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?