Occam's Razor

Google recently announced its inactive account manager. If you have a Google Account, this new manager essentially tells Google, “Assume I’ve died if I haven’t logged in after X days. And if I hit that number of days, destroy all data about me.” You can also tell Google not to destroy its data about you, but to authorize a list of other individuals to then access your Google account.

This might be welcome news to the executor of your estate who has to slog through the odious task of getting your creditors to go away as well as notifying friends, relatives, distant acquaintances and your LinkedIn.com colleagues that you are no more. Assuming Google follows through, if you choose to have its records about you destroyed sometime after your death, not only are you dead in the actual sense, but also dead in the digital sense, at least for data about you in Google.

It’s nice of Google to plan for your demise. Other companies out there are likely not to be so willing to delete data about you. The predominant companies in the online world though are figuring out ways to handle your electronic data after your physical demise. Facebook is trying out a way to let people memorialize a dead person’s Facebook account. Twitter has a convoluted process for decommissioning an account which in its current form will make your executor not even want to bother trying. Doubtless other social media and internet conglomerates will develop their own policies, but is likely your square Instagram pictures will still be out there somewhere in cyberspace centuries after you are dead. Technology is providing a way for us to become immortal, at least in the electronic sense, long after our bodies have succumbed to their finite limits.

Also likely being immortalized about you are many of those digital fingerprints you left. Which ads you clicked on. The dreck you purchased from eBay back in 2003. Your rantings in public forums and comments on Yahoo news articles. Maybe even the porn sites you visited and your account on ashleymadison.com. Also your credit history, your spending patterns as documented on mint.com, your family history as you charted it with Facebook’s family history app and maybe all that stuff you uploaded to your personal cloud. All there for others to pick over. If you think about it, you should feel aghast. I have heard unconfirmed reports that one of my grandfathers snuck out the back door frequently for some booty down the street, presumably unbeknownst to dear old grandma. No one can plausibly confirm or deny it, so I will choose to remember my grandpa as the genial guy who grossed me out when I went fishing with him and he sliced off the fish’s head.

Our generation won’t have plausible deniability. Some enterprising great granddaughter in 2100 may be sifting through open source big data warehouses and be able to trace that message to a lover you made on ashleymadison.com to your IP and computer when five minutes earlier you had sent out an email to a friend. So that’s the downside, but the real bummer is it is probably too late to do anything about it. Being humans we’re bound to have moral failings, it’s just that in the past they did not normally come to light, so the living assumed the best about us. The good news is that if you can keep the researchers from putting all these facts together until after you are dead then it will all be moot. Your ex and children may be shocked when they subsequently learn of your immoral behavior, but it won’t matter to you. I am guessing that an account on reputation.com isn’t going to quite cut it.

So your drunkenness, lecherousness, gambling addiction, wife beating and stash of pornography, or at least some part of it, will be available for those willing to look for it. It is not too hard to envision companies that will do this for profit. In fact, I can see a whole new business model built around electronic blackmail. (The blackmail.com domain, curiously, is owned but parked. I should probably make an offer on the domain.) Something like:

Dear Mr. John Jones,

We are aware that you are seeing two other women on the side, plus you have a gay lover you see on alternate Wednesdays. But no one needs to know because we won’t tell! We guarantee that we will not reveal this information about you for the low price of $1000 a year paid now, or low monthly installments of just $100 a month.

Otherwise we will be sending a summary of the information we have about you to gawker.com and Pastor Vleek at the United Methodist Church where you tithe on May 1^st, along with proof of the veracity of certain claims we will make so they are beyond plausible deniability.

We accept Visa, Mastercard and Discover, or you can make payments confidentially with your PayPal account. Please visit my.blackmail.com and enter your special confidential access code 6f7gjk93! to initiate payment.

Sincerely,

Jason Dweeb
Account Executive

What’s the upside? Well, electronic immortality! Because there won’t be just blackmail.com, you will also want to hire memorializedforever.com. In the past you were memorialized with fading photographs and copies of handwritten letters, if that. In the future you will have the ability to let people see you in high fidelity. You will want to buy their high fidelity service, in which you will be recorded in high definition 3-D. The voice quality will be high fidelity too. Your future great, great grandchildren will feel like they really know that guy otherwise known as the carcass planted under the tombstone at Crestview Cemetery. If you want you can expound about your history, your feelings, your concerns or anything you want future generations to know about you. You can even pay for the three way backup service, where your high definition memorial is hosted in redundant cloud servers plus immortalized in a blocks of digital friendly material, which can be readily uploaded in the event of a catastrophic failure.

I hope this is what you want, but it’s all sort of moot. It’s happening and there is not much that can be done to stop it. There will probably be federal legislation at some point to at least regulate this business, but as a practical matter the internet is impossible to really police, so it will all be stored somewhere anyhow and available for a price.

As for me, when I die I would prefer to be really dead, just like dear old possibly lecherous grandpa. I won’t have that opportunity, but I will at least take the time to set my Google inactive account manager settings, as a courtesy to my wife who will probably clean up behind me and really hates paperwork.

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”

Google, the benevolent overlord of the Internet, last week bared its teeth and bit us. Oh maybe not you personally, but certainly those of us who depend on Google Reader. Reader is not the only product that Google announced that it is pulling. It is also pulling its user portal, iGoogle.

Unsurprisingly, I first learned about this in Google Reader, which is where I spend a good part of my day. First there was the announcement in Reader itself saying it was going away July 1, and providing a convenient link so that you can download your list of sites to import into a different newsreader. But also, my Google Reader soon became full of articles about Reader’s demise. Indeed, I used Google Reader to learn about an online petition on change.org to try to persuade Google to keep Reader. I immediately signed it, of course, as have more than 120,000 others, but the mighty overlord is likely to be tone deaf to our requests.

Secretly, I think that Google suffers from passive aggressive behavior. That’s because it now wants me to do everything in Google +, its latest social network, because it has a serious problem with Facebook envy. It has been aggressively pushing me to use G+. I believe that Reader’s demise is at least in part because people continue to doggedly use it rather than G+. It’s pretty obvious why we are still using Reader: it is a really elegant solution to reading lots of content that we care about.

Still, it is not popular like GMail. It is one of their niche products, something they threw together as newsfeeds began to take off. Newsfeeds are still all over the place. Most sites wanting to attract traffic wouldn’t be caught dead without a newsfeed, along with their Twitter account and Facebook page. It’s all part of building, promoting and sustaining a brand on the web.

With Reader, I don’t usually have to visit a web site to read its content. I simply grab its feed, which it usually advertises either explicitly with a link on its page or implicitly with HTML markup that my browser recognizes. With a couple of clicks the site’s news will be forever tucked inside Google Reader. Now I can go to one place, Google Reader, to read content for all my favorite sites and favorite bloggers. I don’t necessarily have to visit the site again, unless the publisher chooses to publish only teaser text and I choose to read more on the site. Infoword.com, one of the many sites I have in Reader, uses this approach. I can’t imagine trying to keep up with tech news without these site’s newsfeeds.

Reader saves so much time by keeping me from needlessly going to sites of interest. It’s like my own personal newspaper of the web, always topical, and always with stuff I am likely to care about. Okay, maybe 80% of it I don’t care all that much about. Most of what I read amounts to scanning headlines and then digging deeper if I find the content of more interest. I do the same thing with a newspaper. I scan the headlines but except for the front page rarely make it beyond the first couple of paragraphs of an article. That’s the whole point of a newsreader like Google Reader: to allow you to efficiently browse news and content. A good newspaper contains all sorts of divergent topical areas: national news, international news, sports, style, arts, local news, business, etc. Reader does this for the web except it customizes it based on your interests. It will even suggest feeds you might like based on what you are reading. It’s like getting the Washington Post without the sports section, which I never read, but with a bonus tech section stuffed with content it knows that I will want to read. In short, it’s brilliant!

Google Reader is certainly not the only newsreader out there; it’s just the first I found that made reading newsfeeds elegant, simple, intuitive and fast. I had tried other newsreaders before Google Reader came out and they all sucked pretty badly. For one thing, Google Reader was web-based whereas most newsreaders were client programs. So you would see stuff at home you already read at work. Reader also has intelligent search algorithms, prefetching your content. Boom! It’s there. If you see something of interest that you want to read later, you just “star” it and it keeps your list of starred items indefinitely.

Clearly Reader is not for everyone since you have to be a bit geeky to get it. A little education on the business of “feeds” is in order. It helps to know what a newsfeed is, how to subscribe to it and why Atom formatted feeds may be better than RSS 2.0 feeds. (Actually, there’s a bit of a holy war about this.) Once you “get” it, and it’s generally the geeks that quickly grasp the enormous potential of a newsfeed, then the only question is “which newsreader?” After you try a half dozen and you try Google Reader, you don’t want to use anything else but Reader, even if it is boring black type on white pages.

The argument against newsfeeds is that you can get the same stuff by other means. Everyone is publishing to Twitter now, so follow the site on Twitter. And maybe that’s okay if you live your life on Twitter and find the most elegant Twitter client to organize it for you. But not everyone publishes to Twitter and there are only 120 characters there per tweet. Typically a tweet is full of annoying hashtags and @ symbols to parse. It comes across like Spanglish. Facebook is another sort of alternative. Often a site’s Facebook page will have similar content, or not, but again you have to be a Facebook aficionado and read your Facebook newsfeed, which likely includes tons of stuff from friends and family to throw you off stride. The whole point of newsfeeds though is that they are independent of proprietary delivery mechanisms. They are about liberating content on the web. One of its chief evangelists and founder of reddit.com Aaron Swartz recently committed suicide, arguably because he was pushing too hard for the idea that information should be free.

This stuff matters. Newsfeeds matter. No, I’m not kidding. They really matter, big time! In my case it matters because it is an incredibly efficient way to read or at least scan lots of relevant content. Newsfeeds are like Cliff Notes for recent content on the web that you care about. It may be geeky and unsexy but it matters. Most likely the people you read the most on the web also depend on newsfeeds and are probably spending most of their days in Google Reader. That’s how they maintain their edge. If in part I manage at all the project an erudite manner on this blog it comes across because I read a lot, I read it fast, and I read it efficiently in Google Reader.

But it will soon be gone! Which means that while newsfeeds will still be around that I must find another way to get my news. I am experimenting with alternatives, and the Feedly browser extension looks promising, but it’s still not Reader. I was used to Reader. It offered zero latency, i.e. I just didn’t have to think about it. Feedly looks gorgeous but I want to be absorbed in the content, not the window dressing.

I wish the mighty Google would rethink this decision. The intellectual brainpower of the Internet is going to decline sharply when they pull the plug on the unsexy but remarkable Google Reader.

There is plenty of upheaval in my office. We are completing a painful (and I do mean painful) transition moving from one email system to another. In this case, we are moving from Lotus Notes to Google Mail. Lotus Notes meant lots of expensive email servers inside our firewall closely watched over by a crew of technicians who, like grease monkeys, spent their days (and nights) constantly oiling Lotus’s gears. GMail of course is “in the cloud”. A Google enterprise team manages it for us. It’s all sort of magic and at least so far seems to mostly work.

Switching email systems in a large enterprise of 70,000 people is quite a trick. It is roughly like switching out your car’s engine while driving down the street. It can be done. Essentially you have to have two email engines running at the same time processing the same incoming email. Eventually all the email accounts are successfully migrated from one email system to the other and you pull the plug on the old email system. But of course there are thousands of gotchas. You also have to migrate calendars, contacts and to dos. All sorts of applications and systems are tied into the email system. Each of these individually has to be taught to use the new email system. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is hard.

Now that our office is all GMail all the time the office has ditched the dependable email client in favor of using GMail inside the Chrome browser. I like GMail at home and on the road and use it all the time. However, the experience of using GMail on the web casually versus using it all the time is quite a bit different. When sixty percent of your day is spent reading and replying to email, productivity is important. While GMail has lots of nifty features (like its swift search engine to find emails) it also has some significant drawbacks. Specifically you have all the limitations and annoyances of working in a browser. GMail does its best to minimize these drawbacks, but when you are reading and replying to hundreds of emails a day and using a browser for an email client the experience becomes very irritating.

Take, for example, simply navigating between emails. Typically you want to just go to the next or last email. When using a browser and a desktop computer, you must use a mouse. This means you have to reach for the mouse, point to the email you want to read and then click on it. It takes three actions to do something that previously required simply pressing your up and down arrow keys. You don’t notice this at home, but at work I find it is more than irritating. It makes reading and replying to email an annoying hassle.

We don’t have a lot of options. Our service desk supports Microsoft Outlook as an option if you whine about wanting an email client, but as Outlook users know it really prefers that you are using Microsoft Exchange on the backend. Plus it’s a Microsoft product, which means it will have the usual mixture of brilliant, quirky and downright annoying features. Most importantly, it has feature bloat. Ninety percent of the time you need to either delete or quickly file an email. The other ten percent of the time you just need to reply or forward it. You probably don’t need to turn your email client into a newsreader, or to have it transparently integrate multiple email accounts or create multiple personalities. You just want to get through the couple of hundred emails in your email box as efficiently and as quickly as possible, with minimal fuss and keystrokes.

In short, you need Mozilla Thunderbird. The open source email client is not dead, and thankfully Mozilla Thunderbird keeps refining its product, in spite of the fact that its big brother browser (Firefox) gets almost all of the attention. Arguably if you really feel you need an email client with GMail, you should ditch all of the other ones and just standardize on Thunderbird. This is because it works across all the operating systems pretty much identically and it is elegantly simple. And should you feel the need to dress it up with themes or add-ons, it’s easy enough to do. Outlook users can even install a theme that sort of makes it look like Outlook.

It’s possible to use Thunderbird with GMail but it is not intuitive. After installing it, you need to go into your web-based GMail and select “Generate Application Password” (click on the More link near the top). It will create a long string of impossible to guess characters, numbers and symbols and you have to use to authenticate Thunderbird with GMail’s mail servers. Then in Thunderbird you have to find its account settings (Tools > Account Settings) and know the names of Google’s email servers (smtp.google.com for outgoing email and imap.google.com for incoming email). When asked for a password, use the applications password. You may need to tell it to use port 993 and SSL/TSL for connection security. You probably want IMAP instead of POP (Post Office Protocol) because IMAP allows you to keep your email in the cloud, instead of moving it to your computer. This is generally preferred since you never can lose it this way. It’s worth the hassle to make Thunderbird and GMail talk to each other because you sure will get sick of using GMail through a browser if you have to do most of your business day.

Certainly there are some features of the web-based GMail that are occasionally desirable. You can assign multiple tags to more than one email rather than just throw it into a folder. You can do sophisticated searching using a host of qualifiers. The nice thing is that the one percent of the time you might need these features, you can just bring up GMail and peck away. Most of the time you will prefer the speed and efficiency of Mozilla Thunderbird.

Curiously, Thunderbird excels as a purely email client. Maintaining a calendar is very much a part time activity, and GMail’s calendar is slick, easy to use and attractive. You can install an add-on to Thunderbird that will integrate a calendar, but it is relatively ugly. Google Calendar allows you to easily see other’s calendars, once they give you access to their calendar, and you can even see calendars outside of your office network. So if I need my calendar, I go into my browser.

GMail comes with Google Talk for instant messaging. Instant messaging is almost as important as email in the enterprise. With the right program placed in your task bar, you can be notified of instant messages even if you are not focused in your browser. Or you may prefer to install an instant messenger that works with Google Talk. If so make sure you keep that application password because you will need it. Warning: if you generate a new application password, you will need to replace the passwords in other applications you may have connected to Google’s infrastructure. Currently I am using Pidgin, which works well. However you really need to select the XMPP protocol instead of Google Talk protocol. Connect to talk.google.com and use port 5222. Also make sure encryption is enabled.

Perhaps one of these days Google will get GMail browser to work more simply and speedily. Right now they seemed more enamored with adding features you are unlikely to use, like conversation view, than in making it more keyboard friendly. In addition, all the logic is executed through Javascript, which is relatively slow. You notice the time it takes to read an email once you select it. This is less noticeable in an email client. Once you see how comfortable it is to use Thunderbird with GMail, you will likely see no reason to use browser-based GMail at all if you have the option.

Financial planning is supposed to make your life easier, but it is definitely a hassle. It becomes more of a hassle when you old financial planner has faded away and you feel the need to find a new one. Our new planner has his own ideas about what it means to have your financial life properly planned. It means financial assessments, many client meetings and writing three and four figure checks to our financial planner. Finally you end up in a new place, with your financial life not necessarily simpler, but at least orderly and following a sound financial strategy. And hopefully, you have less anxiety about whether you will be eating dog food in retirement. To lessen the anxiety, your planner generally provides a nice binder with pretty charts, words and numbers in it. In my case, the charts even came colored.

One thing that’s new with this financial planner is that we have most of our investments centralized in a brokerage. I chose Scottrade though I am sure there are other good and cheap brokers out there. Like lots of things related to getting your financial house in order, it’s a huge up front hassle for a long-term benefit. In our case, it meant setting up four separate brokerage accounts (one joint, one traditional IRA for me, and two IRAs for my wife, one traditional, one for rollover IRAs). It meant shuffling papers to the investment firms that gave them permission to let Scottrade buy and sell for us. It meant signing another form so one account could access all the other accounts. And it meant $630 additional to our financial planner, to make sure all the initial trades were done right. Using Scottrade with my planner looking over my shoulders online in a Skype session also gave me some insight into how day traders work. I felt I needed a set of green eyeshades, but mostly I am glad not to be a day trader. Rebalancing funds once a year is fine with me.

It also has meant becoming acquainted with mint.com, a free online web site now owned by the Quicken people to help you manage your finances. If you are hoping that mint.com will balance your checkbook, unfortunately it won’t do that, at least not yet. This is probably good for Intuit, the company that owns Quicken, because it keeps them selling their core product. However, for doing budgeting, minimizing hassle and giving you insight into your finances, mint.com is very impressive.

It took me only about half an hour to get it set up. I had to create an account then tell it about my various checking, savings and money market accounts. I had to give it my credentials for accessing these accounts, as well as for my various investment accounts. But it was super easy to do this. What really impressed me is that it knew about the Thrift Savings Plan, the federal government’s agency for managing federal employee’s 401K accounts. To track these investments in Quicken, I had to input the information from my quarterly statements, available in detail only online. Quicken, or at least Quicken for the Mac which is what I use, cannot access it electronically. Mint.com though just jumped into it, quickly summarized information by fund type and pulled in the transactions as well. It also let me know how well each fund was performing. Yeah, just like that. Slick!

Mint.com sifts through transactions in all your accounts and does a pretty good job of automatically categorizing your transactions into its budget categories. Then based on your spending it will try to infer a budget for each category and tell you how your spending is going compared to the budget. Of course you can refine your budget manually. Most people though are like me: inherently lazy. Mint.com caters to us inherently lazy people, and seems to get smarter the longer you use it.

In short, for general tracking your spending, investments and liabilities, it’s a great tool. For getting an overall picture of your financial health and tracking your finances over time, it’s slick as well. Unfortunately, it’s not smart enough to categorize everything correctly. You really should sift through your transactions and put the ten percent or so that are not categorized into the correct categories. But this seems to be necessary only for those who are anal. If big picture is good enough for you, mint.com is all you need.

As I noted, it won’t balance your checkbook. So if you need this level of detail, you are going to be using Quicken or one of its competitors. If you don’t bother to balance your checkbook and are only concerned if you might overdraw your account, mint.com will do a good job of watching for when you drop below thresholds and sending you notifications when you cross them. You just have to be smart enough not to write checks that are too large.

In short, it’s a site with a lot of potential, bringing financial organization to the lazy. If it can wholly replace the functionality of Quicken, it would keep me from the hassle of entering most of our transactions into Quicken, potentially saving me huge amounts of time. I would like the site to morph into a complete financial solution, so I can pay bills from the site with a few clicks. It already warns me somehow of when bills are due.

It’s about saving my time so I can do more interesting and fun stuff. Software like Quicken helps make managing my finances easier compared to doing it with pen, paper and a calculator, but Quicken is a huge hassle compared with mint.com.

Hopefully, mint.com will figure out a sustainable financial model. I don’t think it comes from their current approach, which is to serve targeted financial ads. I think it comes from selling services that balance your accounts, categorize your spending in greater details, pay your bills with a few clicks and that help you see the big picture. Maybe someday I can trust it to be my impartial financial adviser. If it can be as good as my financial planner, and be impartial, it could probably save me a lot of money on financial planning as well.

For someone who makes his living enabling information technology, I can be a technology laggard. So it was with the smartphone and me. Since I am parked in front of a computer for most of the day anyhow, there seemed little reason to buy a smartphone, particularly considering how much it costs to have the privilege of being on the internet all the time. Verizon Wireless’s prepaid plan is $50 a month, and that’s stacked on top of your other communications bills which for most of us is around $150 a month for high speed internet at home, cable television and maybe a home phone. So for me, my $7.99 remanufactured dumb as dirt cell phone with a prepaid $20 a quarter plan from Virgin Mobile (no longer available) made much more sense. I didn’t need the Internet on a mobile device and until recently I was lucky to get one call a week on my cell phone. If it was really that darn important, call me on my cell phone. Otherwise, leave me alone.

Eventually the cost of devices and plans gets low enough where I bite. I bit into the smartphone apple at last this week. Given my daughter’s positive experience with her smartphone and her $35 a month plan from Virgin Mobile for the last year or so, $35 a month did not seem an absorbent amount of money to pay for mobile internet and phone. This plus regular cash coming in from my online business gave me the excuse to take the plunge. So I ordered the fanciest Virgin Mobile smartphone I could find, the HTC EVO V 4G and waited for it to arrive in the mail. For a couple of days I have been getting acquainted with the device and pondering what it means.

One annoyance, which I hope is transitory, is its battery, which cannot seem to retain a charge for more than six hours even when it spends most of its time in sleep mode. I think my battery is a dud so under the phone’s warranty I plan to get it replaced. It may mean dealing with the hassle of keeping the phone’s battery charged more than with my old cell phone, which could go four to 5 days on a charge. I guess all its technology comes at the cost of needing more juice to keep the processor and circuits running.

The phone has 4G capabilities, which is the neatest and coolest IEEE standard in wireless communications. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get a 4G signal, not even along the Dulles corridor where the technology companies are jammed together and the carrier I use, Sprint, has offices just half a mile away. So it is plain 3G instead, which is adequate but still kind of slow compared to the high speed Internet I take for granted at home and at work. This doesn’t bother me that much. I won’t be streaming many videos to my smartphone anyhow.

Buying an iPhone with Virgin Mobile is technically possible, but cost prohibitive, so I stuck with an Android smartphone. At least so far I have found little objectionable using Android compared with the iPhone’s iOS operating system. Navigating the menus and finger motions are a bit different, but not objectionably so. The main thing to understand about Android is that it is not Windows on a smartphone, and it is not a product of Microsoft. Google has bigger plans and understands the mobile market and mobile operating systems much better than Microsoft. So you are unlikely to find Android uncool, just perhaps not as cool as iOS on the iPhone. Moreover, Android runs fast.

A smartphone should marry voice and information intelligently, and my HTC Evo V and Android do a great job. If you are using an Android-based smartphone, it pays to be part of the Google collective, i.e. have a Google account with Gmail and Google calendar. Naturally, it works sweetly and smartly with Google’s services, almost scarily so. It automatically populated my address book with email addresses and phone numbers of people I know and knew. This included a guy I haven’t worked with since 1998, who I accidentally called. It also included a whole bunch of people I really don’t ever want to call or send email to. There was no obvious or fast way to delete these contacts. I ended up keying in many of the most important names and phone numbers myself, as I could not make the Bluetooth connection with my old cell phone quite work.

Some software engineer was also obviously wide-awake designing the phone’s home screen. It is actually incredibly useful. The time of day along with the local weather and current temperature are prominently displayed, along with the number of voice mail, emails in your inbox, and a count of missed messages, which includes text messages and Facebook posts. It is counterintuitive when you first see these that you first must drag a ring onto the screen to tell it you want to do business. Add a security PIN to unlock the phone and that’s quite a bit of pecking and dragging your finger before you can do anything useful.

Still, it’s slick, shiny and has a retinal display. Despite its razzle-dazzle, to my chagrin the smartphone part is quite useful. Appointment cards will soon be a distant memory. I know my calendar instantly now and what dates and times are optimal and it all syncs up in the cloud transparently and permanently. Paper boarding passes will be obsolete as well. Send it to my smartphone and scan it at the gate. Snapping photos is also always available, at least until the battery dies, and photos can be sent via email or social media with but a few strokes of the finger. And of course there is the Internet. The built in browser is adequate but so many sites are now mobile-friendly that most web sites looked stripped down. Most of the time I would prefer the full screen and to zoom into content when desired.

If all that is not enough there is of course a zillion apps, some free, some with price tags that you can easily download and run. It was just a matter of hours before I downloaded my first app, a multi vendor chat app, which can keep me in constant instant messaging status with loved ones and friends. Its main use is to let me know my 23-year-old daughter is alive, because if she is on a computer, she is on MSN chat.

And therein is the problem. By being always on there is the expectation that you are, or should be, always available to any of your extended family or friends on a whim. Sometimes it is not convenient to give attention to your smartphone. Sometimes you just don’t want to type a text message to a spouse or a friend. Sometimes you want to be alone and brood in a corner. Sometimes you need to be absorbed in your job. However, just as often you want those interruptions, because work is often tedious or you welcome some distraction. You find yourself, just because you can do it now, reaching out and touching a friend with a text message or shooting him a picture. There is no reason to wait until the evening to post pictures on your blog or Facebook. Just do it now and let the technology figure out how to handle the logistics of it all.

So I feel like I am giving up something but I am probably also gaining something more valuable. Technology is knitting me closer in relationship and in real-time. Whether this is good or bad I don’t know. Right now it is novel and kind of neat.

Once upon a time when you wanted to meter your site, SiteMeter was the only solution. I started metering my blog with SiteMeter around 2004 because that’s what all the cool blogs were doing. Not that my “impressions” (page views) were ever that impressive, at least according to SiteMeter. Their meter went up and down but generally I was somewhere between a hundred and two hundred page views a day.

As I documented elsewhere, their metrics were grossly inflated, as they caught obvious search engines, which are not human beings. Still, it was useful to get a general snapshot of blog traffic. One click got you an up to the minute report. Google Analytics makes you log in and by default you are always a day behind. Despite its shortcomings, SiteMeter is useful. It excels in useful reports that always just one click away.

Around six a.m. on September 24, SiteMeter stopped metering my blog. The reports still come up but they just show zero traffic. Of course, this blog’s web traffic had not stopped, as evidenced by the fact that you are reading this. Both Google Analytics and StatCounter showed the usual site traffic. I thought maybe my tracking code had expired, but when I was finally able to log in to the SiteMeter manager and review my tracking code I found that it had not changed. So then I figured maybe they just weren’t aware that they weren’t catching my blog’s statistics. So I sent them a support request. More than a week later, I still have heard nothing.

Granted, it is hard to give me much attention when I don’t pay them anything. Most of SiteMeter’s customers don’t pay them. This limits us webmasters to the last 100 page views or visits and overall statistics, but they still have plenty of opportunities to make money from me. Every time I go to check out a SiteMeter report I see no less that two ads, one on the top and one on the side, will appear. And I typically checked the site a half dozen or so times during the day.

Go to SiteMeter’s web site today and it suggests that no one is minding the store. Their latest announcement was in February 2009. Their newest widget is for Windows Vista. They will still take your money quickly enough, if you want to pay for their service. It’s not worth paying for when there are so many superior and free alternatives. Why pay for a service when they cannot be bothered to maintain the site or troubleshoot problems? I imagine they hired some hacks to put the whole thing in the Amazon cloud and just forgot about it. To the extent they pay attention to it, it is to collect Google Adsense revenue. It probably pays for plenty of margaritas at the bar close to their deck chair along a beach in the Bahamas.

Not that they have cut off all my metering with SiteMeter. I also use SiteMeter on two other domains, and they are continuing to run fine. Their statistics, of course, are bogus and inflated as well, but I can still look at SiteMeter reports for these domains. For more official statistics, I go into Google Analytics.

However, Google Analytics tells you far more than you need to know. It’s an amazing product, just overkill for all but the most diehard web statisticians. SiteMeter’s user interface is simple, usable and clean. What I really need to do is emulate their reports and tie it directly into Google Analytics. Being lazy, however, I just haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve searched around to see if someone has taken the time to build SiteMeter-like reports for Google Analytics. If they have, I can’t find them or they are afraid of a lawsuit from SiteMeter’s lawyers. However, if I roll my own, I figure they’ll never know. So when I find some free time for the project, I plan to do it. It looks straightforward if you can write some code to parse a XML file.

Like Craigslist Casual Encounters, it appears that tracking your site with SiteMeter is now simply a waste of your time. So I’ll be removing my tracking code. No reason that I should give them my business since they obviously don’t care about retaining it.

Clouds used to be cute puffy white things in the sky. These days when you talk about clouds, you are more often talking about Internet-based clouds. Even recently just a domain for geeks and techies, knowledge of Internet-based clouds is penetrating down to the rest of us. It may be that iCloud icon on your smartphone or iMac, or the convenience of a Gmail account that you access from a hotel business center. It’s starting to register with us that we are using clouds. We no longer store data in our own personal devices. We don’t know or care where it is stored, just as long as it is. Clouds are here to stay.

The cloud is just the latest manifestation of a trend that has been emerging for some time. With the cloud we no longer worry about whether data like our email or digital pictures are archived and backed up. We assume that if we have a connection to the Internet it is all available instantly. The promise is that at some point it will also somehow done transparently and with no hassle.

All of this is also something of an illusion because in reality this level of cloud computing is really, really hard. Google and Amazon are pioneers in the cloud computing business, but pretty much all the major IT providers are lining up to provide cloud services too, from the mighty Microsoft with its online Office cloud service to the lowly web host (who will probably use someone else’s cloud and make it look like their own). Google has had some infamous cloud outages over the years, most frequently affecting Gmail. More recently Amazon has experienced some embarrassing cloud failures too. It’s nice to know that your stuff is out there somewhere, but making it always instantly available is quite a trick. 99.999% uptime is pretty darn good and most of us would not notice minor outages. The same is not true for businesses that depend on continuous uptime, like United Airlines. Since they can’t take any chances, they are sticking with their own data centers, at least for now. In general, cloud computing tends to be a lot cheaper than doing your own hosting. You just don’t want to jump into the cloud computing arena unless you are really, really sure you can trust your cloud vendor.

The Department of Interior, where I work, is taking the plunge. It recently signed a contract with a company that resells Google’s infrastructure to provide the whole department’s email, calendaring, instant messaging and various other services. In doing so it will save heaps of money, unless the vendor’s claims don’t match actual experience. In that case, lots of highly paid people will be twiddling their thumbs until service is restored because the cloud will be like a light switch: it will either be on or off, and bad things will happen if it goes off even for a little while. At least right now when there are problems they will tend to be localized instead of enterprise-wide.

In any event, we are going into the cloud. To affect change you have to break a few eggs, and in this case a lot more than a few eggs are being broken. Every employee in the department has to be retrained. Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino servers are retiring to greener pastures (well, more likely landfills). Our comfy though somewhat weird email clients are being traded for doing email in a browser. Everyone has to adapt, including our director and Ken Salazar himself. I doubt that even the department will know where the heck their servers are. It’s someone else’s problem, specifically Onix’s, which got the contract. Email alone is mission critical for our department. It’s got to work and work reliably, and the transition has to be smooth. Everything ties into email in some fashion. About 80% of my work day is spent reading and responding to email. My team depends on instant messaging as well, as we are spread across four time zones. We run a mission critical system, but this new cloud-based system is even more mission critical. If we cannot communicate to fix our mission critical system, then it can go down. The nation’s motto is “In God we trust” but perhaps it should become “In Google we trust” here at the Department of the Interior.

There are so many wrinkles to this cloud computing stuff that I will be taking a course to understand most of it. For those of us managing information systems, one of the compelling features of the cloud is the promise that it can scale up automatically to meet higher demand. If true this is quite a feature. Automatic and transparent failover to redundant systems is also available. Obviously, vendors charge more if you need these features, but the promise is that overall it will be less expensive to use the cloud than it will be to have your own hosting center.

This may mean unemployment for many technicians now keeping servers running. Those who physically touch these machines are most in jeopardy. At least in the short term, those who configure these machines in the cloud to do unique stuff probably have secure jobs. With a few clicks you may be able to have your cloud provider install an operating system or a web server. (In reality these machines are already likely provisioned, and are just sitting idle.) If your needs are modest, then you may need fewer system administrators. Integrating a server and the applications that run on it are not necessarily simpler because they are in the cloud. It just becomes more abstract. In some ways, administering cloud servers applications may be more complicated, since the whole cloud architecture needs to be well understood, and things don’t work quite the way they used to.

I learned recently of a revolution that happened around 1820 in nearby Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The town is known for many historical events, and some innovation. One of its innovations was the invention of a breech-loaded rifle. It was constructed from completely interchangeable parts. This revolutionary idea first perfected in a gun was extended to all sorts of items. It made possible the Model-T and many other inventions.

Cloud computing is the latest refinement of this idea born in Harpers Ferry by a man named John Hall. The management, storage and configuration of systems used to store data and information is becoming virtualized and commoditized as well. The interchangeable parts are not so much hardware but the software that runs on the hardware. They are becoming so excellent and interoperate so well with other standard software parts that reside on these servers that new levels of performance and cost savings can be achieved.

Cloud computing is the latest and if it works as advertised will arguably one of the most important revolutions in information technology. We out here in the business world will fuss over it for a while, and there will be more growing pains, but like the breech-loaded rifle cloud computing is a fundamental invention made up of lots of other clever inventions, many of them abstract and conceptual and modeled in software.  These will become savings in time and benefits of convenience that we will soon take for granted but which could be as fundamentally transformative to mankind as the Internet itself.

This blog post by a Firefox developer is making the rounds in the techno-blogosphere. Firefox developer Jono Xia makes the point that constant updates to the open-source Firefox web browser is driving its devotees nuts. It has made me switch from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome for most of my browsing. In Xia’s opinion, the problem is that Firefox developers have become enamored with features, and keep adding bells and whistles to the browser. Most actual users (like me) mostly want high usability and for new features to be introduced gradually. In particular, we don’t like radical changes to our user interface.

This should not be hard to figure out. Imagine if once a month you went to drive your car and the ignition key moved to a different location or that the turn signal had moved from left of the steering wheel to right of it. That’s how it’s been with Firefox for a while. But now these changes occur stealthily. It used to be you were told when a new version was available, and then had the option of downloading it. With the latest versions of Firefox, new versions download quietly in the background and appear the next time you restart the browser. This has its strengths. If there has to be bug fixes and critical patches I’d largely prefer to be kept ignorant of them. What I don’t want is to start my browser and find new tools on my toolbar, or that suddenly some of my favorite add-ons no longer work because they were not upgraded to the latest stealthily upgraded version.

Yet if you use Firefox religiously, this sort of stuff feels like it happens all the time. To say the least, it is jarring. Many if not most of us spend much of our lives staring at content in our web browser. A consistent user interface is good. This means browsing requires less thought and becomes automatic. Add irregular but relatively frequent amounts of change to the user interface and it becomes annoying and at some nebulous point intolerable. It used to be that a year or at least many months would go by between a major version of Firefox. Now it can be weeks!

I use Firefox on a Mac. I noticed over a period of months that Firefox kept slowing down. It loaded slowly. Pages reloaded slowly. If I had a half dozen tabs open when starting up it would take a minute or more for the data in the tabs to be refreshed. Moving from tab to tab was often slow and full of latency, where the current tab just hung there for a while with an hourglass cursor. Sometimes the browser just hung and I had to do a Force Quit to kill it, or would not shutdown when I shut the computer down.

These sorts of problems don’t happen naturally. They are a result of poor software engineering. I speak with authority here because I happen to have a master’s degree in software systems engineering from George Mason University. Granted, building a web browser is hardly a trivial task. There are so many aspects to integrate correctly. In short, it is a complex engineering challenge to make it work on just one operating system, let alone the many operating systems that Firefox supports. Mostly these problems point to a process problem, rather than a programming problem. Just as you can build more cars if you speed up the assembly line, but those cars may suffer something in the way of quality, to keep up with the competition you can push out new versions of a browser more quickly if you cross your fingers and hope that current functionality is not compromised in doing so. It’s clear that a lot of current functionality is compromised by Mozilla’s current approach.

I don’t know exactly how the Mozilla project is run. I certainly like its goals: create a browser that is platform agnostic, that won’t make anyone rich, and that rigorously adheres to the latest web standards. It was this approach that lead to the rise of Firefox in the first place, including a glowing review by me a full eight years ago when it was not yet official. At the time, Microsoft had put its Internet Explorer browser on the back burner. At least you could say that IE did not change a lot. It was quirky, but it was consistently. You could go years between new versions of the browser.

With Firefox, what seems to be missing is good and frequent regression testing. Regression testing means automated testing that tests when you add in new functionality that the current functionality still works. Mozilla is hardly alone in having problems with regression testing. It is a decidedly unsexy thing to do, but vital for good software engineering. It’s also a hard thing to do. I know this from personal experience. The regression testing tools out there tend to be very pricey (Mercury’s suite, now owned by HP, comes to mind) and, for the most part, annoying to use. Most of them cannot handle tiny changes in canned tests, like the change of location of an image on a web page, without failing the test. You are expected to create whole new tests. I am looking into one testing suite that looks like it allows test cases to be reasonably fault tolerant. If so, we can gain a whole lot of productivity doing regression testing.

Doubtless Mozilla is doing some regression testing, but it should probably do a lot more and probably have a much more well thought out process for doing it. If satisfying users is truly their primary goal, they may need more testers and fewer developers. It sounds like it is the other way around.

So I have been seduced by the Google Chrome browser. I won’t use IE. I just loathe it and I can’t quite put my finger on why but certainly it’s not a good thing that it is developed by Microsoft, and its bright blue theme jars me. Chrome, like Microsoft, is a product of another empire, just not one quite as evil, at least not yet, but certainly one targeted to encourage you use all things Google. It’s clear after you run Chrome for a while that it is a slicker product overall than Firefox. It’s also faster and better engineered. For example, each browser tab has its own CPU process. This has lots of benefits; the primary one being it is much less likely to crash. Firefox is catching up here, but even so it is still buggy and slow on my Mac.

I don’t want to love Chrome, but considering how much time I spend in a browser I have to have a browser that works fast, reliably and consistently. Chrome has not been perfect here, particularly with its user interface, which has morphed faster than I would like. But it is standards based, multiple-platform, fast and reliable.

I really want to go back to Firefox. It is the reference implementation for browsers, although maybe not so much anymore the way they throw out new features so quickly. There are certain Firefox behaviors I really miss, like the Bookmark manager in a sidebar. For right now I simply cannot revert. I hope Mozilla gets its act together, and listens better to the needs of its users.

So will it be adios and goodbye forever for Firefox? Or can I say adieu for now, and I’ll be glad to come back when you have your act together? For right now, I say adieu, but pretty soon it is going to be adios.

This blog runs on WordPress. It wasn’t always this way. It started out on MoveableType, which in 2002 was the hot software for a phenomenon that barely existed: blogging. Five years ago I ditched MoveableType and moved to WordPress. MoveableType became too commercialized. While ostensibly open source, the licensing was hard to use freely. The hassle factor eventually became too much to deal with, so I moved to WordPress, but not without a lot of head scratching. Utilities for moving the content out of MoveableType to WordPress were rudimentary. Fortunately, I’m enough of a hacker where I rolled my own.

Moving to WordPress turned out to be a smart move for the blog. There are no more hassles about licensing. And WordPress is huge, with thousands of themes and plugins. If there is something that WordPress will not do out of the box, it has likely been done not just once, but with a dozen variants via free plugins. Unlike, say, phpBB forum software, which can be modified but is a hassle, installing, activating and deactivating a plugin with WordPress could not be simpler. You can search for a plug in inside your control panel, install it with a couple of clicks and you are on your way. Deactivating is just as simple. In short, WordPress is super-slick, has no licensing hassles and is completely free.

The more I use WordPress, the more I understand that it is really something like a Swiss army knife for managing basic content on the web. Yes, it does blogging very smoothly and elegantly, but it also does so much more. I find myself using WordPress for pretty much all my web projects, including recently this neighborhood web site. It makes expensive software like Dreamweaver and FrontPage unneeded in most cases. You can manage all of your site’s content with a web browser. Need a basic web site but lack design skills? WordPress is what you need. Find a cute theme and if you want to make it stand out upload a site logo too. Need a simple content management system? WordPress can elegantly do the job. In fact, I am using WordPress not just for my own web sites, but also for sites I put up for friends, neighbors and to earn some spare cash. Regardless of use, you essentially have a content management system for free with a look-ahead search control and easy categorization and tagging features. All you need on the web server is PHP and MySQL, which are usually provided free.

Web hosts are also making it easy to use WordPress. It used to be you had to download the software, then upload it to your web server, create a database to hold the data, and maybe adjust some file permissions first with FTP. Now web hosts largely come with script installers, where WordPress is one of the prominent options. With a couple of clicks, it will install WordPress for you.

What may be keeping WordPress from being used more for other than blogs is some basic knowledge. There are lots of online video tutorials out there, but it helps to know a few key concepts:

• Posts are used for blogging. Think of a blog as a public diary and a post as a diary entry. Posts are normally shown by date from the most recent, but can also be easily categorized or tagged so they can be readily found in logical ways.
• Pages are for static content. This is key, because if you want to create a web site for say a church or social club and don’t need posts then just create pages.
• Sidebars allow easy navigation and they are modified through the use of widgets (Appearance > Widgets). The theme determines how many sidebars you can have. Default content will appear on a sidebar, but it is so easy to move sidebar content around just by dragging and dropping. It won’t take you long before the default sidebar content probably won’t be enough. That’s when you go hunting for plugins, which can be done inside your control panel. Most plugins also have widgets. So after you install, enable and maybe configure the plugin, look for the new widget then drag and drop it into where you want content to appear.

A few tips:

• Spend some time picking an appropriate theme. There are so many of them out there, but they are easy to try on in the control panel and switch as necessary. All your content should move smoothly as you change themes.
• Be careful allowing open commenting without moderation, as you are likely to attract spam otherwise. In most cases you should install the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin, get a public and private key from Google, and configure the plug in to use it. This gives you high confidence that spam won’t leak through, but it’s usually a good idea to force a comment to go through moderation if it contains embedded links.
• If your site is personal, you can have the Akismet plugin filter comments for spam for free. Otherwise you may want to consider buying a package from Akismet to limit the amount of spam you will have to deal with.
• Want to serve ads? It’s pretty easy. First, set up a Google AdSense account. For sidebars, you will usually want to set up skyscraper ads. Then download and configure the plugin with your publisher ID. Of course, there is a WordPress plugin for Adsense with a widget that allows you to easily place the ad. You can also insert a text widget with the ad code from Google. Google allows up to two ads per page.
• Need to move existing content? In most cases, simply copy and paste each page one at a time from the old site using your browser. In some cases you may need to fix anchors because absolute URLs will tend to copy over. This is easy to do by pressing the HTML button when you are editing a post or page.
• Want to track site your site usage? Get a free Google Analytics account then install the WordPress plug in.
• There are so many smartphones out there that it makes sense to optimize your site for them. I suggest installing a mobile friendly plugin.
• Sharing site content with social media is all the rage. An AddThis account with the WordPress AddThis plug in makes it easy to share posts and pages on your site, plus you can track social media usage on the AddThis site.

WordPress takes the hassle out of presenting and organizing web sites, and it’s free after you pay for hosting. Happy web publishing!

Among the things I am attempting on the road here in Phoenix, Arizona (well, technically Mesa, Arizona) is to take my iPad out for an extended spin. Can I really use it instead of a laptop computer for mobile computing? The answer is, “It depends on what you are trying to do.”

If what you are trying to do is something fairly complicated, like write a blog post, you will miss having a laptop. You can technically peck away using the iPad’s on screen keyboard, but your experience is likely to be like mine. You will make plenty of mistakes and spend much of your time correcting your mistakes. In short, it’s not a viable means for doing any serious writing, at least not without a little help. Which is why I bought a Bluetooth keyboard (a Rocksoul model) with me. Combined, the iPad and the keyboard weigh much less than a laptop. But even with the keyboard, it doesn’t come close to being as usable a laptop.

In short, I don’t quite see tablet computers doing away with laptop computers. To be productive, ten years from now you will still want the convenience of a laptop computer when you travel. However, if your needs are simple, substituting a tablet computer for a laptop makes a certain amount of sense.

You can keep up on email easily enough on a tablet computer, but you will find it’s like using a Blackberry in that you will find plenty of incentive to keep your emails brief. Some things are arguably a better experience on a tablet computer. The iPad comes with a stripped down version of Safari as its web browser. The experience is making me something of a Safari fan. The downside is that there are no plug-ins or extensions that I can install, which means I am assaulted by advertising that I normally block out with the adBlock extension. On the other hand, simplicity is a virtue, and Safari does certain things very elegantly on the iPad, like intelligently reloading web pages.

The iPad may be a few years old, but it is really just beginning to mature. For example, there is no decent word processor for the iPad. Reportedly, Microsoft is working to port its Office suite to the iPad, which will be welcome. Meanwhile, you basically have the built-in Note application, which is very basic. No italics or bolding are possible. For composing a blog post though, it suffices although it is hardly ideal.

The iPad’s user interface is quite elegant, but hardly ideal. Designed for the finger as its pointing device, it is easy to miss selecting the right spot to edit. A stylus would be a useful addition. My wireless keyboard comes with a delete key, but there is no backspace key, which becomes very annoying. Easy methods of emulating the top, end, page up and page down buttons are also missing. Yes, you can use your fingers instead but it is more time consuming.

On the other hand the iPad is amazingly portable. Weighing a fraction of a laptop, it is easy to transport,  doesn’t anchor your briefcase yet renders resolution similar to a desktop monitor. The seven hour battery life is often longer in practice, particularly when in airplane mode. The newest laptops, like the new Macbook, also can survive as long unplugged, so this by itself is no longer a compelling reason to own an iPad. With 4G service, if you can afford it, you also get the convenience of Internet access virtually anywhere.

I also want to use my iPad as an electronic newspaper viewer. So far, I have not found it to be quite there, unless your expectations are modest. Newspaper sites keep trying to arrange content optimally for the iPad but with the newspapers apps I have tried it is clear they still have a way to go. The Washington Post app is a pretty good attempt to make content fit on an iPad, but they still leave so much out. Comics and classified are two glaring omissions. Without them you feel like you are missing something. Instead, you get selected contents in the newspaper. Perhaps the Post is waiting for enough readers to put those features behind a paywall. I confess when that happens I might cancel my print subscription. For traveling, the Post app is good enough to sort of feel like you got the gist of the newspaper experience.

Tablet computers thus hit a sweet spot, but do not fundamentally solve the portable computing issue. Doubtless much more money will be spent trying to close the gap. Most of us will live with their annoyances compared with a laptop or desktop computer while we are mobile, but be glad to swap in real keyboards and mice (mice allowing easier fine-tuned editing) when we need to be highly productive.