I used the navigation system for the first time today because it was inoperable when we picked up the car in Sweden. (It comes pre-loaded with North American map data.) I input a destination, started it up and turned on the voice to hear it announce the route it had selected.

I put the car into gear and turned on the directional signal. While the system was announcing the route, I noticed that there was no turn signal clicking noise.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I gotta have my click. First, I thought it was some kind of manufacturing defect. The dash turn signal indicator was flashing and I assumed a brand-new car wouldn’t have burned out bulbs. Next, I thought, ugh, what a design miss. How could the engineers design out the clicking noise everyone relies on to know whether or not their turn signals are on?

In the time it took me to think it through, the voice announcement ended and voila! the clicking noise returned.

This astounded me even more. It means that the click must be digital…and it must be playing back through the sound system. As I considered this, I realized that the days of a fundamentally mechanical car are long gone. The old-school mechanical solenoid is obsolete. I remember when you used to have to fish up under the dash to find the turn signal solenoid when it failed. In the XC60, I’d need the source code for the infotainment system to find it.

This XC60 is a thoroughly digital device. It just happens to be an automobile. I suspect there’s more software is in this car than is in my DSLR or my iPad or my smartphone. Here’s a partial list of systems in the XC60 that are software-driven: radar and digital image processing to automatically brake the car if you get too close to a car in front, logic to permit the cruise control to automatically follow the car in front, ABS, DSTC, image processing to sense cars in blind spots and sensors in the shocks that can be set to deliver varying suspension rates. Clearly, the engine and transmission are digital, too (the car runs on regular or premium, so a knock sensor must be affecting the spark plug timing to prevent pre-detonation).

And I suspect my wife’s XC60 is to a Chevy Volt as an IBM PC XT of 1983 is to a Core i7 desktop of 2012. In short, as blown away as I am by this car, I’ll bet that hybrid and electric cars are even dependent on software.

So, bye-bye mechanical turns signals…hello, MP3 turn signal clicks.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been talking to people whose job it is to follow/report/blog about software. And more than one has told me that I once worked on a very original product that, despite my best efforts to explicate it, confused them. (Why they waited until now to tell me is fodder for another post. You’d think the more outspoken tastemakers would have been delighted to express their opinions at the time, not ex post facto.)

I love highly engineered products. I also love new ways of doing things. I believe software can and should make it possible for people to do new things, things they haven’t been able to do before. But it’s not that way in the real world.

There, people like incremental changes. They like the familiar (though that begs the question of how the conventional got that way). They want to “get it” right away. They want to be like everyone else (I can’t tell you the number of blonde housewives I see in white Land Rovers with Sudbury High School stickers on the car, typing away in traffic on their white iPhone 4Ss). They want to be conventional.

You’re thinking, “Uh…light dawns on Marblehead. That’s pretty obvious, ain’t it? And, Alex, who cares?”

It matters because many software types believe that to be successful, you need a completely new idea. You can’t fund a company to build a “slightly better” product. To get investor interest, you need to convince them that you can displace an incumbent in a very large category, preferably a category with sales in billions of dollars. But, in reality, I am coming to believe that that’s what the dumb money funds. It’s probably better to fund a replacement for something people already know and hate.

Consider these two (fictional) software products. Then tell me which one you’d spend money on. Be honest. Calculate how much one or the other would change your world, the way you work. Consider having to deal with all the people around you with whom you interact and what would be required to really change how they all work. Decide how much of your day you wish to devote to exploring something new, unknown, different.

Product A:

• Stretches your understanding of how you work
• Has the potential to revolutionize the way you collaborate with your colleagues
• Is less focused on user interface than on managing interaction

Product B:

• Is familiar
• Is an evolution of software you’ve used for decades
• Looks like your favorite website

Bottom line: successful software products today are like a Philip Glass symphony: modern, but repetitive.

Truly inventive software ends up being something only its creators can love — because users today don’t really want innovation. They want to think they’re daring, in the vanguard, forward-thinking…but, really, they don’t want to change a darn thing.

Lately, the price of getting support from me has been a lecture about security and backup. Basically, I tell you that connecting your device to the Internet is so dangerous that unless you are (or want to become) a mega geek, with a deep technical understanding of things like TCP/IP and SSL, you should simply assume you are going to get killed online. Beaten…destroyed…instantly pwned.

I warn you with bone-chilling examples of how you, personally, have failed to be secure. It feels like an inquisition — my family hates it — but the process serves two purposes. First, family and friends don’t come to me unless they are truly stuck; they’d almost rather go off the grid completely than listen to my rant. As a result, I don’t have to actually do that much technical support. Second, I hope the shock value of it sinks in just a little and raises their security consciousness.

To be honest, the ‘net is too useful to give up. But I’ve observed most people are in such a rush to do whatever they want to do, no symphony of exhortations to “slow down, look at that URL in the address bar, make sure it’s a lock icon” or “take your time and read the message before you click OK” is ever going to make anyone more cautious about their online activities. So being absolutist — “There’s no way, none at all, for you to be safe online” — is the only message that has any effect. Once they hear from me that the Internet is an open, global security cesspool, they don’t forget the metaphor…it makes them more than just a little uncomfortable online. And that discomfort makes them act a little bit safer online.

But if you really wanna see someone break out in a cold sweat, remind them how much of their lives are in digital form today. Photos, music, tax returns, financial data: all of it increasingly lives on the hard disks of my family and friends. Many of them don’t even know what a hard drive is…how frail, how old-school mechanical it is. It’s amazing what behaviors this complete lack of understanding of the components inside a computer enables. People will steam vegetables next to a six-year old laptop sitting on the cooktop, then abruptly pick up the machine while it’s running and literally drop it onto a table or desk.

They just can’t understand why Windows won’t boot and they’ve lost everything — even their PhD dissertation – when their machines fail.

For a long time, I’ve included the topic of backup in the “digitally speaking, you’re naked from head to toe in a New England nor’easter” harangue. I ask them how it felt when a family member’s house burned to the ground with so many important mementos lost, including photos and heirlooms (true story). I tell them they must backup their machines on the cloud. And I tell them they have to do it religiously.

But the irony is that even I have been very, very lackadaisical about backing up my own stuff until very recently. I’d counted on a NAS in my basement for backup. Bad move, I know, but I’ve recently gotten religion about backup.

Shunning Carbonite and Mozy as being the equivalent of AOL dial-up, I defaulted to trying JungleDisk, now a product of Rackspace. I liked that I alone controlled the decryption keys and that it could use Amazon S3 storage. But using it was a disaster from the start. It was ungodly slow to upload. It doesn’t support (I don’t think) S3 server-side encryption. They charge, I think, for both upload and download from S3 even though if you upload something to an S3 bucket, the ingress transmission is free. I was willing to live with all that until a scheduled backup crashed and tech support simply stopped helping me after the usual bromides proved ineffective. This, from a company that has trademarked the term “fanatical support.” Bye, bye JungleDisk.

A quick Google search found CloudBerry. And, man is this thing cool. Yes, it requires you to set up your own Amazon account and find the access key and secret. But it’s fast, it’s attractive and best of all, Andy (who I suspect is the author) answers questions via email on Thanksgiving Day. It supports Windows volume snapshot services (VSS) so you can backup open files. A checkbox turns on both S3 reduced redundancy storage (which costs less) and server-side encryption. CloudBerry only charges you for the client; whatever costs you rack up on AWS are between Amazon and you. The only drawback I can see is that it stores your encrypted password locally to encrypt files on the way to S3 rather than allowing you to specify the public key to be used. But that seems minor to me, and compared the arrogance and lack of knowledge of Rackspace’s technical folks, I’d rather work with CloudBerry any day.

So, hello, CloudBerry. And, btw, if you are family or a friend and you want me to set CloudBerry up for you, sure thing. But the “Internet is a cesspool lecture” will continue.

Even before then, in film school (and I mean old-school celluloid film), we were taught to distinguish the color temperature differences between dawn, dusk and midday despite the eye and brain conspiring to make all colors look the same.

So, having been brought up on incandescent lighting and being sensitized to the color temperature of the light around me, I dreaded the coming phase-out of incandescent lighting in the US. Sure, I think it’s a great way to save energy. But I hate fluorescent lighting. It’s greyish-blue light makes everything it illuminates really fugly.

And try as I might, I couldn’t find a CFL I thought came close to incandescent. I tried, I really did, to find a CFL I could live with. But after years of buying CFLs, I gave up. Now, in my home CFLs are relegated to the basement and the garage.

So, in anticipation of the law phasing out my favorite (100-watt power hog) bulbs first by the end of 2011, I did what anyone would do: I started hoarding them. If I had another reason to be in a Lowe’s or BJ’s or equivalent, I bought every 100-watt bulb I could find. By mid summer, I noticed that 100-watt bulbs were getting hard to find, leading me to conclude others were doing the same thing.

Then, I read an article about LED bulbs and the progress being made with them in Wired. The story talks about a start-up that’s making a bulb they hope to have on the market later this year. The article also mentions the Philips AmbientLED, noting that it was first on the market with a 60-watt equivalent bulb that was instant on, dimmable and was supposed to look like an incandescent.

Despite the $40 price tag, I had to try two. So, I ordered them and while they were being shipped to me I received the October, 2011 issue of Consumer Reports which rated the AmbientLED tops. I was psyched. It may seem odd to get excited about light bulbs, but have you thought about many bulbs there are in your life? And what’s so strange about wanting to be the first on my block to try out these expensive new gadgets?

Well, they arrived and, ahem, a light went on for me. Now I sit here, writing this blog post by the wonderful light of an LED. What a relief! I won’t be able to afford these in any quantity, but at least I am no longer condemned to a lifetime of seeing things by CFL light that casts the color of spoiled, uncooked McDonalds burger patties.

Mr. Edison, it was a long love affair. Good-bye and good luck.

P.S. Anyone interested in a wide variety of new 100-watt incandescent light bulbs?

I mentioned to my wife that I knew this was a complete rip-off because HDMI is a digital specification. If you plug two compatible components together and you get audio and video, the cable is working. I know how much big-box retailers need to find profitable items to sell, given the small margins on consumer electronics. Because phone cases, batteries, cables and other accessory items are often not included in a purchase of a consumer electronic items, the retailers have a business incentive to gouge people.

Click to englarge

And, boy, does Best Buy cut deep into your wallet for a generic HDMI cable. Take a look at this search from eBay for 6ft HDMI cables. Many cables are available for a tenth of the price of Best Buy’s cables.

Sure, you sometimes have to wait for something to arrive via air mail from Hong Kong and maybe the cable will be defective and you are stuck with a small loss.

Neither of those risks make up for, IMO, the cruelly efficient fleecing of Best Buy customers, cynically executed by their salespeople who are trained to push all sorts of “pack” (useless add-ons) from cables to warranty extensions on unsuspecting non-techie customers.

(I’m still upset with Best Buy over the way they treated us when I bought a Sonos system for my father-in-law. Long story short, the made us sign up for a store credit card with the most usurious terms I have ever seen, they had us wait next to the dumpster to pick up the equipment, then they tried to give me a receipt that contained the wording “This is not a receipt.” If they can’t treat a knowledgeable customer with any respect, what do you think their attitude is when Grandma comes in looking for a cellphone?)

Then today, in an episode of Jungian synchronicity I ran across this post from CNET, which describes in detail the signaling protocol in the HDMI standard, the differences in the standards and what can really go wrong. Suffice it to say, people buying HDMI cables — something you really want to take home with your new HDTV — are getting massively ripped off if you buy it on impulse at Best Buy.

While I do believe in buyer beware and all that, what frustrates me is how entities like Best Buy have convinced themselves it’s OK to do business like this. If I treated my consulting clients like “marks” from whom I needed to extract the maximum revenue, they’d know it in an instant. How does Best Buy get away with its warm and fuzzy image, which clearly covers up for a raging retail exploitation machine?

I got up Sunday morning, July 3rd, salivating over all the cholesterol-laden meats I was gonna burn…er…grill that day in celebration of the holiday. I was looking forward to my weekend breakfast of imported Nestle 2-in-1 coffee sachets (I prefer the Indonesian version) and peanut butter crackers (cheese-flavor orange crackers only).

But noooo…it wasn’t to be. An email alerted me to the fact that our corporate website, vuuch.com, was dead dead dead.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just reboot our EC2 instance and deal with it Tuesday.

No joy.

Panic sets in. The cracker crumbs mix with coffee drool and run down the side of my face. There’s no freakin’ website no matter how many times I restart the instance. It boots, it dies. It boots again, it dies harder.

“Calm down,” the inner voice says. “You’ll think of something.”

“Up yours, you optimistic fool. The damn thing is in rigor mortis. Start searching for the last database backup ’cause, baby, you are spending the day cooking up a new server, not burgers.”

“Just finish breakfast. Start defrosting the dogs. You’ll…wait a minute. What if…”

None of you really expect me to tell you exactly how I recovered the site do you? After all, if another bozo tries the same thing, I need something to give me an edge, don’t I?

Besides, the real purpose of writing this post is to try out the spankin’ new WordPress 3.2 before I upgrade all my other sites.

As the old saying goes, you can pwn some of the people some of the time, but you can’t help but love WordPress 3.2.

Ok, I really need your help. You guys gotta help me figure out if I’m listening to the pop music equivalent of nearly extinct dinosaurs or if I am really hearing a vibrant revival of the music and bands of the 70′s and 80s. I need to know if it’s just me experiencing some kind of middle-aged regression to my adolescence or if there’s really a new vitality in the dinosaur bands of my youth.

In the last year, we’ve had astonishing releases from Devo, Hot Tuna, Paul Simon and as I write this, just today, the release of a new record from that most 80′s of Boston New Wave bands, The Cars. (It’s almost as if The Atlantics were playing Spit on a Saturday night and Tricia and I were getting decked out to dance off several liters of sweat.)

For the life of me, I can’t tell if I love this stuff because it’s really good or if I like it because it’s the sound of my youth. I’d like to think that I am a critical enough listener to know the difference. I’d like to think that I also listen to The Dandy Warhols, Alice in Chains, even Lady Gaga. That I am open to everything, including hip-hop (though I nearly fell out of my chair when Kanye sampled “21st Century Schizoid Man” for his track “Power”). I like bluegrass, country, even Tuvan throat-singing.

But I’ve been listening to Devo’s “Something for Everybody” for nearly a year. The music is superb, with the track “Human Rocket” among the most clever (and frightening) tracks they’ve ever written. If Devo was cool in the 80′s, why can’t they be in the 10′s? (I must admit that age has its price: I can’t stand watching Devo. Seeing 50-something guys like me with paunches doing robot dances in plastic clothes makes me feel sad and embarrassed for them.)

Yet as I listen to the The Cars’ “Blue Tip” I wonder if anyone else could wrap a commentary about media in a pop-synth beat with a final chorus you just gotta sing along with. Or if the guitar riff in “Free” could be done better by anybody in their 20′s.

I dunno — maybe I am rationalizing the whole thing — but these bands sound as vital to me 25 years on as they did when all I cared about was dancing myself into a stupor. In fact, I’d argue they are better than they were then…more mature, more cynical than they were in their earlier incarnations. Life’s knocks have only made their music even more interesting than it was when all we knew was pop narcissism.

But…still…it could be just a futile hope that these dinosaurs sound fresh and new to anyone but Boomers. Maybe it’s just the sound of an asteroid hitting Earth…the last blast before we all get blown away.

What really mystified me about the problem I am about to describe is the total lack of Google search results that describe this specific problem and potential solutions. There’s nary a hint of what I found, despite months of searching. My experience is that there’s always another heat-seeker out there who’s suffering the same issues I am and that guy has posted about it somewhere. This is the first time in years I wasn’t able to find a discussion or posting about my problem. Hopefully, Google will index this post for the rest of the world who seeks to use T-Mobile’s Android WiFi calling app with a Verizon FiOS Internet connection through Actiontec routers.

Last November, I upgraded the family to T-Mobile G2 smartphones. T-Mobile offers a WiFi calling app on these phones, I suppose as a tacit admission of their network’s failings. Our previous BlackBerrys had UMA calling which differs from the Android app only in the fact that UMA was supposed to automatically transfer calls from the cellular network to a WiFi hotspot. (It never worked.)

We have a Verizon FiOS 35Mbps symmetrical Internet connection. You’d imagine that would be fast enough for T-Mobile WiFi calling. But from the moment I tried to use WiFi calling on the G2 last fall, the sound quality was terrible, voice was choppy and calls would drop after a few seconds. It didn’t work well in other WiFi hotspots either.

Recently, I noticed that WiFi calling started working in public hotspots like those at McDonald’s. That made me wonder if T-Mobile had done something to their network in this area. So, I turned on the WiFi calling app on the FiOS connection and bam something different happened. Instead of connecting and not working, the app now returned a specific error: W006.15 ISP or T-Mobile network error. Now, instead of not working well, the WiFi calling app wouldn’t connect at all.

I actually welcomed this. The app was so useless and unreliable before and T-Mobile’s support was so lame, I was happy to have a hard error. At least that would give me plenty of Google searching to find the problem. But once again the searches were unsatisfying. Finally, I decided it had to be an issue with the Actiontec. I researched ports for UMA and VoIP and tried opening them on the Actiontec. No joy.

Then today, I came across this Wikipedia article on SIP ALG. Funny how a problem that persisted for months melted away in seconds when I finally found the right path. I dug into the advanced settings of the Actiontec and discovered its SIP ALG is disabled by default. Enabling it and restarting the router has resulted in crystal-clear WiFi calling on my T-Mobile G2 over Verizon FiOS. All this effort wouldn’t have been necessary had T-Mobile documented what the app requires. They ship the damn thing on the phone — they should at least post its technical and system requirements somewhere.

Here’s how to do it.

First, log into your Actiontec router. Then select the Advanced icon at the top and acknowledge the warning message. You should end up at a page similar to this one (click on the image to enlarge).

Then click on the SIP ALG link, highlighted in this screen shot.

Then, simply enable the SIP application-level gateway, as below. Reboot the router and enjoy WiFi calling from your T-Mobile Android phone over FiOS.

I hate Drupal

My colleague Chris developed the first iteration of www.vuuch.com in Drupal. Among all the many brilliant things he’s done, that decision doesn’t count among them. Since last August, I’ve struggled to warm to Drupal. Today, I am coming out of the Drupal-hating closet to tell the world what a mess this system is. It’s impenetrable, unsupportable, slow, awkward, poorly architected and ugly. I’ve heard Acquia is doing well selling support — to paraphrase Homer, “Duh.”

Now, finally, we Drupal-bashers have the beginnings of a reaction. Check out this article by Tony Byrne titled “Don’t Get Run Over By Drupal.” It’s written from the perspective of an enterprise (for whom the Drupal mess can quickly become a festering cesspool) but it has the core element of truth that I needed to come clean. Byrne notes that Drupal is fashionable, like an iPhone. Lots of webmaster lemmings take their cues from fashion, but like a pair of too-high platform shoes from the 70′s, they are going to get hurt.

Me? I’m almost done with a new version of our website, a draft of which can be seen at wp.vuuch.com. “WP?” WordPress, baby. The bestest, coolest, fastest, easiest CMS of all.

I love gadgets. Just ask anyone who knows me. I’m the proverbial heat-seeker when it comes to electronics. And, as we close out 2010 and look forward to 2011, I got to thinking about all the gadgets I’ve used in 2010.

Just recently, the four of us in my family upgraded to Android smartphones (G2′s running Froyo). I have an iPad. I have last year’s hot toy, a netbook (with a “real” processor in it, a Core 2 Duo capable of running 64-bit Windows 7). I just got a Roku box. I have a simultaneous dual-band N-router connected to FiOS at 35Mbs symmetrical. I have a DSLR capable of 720p movies (though I did buy it a year too early as recent updates make it possible for DSLRs to autofocus in their video modes). In short,  I am blessed technologically.

But my favorite gadget this year is a throwback: my (relatively) new Lenovo T410 laptop. I know black laptops are oh-so-2005. I realize you can’t take the T410 out of your pocket and nonchalantly place it on the table at Starbucks to impress your friends. I understand how isolated the thing is without a GPS chip.

But all that pales in comparison to the sheer comfort of using a 14″ display and that ThinkPad keyboard. Every time I need to do something valuable — write a blog post or document, crunch numbers, read a PDF — I reach for the laptop. It’s fast and it makes creating and absorbing information a pleasure.

Sure, I use the iPad in bed to stream Netflix. Yes, I will use voice recognition on the G2 to look up a phone number. But Swype, as cool as it is, will never replace (at least for me) a real keyboard. Angry Birds is a blast — for about 10 minutes. Then, I long for a screen my aging eyes can see detail on.

The real difference between mobile devices and a sturdy laptop is the difference between being able to accomplish something more complex in “digital comfort”  versus straining to achieve it on a compromised, limited-function device. Smartphones captivate you — but they don’t really add to anyone’s digital literacy, if you ask me.

So, maybe I have become a technology Luddite, clinging to email and laptops, stuck forever in the mid-2000s.

Or maybe the same thing that pulls me back to the laptop when I need to do something that isn’t bite-sized or simple entertainment will overcome gadget lovers’ current infatuation with mobile devices.

2011: the year of the laptop?

I started work on a post two days ago that was tentatively titled “Hell Freezes Over: I Learn to Love Microsoft.” I didn’t get far because, as anyone who knows me knows, I have this thing against Microsoft: I am still smarting from the way they competed with Lotus in the 90′s. They were ruthless, cutthroat, aggressive, totally without ethics and, by universal acclaim, the least inventive technology company on the planet. Everything that was the basis of their success from the UI in Windows to their messaging technology they acquired or copied. Microsoft fanboys will argue differently, of course, but a careful listener will recognize a revisionist history in the making. I never got beyond the title of that post.

I was moved to consider such a blasphemy because, of late, MSFT is on a roll. Windows 7 is great. Office 2010 is great (though it’s been 10 years and Outlook’s bad copy of Lotus Notes 4.0′s views remains as impenetrable as ever…proof positive that when you slavishly copy design you don’t understand, you make a mess of it). Windows Live Essentials 2011 is great. IE 9 (buggy as it is — and as derivative of Chrome as it is) is going to be great.

These products are the best consumer software products you can get today because they have virtues found nowhere else today in consumer software technology: rigor in design, development and testing. MSFT has the resources to spend big on UI design. They have fleets of regression engineers to test every build. They have technical writers who make sure the products don’t ship until someone has written down what they do. A MSFT product today, no matter what you think of the origins of its technology, has superior “fit and finish.” Plus, Microsoft products today are arguably more secure than anything else simply because the company got tired of being the bad guy — and applied unimaginable levels of resources to improve.

And, I’ve been a fan of the Windows Weekly podcast with Paul Thurrott for a few years. Paul isn’t objective, but his advocacy of MSFT products is well-argued. And I respect someone who is an advocate but not a ho. If you listen, as I hope I do, with an open, but skeptical mind, Paul will rehabilitate your opinion of Microsoft. I don’t exactly forgive them for they way they got to where they are. But that was then…this is now. Today, the simple truth is non-techie people need reliable, well-designed and well-documented software that has been thoroughly tested. Google isn’t doing this. Have you ever tried the help system in Google Apps Premier? Apple products for Windows stink — and pointing out a flaw in them invites jihad.

So, I found myself trying to compose a paean to today’s MSFT, until I ran across this post from Thurrott’s blog about Windows Phone 7 ads. Microsoft is about to renter the smartphone business. Paul and Leo — and the rest of the MSFT-focused press community — have been banging the drum, hard. Thurrott has written a book about WP7. People are hot and heavy for any tidbit about Phone 7. So, when one of WP7′s biggest advocates wants to carry the new product’s marketing water by linking to leaked commercials for that product, what does MSFT do?

They get YouTube to take them down. Click on the image above to see how it looked on Thurott’s Phone 7 blog.

Let’s think it through: after spending big bucks producing what I presume are killer ads, some idiot in marketing — who doesn’t want to “spoil” their launch ad buys — decides that it just can’t happen that people could watch a commercial for their product before it officially launches.

This is woefully stupid — and classic Microsoft tone-deafness. If some shmoe like me wants to see a Windows Phone 7 commercial, why in God’s name wouldn’t they let me? Because they want to keep Windows Phone 7 a secret? This is going to help them build interest in the early adopter community? The free ad impressions will decrease the ultimate effectiveness of the ads? They will sell fewer phones because more people saw the ads?

This is the kind of marketing idiocy — slavishly adhering to some artificial schedule just because they have one — that reprises their fundamental lack of creativity.  Only MSFT could fail to see what a mistake it is to limit access to its own marketing messages. Only they could sap momentum for a new product before it launches. They’re probably sitting around the table talking about how to create Windows Phone 7 “mojo” without knowing they’ve killed it a little. Who wants to bet that marketing team will get a raise and some more restricted shares? (Full disclosure: like others stockholders in pain, it kills me to see MSFT stock stagnant. And yes, I’ve owned MSFT for years.)

So, after all these years, I get my cake and get to eat it, too. I get good products — and I can hold on to my grudge.

Thanks, Microsoft.

How embarrassed must HP be with QA being done by a white person and a black person in front of a retail display of the product?

I’ve been way too busy to blog.

But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck.

It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage wrought by the market meltdown of the last two weeks since 9/30. Going from bad to cataclysmic has wiped out years of parsimony, leaving my personal financial situation questionable. We’ve often heard the stories of people “wiped out” in the Depression of the 1930′s. Could that be happening here?

Then, on a happier note I searched on “UMA” because I’d just gotten a BlackBerry that switches from the cell network to Wi-Fi. I think this is amazing because seamlessly switching from one protocol to another is no mean trick.

Clicking around, I found this story on college students preferring Wi-Fi to beer.

Sorry, but no. I remember college without Wi-Fi. The only thing we preferred to beer was women. And since I founded a failed Wi-Fi hotspot company in early 2002, I know how popular beer remains with respect to being…uh…”online.”

Now the only question is, if you can’t afford beer or the college loans it takes to get that free dorm-room Wi-Fi, does this absolutely guarantee an Obama victory next month, just as Roosevelt was swept in after the Hoover administration’s market-based dogma ruined the economy? (Sounds just like the current Bush administration, doesn’t it?)

And, if it’s Obama (oh yeah, it’s gonna be Obama), does he drink beer? Hillary did…that’s why I liked her.

Now you get the SSAT-level analogy that politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi, right?

 

With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt.

After months of listening to Leo and Steve tell me how great these services were, I was feeling like someone who refuses to get the religion he’s supposed to if I didn’t try ‘em out.

Changing your router to use OpenDNS is plain, dead, dumb simple: you simply change two IP addresses in your router’s configuration. The OpenDNS IP addresses are on every page of their website. Can’t miss it. Total time to implement: 10 minutes.

The decision to use TrueCrypt was a little more involved: I run Vista Ultimate which offers BitLocker whole-disk encryption. So you’d naturally assume that the built-in encryption would be better. But after hearing that Steve Gibson’s Windows XP machine was actually faster after using TrueCrypt, I decided to try this amazing open source product. TrueCrypt doesn’t feel like open source…it’s exceptionally well documented and has the fit-and-finish of a commercial product.

Total time to setup for whole disk encryption on my ThinkPad T60p with an Hitachi Travelstar 200GB 7200rpm drive? 15 minutes, including the burning of a backup CD-ROM. Encryption itself took three hours.

I did have one problem, which was easily solved. I couldn’t hibernate the machine (which Vista isn’t really happy to do anymore anyway, but which is sort of the ultimate test for a whole-disk encryption program) until I deleted the previous hibernation file and allowed Vista to recreate it on the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume.

I didn’t see this in a couple of searches online, so hopefully if anyone searches for “TrueCrypt Vista hibernation file” they’ll find this post and give it a try.

Now, I can’t even “feel” the encryption…my laptop performs as before. My Vista performance base score was 4.3 before and after the whole disk was encrypted.

In short, for a computer user today, the tools to significantly increase your personal security are easy-to-use, free and astonishingly good.

Years and years and years ago (OK, I’m feeling Boomer today), I was involved in the sale of a GUI-based application to the phone company. They resisted and resisted, despite our (and, unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s) ever-more-urgent importuning. We kept telling the executives that this was the future, it was the way they had to go and, damn it, you really need to get into the mid-1980s. They wanted to stay with character-based apps, but as the phone company used to regularly do (at least when I was with IBM), they did what we told them to do.

Such were the GUI wars.

But I didn’t realize that the war had ended…that we had “won”…until one Sunday in the early 1990s. I was, as I was wont to do, red-faced and furious on a Sunday afternoon at the amazing ineptness of the New England Patriots, who if I remember correctly, were losing 5000 to 0 to the Dolphins, when a Dodge Ram commercial interrupted the carnage. That commercial’s visual metaphor was a GUI. I realized that what was once “never going to happen” had now happened so completely, so permanently, that people didn’t even remember when they didn’t use and understand GUIs. It had crossed from a technological feature to a cultural idiom.

I’m not talking about Crossing the Chasm-style adoption. Instead, I am talking about how resistant everyone seems to be to something after which they are not only passive to it, they have amnesia about what life, or technology, or sports, or anything was like before they adopted whatever it is they’ve adopted en masse. It’s like we’re dogs: we live only in the moment.

So it is with podcasting. Nobody believes podcasting will ever be a mass medium. Nobody believes it can change the world. Pshaw! Phooey! Feh! All podcasting can be is a niche thing for techies.

Well, they didn’t spend Sunday afternoon with my college-age daughter and me. Returning from dropping my other kid off at summer camp, Sarah whipped out her iPod, plugged it into the car and said, “Dad, wanna hear my nursing podcasts?”

“Nursing podcasts? I didn’t know you were into podcasts!”

“Sure, Dad. [You helplessly out-of-tune old fart]. I listen to a bunch of ‘em.”

It was an instant replay of the Dodge Ram commercial. This new medium, which software company clients as recently as 2006 were insisting was irrelevant, to which nobody paid any attention, had reached its final destination: a fait accompli. And nobody remembers a time when they thought podcasting was a waste of electrons, spent for the enjoyment of social misfits.

Instead, podcasting, is, and always was, an excellent way to reach specific audiences. It’s part of every nutritionally well-balanced software company’s marketing strategy. Podcasts are the best way to reach your audiences….and they always have been.

The way people seem to be acting about this — without any connection to the previous reality — is gonna put a whole bunch of singing fat ladies out of business. After all, if nothing’s changed, who needs ‘em to signal a transition?

After Revit was purchased by Autodesk in 2002, I spent a grand total of a few months there. I’ve not written much publicly about my experiences there because they have a reputation for long institutional memories. I am sure that this post isn’t going to make them love me any more than they already don’t.

Before Autodesk bought Revit, I always wondered about the apparent favorable bias among the CAD press towards them. In my time in the industry, they were pushing their boots into customers’ and partners’ heads (something I suspect they’re still pretty good at) but portions of the CAD press always seemed to give them a bye. Truth be told, there were some CAD journalists who hated them unreasonably, but by and large, they got a pass.

Still, the “professional” CAD press was careful to hide it. Very careful. But it was there. In an incident that blew up on Autodesk, a letter that Revit sent to ADT consultants ended up in the hands of a journalist who told me Autodesk’s PR department had faxed it to him. They were simply reprinting whatever they were sent by Autodesk.

But now, and for the first time, we got ‘em. Dead to rights. Check out this quote from Deelip Mendez, one of the arrivistes in the CAD press, a blogger who would have little traffic if not for the fact that Ralph and Roopinder have been promoting his blog:

But I know that Autodesk Marketing is the best there is and when they say something, I listen and wonder.

This comes in a long, unfocused post in which Deelip tries hard to make something out of nothing between Dassault and SolidWorks. But there it is: the slavish, unthinking bias that Autodesk is…wait for it…a thought leader. And that that leadership comes from…squeeze your eyes shut in case you are blinded by the revelation…the marketing department.

In being so overt, Deelip has blown everyone’s cover, the thin veneer of independence that has been carefully nurtured for a long time. The CAD world is a small place…there’re only so many vendors to bill. Between dissing startups as irrelevant (they said that about both Revit and Seemage) and kowtowing to ADSK’s marketing department, it must get monotonous drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid all the time.

 

You know all those commercials Verizon is running with a young boy talking about “30db hot” and in which, in open-mouth wonderment, he seems to be awash in light? Well, fudgedaboutit, at least when it comes to multiple HD video on demand streams and high-speed Internet.

Not many people realize that FiOS uses a hybrid system for video. It uses both QAM (what we think of as “normal” cable) for much of its programming. But for VOD, it’s IPTV. IPTV data streams are delivered via the Actiontec routers that Verizon requires customers to use because these routers have a network interface module, or NIM, that bridges IEEE 802.3 Ethernet as we know it to the set-top boxes. The set-top boxes are connected by coax cable, of course, and a standard called MoCA (multimedia over COAX) enables them to receive IPTV. It might surprise people to know that FiOS set-top boxes get an IP address from the router just like computers do. To try to make sure that the VOD video streams do not detract from subscribers’ Internet connections, the router implements QOS for the the IPTV video streams.

Complex? You bet. And it all worked great until VZ started offering HDTV VOD.

Tonight, for the first time, I had two HDTV streams going and it killed my Internet connection. I called VZ and the first thing the guy tried to make me do was factory-reset the router. When I objected, he told me that “hundreds of customers watch multiple HTDV VOD streams while getting full bandwidth from Internet connections.” Because I insisted, he agreed to consult with a video expert.

A few minutes later, he came back on the line and admitted that FiOS can’t support more than one simultaneous HDTV video on demand stream. He didn’t blame the router. Astonishingly, he blamed the ATM switches in the central office. (ATM is old, old, old, and I can’t believe VZ implemented it in FiOS…they can’t seem to help themselves. Billions to build a new network, but they’re still using protocols from the 70s in it.)

Bottom line: when you get FiOS you get fiber, all right. But you don’t get the ability to really use its capacity. In fact, it’s easy to overwhelm it.

Please forgive my non sequitur in the title of this post. But I think it’ll make sense as you read on.

I’ve been raving lately about what a transformational device my new iPod touch is. And I’ve been struggling to put into words exactly what’s why that’s so. At first, I wasn’t convinced that it was so much different from my 5th generation iPod, which I still use daily.

Then I took the iPod touch on vacation with me and discovered that the Safari browser was compatible with Outlook Web Access 2007. And that I actually enjoyed watching videos on YouTube. And that the flicking and pinching stuff I thought was the equivalent of tofu — as in real men use mice to navigate — is the first significant UI innovation in at least a decade.

Then I started reading on the Internet about the upcoming 1.1.3 software update. Monday, Apple announced this was free for iPhone users, but would cost iPod touch users $20. Apparently, Apple has decided that the iPod touch is really a handheld — not just a music device. Ergo, bug fixes are free but enhancements are not. I know that lots of people will whine about this…and I gotta admit I wasn’t too happy having just spent $400 on the device.

But, man oh man, is it worth it! I suspect the iPhone people got this upgrade for free because they are AT&T’s prisoner for two years, and food is included in the jail stay. But for those of us who own our iPod touches outright and have to decide to pay or not, I must say I am not looking for $20 back.

The mail client is astonishing…Google Maps is amazing. This is the first device I have ever owned where a setup mode itself is entertaining (the icons wiggle when you are configuring dock pages).

But for all of the amazing new features and the value, there are two things that bother me: first, Apple really should have made this one free. The device has only been in the market since September, 2007. I’ll bet a lot of people got theirs over the holidays, like I did. It leaves a small aftertaste to have to pony up 5% of the price to get the thing to do what it should’ve at first customer ship.

Second, am I the only one who worries that the Google-masters-of-the-universe-who-control-all-our-searches-and-all-galactic-advertising have figured out a new way to extend their monopoly? This is, I think, the first time anyone is paying for a system with Google Maps. (I downloaded an excellent new version that uses cell towers for location onto my Windows Mobile 6 device last week for free.) Google Maps is a killer app…it’s one of the things that makes the iPod touch a transformational device. I wonder if all the “free” stuff people have become accustomed to was really nothing more than a very long term trial.

But on the iPod touch with that screen (there’s no other way to describe the quality of the iPod touch’s display) it’s as if the device, Wi-Fi and YouTube combine into a completely new medium.

I was searching for music videos, looking for alternate versions of classic music videos from Devo and Fatboy Slim, and came across this gem.

It doesn’t matter if you are a Fatboy Slim fan or not: this never-officially-released video is a spectacular combination of editing and timing. Check out the slow-motion at 2:10 and the Tommy-esque finale in which Angie leads hula-hooping acolytes, some of whom you almost expect to break out into a chorus of We’re Not Gonna Take It.

I emailed the star of the video,  Angie Mackman, and asked her for the back story about why this wasn’t released. Long story short, it seems a competition for the video had to go to a juggler for some reason. The official video for this song is also great, but there’s something about this version that is less contrived and, well, cooler than the very-strictly-cut-to-the-downbeat juggling video.

Tonight, after a long day at work, for fun, I turned to an issue of Auto Week that I’d been saving to read up on the new Aston-Martin DBS. The only Aston-Martin I’ll ever come close to is the silver DB9 that some show-off uses as a daily driver (in the freakin’ snow!) to drop his sixth-grader off at my daughter’s school.

Yes, I have lusted after another man’s car. But nevermore. Look carefully at this photo. The driver’s side of the grill is misaligned. In the printed magazine, this is even more noticeable than in this online photo.

Yes, the press can go on for thousands of words about whether this car is a GT or a sports car, how it compares with Ferraris and how cool it was in Casino Royale. But not me….$256,000 seems a little rich to spend on a car whose marketing people would let this photo into the wild.

Remember the Star Trek episode entitled “The Trouble with Tribbles“? Remember how the furry creatures ingratiate themselves with the crew, then multiply so rapidly they nearly overtake the ship?

FiOS TV is like a tribble. With apologies to Dr. McCoy, FiOS TV is born pregnant with problems.

I spent most of 2006 and part of 2007 negotiating with Verizon to bring their cable service to Southborough, MA. I’ve never blogged about their negotiating tactics, which defined mendacity, because I believed strongly that competition would be good for the residents of the Town and if I went public, it would piss them off and we’d end up with no agreement.

Finally, in May of 2007, after a public hearing in which VZ execs promised great service and technology, we agreed on a franchise and VZ began offering FiOS TV in town.

I had high hopes for the system. I had been an early FiOS customer for voice and Internet and both had been rock solid. In particular, the Internet connection was fast and extraordinarily reliable (if a little too nanny-fied; VZ blocks port 80 on dynamic IPs and in the early days of FiOS VZ insisted on pretending it was DSL by requiring routers to support PPPoE to connect).

But TV has been an unrelenting disaster. There are three intersecting areas that combine to make FiOS TV unremittingly infuriating.

First, billing. The bills are really from three separate companies: voice, data and TV. Errors compound each other and take months to resolve. Representatives misrepresent available options and pricing (resulting in VZ insisting that I am their prisoner now for two years when I am certain I only agreed to a one-year package deal).

How’s this for a nightmare? To get back the Internet speed I was promised on the one-year-deal-that-morphed-into-a-two-year-deal generated a $139 disconnection charge. If you can make sense of a VZ bundled bill, please let me know. I think you’re a genius.

Next, technology. During the licensing process, we specifically asked VZ about their technology (see this “issuing authority report” and a memo from me to the committee complaining about their non-answers).

Now, I know why they obfuscated. They have the most fiendishly complex system imaginable. It could have only been designed by a former monopoly. You could only love this system if you think Soviet design and engineering was underrated.

They use several different “optical network interfaces” or ONTs to connect the network to your home. Older ones, like mine, bring 802.3 Ethernet into your home along with coax cable and twisted-pair voice. Newer ones bring only coax into the home along with voice.

In either case, you MUST bridge the cable and Ethernet networks using a bridge called a network interface module because their set-top boxes speak coax for programming and IPTV for on-demand using a protocol called MoCA. And the set-top boxes use plain old IP for the interactive guide.

(Lost yet? Stay tuned for when we talk about service.)

How do they ever get this mess installed? They give their installers a multi-function router containing so many functions I can’t remember them all. But for fun, let’s see what I can remember off the top of my head.

This thing is an Ethernet switch, a router with a DHCP server, a firewall, a wireless access point using 801.11g set to default to insecure WEP connections, a NIM to bridge the coax and Ethernet networks, among other things. It tries to connect to the VZ network as a DHCP client or as a PPPoE client. And, best of all, it has an back-door open port to allow VZ to completely mess it up for you with updates you don’t expect. You cannot use your own equipment, precluding the possibility of putting a VPN or more effective firewall on your network.

Oh, and when you are watching on-demand movies, getting blasted with 20Mbits of IPTV content while you simultaneously surf your 5M/20M Internet connection, you can watch this consumer-grade device almost smoke.

VZ network designers tried to hide their network technology mashup by cramming so many functions into a single box that you almost pity the electrons consumed in this overmatched device.

But the real prize for Rube Goldberg-ness goes to the Motorola HD DVRs and the interactive program guide. VZ had the time and money to send customers beautiful marketing brochures touting the new features of a IPG they downloaded over the summer. But apparently, they didn’t have the time to test the software. The Internet is alive with people suffering problems with this software, and I’ve been bitten worst than most.

That brings me to the last issue: service. No human being can service a system this complex. That means that everyone at VZ involved in servicing this mess is simply guessing. Nobody, apparently, has a clue. Through bitter experience (and some serious reading of the dslreports.com forums), I have a better picture in my head of what’s going on than the poor shlumps who have to deal with customers.

Once VZ upgraded the guide, my DVR starting hanging. I called about this, and was told they’d ship me a replacement. It never arrived. Then I called again. They sent a guy out. He threw rocks at the people who said they’d ship one, replaced mine and left.

Thing still hangs, refuses to record, deletes recordings, etc. etc. Called on a Friday night. Service guy — obviously hacking the problem — factory resets the device remotely. Now, it can’t even tune a channel. Dead HDTV on NFL opening weekend.

Third guy comes Monday to replace the box for a third time and tells me it’s the “levels”. (Old phone guys miss copper with its certainty of volts and ohms.) Box promptly hangs.

Guy calls me today to tell me they think it’s the IMG software (Really?) and a fix will be out “soon”.

On the positive side, VZ techs speak English well and are polite. These guys (and the one hot-looking woman they sent) are not grease-monkeys. They’ve just not been trained. Who could be?

VZ is birthing tribbles at a Malthusian rate.

Those of you who know me well know that on one topic I have been completely consistent: for years I’ve considered Microsoft the ultimate market bully who simply assimilated (or copied) any technology or company it wanted to. To this day, the blood feud between IBM and Microsoft on the messaging and desktop application battle front continues. Why else would IBM revive the Lotus Symphony brand?

But today I discovered Windows Live Writer (in which I am composing this blog post), and I have to admit that it’s the most impressive application I’ve seen from Microsoft in ages. Even more, I have become a big fan of Vista and even have a warm spot for Office 2007 (even though the context sensitive help in Office is broken).

Microsoft seems to have entered a stage in its history which reminds me of IBM software in the 70s and 80s: exceptionally well-designed and documented software that has increasingly accepted (without “embracing and extending”) open standards. The one flaw both share is complexity.

Whether this happened as a result of its near-death brush with regulators (also an IBM parallel) or if it was inevitable isn’t important. Today, Microsoft is producing some seriously great stuff.

Who’s today’s new dominant bully? My vote goes to Google, which has all the attributes of Microsoft at its worst: a belief that everything in the world will go its way and an astonishing disregard for customers. (Just try getting Google support on the phone. It’s nearly impossible.)

I was in the new Natick Collection Apple store tonight. (Yes, the “Natick Collection” is just a mall — but to be tragically hip it had to become a “collection”.)

The place was mobbed and we finally got a chance to try the new iPods.  I immediately went for an 80GB iPod Classic to compare it to the 5th gen 80GB model I currently have.

My first impression was that Cover Flow made the thing very slow. Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart was loaded on this unit and while I listened to it, I rapidly pressed the center button. As any iPod owner knows, pressing the center button while you play a song takes you through a loop of additional play functions, like skipping back and forth or changing the rating of the song. I was doing this to see if Apple added any new functions to the loop. They did — the ability to shift in and out of shuffle mode.

But what blew me away is that if you press the button rapidly while the song is playing, the music stutters. I couldn’t believe it…I tried every iPod Classic in the store and they all did it.

Apple is now in its baroque period: constantly guilding the lilly with pretty stuff while the basic technological content slips. The fact they shipped the device like this is proof positive that Apple is cruising on design and brand, and that the technological core of brilliant innovation they used to combine with imagination has begun to wane.

As Porky Pig says,  ”Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks, for the iPod.”

I am well-known to be car crazy. And BMW is well-known as one of the most desirable brands in the world. So, it’s no surprise I draw many lessons from them and try to apply them to high-technology marketing in general. Trust me, this brand has enthusiasts (“a community” in Web 2.0-speak) to die for.

What the marketing whizzes who will ”teach” you how to have a brand like BMW don’t get is the flawless head-fake BMW’s marketing machine routinely executes by producing the exact kind of propaganda their hard-core community wants to consume while at the same time officially ignoring that community.

Two examples. First, this document describes in numbing detail the innovations and design philosophy of the then-new 2006 BMW 3 Series. Ostensibly, it’s for internal use only. But this document “leaked” into the enthusiast community and how many times do you think I, for example, have read this document? (Answer: too many. Most obscure thing I learned? That the interior door pulls for the left and right front doors are different, a point BMW makes to stress that real design takes into account things like the location of the window switches. Now, go look in your car. Are the pulls mirror images of each other? Hmmmm?)

How many times do you think other enthusiasts have read it? Now think about how many times its target audience — salespeople in BMW dealerships — read it. Brilliant marketing: write something “exclusive” for an audience that could care less, but make sure it gets out — as a leak — to the people who really care.

Today, the BMW world community is all a-titter…just freakin’ shakin’…with excitement over the new M3 (pictured above from the BMW USA web site in “European trim”…another nod to the dreams and aspirations of hard-core BMWphiles).

How to keep the excitement at fever pitch? Simple: issue a 93-page press kit on the car. Make sure it leaks so the enthusiast sites can post it. Fill it with an rich mix of over-the-top hyperbole (“…the BMW M3 has ranked alone as the epitome of ultimate dynamism derived directly from motorsport, a car offering powerful and superior aesthetics, as well as a truly incomparable driving experience…”) and ennui-inducing technical detail (“…electronically controlled power screwdrivers [are used] on all critical bolted connections…”). Then, in the most brilliant move possible, delay introducing the product into your largest market until the propaganda has generated intense longing in the community. The link above is for the UK introduction. Convenient, ain’t it?, that the US and UK markets share a common (OK, nearly mutually-intelligible) language.

I don’t have the words to describe how astonishingly successful BMW is at managing (or is it ”manipulating”?) its community. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go re-read all 93-pages…

While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth.

Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T has been the target of repeated customer lawsuits (here and here) and has done just about everything it can do to customers from over-selling Digital One Rate in the late 1990′s to consistently scoring at the bottom of Consumer Reports subscriber surveys.

In fairness, none of the cell companies are very good. But the prize for being the worst for the longest and consistently treating customers like dirt goes to whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-today AT&T.

When Apple, the control freak of the consumer electronics biz, made the rounds of carriers to see which would allow it to control the user experience (this is from Wall Street Journal stories that you need a subscription to read), only AT&T signed up and in return got an exclusive for the iPhone.

I’ll bet you Steve Jobs and Apple are regretting that decision. It’s been a mess, with the ‘Net exploding with horror stories around activation and porting numbers from other carriers. AT&T and Apple are both minimizing the impact publicly, saying that it’s only a few customers.

I know how I’d feel if I’d just made a $2000 commitment to the iPhone — $600 plus 24 months of service at a minimum of $60 — and I was in the “2%” having problems. (Get this, even if you are an AT&T customer you must still activate for two more years. Talk about extending the sentence!)

C’mon…we all know when they’re saying “we had an unexpected surge” or “we’ll clear it up soon” it means it’s outta control. Can we really believe that AT&T didn’t know how many iPhones would be in the stores on June 29th? That they couldn’t have sized their systems to prepare for that number?

The thing is, this must be amazingly painful inside Apple. I feel for them. They tried to keep control of the experience, but they aren’t a cell phone operator…they just really don’t know how to screw customers.

AT&T has sure taught Apple something about control this week. It’s one lesson I hope Apple doesn’t take to heart.

I apologize for the knowledge-base-like title of this post, but I did it in hopes the search engines will index it and save some other poor shlub the four months of effort it took me to get my iPod to synch with my HP Pavilion desktop.

In case you found this post after months and months of searching for others who have the problem that under Vista iTunes slows to a crawl and will say “syncing iPod” for three days or more without actually doing anything and can’t wait to read my more detailed tale of wow, here’s the link to what you need.

Now, back to my tech support catharsis. I upgraded to Vista from XP on my Pentium D 3Ghz machine right after Vista shipped. Everything worked but the iPod. When I connected it, it would hang. The rest of the system was fine.

OK, I figured, Apple wasn’t supporting iTunes on Vista. So, I’ll wait.

Then, both Apple and Microsoft started fixing the problems. Plus, this same iPod connected and synched flawlessly on my ThinkPad running Vista. If you can get a ThinkPad running Vista to synch with your iPod…well you get the idea.

So, I swapped cables on the HP. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and QuickTime dozens of times. Finally, I wiped the hard disk and reinstalled Vista cold on the theory that the XP upgrade left vestigial shmutz that messed up iTunes.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — worked. Calls to Apple had them scratching their heads as well. Search after search on every search engine with every combination of search terms I could think of produced nothing of use. One thing years of technical trouble-shooting has taught me is that you rarely discover a new problem yourself. Especially after four months, someone had to have had this problem. But just wasn’t yielding to my attempts to find even a small clue.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I connected an old 2G FireWire iPod to the HP and it worked perfectly.

Voila! It must be the USB ports, right? Right. But where do you get updated USB drivers for Vista? Actually, you don’t. You get updated .INF files for the chipset in your computer (if it’s an Intel chipset on the motherboard) that tell Windows Vista how to configure the USB ports. Apparently, the .INF files that ship with Vista aren’t compatible with this motherboard’s chipset and the Apple iPod. Imagine that: the installed configuration of the OS (remember, I installed from scratch) doesn’t have compatible configuration files for the USB drivers…at least for this motherboard and chipset combo.

Every other USB  device appeared to work perfectly, with the exception of the speaker mute button on my HP USB keyboard. That fact made this problem even more devilishly hard.

So, there’s my tale of woe for the Internet community in hopes it helps somebody. If you have an HP Pavilion with an Intel chipset and iTunes won’t synch with your USB iPod, update the .inf files.

First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself.

Well…ahem…back to the post at hand.

I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about all things WordPress. You know, comments like “It’s OK to stop ranting about this now” and “Here comes the blogger.”

Mostly I smile and take it in stride because I know what they don’t: there’s a subculture around WordPress that is worldwide, massive and far more rabid that I could ever be.

It’s simple. WordPress is just too cool to ignore. Consider: a multi-user content management system easy enough for non-techies to author in and which middling geeks can setup and maintain for…uh…zero dollars.

But it’s not just that the system is so rich. It’s that there’s this amazing community that supports and enhances it. It’s the whole subculture that makes it so engrossing.

And what’s always amazed me about technical subcultures is their binary nature. Once you stumble onto (or into) them, being involved is like driving a fast car on the track. It consumes you a little.

The other side is that if you aren’t “in it,” not only does the subculture not exist at all for you, but you are likely to swear the subculture can’t exist. If someone twists your arm and forces you to look, the binary off state makes you minimize the value of the subculture (“Who reads blogs? I don’t know anyone important who reads them.” “Nobody’s making any money from blogging.” “My customers are pizza delivery people.” “Blog, schmog.”).

Today, two things happened that made it clear to me I’m clearly in the on state with the WordPress subculture.

First, I found the WordPress podcast. No surprise here…I loved it. This is a high-quality, authentic podcast about the subculture. It’s proof positive this thing has gotten bigger than outsiders can see.

Then, tonight, I had a long email thread with a plugin developer whose plugin isn’t working for me. Lemme tell you, Microsoft and IBM can’t support a product better than this or at lower cost. This guy is doing it for the community…for the subculture…because he likes it and he knows how important it is.

So, all I can say is, it’s good enough for me.

I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and unresponsive conglomerate that’s cruising more on astonishing marketing than satisfying customers.

Lest it be said I never have a nice word for Apple (as is often said about me and Microsoft, to whom I will shortly return to bashing like Niyazov’s beloved melons dropped off a roof), I gotta say my new 80GB iPod’s audio quality simply blows me away.

I have two kids. A teenager and a tween. As you might imagine, they are hard on iPods, destroying an average of one every 18 months. That’s OK, because the stinkin’ batteries don’t last that long anyway.

(Roger Greene, for whom I used to work at Ipswitch, is apparently as inveterate a heat-seeker as I am. When he upgraded years ago to, I think, a 4G iPod, he asked me if I wanted his 20GB 1G unit. Even though I already had a 10GB 1G iPod, I was glad to have the spare unit – my kids had already started eating iPods. Today, neither his nor my 1G iPod can last the two minutes it takes to play The Doors’ Hello, I Love You. And the $15 Apple sent me to make up for the short battery life buys about 4% of the 5.5G 80GB iPod. Thanks so much, Apple. At least you could honestly assert every successive iPod had better battery life than the previous generation.)

In what is probably a self-serving justification for satisfying my toy habit, the way it works here is that the kids get my latest iPod as a hand-me-down when they kill one of theirs. I get the new one. (-:

This time, I was really worried about passing along my 60GB 5G black iPod video when Becca came home and said:

“Dad, the iPod broke.”

“You mean you dropped it? Treated it like a bookmark between your 500 page history and math books in your backpack?”

“C’mon, Dad! Do you have to be so annoying? It just broke.”

The audio quality of that 5G iPod was superior, delivering vastly better performance than Bill Machrone heard on the 4G iPod. If you are willing to make slightly larger MP3′s using LAME’s VBR mode (I use 320 kbps as the maximum bit rate) and something like EAC (troublesome as it is to use) to really get them bits off the disc cleanly, you can produce MP3′s I defy you to differentiate from the uncompressed WAV file. With my Sennheiser PX100 phones, the 60GB iPod sounded sublime. Sure…purists will complain about “artifacts” and other inventions normal people cannot hear. But with this unit, there were times I would be running and would have to stop dead just to listen to the music. It was just that sublime.

But I am happy to report that the 5.5G 80GB unit I bought to replace the 60GB unit I gave my kid sounds even better. I wonder if the improvement is due to better decoding. But increasingly, I have come to think that the 5.5G unit sounds so good because Apple reduced noise in the amplifier.

Unlike nearly every MP3 player I’ve heard, this 5.5G unit says completely silent as you crank up the volume in phones with no program material. No hiss, no pops. Just silence. When used with the Logic7 audio system (13 speakers, 450 watts) in my car, the sound is simply astonishing.

This thing is so good it’s almost worth the price Apple makes me pay for a scratch-seeking, astonishingly fragile, non Vista-compatible MP3 player.

</Turkmen-apple-bashi>

Hello…Apple? Could you please please pretty please ship the freakin’ update of iTunes for Windows Vista?

I know – I just know – you have the thing finished. After all, if nearly everybody else could have their products somewhat ready for Vista, couldn’t you? I mean you own the whole MP3 marketplace, right? Surely someone on the iTunes team had access to MSDN and copies of Vista since frikin’ November, when it shipped to businesses.

You’re just waiting to inflict suffering on Vista early adopters, right? I don’t care if it’s spite or callousness. You’ve had your fun. Now, you gotta get over it, move on and ship the damn thing.

Seriously, you’ve made the point: Vista is hard to upgrade to. But is it really necessary to make the point by killing my iPod? I can’t sync pictures (I left the darn computer on overnight), music and podcasts syncing is a mess and takes forever. My library is a disaster. If you can ship a fix to play iTunes store purchases, you can ship the whole thing.

C’mon now…you’ve made the point? How about acting like you like the customers who bought iPods to use with Windows.

I know that in the torrent of comment, wailing and teeth-gnashing the blogosphere, podosphere and ipodo-universe will generate about Steve Job’s comments on digital-rights management, my little post here will live in obscurity. Still, I can’t help myself: I’m blue in the face with envy…Envy of Apple’s marketing brilliance. And the power they have to call the kettle black.

Face it, this diatribe is as self-serving, as blind to reality, as any piece of propaganda written during the Cultural Revolution. Apple doesn’t give a damn — not a freakin’ blob of spittle — about “openness” or “accessibility.”

But, by putting the onus on the record companies for the big, bad DRM Apple is “forced” to use (against its will!), they neatly avoid the real issue: they’d rather die than open iPod to anyone.

But the world will applaud Jobs for taking this stance. Apple has neatly deflected the fact that its near monopoly of digital music players and downloads gives it market power it refuses to use. And by smearing everyone from Microsoft to the big record companies, Apple brilliantly panders to the conventional wisdom while adding luster to its brand.

Man, these guys are good…really, really good. I only wish I could stop feeling like Winston Smith.

Wow! Is this Internet thing powerful or what?

Over the Xmas holiday, a well-known security expert and professor in New Zealand named Peter Gutman wrote and posted on the ‘net a scathing critique of Windows Vista’s new DRM technology.

Now, it’s nearly impossible for you to go anywhere on the ‘Net without seeing people podcast and blog about it.

Wait…hold on…wait! Before you decide you would rather die than read an expose of Vista security, consider Gutman’s “Executive Executive summary”:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

The entire paper is full of such pithy, outraged writing, and I highly recommend it to you.

But I am struck by two things…beyond my outrage at the allegations Gutman makes.

First, this is another example of the overriding importance of the ‘net. People from the CAD community, the security community and a bazillion other communities have begun fervent discussions of this paper. Normally, these communities are somewhat isolated from each other. But when something like this “breaks out” into general discussion among communities, it’s a beautiful thing to watch and so much more powerful.

Second…and here’s where I can’t help myself…I just love it when MSFT gets whacked. I know they’ve tried hard to reform themselves. I know they aren’t the overarching power broker they once were. And I know there are lots of hard-working and bright people in Microsoft. Still, they deserve it.

Microsoft is a leader in an industry where strong, undiluted ideas come right at them. They can’t plead innocence. But they have a consistent habit of being tone deaf.

I’m sorry that it makes me gleeful that they’re getting whacked. But it amuses me to watch a company that built a monopoly on the back of an open, ubiquitous platform clumsily close that platform and pay the price at the hands of multiple online communities.

I am seriously bent out of shape by an editorial entitled “Franchise Freedom” that I read in the January 2, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

I can’t link to the editorial here, because even the Journal’s red-meat-Republican opinions are locked behind a subscription site. (How very web-centric…how very authentic it makes me think they are when they report on the Internet. See?…I’m so upset I am “side-ranting.”)

What’s got me so fired up are the unfounded, baseless accusations printed in the editorial to add emphasis to the Journal’s support of the smoke-filled-room FCC action to “deregulate” the cable TV franchising process.

Fortunately, nobody believes this FCC gift to the regional Bells will stand.

So, enter the WSJ…defender of mega-telcos against people like me. I am apparently “beholden” to the cable industry. (I may be infamous elsewhere, but I absolutely guarantee you nobody in Charter Communications in Worcester knows who I am.)

I and my hard-working colleagues on the Southborough Cable TV Committee have been, apparently, “shaking down” Verzion for things like service to our whole town, requests to interconnect their system with the existing system for public programming and a fair level of support for continuing that programming.

I’m incensed. (Duh!) I wrote the Journal a letter, which met with complete silence. I’ve copied it here, mostly for catharsis.

Last year, you may remember that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia got upset for being caught giving a gesture in public that conveys precisely how I feel about the Journal’s editorial. Since Justice Scalia is a favorite of the Journal’s opinion editors, I though I’d send them an “alito” of my own. Maybe they understand that better.

Here’s the letter I sent the Journal:

Dear Sir and/or Madame:

Usually, your more strident opinions roll off my back easily.

But reading Franchise Freedom (WSJ, January 2. 2007) felt more like being stabbed in the back. As a member of a “so-called” local franchising authority, I vehemently reject the accusation that anyone is “shaking down” the competitive cable applicant in my Town. Further, nobody I know working in the largely volunteer cable franchising authorities in Massachusetts cities and towns is doing anything “at the behest of the cable industry.” It’s wrong of you to assert that is the case and an insult to many of the good people working on these issues at the local level. Painting us with the brush of corruption is facile…and dead wrong.

On the contrary, the Bells have used their resources and power at the Federal and state regulatory and legislative levels to seek expedited entry to the cable business while simultaneously dragging their heels and bemoaning their fate at the lands of local officials. They simply placed multiple bets…and the FCC rolled their number. Meanwhile, they just sat pat. The irony is that with local authorities – like my Town — who have consistently expressed a desire for rapid negotiations and which want vigorous cable competition, the imperious Bells have slow-rolled us while seeking a better regulatory deal.

What the FCC’s decision has done is to introduce chaos to the franchising process, ultimately delaying cable competition by ensuring legal challenges and injecting uncertainty into the process. Disrupting 40 years of well-established process does not accelerate government. It paralyzes it, and for far longer than more comprehensively thought-out deregulation would have. This was bad public policy…and a not-so-subtle parting gift from the Republicans to the Bells.

You have reflexively sided with the Bells, impugning not just the entire cable industry (an easy target, I must admit) but also scores of well-intentioned and civic-minded people who have until now effectively managed local cable franchising. The system does need improvement – and both Democrat FCC Commissioners said as much during hearings – but that change cannot come by transferring public assets to the Bells.

Thank you.

Alex Neihaus

Many pundits who review software are saying that Microsoft has "caught up" with Firefox in Internet Explorer 7 (here and here, among others).

I beg to differ. Since the mid-1990s, what Microsoft has done — time after time — is deliver pale imitations of others' UI inventions. Have you ever used the View menu in Outlook? Of course not…because it's a bad imitation of Notes release 3's view menu, which Lotus dumped in about 1996.

Have you seen Office 2007? This is the first release in which Microsoft has done it all itself, having abandoned the "common user access" design metaphor it ripped off from IBM during the 1980s joint venture. (Historical note: the menu system and windows graphic controls descended from an IBM product called GDDM, which lead to OS/2 Presentation Manager. In fact, Microsoft used to actually distributed the IBM Common User Access manuals with Windows 3.1 SDK's.)

Office 2007 is a complete mess. The eye candy gets in the way of anything you want to do, reduces screen real estate for the actual work to near nothing and doesn't make life any easier for novices. That's what you get when Microsoft tries to "innovate." And as for Vista, well…I don't use a Mac, but even I can see they've copied Tiger.

Tonight a single difference between IE7 and Firefox 2.0 crystallized this for me.

You can almost hear the design discussion in Microsoft during the IE7 planning meetings: "We gotta get us some tabbed browsing. It's killing us to not have it. Put it in…now."

So, you end up with IE7's "interpretation" of tabbed browsing, which includes a close box (the red "x") on each tab. 

What happens if you accidentally hit that close button? I have, and I'll bet thousands of others have in a rush to get somewhere else on the screen in a hurry. In IE7, you've lost that tab. It's gone. You gotta open a new window and reload the page.

In Firefox — which admittedly didn't have the close box until Firefox 2.0 — the developers have really innovated. You can undo the close. Check out these two images from the context menu (right click menu) of each browser:

See the "undo close tab" selection? Click this, and a new tab is opened and the last page is reloaded. True innovation from the open-source Firefox folks.

Here's the equivalent context menu from IE7:

A pale imitation, to be sure. Just enough for Microsoft to obscure, once again, true innovation by delivering "just enough" to say they have the thing they couldn't invent themselves.

OK, you say, nobody uses context menus and nobody ever undoes an accidental close.

Maybe (though I found it and used it). But my point is about innovation.

Microsoft just doesn't have any. 

My Google searching skills must be off…way off. I'd been trying for days to find an authoritative recommendation for when to switch from summer (actually All-Season) tires to snow tires.

I just couldn't find anything other than the usual forum drivel. But then Tire Rack sent me instructions with the new winter tires I ordered and voila! An answer!

Seems that once the air temperature stays consistently below 45F, it's time to switch the tires. Apparently — and I liked this logic — the compounds on winter tires stay softer at lower temperatures. Becoming more rigid is what makes summer and All-Season tires less effective in the snow. But, if you put winter tires on too early, they're so soft they just melt away.

Lest you think I have hit rock bottom on blogging ideas, I want to tell you that I actually find this scintillating. No excuses…I'm into tire tech. Far from being lowly pieces of rubber, my flirtations with track days have taught me that very little is more important than the tires.

So, now you know. And, admit it…just to yourself…don't you feel at least a little smarter?