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Personal Computing

Friday, May 7, 2010

iPad - Part 4: What You Can Not Do

There are many things you can do with the iPad and we are only at the beginning -- but there are some things you can't do. Although I have been accused in jest that my enthusiasm for the iPad makes some wonder if I am on the Apple payroll. I am indeed very bullish about the iPad but this story is to highlight some of the things that -- at this stage -- you can do or not do very well with the iPad. Will the iPad replace the laptop? At some point, yes, but at this point I am writing this post on my ThinkPad (running Ubuntu Linux with the Google Chrome browser and WordPress). 

Gadgets, Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone May 7, 2010 10:26 PM

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

iPad - Part 3: Other Reading

Many of us have weighed in on the various aspects of e-books and e-readers. The jury will be out for quite awhile as the publishers, Apple, Sony, Google, Lenovo, Dell, and numerous others refine their strategy for what goes into a book, how it is displayed, and how it is priced. While the book war heats up, there are other dimensions of the e-readers to consider.

Reading magazines and newspapers on the Kindle can be quite convenient  -- especially if you travel a lot -- but I can't say it is enjoyable or even natural. On the iPad reading magazines and newspapers is enjoyable and increasingly will seem the natural way to read them. The New York Times got good press at the launch of the iPad but I find it weak. The WSJ, however, is quite good. Easy to navigate and you get the full "paper" as it was published in the morning plus updates during the day. The ads are annoying and it doesn't take long to realize that it takes two swipes to go to the next page if the page you are leaving is an ad. I would rather not have the ads but having them is the publishers only hope of making money which they need if we want good journalists. The NPR and BBC news apps are pretty good also. The Zinio ipad app is home to a large number of magazines. A few are free. Pricing is reasonable -- Popular Mechanics, for example, is $7.99 for tweleve issues. Flipping Zinio pages is smooth and natural. Bottom line is that reading newspapers and magazines on the iPad is a pleasing and natural experience. My friend Jim Kollegger at Genesys Partners says "the iPad will do for publishing what the ATM did for cash".

Aside from books, magazines, and newspapers there is an infinite amount of material to read on the iPad. Even the uninitiated organizations of the world are distributing their documents in PDF format. Not my long term favorite format but it is far better than receiving a doc file that wants to open some "bloatware" to be read. In cases where I must receive a fax I have it sent to my efax number and it shows up in the gmail inbox as a PDF. When checking out of a hotel I ask the desk to fax a copy of my room bill "to my office, no cover sheet required". The PDF in my inbox can then be archived or used for reimbursement purposes. For more significant PDF's that are important for future reference or even a board packet for a meeting I use the GoodReader iPad app to store and read the files. I would prefer that things were synced in the cloud rather than iTunes but the process of moving PDF's from my ThinkPad to the iPad over the home LAN is easy now that I have done it quite a few times. The storage of the iPad allows nearly unlimited documents for most of us and having the documents "local" is nice for travel plus partaking of the great zoom and pinch features lets you have whatever the optimum view for you may be. This is especially important for charts and graphs.

In preparation for a board meeting this past week, I received the normal FedEx package containing the agenda and board papers. It was 38 pages, and including the binder clip, weighed a half-pound. I emailed the person organizing the meeting and asked for a PDF. After saving the attachment on the ThinkPad and uploading it over the LAN to the GoodReader app on the iPad I was good to go. Both reading the papers in a comfy chair the day before the meeting and following as needed at the conference room table were a welcome approach compared to fumbling with the paper. I reminded some people about the time, cost, and environmental impact of the old approach. In theory the same thing could be done with the iPhone but I have to admit that it is difficult with tabular information and graphs. It has certainly been feasible with the laptop but then you have to worry about battery life and the bulk of the device on the table. The iPad fills the bill really well. Another handy document reading tool on the iPad is the Memeo Connect Reader which syncs your Google Docs folders to the iPad app. This is really nice when you are on an airplane or somewhere that doesn't have a WiFi signal.

And then there is reading what bloggers have to say and the thousands of news feeds. I am using both NewsRack and Early Edition on the iPad. Both are evolving, listening to feedback and continuously improving their products. You can read patrickWeb, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Engadget or any of the millions of feeds that are out there. You can add new feeds on the iPad or use Google Reader on the desktop and have the feeds automatically sync to your iPad reader. The size and clarity of the iPad makes it quite enjoyable to scan through the feeds and read stories of interest. Another nice iPad app is the Wiki (squared). You enter a word of interest, read the article about it just like an encyclopedia but then follow the links and read to your heart's content. A real bargain for 99 cents.

How about creating documents? There are more tools to read than there are to write but there are some incredibly sophisticated writing tools available on the iPad. Apple itself features Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. I was skeptical about creating and manipulating a spreadsheet on the iPad but with Apple Numbers and no training I have learned how to do it. It is mostly intuitive. What surprised me is the breadth and depth of the functionality. I have a couple of other favorite iPad tools for writing. First is the CarbonFin Outliner. I have always liked outliners as a way to organize thoughts for a meeting or discussion agenda. You can add bullets and sub-bullets and then move them up or down or promote or demote them in the outline. The Outliner is available on a web site and you can sync your outlines. That enables you to make a change on any computer or on the iPad and everything is synced. This is the beauty of the Cloud and the way all applications should be (and will be). I have been using the Outliner for more than a year with the iPhone and I can highly recommend it. Another nice app is Things. Aside from being way overpriced ($19.99), Things provides a well organized way to capture your to do's in buckets -- Today, Next, Scheduled for a specific date, Someday, and Projects. As things get completed or moved around they show up in the Logbook. I have tried dozens of task list managers over the years and end up using scraps of paper and email as the dominant tools. Maybe Things, with the personal relationship people will have with their  iPad, will make it a winner. I especially like the "Someday" category as a way to capture those things you think of that you want to do but you know you are not going to do anytime soon.

Meanwhile I am still reading The Great Bridge by David McCullough. Among my friends and recent acquaintances it seems I am the only one who has not read this great epic book. Both the political and engineering complexities encountered in the project are mind boggling. Even though I can't seem to find the time to finish this great book in a timely manner, I am getting used to reading on the iPad.

iPad stories on patrickWeb
Other gadget related stories on patrickWeb

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 27, 2010 09:30 PM

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

iPad Thoughts

I confess -- the doorway did not get out of my sight for the entire day yesterday. I had placed my order early in the morning on March 12 and when the first tranch of thousands of iPads left China for Louisville, KY and then to Orlando and on to Daytona and then onto a big brown truck, I did not want to be the unreliable part of the distribution scheme that Apple had planned with precision. By 4 PM the doubts were arising but at 5 PM my iPhone rang and it was the UPS driver at the front door with an iPad in his hands. Here are the thoughts about the new tablet so far.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, iPhone, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi April 21, 2010 10:05 AM

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

iPad - Part 2: Book Reading

If the financial analysts are right, Apple may soon have a market capitalization of more than $250 billion -- that is one quarter of a trillion dollars. Apple stock is up seven-fold in the past five years. People were skeptical of the stock price then and some are now but it is quite possible that the iPhone and the iPad have changed the game for the company in a very positive way. The "spillover" effect is that Mac sales are also booming and half of the buyers are first-time Mac buyers. Can Apple sustain such a high growth rate? The world is a big place and more than half of the iPhone sales last quarter were outside of America. The iPad sales outside the U.S. have not even started yet. The potential is very large -- many billions of dollars. 

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 20, 2010 10:00 AM

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Neonatal Healthcare

We can all picture a hospital neonatal environment where a plethora of
medical monitors connected to babies are used to alert hospital staff
to potential health problems before patients develop clinical signs of infection or other issues. There are breakthroughs on the horizon for how this will be done. Today the instrumentation generates huge amounts of information -- up to 1,000 readings per second -- which is summarized into one reading every 30 to 60 minutes. The information is stored for up to 72 hours and is then discarded. If the stream of data could be captured, stored and analyzed in real time there would be a huge opportunity to improve the quality for special care babies. 

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 11, 2010 06:59 PM

Sunday, April 4, 2010

iPad - Part 1: Initial Thoughts

I confess -- the doorway did not get out of my sight for the entire day yesterday. I had placed my order early in the morning on March 12 and when the first tranch of thousands of iPads left China for Louisville, KY and then to Orlando and on to Daytona and then onto a big brown truck, I did not want to be the unreliable part of the distribution scheme that Apple had planned with precision. By 4 PM the doubts were arising but at 5 PM my iPhone rang and it was UPS driver at the front door with an iPad in his hands.

If you know how to use an iPhone then you know how to use an iPad. I would not agree with some who say the iPad is *just* a "big iPhone".  In fact I see the iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions -- not immediately. Over time, however, it is easy to see how the world will change. When we introduced the ThinkPad in 1992 it seemed like a huge deal just to get everyone at IBM to agree with the name. No one, certainly not me as VP of marketing at the time, had any idea that more than 30 million ThinkPads would be sold. The iPad will surely sell multiple times that number but more important the iPad will change the model of personal computing -- not immediately and not for everyone, but for many millions of people the PC will begin to look like a dinosaur. One of my reasons for such a bullish view is the number of skeptics coming forward to say that the iPad is not what it is cracked up to be. Skeptics have been a reliable predictor of the next big thing -- the Internet is too insecure to allow for banking and insurance. WiFi is too expensive and slow and will fizzle. Blogging was to peak out some years ago. Social networking is a fad. The iPad is just a big iPhone. Those with decades of experience with PC's may find it difficult to master the iPad but the younger generation which grew up on Nintendo will find it natural. They will use it not just for games, music, videos, and browsing but for creative work -- writing, drawing, composing, authoring, building, creating documents and web sites and multi-media content.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 4, 2010 10:59 PM

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Recycling

Most of us have old computers or electronic devices in our basements. Among my "collection" was a huge CRT computer display. Not a flat panel -- a huge old-fashioned monitor. My back hurt for days from lifting it. Not only did it weigh 100 pounds or so but it cost a small fortune in electricity and has a very ugly carbon footprint. I had not used the CRT display for years but one day I decided it was time for it to stop taking up space in the basement. How to get rid of it?

Too big to put in the trash and dangerous in the event the CRT got broken and gasses escaped. A quick search on the web revealed that BestBuy was the closest recycling program to where I live. I loaded up the truck and visited their store on a Sunday afternoon. They charged $10 but gave me a gift card for the same amount.  The young macho man who assisted me grabbed the monster display from the back of the truck and nearly dropped it. I hope his back feels better than mine, but one thing for sure is that the environment is better off by taking this monster out of circulation.

Whatever you believe about the effect of green house gasses, there is a compelling financial reason to be aggressive in reducing your footprint. Another dinosaur in my basement was an old PC server with a half-terabye of RAID storage in it. I used the "redundant array of inexpensive disks" as a backup server -- music, photos, and data files of all kinds. (see various stories here in the blog about backup). It had served me well but then one day I learned about the Kill-A-Watt Meter. After plugging the server into the meter and later checking the reading I found that the server was using $50 per month of electricity. I then bought an Iomega StorCenter terabyte external hard drive which I placed on top of the now powered down rack in the basement. It is a tiny fraction of the size and uses a tiny fraction of the electricity. The setup was trivial.

I was proud of the savings but then I learned about iDrive.com. The online backup storage service costs $4.95 per month -- for 150 gigabytes; free for 2 gigabytes) and brought my in-house electrical bill for backup to zero. The "backup in the clouds" solution has been totally reliable and automatically keeps all of my files backed up. Cloud computing is compelling but moving your servers and storage to the clouds does not eliminate the issue of greenhouse gasses -- it just moves it to the cloud provider. How big is their footprint? I don't know the answer but I am confident that with thousands of servers (not just one in the basement) that they are highly motivated to be energy efficient. Helping data centers become more efficient (and green) has become a really big business for IBM and others, and as footprint consciousness increases companies will ask their providers not only about their security and scalability but also about their policies and practices for handling their equipment recycling and their data center electrical usage.

Speaking of Cloud Computing, there is an interesting new post at Irving's blog about "The Big Shift: from Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning".

Personal Computing July 26, 2009 08:02 PM

Sunday, December 28, 2008

In The Clouds -- Part 3

One might properly conclude from prior stories that I have become a real believer in Cloud Computing. From a personal perspective, the vision is simple. All of my documents, contacts, calendar entries, photos, music, patrickWeb content, and backup files safely and securely kept in various clouds. All contacts, calendar entries, and selected songs and pictures, and email synchronized and accessible on the iPhone. Everything else accessible via the iPhone browser or any browser or any computer, anywhere, anytime. It is that simple. Oh, how I wish. The vision is attainable and I am confident that it will happen in 2009 -- but, there is a way to go.

Let's start with the easy parts. Effective and simple backup has been elusive for me for decades and much has been written here about the subject. Finally, a solution is in place that I am comfortable with. It has two parts to it. First is idrive.com. The service is free for up to 2 GB. You simply identify which files and folders are critical and it keeps them backed up in the idrive cloud. Very simple interface and you can't beat the price. I have been using the service on two Windows ThinkPads in the house and have been extremely pleased with how it works..

The other half of the solution is the Iomega one terabyte StorCenter. The six-pound marvel plugs right into the home LAN in the basement. Very inexpensive and easy to setup. I use it to back up really big files and Linux ThinkPads. It is set up as an I: drive and is accessible just like the C: drive. It is connected via gigabit ethernet so copying files to and from the box is lightning fast. Like the predecessor I had been using for years, it is RAID storage, so there are always redundant copies of everything. The box is smaller than half a shoe box and it uses roughly $3 per month in electricity. The predecessor used $30 per month, so the justification to spend $250 on the StorCenter was very simple.

There are two applications on my desktop that keep me chained to Windows and which I backup every time I use them. First is Quicken, which I I have been using since Release 1.0 back in the early 1980's. As I wrote in Net Attitude seven years ago, the web version is not a viable alternative. Unfortunately, that is still true today. In theory a web-based application like Mint.com and others could replace Quicken but they just are not up to it quite yet. The other workhorse for me is Dreamweaver, which I use to manage patrickWeb. In theory there are many web based alternatives but I have yet to find one that is as powerful and easy to use. Eventually, I expect both of these to be "in the clouds" but not quite yet.

Now, on to the more interesting things. Photos are all in the Picasa cloud and music is in iTunes. No particular issues with either of them. Next is email. I started using email in the early 1980's with a system at IBM called PROFS. In 1994 the company email system became Lotus Notes. I was an early adopter and in the beginning there was nobody to send email to! When I e-tired in 2001 I switched to Microsoft Outlook so I could be like everybody else that I attended tech conferences with. As with many people I know, it developed into a love-hate relationship. The Lotus and Microsoft mail solutions are great in many respects but in a way you are chained to someone's central infrastructure with them. I was looking for freedom. Along came gmail and, bingo, I was liberated. Or so I thought. The mail part of it was easy. Gmail is lightning fast and although it is a "cloud" application with all the user functionality appearing in the browser, it acts like a desktop application and I can use it on the Ubuntu Linux ThinkPad in the kitchen, a Windows PC in the workshop, or any computer anywhere. And freedom from Outlook -- almost, expect for contacts and calendar entries, my lifeblood.

Contacts and calendar entries were still in Outlook but they synchronized with MobileMe which in turn synchronized with the iPhone. Seems a bit convoluted but it worked. Some occasional glitches but it was acceptable. How to add a new contact or modify a calendar entry? Could do it with Outlook but that would defeat the purpose behind my strategy. MobileMe might actually be the perfect cloud application. It was awkward at first and Apple definitely had some problems as chronicled here before, but I began to get used to it. Apple appeared to have fixed the most serious bugs, and I actually began to like it. However, as I got to be really dependent on MobileMe I found a lot of shortcomings. Calendar invitations did not work. Contacts would at times "go missing". The MobileMe page would hang up in certain browsers under certain conditions. Bottom line -- MobileMe proved to be extremely slow and unreliable. It had to go. It became clear that the solution was Google contacts and Google calendar. I was getting sucked in -- just as Google no doubt hopes we all will. Quickly getting over the issue of having all my eggs in Google's basket, the bigger issue became how to get there from here.

MobileMe not only has huge performance problems it is also a closed proprietary system, just like iTunes and most everything Apple does. Some people fear Google but what gives me comfort is that they use Internet standards and they provide both import and export from any of their applications. Their only lock on you is that their stuff works really well and you get addicted. MobileMe is a one way system -- easy to import things to it but you can not export. Maybe you can if you have a Mac but not with the hodgepodge of Windows and Linux systems on my home LAN. No problem. I synched back to Outlook, exported from Outlook, and then imported to Google. Good riddance to MobileMe. Now everything is in Google. Calendar invitations work. Contacts are nicely integrated with the calendar and with email and with maps and documents that I choose to share. Microsoft has good reason to fear Google. Their cloud approach is far superior to the heavy-weight desktop approach of Outlook and Office. Google is not without faults, however. There are issues when importing and at one point I lost all the contacts and calendar entries and had to stitch everything back together from various snippets and backups. It was worth the pain.

Google Docs is still a work in progress but highly worth using. You can email documents to Google docs but not pdf files. You can upload pdfs but only one at a time. There are issues with printing certain things and various other shortcomings, but having documents in the cloud assures they are continuously backed up. You can share them with others and work on them anytime from anywhere.

The biggest gap with the Google cloud is that it doesn't synchronize contacts and calendar entries with the iPhone. Ooops. I am sure they want to offer synch and that it is not a technical issue. It is an Apple issue for sure. I found two third-party applications in the app store that not only work with Google but also provide extra functionality on the iPhone than the basic calendar and contact manager that comes with it. I can recommend them both -- SaiSuke calendar and Sync in a Blink for contacts. I am sure Google will soon offer their own iPhone synchronization soon.

If this all sounds complicated -- it is. I have spent many hours getting to this point but I am a happy camper. More importantly, I am confident it will get better and better and I am almost no longer chained to my PC. Almost everything is in the clouds!

Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone December 28, 2008 10:55 AM

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

iPhone - Update No. 13

I am sticking to my story -- the iPhone 3G is fantastic. There are some issues however. The iPhone is much more than a "cell phone" -- it is a platform. The six basic elements of the platform are the iPhone itself, the network (AT&T in the United States), iTunes, the "App Store", MobileMe and, most importantly, the applications.

Some are saying that since the new iPhone 2.0 software is available for the original iPhone that there is no need to upgrade to the iPhone 3G. It is true that there is no need to but there are a number of good reasons to. The new iPhone uses the new "new AT&T" 3G network which is claimed to be twice as fast -- as something. Speed claims are rarely delivered upon but no doubt that the 3G network is faster. The receiver in the iphone is also better even when communicating with an AT&T non-3G tower. I have noticed at least one bar improvement here at the lake where there is no 3G tower. The WiFi implementation is better too. Not sure if it is the hardware or software that is improved but it is much more reliable and doesn't get confused about whether to use the cellular signal or the WiFi signal. I am getting ahead of myself but one of the neatest new applications is TruPhone. TruPhone allows you to make a phone call from your iPhone via WiFi even if there is *no* tower of any kind. This happens. I was visiting friends in New Hampshire last weekend and we had brunch at a nice place in a remote area. There was no AT&T or roaming partner signal. None. No service. The restaurant, however, had a very nice free WiFi signal. With TruPhone you can make calls to anywhere in the world at a very low price -- pennies per minute. If you are calling another TruPhone user, it is free. I made some calls with it today and the quality was quite good.

There are other reasons to get the new iPhone. It is a bit thinner and more rounded and feels really nice to hold. It is a joy to use. The 3G has a real GPS receiver so when you use maps it is not an estimate of where you are based on cell phone tower triangulations -- it is using satellites to pinpoint exactly where you are. This opens up a slew of "location based" applications -- where is the nearest pizza place? What are the nearest geocaches? How do I get from where I am to wherever? The battery life is claimed to be better but I am not so sure of that. The iPhone has so much more to offer that I think the usage will be higher and maybe effective battery life will actually be less -- that is the case for me so far. Good idea to have a car charger on hand. One of the irritating things about the original iPhone is that you can't plug your favorite headset into it without a special adapter. The new iPhone accepts any headset and does so without any adapter. Bottom line, it is a really great device. There are many iPhone killers out there and more coming but I don't think they will match the overall experience of the Apple iPhone.

The network is another story and I have written about it in not so glowing terms in each iPhone update. I do think they are getting better. As I have always said, it depends on where you live. In the Northeast, Verizon has better coverage but AT&T is putting up new towers -- one just came online two miles from where I live in Connecticut. Naturally, major cities are covered. I also detect that AT&T customer service is really trying hard to satisfy their customers. The overall model of the industry is bad -- limited choice, get locked into two year contracts, and penalties if you want to move to something better.

iTunes continues to dominate online digital music sales but is facing more and more competition. I have been buying my music from Amazon. They have a nice downloader that puts the mp3 music directly into iTunes and there are no digital rights management restrictions. I like this because I can put purchased music on the iTrike. One of the other great applications on the iPhone is Pandora. This has become my music of choice and I play it through the Squeezebox. The Music Genome Project is awesome. If you love music, I highly recommend it.

iTunes is is integrated tightly (as all things Apple are) with the App Store. Both present easy ways to spend your money from your iPhone. I see this as a huge emerging trend. Call it m-Commerce (mobile commerce) if you want. While sitting in the dentist office awaiting your turn you can buy music and applications from your iPhone. An eBay application let's you spend your money -- or monitor your auctions-- there too. On launch day earlier this month there 500+ applications available for the iPhone. There will be many thousands of applications. So far, about 25% of them are free and supported by various flavors of advertising. You click to find the nearest pizza place and Apple gets a slice of the pie. Some are expensive but add huge value. I bought an aviation application for $69.99 that does everything a pilot can imagine. You can file flight plans with the FAA, check weather radar, airport runway lengths, pilot advisories, and much more. I am not a gamer but millions of people are and the iPhone accelerometer allows you to shake or wave the iPhone as inputs to the game. I have to admit that the Phone Saber is fun, albeit a bit geeky -- lets you take on Darth Vader. The impressive part to me is that the applications are stored in the iPhone but also in iTunes. When you sync you are syncing calendar, email, contacts, and the applications. When you click the App Store icon on the phone it tells you if any of your apps have an update available. When you do a search at the iTunes Store, the search results are organized by artists, albums, movies, etc. and applications.

On the flip side, organization is an issue. So far I have 55 applications. I expect to get many more. The human mind is amazing in terms of icon recognition. You just know that the Phone Saber is at the upper left of the fourth page of applications. But at some point it is overwhelming. I expect Apple or perhaps a third party developer will soon introduce an "app launcher" that allows you to tag an application as news, weather, financial, aviation, game, etc. and let you drill down to what you want.

Last, and I hope not least is MobileMe. Apple says it is the "Simple way to keep everything in sync". The vision is great -- your photos, contacts, email, and calendar are all pushed to your iPhone from the "Cloud". You can make a change on the iPhone and it shows up in Outlook or you can make a change in Outlook and it shows up in your iPhone. Those that work for companies that have Microsoft Exchange or IBM's Lotus Notes already have this kind of capability but there are millions of us who are "independent" and have our own mail server or use gmail, or Yahoo! or any of numerous other services. With MobileMe we can be like the "corporate" world but we can set our own policies and practices. We can have Exchange or Notes without Exchange or Notes. The cloud approach is clearly the next big thing (see prior stories on this and also by Irving), but Apple has stubbed their toe big time on this. There are numerous analysts, bloggers, and experts who have ripped them apart about the failings. As previously reported, I struggled with MobileMe the first few days but then it began to work properly for a few days albeit with some hiccups. Beginning this week it is not working properly. Calendar entries get duplicated, synchronization is sluggish or doesn't work at all at times. It is not like Apple to fail big time like this and I am sure they are scrambling to straighten things out.

I got an email from MobileMe@InsideApple.Apple.com the other day asking if I would be interested in a trial of MobileMe! Seems they didn't check their subscriber list first. The MobileMe web site says that "1% of MobileMe members have limited access to MobileMe Mail. Full service will be restored to these accounts on a rolling basis over the next few days". 99% and in a few days were good in the old days but not these days. I decided to try the online chat support to see if they could help resolve my problems. After sending my initial "instant message" I got a reply saying "A MobileMe Support Representative will be with you in approximately 26 minutes. We look forward to answering your questions". I got a reply while I had stepped out of the room for a minute and then had to start over and wait another 26 minutes. After 3 hours and 14 minutes the support rep said he had to escalate the problem to a specialist who would contact me by email. More than two days have gone by and I have had no email from Apple.

This all reminds me of the Fall of 1995 when we were preparing ibm.com to host the Olympic Games of 1996. It turned out to be the largest web site ever built. We had 54 outstanding engineers working on it and it turned out to be successful. Fortunately, we were able to convince the company to make a large investment in the infrastructure. I remember saying that "we don't how many people will come to the web site, we don't know when they will come, nor do we know what they will do when they get there". It was "trial by fire". That was 13 years ago. The lessons learned in 1995 served IBM well and it is now the largest web hosting company in the world. IBM doesn't always call it cloud computing, but they have built the largest clouds on Earth -- in the clouds. Apple has a lot to learn. I am confident they will. Their brand loyalty depends on it.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone <

IBM, Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone July 30, 2008 08:53 PM

Saturday, July 12, 2008

How To Remove AOL Advertising - Part 2

A number of readers have sent me feedback about the AOL advertising trailer in their email. One person was extremely happy and had been trying to get rid of the ads for a very long time. His response to the blog post was "Bless you!". Not sure if deserves a blessing but a number of people are really thankful to get rid of the obnoxious ads from the email they send. Two people told me that the link to remove the trailer did not work. I can't explain why it works for some and not for others. The only suggestion I can make is that if you are now aware of what is going on and want to stop it then try the link one more time. If it doesn't work then call AOL support and ask them to remove the trailer for you.

Media, Personal Computing July 12, 2008 10:28 AM

Monday, July 7, 2008

How To Remove AOL Advertising From Your Email

In the last Supernova story I opined about how bad TV advertising is. The broadcast networks are not the only culprits who are bombarding us with their messages. In fact one of the worst perpetrators is AOL. Millions of people use AOL for their email service. No problem with that but AOL appends an ad at the end of every email their users send. I got an email from a fellow board member this morning and the epilogue said "Gas prices getting you down? Search AOL Autos for fuel-efficient used cars.". How bad is that? My distinguished colleague sending me used car ads!

This is a classic case of Opt In vs. Opt Out. When you get an AOL email account, they automatically Opt you In to include advertising at the end of your emails. It is possible to Opt Out but it isn't easy. They intentionally make it hard or at least do not intentionally make it easy. I asked my friend if he realized he was being "used" as a carrier for AOL advertising -- for which they are getting paid and he isn't. Like many others that I have asked that same question, his response was "I am aware and very annoyed by it but don't know how to get rid of it". I decided to do some research to see if I could help reduce the AOL spam from our inboxes and outboxes. The simple answer is for AOL users to click here and then uncheck the check box and click save. Three simple mouse clicks and a lot of senders and receivers will be happy.

Net Attitude, People, Personal Computing, Public Policy July 7, 2008 10:53 AM

Friday, June 27, 2008

Temporarily Out of Service

Two nights ago, for some mysterious reason, my entire web site disappeared from the server. I have been using the Dreamhost shared hosting service in Southern California for a couple of years now and have been quite pleased with the price, performance, reliability, and support, but they were as puzzled as me as to how it happened. It took me a few hours to notice the problem and some more time to get things back to normal -- there are thousands of docuemtns, audio, video, and other content. I apologize for any inconvenience to visitors and readers. As always, incidents like this show the critical importance of regular backups. Dreamhost makes what they call snapshots every hour, day, and week. After nearly fourteen years of adding content to the web site I would hate to lose it!

Blogging, Personal Computing June 27, 2008 10:02 AM

Monday, June 9, 2008

Roku

About fifteen years ago one of my children worked at Blockbuster. One day I told him that Bockbuster would be history because people would be downloading their movies from the Internet. Yeah, right Dad. Ok, I was a bit ahead of my time. In the intervening years there have been numerous companies started to offer various ways to get movies via the Net but none have gotten much traction. The most successful innovation has been Netflix which offers 100,000 movies and an incredibly efficient distribution system for DVDs. The barriers to a downloading or streaming approach have included technology cost, inadequate bandwidth, complexity, device incompatibilities, and intellectual property concerns.

Then along came the Netflix Roku. The snazzy new device may be like manna from heaven for movie lovers. I have had previous experience with Roku. A few years ago I installed a Roku box for pictures. It enables the display of digital pictures on any TV in the house via the home local area network and can be a nice thing at holiday time. The Roku for Netflix movies is a fraction of the size and allows watching up to 10,000 movies or TV episodes on any TV in the house, if you have a video distribution system, or if you don't then you can use the Roku with the TV of your choice -- home theatre, HD, non-HD, any TV. I took the Roku out of the box, plugged in the power supply, and connected the cables to the video jacks. You then need to connect the Roku to the Internet. You can either plug it into your home LAN or connect via WiFi. The hookup took about three minutes. The TV then displays a code which you enter at netflix.com and you are then activated. A new tab is added to your account at Netflix labeled "Watch Instantly". You make a selection and it shows up on the Roku screen on your TV. You push the play button on the Roku remote and the movie starts streaming. I was watching a movie within five minutes of taking the Roku out of the box.

Streaming is different than downloading. There is no hard drive on the Roku. The movie comes from a server at Netflix directly to the Roku. Some buffering obviously takes place as I detected no jitters or pixelation. I was quite impressed with the quality. Looks like a DVD. Does this mean the end of DVDs? Yes, but it will take quite a while. Music is shifting to digital but there are still a lot of CDs sold. The transition for DVDs will take longer for a number of reasons. Streaming requires a stable and reliable one million bit per second connection. In theory, any DSL or Cable Internet provider should be able to provide that but in practice it is spotty. The trend is certainly in the right direction. HD streaming is not yet available but surely it will soon. That will require more bandwidth. So far only 10% of the Netflix collection is available for streaming. Not sure how fast they will be able to convert the rest.

The pricing is good. If you already subscribe to Netflix under any plan of $9.99 per month or more then you get unlimited streaming at no extra cost. The Roku unit is $99 plus shipping. Movies and TV episodes are selected via the web site just like picking a DVD. All things considered, I think Netflix and Roku hit a home run. Not perfect but you can see the beginning of the end of DVDs.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Media, Personal Computing, WiFi June 9, 2008 06:00 PM

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Yottabytes

A reader of the story about the hospital SmartCard project asked me if the card could store an MRI. The short answer is no, not today, but in the long term, yes for sure. The most important short-term role for the smartcard is authentication. The best example to explain that is Clear. The Clear smartcard contains a digital representation of each iris, all ten finger prints, and your photograph. When you present your Clear smartcard at the airport, there is no doubt that you are who you say you are. You then "fly through airport security" to your destination. Imagine the same at the hospital -- no more clipboards and filling out information they already have. It seems like a dream today but in the not too distant future we will be able to "fly" through the healthcare process, experience personalized medicine, and feel like the providers are giving us concierge treatment.

Back to the MRI question, where are the MRI's -- and CAT scans, X-Rays, and mammogram's -- stored? They used to be on film and the patient would carry them around from specialist to specialist and the hospital would keep football field size storage rooms loaded with them. Progressive hospitals today use a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). The performance and reliability of PACS are critical to a hospital's ability to provide patient care. The PACSs have gotten better and better but physicians are continuously raising the bar. Understandably, CIO's and CFO's are concerned about the fast growth of storage needed as the imaging technology supports higher resolutions, more images per study, and escalating federal and state government storage requirements. Physicians want online access 24x7 from the office, hospital or their home to not only the MRI you had today but the one you had a year ago and maybe ten years ago. Hospitals have tried to cope with the increased demand by offering online storage for very current images and "nearline" storage for those that have been archived. Nearline often means that the image is stored on tape and can be brought online if a special request is made. Increasingly physicians and patients do not feel there is anything "special" about it -- they expect all data to be online all the time just like Amazon. The online retailer has every order they have ever received since the company started in 1995 online and available 24x7. Easy for them some might say. An order for a book is trivial compared to a digital MRI image.

How big is a digital MRI image? A recent cervical spine MRI contained 160 images and was approximately 60 megabytes in size. About the same as 200 iPhone pictures or 20 iTunes songs. Let's suppose a community hospital has 25,000 patient visits per year and that on average a patient has two image studies performed. That would be 50,000 times 60 megabytes which equals 3 terabytes. Now let's consider what size storage is available and how much it costs.

In the mid 1970's an IBM "disk pack" for a mainframe computer had a capacity of 200 megabytes -- about three MRI's. The entire storage system could contain eight "drives" for a total of 1.6 gigabytes. It seemed like a lot at the time. The cost of the disk drive that the disk pack fit on was nearly $200,000. During the last thirty years the cost has continuously plummeted while the capacity has skyrocketed. The Apple Time Capsule has a capacity of one terabyte and costs $499. IBM has a new storage system that offers up to 1,176 terabytes in a single system. Soon we will be talking about petabytes (1,000 terabytes) and then exabytes, zettabytes, and yottabytes. When I had written a story about yottabytes back in 2005 a reader said the term should be "alottabytes". A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

The bottom line is that there will be plenty of storage to put all our images online. The key challenge is the management of the data -- keeping it secure, backed up, resilient to disaster, and easy to access and manipulate. Many providers will decide to put all the data in the "cloud" and let someone else manage it. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) is the tip of the iceberg. They charge $0.15 per gigabyte per month of storage used. IBM offers a wide range of storage services and also partners with many healthcare information technology companies.

The normal reaction would be that having all the images online is too expensive. I think many of us will instead think of it like electricity. Healthcare providers use a lot of electricity and some are beginning to cogenerate their own to save money. One thing they don't do however is consider having some of their electricity "offline" or "nearline". It is online 24x7. That is the way we will soon think of medical images.

Other patrickWeb stories about healthcare

Healthcare, Internet Technology, Personal Computing April 29, 2008 01:18 PM

Monday, January 21, 2008

iPhone - Update No. 10

According to some people, the most important question about the iPhone is "does it blend?". Although quite amusing, the more important question to me is whether Apple is listening to the feedback of customers. In prior stories I have expressed confidence that there would be continuous improvement in the functionality of the iPhone. For the first six months I would give them a B+. The two big issues remain to be the applications and the network.

On the network side, I am still not very happy with AT&T primarily because of poor local coverage. However, I have learned about a new tower about two miles from my house that is scheduled to be turned on in late February. That could potentially make a dramatic difference for many people in my neck of the woods. In a few weeks I'll be in South Africa and will get a chance to see how the International aspects of the AT&T service work. Stay tuned on that.

The bigger question for most people is about applications. The "standalone" applications such as the calculator, calendar, photo gallery, clock, and offline email have not changed. There is still no "notes" application that syncs with anything and allows cut/copy/paste. The "networked" applications, such as stocks, weather, over the air email, and YouTube have not changed. iTunes has been improved and "maps" has had a huge improvement with the addition of a location function that uses radio signals to estimate your current location. Not as accurate as GPS but pretty good. I used it at the Albany airport this past weekend and it provided very good directions to where I was headed. The "Web 2.0" applications, through the Safari browser, are still a disappointment but I am sure there will be many useful webapps soon.

Webapps are most useful when they are connected to the network, preferably a fast one. The presumption with webapps is that the data -- travel itineraries, frequent flier numbers, healthcare information, personal financial information, etc. -- is on the server. That model only works if you can get to the server. With 16 GB likely on the way for new iPhones, there will be plenty of room for pictures and music and have space for local data. Local data will allow a lot of useful applications even when there is no available network connection.

The other limitation of webapps is the interface. In theory you can do anything in a web browser but the human interface is not always ideal. That is why millions of people use Quicken instead of quicken.com. This will change over time as web standards evolve but in the short term I believe there is a rational need for local applications. There are many applications that could be local applications with local storage on the iPhone. Both the app and data could be synchronized (backed up) through iTunes. What we are all anxiously waiting for are "third party local applications" on the iPhone as a supplement to Apple's apps and webapps. Apple announced that that they will have a development kit available in the first quarter and many are waiting to see what the SDK will allow and what "approvals" will be necessary and whether AT&T will have any say in "certifying" applications. The clock is ticking and I can hardly wait. Following the political scene is exciting but third party apps for the iPhone will be more exciting.

The most subtle change in the latest iPhone update last week was the ability to move the home screen icons around, and to create up to nine pages on which you can place icons or web address links. The iPhone comes with just seventeen icons. The home row plus nine screens of sixteen each will allow 148 applications. One that I am hoping for is Opera Mini.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

Gadgets, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone January 21, 2008 02:54 PM

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Backup To The Rescue

The ThinkPad T60p had been acting strangely for a few weeks and I had a hunch it was going to crash. Unfortunately, it did. I called Lenovo support at 6PM Monday night and they determined that the problem was the "motherboard" needed replaced. The shipping carton arrived on Tuesday, they received the ThinkPad in Memphis on Wednesday and I received the repaired unit on Thursday morning. Nothing short of remarkable customer service. That is the good news.

The bad news is that I continue to learn more about the nuances of backup and "recovery". I should not still be learning after all these years. I suspect I am not alone. There are a number of stories about "backup" here in the blog. I don't claim to be the master of backup but I do take it very seriously. The moral of this story is to take recovery as seriously as backup. This story is a little bit more technical than usual stories but I hope it is helpful. If you are interested, please read on.

Internet Technology, Media, On Demand, Personal Computing January 12, 2008 11:36 AM

Sunday, November 25, 2007

One Laptop Per Child

There will be millions of iPhones, Casio cameras, and other electronic gifts given this holiday season. If you want to give the gift of a lifetime and get satisfaction that you are helping improve the world, then consider buying a Laptop XO. For the price of an Amazon Kindle, you can be part of a really big idea. Originated at MIT, One Laptop Per Child, aims to put computers in the hands of millions of children in developing countries. "One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time".

The OLPC laptop has been in development for years but is now becoming a reality. Manufacturing has started and orders are being taken online between now and yearend. For $399, get a laptop for yourself -- or a lucky child you may know -- and one will also be given to a less fortunate child in Cambodia, Greece, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Uruguay, or other participating countries. (The countries themselves are buying XO's -- Nigeria ordered one million of them). The two-for-one deal includes a full year of T-Mobile Hotspot WiFi service.

The XO has quite an impressive set of features and functions. The design optimizes power usage. The Internet connectivity is by WiFi but it also uses wireless mesh networking. This means that each XO acts as a wireless access point in a peer-to-peer fashion sharing connectivity with a nearby XO. The software is all open source and free including Linux, a web browser, word processor, email, audio and video player, and a very clever graphical user interface.

I hope large numbers of people, companies, and foundations participate in the limited time offer and that many millions of children will benefit. As an individual, the T-Mobile WiFi subscription for a year plus the $200 tax deduction for the donated laptop, it is hard to go wrong. Visit LaptopGiving.org during the holidays and you can make a difference.

Internet Technology, Media, Mobile, People, Personal Computing, Public Policy, WiFi November 25, 2007 10:56 AM

Friday, October 19, 2007

iPhone - Update No. 9

The most encouraging thing about the iPhone is that Apple seems to be listening to the feedback of customers. The price cut rebate was handled well -- and expeditiously -- but compared to the other issues it was an easy fix. Other than various functionality, which I am sure will be continuously improved, the two big issues remain the applications and the network.

There are four kinds of applications. First are the "standalone" applications such as the calculator, calendar, photo gallery, clock, and offline email. No network required. A second type could be classified as "networked" applications. Examples would be stocks, weather, over the air email, and YouTube. Each of these is a combination of a standalone application plus a network connection -- either via AT&T's network or from a WiFi hotspot. A third type of application is a networked application which works only with WiFi. Example being iTunes. The fourth type is the "webapp" or as described by Steve Jobs "Web 2.0" applications. The webapps work through the Safari browser. There will surely be many useful webapps but there are two important limitations.

First is that webapps are most useful when they are connected to the network, preferably a fast one. The presumption with webapps is that the data -- travel itineraries, frequent flier numbers, healthcare information, personal financial information, etc. -- is on the server. That model only works if you can get to the server. Some people 8 gigabytes is not enough to have local data in addition to music and pictures. I think many people would happily make the tradeoff to have a bit fewer songs and have some accessible local data. the 8 gig limitation is only temporary as we will have a terabyte of local storage before long.

The other limitation of webapps is the interface. In theory you can do anything in a web browser but the human interface is not always ideal. That is why millions of people use Quicken instead of quicken.com. This will change over time as web standards evolve but in the short term I believe there is a rational need for local applications. A perfect example is Navizon which is a software-only wireless positioning system that triangulates signals broadcasted from WiFi access points and cellular towers which pinpoints your location and then launches a Google Map to show you where you are. (This is one of the third party applications that Apple erased with their recent firmware update). There are many applications that could be local applications with local storage on the iPhone. Both the app and data could be synchronized (backed up) through iTunes.

There is no doubt in my mind that enabling third party local applications on the iPhone as a supplement to webapps would be a great thing for Apple. I also have no doubt that Steve Jobs thinks so too. Apple announced this week that they will have a development kit available in the first quarter. This will spawn a flood of new iPhone applications. If anything, I believe Apple underestimated how many developers, in addition to the high-end personal digital assistant users, would take quickly to the iPhone and start building third party applications. Mr. Jobs says they need the time to make sure there are tools to enable the local applications to be built in a way that protects against viruses and other malware. The hubris of wiping out the third party applications was not a good move, but as I started this story I do believe Apple is listening and I am optimistic that in a matter of months we will see a lot of very useful and exciting applications emerge for the iPhone.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone October 19, 2007 05:16 PM

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

iPhone - Update No. 8

The price cut is understandable. It is not unprecedented by any means and the rebate was handled well by Apple. Nobody was forced to be an early adopter. People were forced to sign up for AT&T but it was no secret. It was announced that way, promoted that way, and is somewhat understandable even though I don't personally like it because of poor network coverage where I live and poor network performance when there is coverage. I can also understand why a warranty would be voided if people physically break in to the iPhone and modify it. That is a standard warranty provision with cars and most everything. A software modification is a different issue from my point of view.

I need to clarify my comment that I got "bricked" last week. Walt Mossberg properly corrected me that getting bricked means that your iPhone is not functioning at all -- it is like a brick. That is not what happened to me. I believe in most all cases where someone got bricked it was because they had tampered with the iPhone or somehow bypassed AT&T and enabled the phone to work with T-Mobile or someone else. I can understand why Apple would not like that because of their deal with AT&T and the fact that it has always been marketed as an Apple - AT&T exclusive arrangement. In my case, I made no attempt to change out AT&T. I just added the "installer" from AppTapp from Nullriver. This enabled me to add a bunch of third party applications that added a great deal of missing functions and new capabilities. I was really happy with the new applications.

I can understand that neither Apple nor AT&T would offer technical support for third party applications that they have not certified. I could even understand that they may require them to be uninstalled if suspected of causing a problem with the iPhone or the AT&T service for which I requested assistance. The issue I made in my last update was not of that nature. The issue was that Apple unilaterally *deleted* all the third party applications, including any data that may have been created by the apps, and also deleted the launcher and installer. An industry colleague described this unprecedented move by Apple as "hostile". I have to agree. Another colleague called it hubris. Some might describe it as arrogance.

I remember in the 1970's when IBM was accused of such an attitude. If a customer had a mainframe maintenance problem and they also had "third party" memory or peripheral devices attached to the mainframe, IBM would refuse to work on the mainframe or even diagnose the problem. Later they loosened up and agreed to "take a look" at the problem but only if someone was present from the maintenance department of the "other" company. IBM had a significant comeuppance as a result of the unwarranted attitude. Eventually -- in the late 1980's -- IBM saw a services opportunity in working on *all* of the customer's equipment, no matter who manufactured it.

A similar situation may be at hand for Apple. What could be better than having thousands of developers around the world creating useful applications for the iPhone? That is how Palm got established. Apple is now gaining on Palm but if they don't watch their hubris they may have a comeuppance.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

IBM, Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone October 2, 2007 05:26 PM

Monday, October 1, 2007

iPhone - Update No. 7

The $100 rebate was a good move by Apple. I was impressed that within a couple of weeks they had a rock solid online application to actually get the rebate coupon. Considering the testing needed to put out a public web application it was very timely. Big companies often take months to do something like this. I took the coupon into the local Apple store and bought a VModa Vibe Duo noise-isolating hi-definition headset for the iPhone. The sleek “hands-free” microphone and amazing high-definition sound are quite impressive.  The discrete microphone blends seamlessly with the black fabric cable. It comes with a black leather pouch and is remarkably lightweight. The store rep offered to send my purchase receipt via email. I was impressed.

From a business point of view the rebate not only took the sting out of the big price cut impacting the early adopters but will ultimately be the sleeves out of Apple's vest. One of the financial analysts said the cost of the rebate to Apple would be $100 million. I don't believe that for a second. First of all, some percentage of those who are eligible will never bother to pursue the rebate. Others will follow the (simple) online procedure and print out the coupon and leave it on their desk to get lost. Some of those who do take the initiative to use the rebate will go to an Apple store and see a host of goodies for sale which will leave an impression with them. When it comes to spending the $100, I suspect most will spend more than $100 rather than leave money on the table. Some may buy a Mac Mini or a big monitor or some software. Whatever they walk out with it will add to the amount of Apple computing and accessories that are in people's hands and will lead to more purchases in the future and continued increases in market share for Apple.

That's the good news. Now the bad news. Like many others, I got bricked on Thursday night -- the Net is buzzing with commentary about it. As previously reported, one of the two major shortcomings of the iPhone is the availability of applications (the other being the AT&T network). Skeptics were pessimistic about the speed of introduction of improvements and believed that Apple and AT&T would operate an approval and collection gate for anything new. I was more optimistic. I turned out to be wrong -- so far. When Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be open to Web applications he meant applications that worked through the Apple Safari browser, not applications that worked natively as part of the iPhone menu. Then along came AppTapp from a company called Nullriver in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Someone at Demo showed me a link where you can download an "installer" that puts a new icon on the iPhone. When you click the icon the iPhone shows a list of dozens (maybe hundreds) of third party applications that work on the iPhone. These are not web apps but native iPhone apps. Apps that do not require being connected to the AT&T network. These are apps that have nothing to do with who the network provider is and do not involved cracking open the case and using a soldering iron. They are just apps that use the iPhone as a platform to run. The first app I installed was a launcher. This icon displays a menu of the iPhone third party apps that you have installed. I installed a dozen or so very useful new things.

The first app I chose was Navizon, a software-only wireless positioning system that triangulates signals broadcasted from WiFi access points and cell towers and then displays a Google Map of where you are. You can then click "Directions to here" or "Directions from here". By using the incredible squeeze magnification feature of the iPhone you can zoom in on either the map or satellite images of where you are. This is a really great value-added application for the iPhone. I also installed an instant messaging program that let me IM through AOL IM and pedometer app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to measure how far you have walked.. Other applications include dictionaries of various kinds, games, and programs that allow you to see all the files on your iPhone and more importantly allow you to create files and exchange them with your PC. This could solve my problem of not being able to display my frequent flier and hotel account numbers like I could on the Treo. In summary I found the initial set of third party applications empowering and exciting. That was until I got home late Thursday night and put the iPhone in the dock and got the latest iPhone "update" from Apple. The update added iTunes to the iPhone, a very nice addition indeed, but it also *deleted* all the third party applications including the launcher and installer. An industry colleague described this unprecedented move by Apple as "hostile".

Apple has now created the iBrick -- an iPhone that doesn't do nearly what it can do. Ironically, third party apps are the heart and soul of the Mac. Microsoft and Apple both have their office suites and various applications but without third party applications we would not have a fraction of what we have as users. Apple has basically said that the iPhone is theirPhone. You can install only the applications that they (and AT&T) decide are good for you and for which they will decide how much you will pay. Imagine turning on your computer one day and seeing a message saying that Windows (or Mac OS X) has "been updated" and then you find that Quicken, Dreamweaver, OpenOffice, Adobe Photoshop, Google Desktop, AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, and dozens of other things you are dependent on have been *deleted* and a modification was installed that will prevent any further additions of third party software on your computer. That is what we have here.

The important letter in PC is the P, for personal. I think of my PC as *my* PC. Millions of people use only what Microsoft or Apple provide and don't take the risk of downloading and installing third party software. They may consider it rogue software, be concerned about the possibility of the software containing a virus or crashing the computer -- all of which are risks. Millions of others, like me, accept some risk and like to experiment with new software and capitalize on the infinite creativity of software developers. I have a ThinkPad that came with Windows XP on it. I erased that and put Ubuntu Linux and VMWare on it. Millions of people use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, partly because OO is free and partly because they just choose to. That is the great thing about the Internet and PC's -- they give us choice.

What is next? I am sure people are hard at work to figure out how to make third party software work on iPhone again. Many iPhone users are going to Hackintosh for instructions on how to downgrade their iPhone to the prior version of firmware so they can reinstall the third party software. What is the prognosis? I am not politically liberal but when it comes to the Internet and personal computers I guess I would be called a libertarian. The question to me is whether mobile computing is going to be a locked-down proprietary world controlled by Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Qualcomm, and a few others or whether it is going to be an open highly creative and collaborative world like the Internet and PC's have been. I would never bet against the grass roots.

Apple did listen when the mass market said it wanted downloadable ringtones for the iPhone but their implementation is not as brilliant as other aspects of the iPhone. Apple is charging 99 cents to make a song you already paid 99 cents for into a ringtone. I purchased an album called "Crazy Ringtone #2". It contains some really good tracks. When I tried to add the ringtones to my iPhone I got an error message saying that these particular ringtones do not qualify to be iPhone ringtones, even though I had purchased them through iTunes. Meanwhile we are stuck with the sparse and weak AT&T network. The iPhone is an ingenious and elegant piece of hardware -- it is a very powerful and well designed mobile computer. The iBricking of the iPhone has really soured me on Apple. I haven't given up but now that I see how powerful iPhone applications can be I will be more impatient to see the platform open up more.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, iPhone October 1, 2007 04:00 PM

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Spam Arrest -- part 3

I started using spamarrest eleven months ago and all of my email goes through and mail that is not spam goes from there to my inbox. As of today spamarrest processed 50,129 inbound emails for me and 10,711 of them made it to my inbox. Spam represented 78.63% of the mail addressed to me. In other words only one in five emails were legitimate. Hormel Foods Corporation loves Spam. They say their SPAM Luncheon Meat is "the one in good taste". For the rest of us spam is something quite different and anything but in good taste.

There have been quite a few stories about spam here on patrickWeb. Early in the debate -- years ago -- I took the position that the elimination of spam could be handled by technology and that laws would not work. Even though the spammers have gotten more creative and we are currently seeing a rise in spam, I continue to believe technology is the best answer.

Around August 1 last year I started using spamarrest. All email addressed to john@patrickweb.com gets automatically picked up from my patrickWeb mail server by spamarrest and the spamarrest server then determines whether or not the mail gets forwarded to my patrickWeb inbox. For everyone in my contact list (1,400+ people), their email comes through to my inbox with only a second or so delay. However, if an email arrives for me from someone not in my contact list, an automatic reply is sent to them that says something like "Your email to John is pending delivery. Please click here to validate that you are a real person". When you click, you are presented with a web page where a word appears in a graphic image. Something simple like "cat" or "water". After you type in the word that appears you become validated as a real person -- not a robot sending millions of spam emails -- and you are added to the "ok" list just like everyone in my address book. Likewise, anyone that I send an email to for the first time is automatically added to the ok list. For anyone in the ok list their emails are never challenged -- and I answer all my email.

I had resisted challenge/response approaches in the past, but unfortunately today's environment forced me to make a change. I am really pleased with the results. No more spam or junk folders with daily trash emptying duties. The 79% of uncertain mail goes into an "unverified" folder. I check this folder on occasion if there is an email I am expecting. Spamarrest is very easy to manage. You can add entire domains to your ok list. For example, any email from someone at ibm.com comes through unchallenged. I have added a dozen or so other domains to the ok list. Occasionally a spammer or recruiter will respond and verify their email address but I then click to add them to the "not ok" list. The bottom line is that I spend significantly less time managing email than I did before and I can spend more time communicating with colleagues, family and friends old and new.

The week before switching to spamarrest, I received an email from a person I don't know who had read something of interest in my blog and wanted to give me some feedback. This is really valuable to me. I asked her what she thought of the challenge/response approach I was moving to. She said "I think that's a very good idea. People who are worth talking to, either personal or professional, will understand". From my perspective, I am really enjoying a 100% spam free world and yet still able to meet new people and learn from them.

Internet Technology, People, Personal Computing, Public Policy June 14, 2007 10:26 AM

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

New Home for patrickWeb

It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site -- ibm.com/patrick -- was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York and then in 2003 moved patrickWeb over to Interland which was subsequently acquired and became Peer1. The dedicated IBM server at Peer1 in Miami has been very good for the past four years but managing it has become a bit complex and time consuming. With all the bad guys out there trying to hack into anything and everything there is a need for near constant surveillance -- even with all the automated tools. I decided that having a shared server with constant and professional monitoring was better than having a dedicated server with part time security inspections. patrickWeb's new home is at DreamHost.

DreamHost is an employee owned company. They seem to have a passion for providing solid web hosting at a very affordable price. For $7.95 per month you get more capacity than I can imagine using. They have no telephone support but the combination of a really good interface to their hosting environment plus a good Knowledgebase and normally responsive email support makes me feel confident. One thing I like is their status page where you can always see what is going on. Adding and managing databases is a piece of cake and Dreamhost includes full backup "snapshots" of your data at various regular intervals -- hourly, daily, and weekly.

Last weekend I bit the bullet and began the move of patrickWeb and other sites and related email that I manage over to Dreamhost. I changed the DNS servers at Network Solutions to point to the Dreamhost servers in Los Angeles instead of the Peer1 server in Miami. The change propagated through the Internet in a roughly a day and most everything works. There are a few glitches on patrickWeb that I haven't figured out yet. If you see some pages on the site that have a missing menu, that is one of the issues I am working on. Feedback on broken things is always welcome.

The cost, speed, and reliability of DreamHost is just one more reminder of how much the Internet is being woven into our lives. Not that long ago it was necessary to get a CD and install software on your PC to be enabled to utilize an application. Now you can get almost any application online. In the early days of dial-up modem connections to the Internet it wasn't practical to depend on the Net for applications. With "always-on" connections, high speed, dramatically low cost storage, and impressive new Web 2.0 interfaces (such as kayak.com), the Internet is really becoming the computer. The next phase is surely going to move that capability to our handheld and mobile devices. The Nintendo Wii with WiFi and the Opera browser offers a glimpse of the future that is right in front of us.

Home Automation, Internet Technology, Personal Computing April 18, 2007 02:12 PM

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Visa 2000

The upcoming trip to China requires a visa and the visa application requires a passport photo. The instructions were clear that it should not be a "home photo". I was anxious to get the application in the mail and was confident that the processor of the application would not reject my photo printed from the Canon i960, but unfortunately it was out of one of the ink colors. No problem, I though, there is a CVS store nearby and they do passport photos. The $7.99 price seems high but I was in a hurry. I like CVS as a company but their customer service in the store is not that great. The photo department had a sign up saying to check with a cashier. The cashier lines were all long. A supervisor happened to walk by and sent someone over to take the photo.

In a minute or so a digital picture was taken and the CVS person then escorted me to one of their Kodak kiosks. Of the five kiosks, two were "out of order" -- reminded me of the early days of the airline check-in kiosks. Two of the other three were being used by customers who were sorting through the pages of pictures to pick the ones they wanted to print. I could see they were going to be there quite a while. The "available" kiosk was hung up. The employee had to unplug it to get it to re-boot. It took at least ten minutes for the kiosk to initialize -- it was running Windows 2000.

Why Kodak or CVS did not select Linux for this application is beyond me. Linux is perfect for "embedded" applications -- either embedded in a handheld device, a car, a digital audio server, home automation system, or a digital video recorder. Linux can also be "embedded" in a PC in a very nice way, especially on a PC like a kiosk which only runs one application. In all these cases Linux is quietly working in the background to enable the device or the application. It doesn't crash, doesn't give insulting or confusing error messages, "blue screens", or hang up. It just works.

Munir Kotadia at ZDNet Australia just wrote a story saying that the launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market.

Other patrickWeb stories about Linux

Personal Computing January 16, 2007 10:43 AM

Monday, December 18, 2006

Power to the People

There has been a lot of discussion here in the blog and in Net Attitude about "Power to the People". The "power" discussed had to do with empowerment made possible by the Internet. To get connected to the Internet requires another kind of power -- electricity. Although some improvements have been made there are still hotel's that provide only one outlet on the desk and must not realize that travelers need to charge up both their laptop and their mobile phone -- and maybe an iPod and a few other things.

The USB ports on all laptops do conveniently provide five volts of power but at a fairly low current and hence a longer charging time than with the 120/240 volt charger. Airports have an even bigger problem. Many of them were constructed before people had laptops and it would have been unimaginable for architects to include outlets around the wall of an airline gate or even in the clubs and lounges. I have gotten strange looks as I walked around a gate or lounge staring at the floor looking for an outlet. Airport managers are no doubt planning for new outlets but the cost to retrofit them is very high and it is going to take a long time before we have enough to satisfy the demand.

How about wireless electricity? I have often heard people joke about wireless electricity. It is not as far fetched as it may seem. In fact, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say it is possible. They have developed a system, which in theory can power gadgets in the same manner as wireless broadband signals are received. The MIT system is very early in the development stage but uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy from a source of power to a device ten feet away. At some point there may be electric rooms where anything you have with you -- laptops, cameras, mobile phones -- will receive a fresh charge while you are there.

There is also great progress being made in the efficiency of the electrical use. For example, IBM has been working on an Adaptive Battery Life Extender to reduce the hard drive power consumption based on what the user is doing. For example, if you are working on a word processing document, most of the time you are typing and editing or maybe thinking. During that time, the hard drive senses what your level of activity and turns off the hard drive until you actually need it to save your document.

Personal Computing December 18, 2006 09:40 AM

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The MooBella Demo

It was such an exciting week at Demo that it is hard to summarize. There are many reviews of the conference on the web and you can find some of them at Kaboodle (one of the companies that debuted at Demo). There were sixty-eight companies showing off their latest and greatest -- the Demo site has the full list with links to the companies, so if you want to know what is hot take a look here and click the + sign next to Demo 2006 at the top right of the page.

The product least expected but perhaps most enjoyed by the 700+ attendees was the MooBella virtual ice cream vending machine. After attendees made touch-panel choices from up to 96 combinations of flavors and mix-ins, the machine mixed and instantly froze fresh ingredients to produce a delicious scoop of ice cream within 45 seconds. The only drawback I could see was that there was no chocolate. Apparently, that flavor (favorite of 20% of the market) poses special challenges due to the viscosity of cocoa powder.

There were a number of themes that emerged at DEMO. Collaboration was one. Chris Shipley said that 2006 will be the year of collaboration. Demos included virtual meeting platforms, tools that in effect allow people to act as librarians and share their findings with others, and tools for collaborative software development. Another theme was vertical search. Google and Yahoo! are great but highly specialized searches offer much better results. Examples shown included shopping, entertainment, software code, healthcare, and politics.

Mobile applications are still somewhat limited by tiny screens but innovative new ideas were shown that make cell phones more useful than ever. One company showed a phone being used as a personal trainer during exercise. It kept track of your pace and location and plotted results on the screen. Another small device was shown that allows complete control over the phone, music, and every aspect of things going on in the house.

Security solutions were shown to protect our identity, protect our networks, stop spam and viruses at the door, and diagnose Internet traffic and catch malware before it gets to our systems. Biometric technologies were shown to allow secure payment and authentication. I look forward to some of these technologies being used in healthcare.

Through two FutureScan panels I attempted to help the audience see the future of security and computational biology. On the security panel we discussed the general state of Internet security (not healthy) but more importantly some of the research that may lead to a healthier net. To me the most promising thing is PKI. I have written much about this here. The computational biology panel was mind-blowing for most of us. Systems biology models, redesigning proteins, and learning about our genetic history will affect all of our lives. There was a great deal of interest in The Genographic Project. (A dozen DNA kits were given to the audience -- you can get your own here). If you are interested in learning more about the human genome, the panelists recommended Genome by Matt Ridley. I am reading it now. We were all extremely fortunate to have had some of the world's leading experts share their thoughts on the panels. You can find links to all the panelists here.

The most asked question between Demo attendees at breaks and meals is "See anything interesting?". Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences, introduced sixty-eight companies -- there was definitely something for everybody. I was not able to visit all the companies or hear all of their pitches, but at the end of this story I will mention eleven companies that I found most interesting -- "My Top Ten Picks"

Conferences, Healthcare, Internet Technology, Media, Mobile, Music, People, Personal Computing, Public Policy February 12, 2006 01:38 PM

Friday, January 13, 2006

Open Hopes for 2006

The debate about the OpenDocument format is still underway. See this link for a list of the stories in patrickWeb about it. Bob Sutor over at IBM just posted a very good story called "Open standards, open source, open minds, open opportunities". Rather than repeat or plagiarize it, here is a link to it. It is a worthwhile read about the difference between "open standards" and "open source". He also talks about an "openness movement" that he hopes will take hold in 2006. Me too. Bob will no doubt be discussing this on the SIIA Technology panel which I will be moderating in New York in a few weeks

Upcoming conferences in which I will be participating

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Conferences, Internet Technology, People, Personal Computing January 13, 2006 02:59 PM

Monday, November 14, 2005

Power To ThePenguin

As discussed here many times, grass roots movements such as the Internet and Linux are hard to stop. However, one of the impediments to very fast adoption of Linux as compared to just the fast adoption that is taking place has been the underlying threat of legal action to a user or vendor of Linux by a patent holder.

That threat is about to be dealt a big blow as IBM, Sony and Philips have joined forces with Novell and Red Hat to form a new company called The Open Invention Network (OIN).

The concept is simple, but potentially brilliant. OIN, using the funding provided by the founding companies, will purchase Linux related patents in the open market. It will then offer them on a royalty free basis to any individual or company member that agrees not to sue the other members. OIN is starting out with a set of electronic commerce patents that were purchased from business-to-business (B2B) software pioneer Commerce One. More purchases will follow and likely the purchases will spur even more innovation for systems and applications that leverage Linux.

OIN will have no income since it will seek no royalties from it's patent portfolio, so how do the founders make a return on their investment in OIN? Through the accelerated adoption of Linux which in turn opens the door for more sales of hardware, sofware, and services. Much of the IT industry and it's customers will embrace the OIN move -- with the exception of Microsoft which has argued that relying on "open
source" software poses legal risks. Market researcher IDC estimates that the worldwide Linux business will grow 25.9 percent annually, doubling from $20 billion this year to more than $40 billion by 2008. If OIN is successful the growth rate could be even higher.


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IBM, Internet Technology, Personal Computing November 14, 2005 12:26 PM

Friday, October 28, 2005

Open Office Is Here

Many people are already aware of the new free Open Office 2.0 productivity suite, but if you are not I highly recommend taking a look. You can find it at openoffice.org, I am quite impressed with what the team of collaborators around the world has done. The spreadsheet application, presentation tool, and word processor are elegant. I have been using Open Office for years and do not have a copy of Microsoft Office on my ThinkPad. I have not found any significant compatibility problems. If someone sends me a Microsoft Office file, I can open it and use it with no problem. Likewise, I have never had a complaint from someone saying they can't read the Open Office files I send them and which they can read with Microsoft Office. The compatibility is surely not 100% but it is plenty good enough for me. More importantly I think Open Office is good enough for billions of children in schools around the world. Microsoft has done an incredible job of building their suite of programs, but for 99% of us the vast number of features are more than we can comprehend let alone use.

There are many other office productivity suites out there in addition to Open Office and Microsoft Office. Take a look at Nick Mudge's list here. The more strategic issue is not which suite to use but the long term compatibility of the data -- in other words the format that spreadsheets and other office documents are stored in. This is where OpenDocument Format comes in. As has been written here before, there is nothing to not like about ODF. That is why the 84 member companies of Oasis voted unanimously to adopt the new standard.

Open Documents - Part 1
Open Documents - Part 2
Open Documents - Part 3
Other patrickWeb stories about open systems

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Personal Computing October 28, 2005 12:18 PM

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Open Documents -- Part 3

The battle over OpenDocument Format has begun and Microsoft is using their traditional brass knuckles approach. It was revealed this week in some blogs that a recent article, "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument", which ran at Fox News, was written by a journalist hired by Microsoft. (See an interesting rebuttal). The stakes are high. The issue is who owns documents, the document creator or the software that was used to create the documents.

Let's make it personal and down to earth. Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children all have computers on the local area network at home. They recently had a busy weekend. Mr. Smith created a presentation which he will take to a conference and present using his ThinkPad. Mrs. Smith wrote a newsletter which will be distributed to dozens of members in a local non-profit organization she belongs to. The Smiths' daughter completed a school term paper replete with graphical images, clip art, and photographs. The Smiths' son is a graduate student in business and he developed a spreadsheet to reflect a ten-year financial plan for a new business idea. Who owns these four documents? (read more)

Personal Computing October 15, 2005 03:14 PM

Thursday, October 6, 2005

Open Documents -- Part 2

There are some questions people have asked me about the OpenDocument Format . The first question is what is the consumer benefit of ODF, in other words why should you care? Nice that the automotive and aircraft industries can benefit but does it mean to the average consumer?

The one-word answer is compatibility. How many times have you received a file attachment from someone and could not open it or you could open but it was unreadable? All of us have had that experience. The reason for such problems is that the file format was not compatible with your system in some way. The OpenDocument Format is designed to be "open" -- any software developer who wants to write a program to read or write an ODF file has complete access to the details of the formats. Assuming all parties are using software that supports ODF, if someone creates a spreadsheet on a Mac and sends it to friend who uses Linux and another friend who uses Windows and a third friend at a major corporation who uses IBM's Workplace software -- they will all be able to open the spreadsheet file and both read it and make changes to it. Another way to say it is that the ODF document is compatible across all of these different software systems. (read more)

Personal Computing October 6, 2005 02:45 PM

Monday, October 3, 2005

Open Documents

The debate about the OpenDocument format is just beginning. Massachusetts put a stake in the ground with their decision to adopt ODF for all employees in the Commonwealth and for anyone doing business with them. This may go down in history as a bold and important move. But Microsoft, which opposes ODF, will not give up easily.

There was an OpenOffice.org 2005 conference in Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia last week at which a professor delivered a keynote speech entitled: "Should I Adopt OpenOffice?". It is reported that after taking a few questions from the audience, a loud voice boomed out from the back of the auditorium saying "In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Microsoft technical officer." The person then launched at attack on the professor about the information that had just been presented. The gentleman then claimed that the European Union had accepted Microsoft file formats as "sufficiently open" and finally, he directly attacked the new OASIS OpenDocument Format. It was further reported that the professor had not even mentioned the OpenDocument Format or Microsoft's "Office Open XML". Needless to say, Microsoft is very defensive about the subject. Why? They have a monopoly and they want to keep it. Maintaining some degree of control over the details behind the formats gives a vendor more flexibility in developing their software and in deciding when and how to offer upgrades. Having to work with formats that are controlled by an outside independent third party is definitely harder. (read more)

Personal Computing October 3, 2005 10:28 AM

Friday, May 20, 2005

Yottabytes - Feedback

Bill Reith says " the correct unit of measure is not 'yottabytes' but 'awholelottabytes'". He also pointed out that a key issue is how to retrieve all the data. In particular he says that often he finds himself saying "I know I have an email...or a document... on that subject around here somewhere. Where the heck did I put it?". Part of the answer is meta data. I envision that increasingly software that is used to save emails, pictures, music, etc. will make it much easier to add tags of our choosing. Some software will undoubtedly figure out what the tags should be and create them for us. Another part of the answer is better tools for finding things. My favorite is X1. X1 indexes your email while you are sleeping and it can then sift through tens of thousands of emails and find what you are looking for as fast as you can type in the search box. It is one of the most amazing pieces of software I have ever used.

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Personal Computing May 20, 2005 03:52 PM

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Yottabytes

The amount of data and meta data that we are creating and saving is growing at an incredible clip. The data includes emails, presentations, documents, and other things but the majority of the data for many people is digital pictures and digital music. The meta data is data about the data. For example, a song (track) is data. The data about the data (the meta data) includes the name of the artist, the name of the album, the name of the composer, the length of the recording, genre (classical, blues, rock, pop, opera, etc.), the artwork from the CD case, and potentially a whole more. For a digital picture the meta data includes the date, the camera used, the various settings of the camera at the time the picture was taken, the size of the picture, the lighting, and potentially the latitude and longitude and digital ID of the photographer at the time the picture was taken. Meta data also includes "tags" that we assign to pictures and music -- things like "favorite", "top ten", "family", "vacation", "Carribean cruise", "Private", "Aunt Sallies birthday party", and on and on. At some point there may be more meta data than there is data.

My first computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80, had 80,000 bytes of storage on the hard drive. An average email these days is probably 5,000 bytes, so the TRS-80 hard drive could store sixteen emails. My current ThinkPad hard drive has a capacity of 80 billion bytes -- one million times more storage. A bit hard to imagine -- until you start to think about the explosion of music, pictures, and meta data. Fortuntately, the technology is keeping up with our insatiable appeatites to store more and more data. Hopefully, the availability of affordable and easy-to-use backup technologies will be there too and we will have the patience and discipline to use them. Losing a few emails is one thing but losing pictures of a baby's first few steps is another.

Pretty soon we will have a new word in our technical vocabularies -- the yottabyte. How big is a yottabyte? Let's start with the basics. An alphabetic character such as an "a" is represented in most computers by a combination of eight zeroes and ones called a "byte".

1,024 bytes is a kilobyte
1,024 kilobytes is a megabyte
1,024 megabytes is a gigabyte
1,024 gigabytes is a terabyte
1,024 terabytes is a petabyte
1,024 petabyes is an exabyte
1,024 exabytes is a zettabyte

and finally -- or at least for now...

1,024 zettabytes is a yottabyte

Other ways to look at a yottabyte are that it is 2 to the 80th power bytes, or 10 to the 24th power bytes , or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. I have no doubt we will have lots of yottabytes of meta data.

P.S. You can find some interesting information about the origins of the yottabyte in the wikipedia. Also, if one would commit a single byte of information to store the location of every atom contained in the human body, it would require about 5,900 yottabytes. Not long ago, no one would even try to describe what it would take. Maybe BMUS (beam me up Scotty) is not so far fetched after all.

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Personal Computing May 19, 2005 11:36 AM

Thursday, May 5, 2005

My Outlook

Warning: this story is not for the feint of heart. It is about an experience over the weekend that made me want to scream. If you don't have any problems using Outlook, no need to read further.

The queue of things I want to write about for the weblog is a long one. With a rainy forecast for last weekend taking fun motorcycle rides out of the picture, I had thought the weekend was set to give birth to at least one story and maybe a few drafts for later. Friday morning when I awoke at the Sheraton in New York City , where I was attending the IBM/Forbes Executive Conference, I was surprised to find that my inbox had no new mail in it? Something must be wrong, I thought, since normally I would have had at least a hundred new ones during the night. I investigated various things on my ThinkPad for ten minutes but then had to give up and go to the conference.

I got back to my home office from New York around 4 PM and started working with Outlook to figure out why there was no email coming in. I went to the patrickWeb mail server using the new Opera 8 browser and sure enough the inbox on the mail server had the normal few hundred (by now) daily emails -- about 85% of which is garbage from spammers. I tried sending an email to myself with webmail and it worked instantly. I then started the Thunderbird email program. It immediately connected to my mail server and downloaded all the mail -- I leave a copy of email on the mail server for 30 days. Seemed that something was wrong with Outlook. After spending the entire evening until quite late, the bottom line was that webmail with Opera and Thunderbird worked just fine but Outlook was unable to send or receive email. I was tempted to switchover to Thunderbird on the spot. However, like many people, I use Outlook for not just email but also my calendar, task list, and thousands of contacts in Outlook. It is also setup to synchronize all this with my Sony Ericsson P910a mobile phone. I also have various plugins in Outlook that enable me to synchronize contact information with hundreds of industry colleagues, filter out the spam, allow me to read other people's weblogs, and a few other things. In other words, I am locked in to Microsoft Outlook -- for now.

The support people at Microsoft are very well trained, efficient, and polite. I talked to several in Bangalore over the past few days. They are quite methodical in their approach but have also been trained to focus on the non-Microsoft software that may be causing problems. The immediate presumption if Outlook is not sending or receiving mail is that there is something wrong with your PC, your anti-virus software, your firewall, your ISP, or you yourself! They also don't acknowledge that some users want to organize their data in certain ways -- not necessarily the way Microsoft would organize it. For example I like to keep my outlook data in a place on my PC that I can remember, that is easy to reach, and easy to backup. Outlook data -- mail, calendar, contacts -- is kept in a file that ends with .pst (no idea what that stands for). I have five pst files -- outlook_jrp.pst, archive_2002.pst, archive_2003.pst, archive_2004.pst, and archive_2005.pst. I backup these files at least twice per week. In implementing a Microsoft support resolution to my Outlook problem on Saturday, I did not realize until the next day that the steps I was given lead to changing the name and location of my primary outlook file. It was now Outlook2 and it was stored as a hidden file deep in the bowels of Microsoft's file structure. I searched around the MS web site and found that the file is not only hidden, but that the search capability of the MS File Explorer can not find it! No problem though because there is a quick fix to enable the Explorer to find the pst file. You won't believe there "quick fix" (read more)

Personal Computing May 5, 2005 04:11 PM

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Demo@15

Of all the many conferences I attend each year, my favorite is Demo. Many conferences offer insight in various ways. All conferences offer a chance to network with friends and colleagues from the industry. Only Demo offers the chance to meet with the top couple of people from dozens of technology companies, see their product in action, and discuss their plans and strategies with them. The conference is attended by analysts, consultants, editors, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs. This year was special because it was the fifteenth year of Demo. There were several people there who had attended fourteen of the fifteen (I have been to thirteen of them). There were 73 companies showing off their new offerings.

Various stories have appeared in the media about Demo this week and news about the conference will reach 250 million people around the world via print and online media. Chris Shipley is the Executive Producer for DEMO Conferences and she always opens the conference with her vision of where things are headed and what technologies will have the biggest impact. Half or so of the companies get six minutes to tell their story and do their demo on stage -- others get one minute. During half of the morning and half of the afternoon, the 750 attendees get to mingle at the company booths. Needless to say, a lot of networking occurs and much of it leads to new relationships and in some cases financing.

Chris says that she gets to be like a kid in a candy store - she looks at more than a thousand companies in order to select the ones that present at Demo. At breaks, colleagues always ask each other "see anything you like?". I always do. It is hard to summarize the excitement I felt for what I saw. I'll highlight a few things I saw but you can see a one page summary and link for each company on the list of demonstrators. (read more)

Conferences, Gadgets, Internet Technology, Personal Computing February 17, 2005 05:43 PM

Sunday, January 9, 2005

PC Innovation

I have been following the writings and speeches of Professor David Gelernter of Yale University for several years. He is a really smart guy and has great perspective on the future of information technology. Most recently I read with great interest Dr. Gelernter's contribution to the Wall Street Journal and the letters to the editor which have been appearing in response. The basic premise of the good professor's essay is that innovation in the personal computer space is dead and that information technology vendors are not stepping up to the major issues of users. In some respects I agree with him but as a veteran of the PC business (several of my short thirty-five years at IBM) and an avid PC hobbyist since the days of the Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), I believe there are a few additional factors to be considered.

I think of the Personal Computer in two different ways. First as a standalone computer that I use for some number of hours per day with application software such as Quicken for financial matters and Movable Type and Dreamweaver for managing my blog and patrickWeb. Secondly, I think of the PC as one of a number of devices that I use to connect to the Internet to interact with business, entertainment and information services such as Amazon, eBay, eFax, CopyTalk, Netflix, Weather Underground, Google News, and iTunes. Let's examine innovation in each of the two categories -- PC as a computer on my desk, and PC as one of many devices connected to the Internet. (read more)

Personal Computing January 9, 2005 10:44 PM

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

iTrike Riding

It was not exactly a sunny and warm day but, as long as the roads are dry, I like to go out for a motorcycle ride on Sunday afternoons. Winter riding is actually very nice and refreshing -- as long as you have the electric vest and gloves plugged in. They really did the job today when the wind chill was in was single digit territory. Today's ride was on the trike through lower Westchester County, New York and was especially enjoyable because I listened to some great music from the Harley-Davidson MP3 player. The music came from iTunes, hence the term "iTrike Riding". First I will review the motorcycling and digital technology involved and then discuss some of the issues and implications. (read more)

Gadgets, Mobile, Motorcycles, Music, Personal Computing December 15, 2004 10:06 AM

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Zippity Doo Dah

The title of this short snippet, zippity doo dah, has nothing to do with the Wizard of Oz, but it does have something to do with wizardry. The magic comes from a company called Zip-linq and specifiicly, the product is a retractable cable that simplifies plugging things in at home or on the road. (See related story about Power Over Ethernet). Here a few pictures of the cables to help you see what this is all about. The IBM keyboard is a new product also. It is a cousin to the ThinkPad keyboard and connects to your PC via a USB cable. There are many interesting features to the keyboard including two USB ports on the back. I keep a zip-linq cable plugged into the keyboard. Before hitting the sack, I extend the retractable cable, connect the Treo, press one button on it's touchscreen, and return in the morning to a completely synchronized and charged handheld.

Personal Computing June 9, 2004 06:49 PM

Sunday, June 6, 2004

Cable and Wireless

There is an international telecommunications company, with customers in 80 countries, called Cable & Wireless. For 130 years it has constantly reinvented itself to embrace the latest technological advances to serve its customers' needs and today is a leading provider of IP (Internet Protocol) voice and data services to business and residential customers.

Speaking of "cable(s) and wireless", there is no end to the creativity of the technology industry. The USB (universal serial bus) cable has the primary goal of creating a more compact, instant, hassle-free way to connect a keyboard, mouse, printer, joystick, scanner, digital speakers, digital camera, PC telephone, and more to your PC. Prior to the sleek and simple USB cables we had big and bulky serial and parallel cables. If you had more than one device, then you needed a special box with multiple cable connectors and a switch know and you ended up with a mess of cables. Adding a non-USB peripheral device to a PC was a non-trivial task that required a lot of technical savvy and a certain amount of luck. First you have to figure out which port to use and then, in most cases, you have to pry open your PC to install an add-in card, set special switches, and figure out various "settings". USB makes adding peripheral devices really easy. USB replaces all the different kinds of serial and parallel port connectors with one standardized plug and port combination. With USB-compliant PCs and peripherals, you just plug them in and turn them on. What's next? (read more)

Personal Computing June 6, 2004 06:14 PM

Thursday, March 4, 2004

Blogging and Spam Update

One of the ways that you can tell if a new Internet technology is going to be successful is to look for skepticism. When people begin to say the hype exceeds the reality, it means we are on the way toward the reality exceeding the hype. I am not referring to new business models that are going to make water run uphill, but rather to fundamental technologies such as the Internet itself, the Web, Java, Linux, WiFi, and others. All of those were discounted in the early days. Blogging has now entered the phase when we can be sure it will be enormously successful and change the fundamentals of how information is written, distributed, syndicated, and archived. How do I know? A recent story by The Associated Press proclaimed that "Blogging still infrequent, study finds". The study found that somewhere between2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States are bloggers. The implication of the story was that "only" 2-7 percent of Internet users were blogging. I find the 2-7 percent number extremely encouraging. (read more)

Blogging, Internet Technology, Personal Computing, Public Policy March 4, 2004 10:44 PM

Monday, March 1, 2004

My Office Is Open

In a recent post I mentioned that I had built a spreadsheet with OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org is an open-source application and it is free. I do not use it because it is free. As I said in the ZDNet interview, the issue is not "free" -- the issue is "freedom". OpenOffice is a multi-platform office productivity suite compatible with all major file formats and it runs on both Windows XP and on Linux. I use both operating systems and I don't want to have to remember the idiosyncrasies of two different office suites. OpenOffice is identical on the two platforms. Some people worry about file compatibility, but I have not found that to be an issue. (read more)

Personal Computing March 1, 2004 10:28 PM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

The future is... Linux televisions

Recently I spoke with Munir Kotadia at ZDNet UK in London about the future of the Internet -- a subject I love to talk about. One of Munir's questions was "How long can Microsoft dominate the browser market?". "Browser market", I said? Sure, if you look just at PC's you would wonder why anyone would try to compete with a monopoly that has 95 percent of the market. However, if you look at the market for Internet devices with browsers on them -- including televisions, PDA's, phones, automobiles and virtually any kind of device that has a chip on it and a network connection -- then you get a much different picture. How many devices will have a chip and a network connection? All of them -- billions of them. Basically, everything becomes a computer on the Web and then no one company dominates that market. There is a huge opportunity for innovation and we are the very beginning of the potential. This is why I am optimistic about Opera Software.

The other topic Munir asked about was why Linux is so popular? There is a perception that Linux is about "free", but my belief is that Linux is about "freedom". I got some feedback from a few readers who said I was more than a little off base with my Linux comments. Maybe, but it is what I believe. It is not about free because it is not free, no software is free. There are implicit costs involved in using any software. The issue is about freedom -- for people to make the choices they want to make with the software they use and to have the partnerships they want with other vendors.

The complete interview is here.

Internet Technology, Personal Computing February 26, 2004 05:35 PM

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Chilling Effects

Geocaching in Florida last week was an exciting experience and it was chilling to come home and find the temperature more than 75 degrees colder. There is a lot I want to write about Linux, WiFi, blogging, digital identity and other aspects of Internet technology, but I know there are patrickWeb readers who are fellow motorcyclists and geocachers who may be interested in this update. The sky was blue, the roads were clear, and I could not resist a motorcycle ride. It was one of the shortest on record for me. An even chillier experience is what happened to my hard drive. (read more)

Motorcycles, Personal Computing January 21, 2004 08:23 PM

Friday, December 12, 2003

Linux In School - Part 2

It was privilege once again to be able to speak to students at the IT Leadership Academy program at Naugatuck Valley Community College. A show of hands indicated that about 20% of the students had some familiarity with Linux. Michael Mino, the program director, had provided a laptop with Red Hat Linux to each of the seven school groups so they could learn more about it. After my talk the students broke into groups and I looked over the shoulder of some of them to see what they were doing. One student was using Red Hat and I asked him how it was going. "I am figuring out how to use it", he said. The point is that he didn't have a reference manual, had never been to a class, and didn't need to ask any questions. He was just "figuring it out." (read more)

Personal Computing December 12, 2003 03:16 PM

Friday, December 5, 2003

Linux In School

Two IBM colleagues, John Boutross and Craig Fellenstein, are helping out as volunteers in a program called the IT Leadership Academy. The program is sponsored by the Governor of Connecticut and is designed to bring 180 public High School students together to work on IT related projects during the school year. The participating high schools include both suburban and urban. The Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, CT is the host for the sessions. I was fortunate to be guest speaker this morning. (read more)

Personal Computing December 5, 2003 04:05 PM

Thursday, December 4, 2003

ActiveWords (corrected link)

ActiveWords has teamed up with Lockergnome to offer a free download of the basic version ActiveWords to anyone who wants it. There has been a lot of demand that has resulted in some download problems so it may take some patience, but I can recommend the product to anyone who spends a lot of time at the keyboard and would like to try a good productivity tool. The free download is here.

Personal Computing December 4, 2003 09:45 AM

Wednesday, December 3, 2003

ActiveWords

One of the software tools I use to leverage my time is ActiveWords. The basic idea with ActiveWords is that you type a word and the word launches a program, jumps to a website, sends an email, substitutes text, or any number of things. I have gotten hooked on it. There are an unlimited number of uses. I type "mob" and ActiveWords types "Best way to reach me is on my mobile phone at +1 203-526-3680". When blogging, I have a number of ActiveWords that speed the creation of links. For example, I type "cat" and ActiveWords responds by typing "http://patrickweb.com/weblog/categories" or I type "ht" and it types "http://www.". I also use it to speed up various functions in Outlook. ActiveWords is one of those things that you have to try for awhile to see the power of it. ActiveWords has teamed up with Lockergnome to offer a free download of the basic version ActiveWords to anyone who wants it. There has been a lot of demand that has resulted in some download problems so it may take some patience, but I can recommend the product to anyone who spends a lot of time at the keyboard and would like to try a good productivity tool. The free download is here. Now, if only they had a version for Linux.

Personal Computing December 3, 2003 05:45 PM

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Linux on the Desktop - Part 1

The introduction of the new version of Microsoft Office has me thinking a lot about Linux for my desktop. Microsoft has performed many technical fetes in their software. Many of the features in Windows XP and Office are impressive and many are even intuitive and easy to use. However, many features are not intuitive or easy and worse yet impose decisions upon the user and at times border on harassment. We all have our favorite examples of Windows/Office frustrations and I won't bore you with mine. Microsoft is taking security issues seriously but I believe that they believe that the answer to achieving better security is to make the world "windows everywhere". I feel the noose tightening. One path to freedom is Linux. More and more servers at the world's e-businesses are running Linux and the open source community continues to make major progress on scaleability, reliability, and manageability. The desktop is another story. Microsoft dominates the desktop more strongly than any product in any market that I am aware of. I decided to begin the journey toward Linux for my desktop, to learn more about Linux, and see how far I can get. I'll be writing about my experiences here on patrickWeb. At IBM, there are thousands of desktop Linux users, but I would have to say that they are not average users by any means. I have confidence in the future of desktop Linux, but I do have some questinos and I intend to explore them -- and also learn from the experience of others. (read more).

Personal Computing October 29, 2003 10:20 PM

Sunday, September 28, 2003

The Sharer

There was an excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine today called "The Sharer" written by David Diamond. He had a Q&A interchange with Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. The final question he asked was about Linux being the nemesis of Microsoft. The answer from Linus will be a classic. "I just can't see myself in the position of the nemesis, since I just don't care enough. To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect". See the full Q&A at The New York Times.  (read more)

Internet Technology, People, Personal Computing September 28, 2003 11:43 AM

Friday, August 1, 2003

USB - What Next?

There is no end to the creativity of the technology industry. The USB (universal serial bus) had the primary goal of creating a more compact, instant, hassle-free way to connect a keyboard, mouse, printer, digital joystick, scanner, set of digital speakers, digital camera, or PC telephone to a PC. Prior to the sleek and simple USB cables we had big and bulky serial and parallel cables. If you had more than one serial device, then you needed a special box with multiple cable connections and you ended up with a mess of cables. Adding a non-USB peripheral device to a PC can be a non-trivial task that requires a lot of technical savvy and a certain amount of luck. First you have to figure out which port to use and then, in most cases, you have to pry open your PC to install an add-in card, set special switches, and figure out various "settings". USB makes adding peripheral devices really easy. First, USB replaces all the different kinds of serial and parallel port connectors with one standardized plug and port combination. With USB-compliant PCs and peripherals, you just plug them in and turn them on. What's next? (read more)

Gadgets, Personal Computing August 1, 2003 09:53 AM

Sunday, February 16, 2003

The Home Office

The Hartford Courant ran a story this morning called, The Home Office, by Rebecca Reisner. I was pleased to be able to spend an hour on the phone with her to offer my thoughts. Since I have been spending most of my waking hours in my home office for some years I have a lot of thoughts about the matter. She reflected a couple of my thoughts along with those of others in her short story. She did a nice job. There are some more details about the technical parts of the office in patrickWeb, but it needs some updating -- a project I plan to do soon. (read more)

Personal Computing February 16, 2003 12:01 PM

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Outlook Again

I have received a flood of email from readers about my Outlook backup dilemma. Most of them were sympathizers who have the same frustration. Some offered solutions. I have tried some of them and found none that give me confidence that I have really backed up the very latest information in both the MS Outlook folders and my own personal folders that are stored in Outlook. That was my point about Lotus Notes. I am not trying to get into an argument that Notes that is better or start any marketing efforts here in my weblog; nor am I trying to make my blog into a personal tech support resource. The bigger point is about choice. (read more)

Personal Computing January 23, 2003 01:13 PM

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

How Is Your Outlook?

I have written quite a bit about how difficult it is to use some web sites. I'll pause on that for the moment to comment about Microsoft Outlook. I won't say anything about Outlook Express -- the shortcomings there are well known. Outlook is supposed to be much more "industrial strength". I am somewhat spoiled after having used Lotus Notes since 1992. It has it's own set of shortcomings for sure but it is unquestionably "industrial strength". After I retired from IBM at the end of 2001, I decided I should use Outlook since most of the people I interact with outside of IBM use it. (I still use Notes too). Outlook definitely has some nice features and in some ways it is very intuitive and easy to use. In other areas it is a disaster. (read more)

Personal Computing January 21, 2003 10:07 PM

Friday, January 10, 2003

Linux In The Kitchen

The pace of Linux in personal digital assistants will likely begin to accelerate. The Sharp Zaurus is already available and users are enthusiastic. Corporate buyers may be also. In addition to the obvious virtures of Linux, a more subtle attraction is that a Linux PDA can run Java applications and Java is quite good for creating applications that can be integrated with other enterprise-wide systems. Acceptance may also pick up in the consumer market now that Sony and Matsushita have announced their plans to develop a Linux operating system for their digital consumer electronics products. (read more)

Personal Computing January 10, 2003 03:33 AM

Sunday, December 15, 2002

Lindows - part 1

I just re-booted Windows XP Professional for the third time this weekend. The power of being able to run a dozen applications at once is nice, but having to shut them all down (sometimes by having to turn off the power) and then start them all again is frustrating. I recently bought a Lindows computer from Walmart.com. I was curious about it and so I bought one to try it out. It was $300 including the operating system. For an additional $99 I got access to 1,600 applications. When you install a new application on it you just "click 'n run". No re-booting. It uses Linux as the underlying operating system. I haven't had time to try out the Lindows claim that it can run Windows applications in addition to Linux applications. I am getting motivated to spend some more time trying that. I'll have much more to say about Lindows in future postings. Stay tuned.

Personal Computing December 15, 2002 11:23 AM