox (or even IE).
• built in support to rip PDFs to text so they are readable. PDF is unpleasant to read on a PC and worse on a PDA.
• synchronizing calendar to work and home (first thing I tried. First thing my coworker tried. Who wouldn’t wan’t to do this?
• synchronize contacts without losing/trashing information in them
• work over a VPN so I can use terminal and sync with my unsecured wireless lan. I am tempted to try SSH and VNC instead as a way to control my PC, Mac, and synchronize through wireless.
• associate some maps with a contact.

If you buy a pocket PC, don’t except it to work like PDAs have been out 5 years. Imagine you are buying the very first one. Because you will feel like an early adopter on the bleeding edge.

With any luck the Windows Mobile 5 Upgrade Available for Dell Axim X50 available from Dell will fix all these things – they have had years now with Windows Mobile 4 to understand customers, fix bugs, and make the product usable.

Things I do like about my pda:

• photo viewer. Not a key business use case, but useful.
• watching video, another toy use case. I have 5 minutes of my son in a Jolly Jumper.
• reminders of tasks and appointments
• portable task list & caledar synchronized with PC. This is the main reason I don’t use a Hipster PDA
• Microsoft Reader Ebooks. I have a few free classics for when I am stuck somewhere reading.
• Offline reading of web pages, Microsoft Reader EBooks (I read free ones) or scraped material from PDFs. I do go through hoops to make this work. It’s mostly hard. However, its nicer to read on the PDA than paper or a PC screen.

Technorati Tags: PDA, Axim, Windows Mobile, ActiveSync, PDF, Hipster PDA, MicrosoftReader, PocketPc

I am not a big fan of Google or their claim they do no evil (sounds silly to me). Some people think Web Accelerator is bad.

The reason web accelerator is good is that most folks who have written sites that don’t work well with accelerator aren’t following the recommendations/standards of the internet and web. Their sites are buggy and causing pain throughout the web by not working well with caches, proxys, etc. Google Web Accelerator just highlights these bugs and are doing web masters a favor by bringing them to their attention sooner (and perhaps uses a little extra bandwidth).

The web will soon be a google affiliate program anyway – get ready for it. I have often wondered why google doesn’t offer to host websites – they have most sites cached anyway.

From the wall street journal via Infectious Greed:

Some argue that one hurdle to wider use of RSS is the arcane acronym itself. Microsoft has tentatively used the term “Web feeds” as an alternative, a move that has prompted criticism from a few purists in the blogosphere. Google and others, meanwhile, have used the term “feeds.”

I completely agree with this – RSS has several acronyms for different flavours of the same purpose, along with CDF and ATOM. Someone wanting to subscribe to feeds must look for an orange logo containing the words “RSS” or XML within an image (how does that help you if you are visually impaired!), a blue logo of the same, the text “RSS”, the text “syndicate”, the text “feed”, the text “atom” or in the rare case where the publisher actually gets the technology and has bothered to put in a tag indicating an RSS feed exists on this page, the browser. Further confusing things, some publishers (or their heinous software, like this blog’s template uses at the time of writing) use a feed: URI scheme – a real sign the authors don’t get URIs (much as written why feed: URIs are bad).

Try to explain what RSS means to your mother (assuming she doesn’t write optimizing compilers for sun) and the numereous ways of finding them on a web page. At least Atom is not an acronym so not immediately rejectable as a recognizable term to people.

The next steps to making RSS work are:

• Validators should reject feeds and user agents warn about feeds that summarize HTML pages if the HTML pages in turn don’t have both a element referencing the feed. Anchors should have something like a rel=”feed” attribute. Its going to be hard to get web programmers/designers/masters etc. to understand they need a link tag on every page that references a feed.
• depracating RSS in favor of Atom, and removing all RSS feeds from the web. User agents should at least warn they are obsolete.
• Maybe a practice of no anchors to feeds from html
• Get rid of the useless feed: URI scheme. Its confusing.
• Things must be very usable – the user agent must let users know if there is a feed for the page they are looking at – the users can’t be expected to hunt for the words “rss” or an orange logo. It should just work.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Syndication