Occam’s Razor

iMac Journeys, Part Two

After a couple weeks, my iMac and I are settling in comfortably together. There is little sign that this marriage will require a quickie Las Vegas divorce. Mostly I love what I am experiencing. However, after having spent the last fifteen years in the bizarre world of Microsoft Windows, I can see it will take some time for me to reorient my brain to think like a Mac.

The extra peripherals have arrived and are installed. The most important one is this matias OS/X keyboard. Finally, I can type reliably again, although this keyboard is of no higher quality than any other plastic keyboard I have used. The chicklet keyboard that came with my iMac just was not working out. Also installed is a super quiet OWC Mercury Elite Pro external hard drive. It is hooked up via an ultra fast FireWire 800 cable to a FireWire port on the back of the iMac. It has 250 gigabytes, which is about average for an external hard drive these days. Its real virtue is that it lets me enable perhaps the most important but most neglected software built into the OS/X operating system, a utility called Time Machine. Time Machine not only keeps hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups of my hard disk automatically, but also has a cool interface so I can go back in time to easily retrieve previous versions of a file. Using it to search for previous versions feels a little bit being Tony and Doug in that 60’s TV show Time Tunnel. Its main virtue is not that it keeps backups. You could do that on a PC for many years too. Its virtue is that it does it all automatically so you never have to think or even worry about it. Like much else about the Mac, after a tiny bit of set up, it just works.

That is not to say I have not had a few quirks. Mac Mail, an otherwise excellent email program, hung on me yesterday. Fortunately, OS/X figured it out and gave me the option to restart it. In addition, Mac Mail got confused today. It told me that an email in my Inbox was from X when actually it was from Y. Hopefully this is just a momentary glitch because otherwise I really like Mac Mail. I like the way that when you are focused on a message it automatically highlights other emails in the folder from the same person. I like its slick integration with IMAP mail servers. IMAP essentially lets me put all my email on GMail, but has the advantage of a much nicer user interface than GMail. Of course, if all my email is in GMail, then I can access all ten years of my email from any browser.

My Mac is just phenomenal at finding stuff easily. There is always Spotlight, which is a super fast and super easy to use search index of your computer. However, many applications, like Mac Mail, have a program-specific version of Spotlight integrated into it. In Mac Mail, for example, there is a convenient search box. Type anything in there and you do not even have to hit Return for it to start searching. It starts showing a results window specific to folder you are focused on in Mac Mail. It took a while to figure out how to import my email on my Windows machine. I was using Mozilla Thunderbird. Mac Mail would not let me directly import it from my PC version of Thunderbird. So I had to install Thunderbird for the Mac and import from the mailboxes on my PC. Then I used Mac Mail’s built in import facility for Thunderbird for the Mac. Forty thousand plus emails saved over the last ten years imported quickly and flawlessly.

So far, I found equivalents for various PC programs that I was used to using. I used Webdrive to remotely access computers as drive letters inside Windows, using the familiar FTP or SSH protocols. You can do this with a Mac but it is something of a hassle to pass the authentication information in an automated manner. ExpanDrive is an OS/X equivalent to Webdrive. I also needed a good visual code merge tool. WinMerge is a Windows solution that is neat and has the virtue of being free. I found a Mac equivalent called DeltaWalker that unfortunately is not free. That is the general problem with Mac software. There is a lot more free stuff for the PC than there is for the Mac. I do not mind paying extra money for this software for the conveniences built into the OS/X operating system.

Quicken for the Mac remains an issue. It is a little disappointing to pay $69.99 for the software to discover that it cannot even do some of the same features as my Windows version. For example, it cannot do scheduled transactions. This is annoying but right now, the larger problem is simply getting my 18 years of financial data moved over. I tried the conversion tips but they did not work. I get a “transaction file full” error when I move over my transactions. It looks like I will need some phone support from Quicken to clear this hurdle. Unfortunately, this means that I cannot donate my Windows machine quite yet.

The Mac has a cool multiple desktop feature called Spaces. The only problem is that old habits break hard. I find myself ALT-TABbing a lot, which in the Mac world is CMD-TAB but it does the same thing. I will refine these skills with time.

I really like The Dock, which is something like the Windows application bar that hangs out on the bottom of the screen, only bigger and with better icons. Unlike the Windows application bar, which only shows running applications, this one allows you to store shortcuts to your favorite applications. It also tells you wish are running by placing a small luminescent blue dot beneath it. The Dock is always there so you do not have to navigate using a Start button. If an application needs your attention, it does so by jumping up and down. It is hard to miss and kind of cute!

I have just begun exploring some of the OS/X utilities. I have a movies folder and it is neat how in the folder view you can see a sample frame from the movie automatically. In addition, OS/X is smart enough to provide right and left arrow buttons on each side to let you easily browse your movies. There is also a scroll bar available to quickly zoom through your movies. On the other hand, I find some things annoying about the iTunes program. It does not seem to like Windows media and there is no conversion utility to turn them into MP3s, at least that I have found. Naturally, it wants to sell me iTunes. Moreover, iTunes seems to want to only work with an iPod. I own a Creative MP3 player. So far, to store music to it I have to mount it as a device and copy and paste MP3s into it.

I like OS/X’s Sleep mode. Windows has a Hibernate mode that most people do not use. Unlike Windows Hibernate, which can take thirty seconds or more of disk activity before it goes into hibernate mode, it is just a few seconds with the iMac. This is very convenient. Sleep mode uses very little power, and it takes only a couple seconds for the iMac to wake up. So I do not have to feel that guilty leaving it in sleep mode overnight. Everything is where I left it and fully accessible.

Unquestionably, OS/X is a superior to any edition of Windows. I would not characterize it as completely intuitive or 100% reliable. However, it is generally very consistent and reliable. With my memory upgrade to four gigabytes, it is also now blazingly fast. With its faster memory, it can download files much faster than my Windows machine. I figured the problem was that my Internet connection was relatively slow. It turns out that my Windows memory was the major bottleneck when I downloaded files.

Ah, engineering. That is what you really buy when you buy an iMac: premium hardware specifically designed to operate with the premium software. Using Windows is like driving on a gravel road. Using an iMac is like driving on a newly paved interstate highway with no traffic. It feels slick because it is slick.

More iMac adventures to follow.

July 10th, 2008 at 08:58pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

iMac Journeys: First Impressions

Back in January, I pledged to buy an iMac this year. I did not actually receive my iMac until Monday. Unbelievably, it sat in its packing box for four days. Hey, I was busy doing other things like buying a car for our daughter to drive to college. Last night I finally felt that I had sufficient leisure to open it up. I placed it temporarily on a card table next to my aging and noisy Windows desktop computer.

I generally knew what to expect from my three-hour Mac tour back in January. Mine is not the souped-up iMac, just the base $1199 model available on the Apple web site. It comes with a twenty-inch monitor. Originally, I was going to get the Mac mini, which is a small Mac box minus the peripherals. When I added up all the options, extra memory and bigger hard disk that I wanted, it was not that much more expensive to just buy the iMac. Particularly since I was not paying for it, but the government was (I paid for it with our stimulus check) I felt more inclined to go with a pricier model. Except for paying sales tax, my iMac was essentially free. (More specifically my grandchildren will be paying for it. However, since my daughter does not plan to have any children, I guess it is free.)

There is not much to assembling an iMac since the motherboard, CPU, memory and disk drive are stuffed somewhere inside the housing of its flat panel monitor. Also inside (but not obviously) there is a camera and a microphone. Presumably, the “i” in iMac is not just for “me” but also for “integrated”. Apple’s selling point has always been that you are getting a completely engineered package, with software optimized to run on a particular type of highly engineered hardware. Part of the reason that Microsoft Windows is so lousy is that it is expected to work with a broad range of off the shelf computer peripherals. When you control the hardware, presumably you have extra time to work on stuff that matters, like the ultra slick OS/X Leopard operating system that comes with the iMac. There are just four things to plug in: the power cord, the keyboard, the mouse (which plugs into the side of the keyboard) and an Ethernet cable.

I am sure some iMac bigots will tell me I am so full of it, but putting the on-off button behind the left side of the flat panel monitor is counterintuitive. I guess doing so would make the iMac itself look less “clean” since, as we know, Apple is big on aesthetics. For a few minutes, it did not seem to boot. Perhaps it did not power on right away because I expected something to happen instantly. Don’t panic. Press the button and give it a few seconds.

Also a disappointment: its Chicklet keyboard. It has to go. Fortunately, my friend Jim Goldbloom knows exactly what replacement keyboard to purchase. So while overall Apple does a great job of design, they have a few minor deficiencies. I do like its mouse though, and its tiny scroll wheel. I know some people hate it, but think it is much easier to manipulate.

I have just begun dabbling with the OS/X Leopard operating system but the features I saw in January are even more appealing now that I own one. OS/X has a curious absence of OK and Cancel buttons. In general, the Mac design is that when you make a choice it should be instantly set. This is one of those obvious user interface ideas that seems to have eluded Redmond and I really like.

The first application I installed was the Firefox web browser. I used the built in Safari web browser to download it. It was straightforward to install, but because a Mac is not a PC, it behaves a bit differently. I also struggled with moving my bookmarks. I eventually found the bookmarks.html file, put it on my flash drive, and then loading it from my flash drive. I had to reorganize the bookmarks I imported for them to appear on the bookmarks toolbar. I also need to move my cookies, which I am sure can be done, but Firefox provides no obvious way to do it.

Mac Mail was simple to set up. Mac Mail is a very slick email client that I look forward to exploring and integrates slickly with the iChat and iCalendar programs built into OS/X Leopard. I can already tell that it will be better than Eudora, my previous high water mark for an email program. I pointed it to the GMail IMAP server. IMAP allows your email to stay on the server. I could not figure out why the email was not moving into my local inbox. Since I had never used IMAP before, my confusion was understandable. Particularly nice about Mac Mail is how the Mail icon on the dock will show you the number of new messages. Moving my 10 years of email out of Thunderbird and into Mac Mail looks like it will be challenging.

Spotlight (which does ultra fast searches of your hard disk), the Dock (which anchors programs to an easy location near the bottom of the screen) and Spaces (which lets you divide your screen into multiple windows and place applications in each, essentially giving you multiple desktops) are all neat features. They demonstrate how far more usable OS/X is compared with Windows. Doubtless, I will discover much more in time. I need to buy an external USB hard drive soon so I can enable the Time Machine feature in OS/X. This lets you easily go back in time to see and retrieve previous versions of documents. It also transparently performs a general backup of your files.

There are some peculiarities with the OS/X Leopard interface compared to Windows. You can only stretch windows by dragging the bottom right corner of the window, rather than grabbing a side of the window. In addition, even though your application may not take up the whole window, a context specific menu always appears at the top of the screen.

Integrating useful applications will be a challenge. The Mac simply does not have the breath of software that Windows has. I determined though that it did not matter for the applications I needed. There is a version of Quicken for the Mac but you cannot easily export your data from the Windows version to the Mac. You have to trim account and category names to 15 or fewer characters, remove special characters from your investment fund names and then export to QIF (Quicken Interface Format) files. QIF is the equivalent of storing a spreadsheet as a tab delimited file, in other words it is very basic. I have a feeling I will be I will be uttering some swear words before I successfully have Quicken working with my Windows data on the Mac. The Mac version of Quicken tends to lag a year behind the PC version, which is not a problem for me because I tend to upgrade only every other year. I am a bit miffed because even though I own a copy of Quicken, I apparently cannot upgrade to the Mac for a reduced fee. In fact, Quicken charges a premium for its Mac version: $69.99. Yikes!

I need the equivalent of Microsoft Office soon. Apple has its own peculiar version called iWork. I am sure it is spiffy, but given the ubiquity of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is probably too much of a transition. I am more likely to install OpenOffice, since it is free.

I also want something equivalent to Choicemail for the Mac. ChoiceMail is a client-based white-list email filter. It requires people who are not in my address book to authenticate at a web site using a CAPTCHA interface. I suspect there are Mac Mail proxies out there but they will take time to locate and install. Mac Mail does have a reasonably good spam filter, but like all spam filters, it is not perfect. I should also be able to get Dreamweaver for the Mac, since I have a license for it for Windows. I hope that any upgrade costs will be minimal. In addition, I need to figure out how to easily mount to external web servers so I can keep earning bucks in my side business. Since OS/X is a certified version of Linux, this should not prove too challenging.

Stay tuned for more observations on the strengths and weaknesses of the Mac in the weeks ahead. As you might expect, my impressions in the first twenty-four hours are quite positive.

June 28th, 2008 at 08:52pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

Mac Attack

Is it too much to ask your PC just to work? Apparently so. I have been living in the Microsoft universe almost universally since 1988. Why did I buy PC after PC and keep putting Microsoft on it? Was it because I thought that MS-DOS or Windows was the neatest and most reliable operating system in the world? Ha! I was never that naïve. No, I stayed with Microsoft all these years like most of us because I needed the applications that ran on it.

Around 1995 I did briefly flirt with OS/2 Warp. I installed the sucker (it came on something like a dozen 3 ¼ inch diskettes) and enjoyed its nice snazzy features. For compatibility, I ran my Windows 3.1 programs in protected memory. It did not take too long though before I was running Windows 95. Did I hate OS/2 Warp? Not at all. It was a cool operating system. The problem was that its applications, if you could find them at all, were generally crap compared to the Windows equivalent.

The reality was that until I could run applications that were the same or as good on another operating system, I was stuck in the Windows universe. After spending a couple hours yesterday with my friend Jim Goldbloom learning about his Mac, I realized: I do not have to take it anymore. Soon Bill Gates, it is gonna be see you later sucker. I just hope this time I do not have to come crawling back because of some killer applications that are just not available for the Mac. (Even so, I can now run a Mac in dual boot mode and run Windows on it, or buy Parallels and run Windows Vista at the same time.)

Currently it takes three to four minutes to boot my machine. It is a couple years old, and has plenty of memory and CPU and runs Windows XP. My wife built it for me (she does these things for friends and family.) I am not entirely sure why it takes so long to boot up. When it was new, it only took about 45 seconds. It is probably because when you have to build a software fortress around your PC every time you use it, it just takes time. There is the ZoneAlarm firewall. There is the free Avast! Antivirus software. There is my Webroot Spy Sweeper program. However, there are all sorts of other stuff, much of which I am only dimly aware of getting loaded and entertaining my CPU. Likely, some of it I do not actually need anymore. Perhaps there are tricks I could learn from a Windows Secrets book on how to speed up things. Perhaps it is just getting old. Booting my PC in 2008 takes longer than it took to boot my Commodore 64 in 1984 and load a program like PaperClip off my floppy disk. That took about two minutes, which seemed intolerably long back then.

I have enough PC savvy to know what the real problem is: Windows is an operating system that is about as lithe as an elephant. Windows was never engineered. It started out as a rickety shack in the backyard. The Microsoft “engineers” kept adding rooms, only they learned carpentry from Alf and Ralph Monroe from Green Acres. Bill Gates was the oily Mr. Haney. We were the foolish Douglases. No matter how crappy their operating system and software was we kept buying because we had to have those compatible applications. Moreover, we needed those applications because we had to share stuff with others, and they were running those applications. There were times when Windows 3.1 would GPF on me every fifteen minutes. Windows Me, released in 1999, was nearly as bad.

We got some relief with Windows 2000. It looked like Alf and Ralph had finally figured out how to add a room to the house without the rain coming in through the roof. It was somewhat acceptable and my applications ran okay. Gradually I could go days or weeks without getting General Protection Faults or BSDs (Blue Screens of Death). Windows XP proved that Alf and Ralph could even put up wallpaper right.

Still, Windows annoyed me. It is like my first car, a 1970 Toyota Corolla. Back then, they were cheap and crappy cars. The good part was that the car was elementary enough that I could do a lot of its servicing. Windows is like that. If you are not part PC geek, running Windows is like driving a car around with the oil nearly out. You can do it, but you are being stupid.

You should not have to be a hardware geek to run a desktop computer. You should not need to subscribe to an online newsletter like Windows Secrets because, well, there should be no secrets between you and your personal computer. Moreover, the damn thing should just run, and run reliably. There is a reason I drive a Honda Civic instead of a Yugo. I have better things to do with my time than take the damn thing into the shop all the time. All these years I have wanted to say the same thing about my PC, but could not.

I avoided a Mac for years not just because my software wouldn’t run on it but also because there were still a few kinks in the machine. They are gone. The OS/X Leopard operating system is as solid and reliable as UNIX, because it is UNIX. It is UNIX with a highly optimized graphical user interface that will finally enable me to do my work without much thinking, instead of a gadget I have to regularly fuss over. I do not think about how a screwdriver works. Why should my computer be a mysterious black box that occasionally requires some guru skilled in a black art to fix it?

OS/X Leopard is slick and effortless. I needed Jim there though as my tutor. The problem with learning the Mac is you have to unlearn Windows. You have to erase the idea that computers have to be mysterious or obscure. Need to find something? Click on Spotlight, type what you are looking for and see the results instantly appear. Lost something but you have not backed up your files recently? Not a problem. Time Machine, sitting in the background, can find it for you. Do you want the version of the file on November 5th or December 8th?

Where is that big rectangular box with all the hardware stuff in it anyhow? There is no box. The computer is built into the monitor. What sort of special cable do I need to get the photos off my cell phone? You do not need a cable; the Mac is Bluetooth enabled. Just where do I attach my web cam? Umm, it is built into the monitor, along with a microphone. It’s just there because it should be there. You have just been trained by Microsoft to spend your odd hours plugging in things to your PC and fussing with drivers. With a Mac, most of the time you just assume it is already there.

I went with Jim through all my myriad software requirements. Can I get Microsoft Word for the Mac? Yeah, you can buy it if you want, or use the Word processor that comes with it, or install the free OpenOffice suite, which is compatible. Browser? Safari is bundled with it, but you can run Firefox for the Mac, keep all your bookmarks and still use its many neat extensions. I am a web developer. Can I run Dreamweaver? Of course, you can get a Mac version. I keep all my financial stuff in Quicken. Yes, there is a Mac version for it too. What about my whitelist software? I hate spam and need a challenge-response system for people I do not know. The Mac Mail program will probably suffice with a little tweaking of the rules. If not, there are doubtless many free applications written for the Mac that can be your proxy that you can download from Apple’s website. Is there the equivalent of Webdrive, which lets me write to a web site as a Windows drive letter? Umm, drive letters are so PC. You do not need to remember drive letters anymore. You simply mount the sucker, and a SAMBA mount pointing to a server on the Internet will suffice. Will it recognize my printer? Just connect it. Unless it is more than a few years old, it will work transparently.

Bottom line: I do not need to put up with Windows anymore. I can finally be liberated.

I will not be rushing down to my Apple store to buy a Mac but I am making plans. I am wondering: will the Mac mini be all I need? After all, I already have an excellent monitor. Whichever Mac I buy I know that my desktop computer will be one less thing about which to worry. I will be driving a Ferrari, not a Yugo.

Sadly, I still will have to use Windows at work. I cannot escape Windows entirely until I retire. I do look forward to the day when I can purge Windows from my brain. It is impossible to have zero latency between my ideas and executing them on a computer or on the web. The Mac is likely the closest I will get to getting there.

January 22nd, 2008 at 10:05pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

The universal translator arrives

One of the fun things about watching classic Star Trek TV shows back in the 1960s was marveling over the fantastic devices that were waiting for us in the 23rd century. The only problem is that just forty years later many, if not most of these devices have already arrived.

The communicator was a neat idea. It was wireless and able to be used over thousands of miles. However, we mastered the cell phone many years ago. In addition, where cell towers are not present you can use a satellite phone. The transporter may never dematerialize us and move us instantly to another place, but scientists have teleported photons and atoms without traveling through space. The phaser? We are not quite there, but we do have commercial laser pointers. Moreover, our Department of Homeland Security is worrying about whether these cheap devices, by shining them into pilots’ eyes from many miles away, could be used by terrorists to bring down airplanes. There is also the Taser, whose name I am sure was not coincidental. One version can deliver a shock remotely (using a wireless signal). Shuttlecraft? We got them already. While they cost hundreds of millions of dollars per flight, and require a rocket booster to get them into orbit, they are (mostly) reusable. Medical injections without puncturing the skin? Nicotine patches prove they can be done. Of course, there are all sorts of medicines you can take via inhalation or ingestion. Those fancy body-imaging machines Dr. McCoy used to use to diagnose patients? Got ‘em. They are called MRIs. Scalpel-less surgery? We are already doing some of that. Had any colon polyps snipped recently? The Warp Drive engine still eludes us, as well as the whole Star Trek thing about faster than light travel that somehow eludes Einstein’s Theories of Relativity. Maybe someday we will get there.

The latest gee whiz “right out of Star Trek” gizmo is called MASTOR. MASTOR stands for Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator, and it is a product of IBM Research. When I heard about it yesterday on the BBC’s World Update broadcast, my interest was immediately piqued. You can think of it as a Star Trek universal translator.

Translation software is nothing new. Even if we seem to doggedly prefer our keyboards, Microsoft believes we will evolve. It built speech to text translation into its Windows Vista operating system. (It may need a bit more work.) We also have programs that translate text from one language to another automatically. While such software usually does a faithful job translating words, it can also kick out intensely strange and occasionally hilarious mistranslations when it attempts to translate expressions and colloquialisms. I used freetranslation.com a few years ago when I sold a car to a Spanish couple. It seemed to be good enough and allowed us to sign an agreement of understanding even though my Spanish was rudimentary at best and their English was nonexistent. MASTOR is the next logical step. Make no mistake: MASTOR is a quantum leap in functionality because it can allow two people who speak two different languages to talk in real time with neither directly interacting with a computer. It is being field tested in Iraq right now as a means to allow our English-speaking soldiers to communicate with Iraqis, and visa versa. Reputedly, it is doing a decent job.

The software is installed on ruggedized laptop computers that soldiers can carry around with them. It is sensitive enough not just to translate spoken English into spoken Arabic, but into the Iraqi dialect of Arabic. IBM has been working to make the software work on small portable computers. In Star Trek, the universal translator was able to accurately translate any kind of speech, or in some cases thoughts in the form of energy. It was a neat gizmo to have and helped move the plot along at a brisk pace. While MASTOR is not as sophisticated as what was envisioned in Star Trek, it is easy to see MASTOR as version 0.1 of the universal translator. Presumably in time IBM will work out the kinks, and add translations for many more languages and dialects.

What is more exciting to me is where this should eventually lead. Computer storage continues to get cheaper. Memory continues to get denser and less expensive. Processors become more powerful and more energy efficient. The MP3 players that many of us carry around demonstrate just how much functionality can be squeezed into such a small space and yet have such modest power requirements. My MP3 player has 1GB of flash memory, plays, records, has an FM-radio and works on one AAA battery.

I can see the day, likely in my lifetime, when every international traveler will journey with a universal translator. Maybe it would just be a feature on our MP3 player. Instead of FM radio, we would engage its translation feature. On the other hand, perhaps it would be smart enough to detect foreign words and phrases and automatically speak them to us. Such a device would need a microphone that most players already have as well as a small speaker. Even if the translation were not perfect, it would be sufficient for your average tourist. When we travel this would make it unnecessary for many of us to have to learn the local language or purchase foreign phrase books.

I know that last year when my family visited France even though I had my daughter with me (a fourth year French student) I was a bit intimidated by the language, Fortunately, we stayed in tourist areas, so language barriers were rarely a problem. Admittedly, reading signs in foreign languages would be a problem. However, GPSes can get us from point to point in our favorite language, as well as always tell us where we are. Spoken word translation though is better. It predated the written word for good reason: it was universal. As long as there are people, a universal translator would be a convenient and natural way to navigate in foreign countries.

As a Washingtonian, I often feel that I need a universal translator right here where I live. The cultural diversity is such that you are about as likely to hear someone speaking a language other than English as English itself. Newt Gingrich wants to require that all Americans read and speak English. There may come a time when our universal translators become so fast and proficient that knowing more than one language will be unnecessary.

I hope the MASTOR succeeds in Iraq. Improved communications with Iraqi locals certainly could not hurt, and might reduce casualties. We sure could have used it when we invaded back in 2003, for we invaded with grossly insufficient translators for our needs. When MASTOR is finally available commercially at an affordable price, you will be seeing me using my passport a whole lot more often.

April 7th, 2007 at 08:56pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

Rehosted

This will be a short entry. My writing here lately has been constrained because (a) I have been busy at work (b) having Google abandon my blog has made it more difficult to get inspired (c) I have been busy doing phpBB modifications work for clients and (d) I have been up to my armpits with rehosting issues.

Thankfully, the rehosting issue is finally solved. I went through a tedious process of moving over my two phpBB message boards (Oak Hill Virginia Online and The Potomac Tavern) but the last domain, this blog, has proven daunting. Thankfully with a help from my friend Jim Goldbloom, calls to the tech support people here at westhost.com, and helpful users in their forums, plus a lot of the troubleshooting common sense skills acquired from being in this business 20 years, this blog is now rehosted too.

So hopefully I will feel a bit more inspired, Google will put me back in their index and clients will not need my services as much, so I will have more leisure time to get back to the sober and well crafted blogging I hope I do so well.

Thank you for your patience.

December 6th, 2006 at 08:26pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

New Computer Joys and Annoyances

I was in no particularly hurry to replace to my 700mhz Dell Dimension computer. I have had it for about three years and it was working fairly well. It did have a few things that were getting on my nerves. First, it took three minutes or more to boot my computer in the morning. It reminded me of my old Commodore 64 and the 1541 single sided, five and a quarter inch disk drive I used to own about twenty years ago. Those were the days but they were not the sorts that I wanted to relive twenty years later. There was also an annoying problem watching videos on my computer. Very often the CPU couldn’t keep up with the dialog, or the video got choppy. But those were my only real complaints. Otherwise (once Windows 2000 was installed over that piece of crap Windows Me that it came with) it was a very reliable system. If my wife didn’t build computers as a part time hobby I probably would have bought another Dell computer.

Every three years her company allows employees to get reimbursed for fifty percent of qualified home computer expenses. Three years had passed and the time was right (particularly since they are about to lay her off) so we went on a mini-spending spree. That is the real reason that I spent much of yesterday configuring my new machine. This is a fast machine but I guess by current standards it is somewhat pokey. It has a 1.8 gigahertz Athlon CPU, about the slowest CPU you can buy for a desktop computer these days. But I didn’t need anything faster since I am not a gamer. I saw no point in consuming more electricity and pumping out more heat into my house just to say I was cruising at 3 gigahertz. I really have no idea if I have a souped up video card or not since it is built into the motherboard. But my data has plenty of space now: 80 gigabytes on the hard disk (plus 20 gigabytes on the old drive) and 512mb of RAM. And finally I have two USB ports on the front of my computer where they belong. Since we bought a stack of DVD-RWs I figured we might as well have a DVD drive that could actually write DVDs. Now we do.

I held my nose and requested Windows XP as the operating system. This was not because I liked XP but because Windows 2000 support is dribbling away. XP was inevitable so it was best to get it over with. What I did not expect is that I got the new XP Service Pack 2 with the computer. So I’m gritting my teeth and hoping I won’t have too many problems. So far I can’t trace any of my problems directly to XP SP2, but it’s hard to tell since I haven’t used XP at all very much.

The real challenge with each computer migration is to get everything configured just right and to move over all the data. This time I had my wife put the old hard drive in the new machine as a slave drive. If Windows were an operating system that made sense then all that lovely software I had on what was my C drive and is now my D drive would work transparently. But of course this is not the way things should work in the World According to Redmond. Word, Excel and Powerpoint cannot be run as is from my D drive, even though my versions are all legit. They must be reinstalled so that they show up on the Windows registry on the C drive. I have only found one program so far that I can run directly from my D drive: an old version of WS_FTP LE. It apparently is so old it doesn’t know or care about the Windows registry. Even my trusty email client Eudora gave me some fits. Tweaking the Eudora.ini file to show references to the C drive to be the D drive did not completely end annoying error messages.

Right now my most annoying problem is that my computer cannot talk to the other computers in the house. Alas this is not a new problem. For at least six months I have been unable to print to the printer attached to my wife’s computer. But I was hoping with XP that this would go away. Leave it to Microsoft though to take a simple peer-to-peer network concept and add a new layer of complexity to it. Now to do any kind of home networking it darn well wants every computer on the network to be running the .Net framework. I spent a couple hours in a futile Google search to find ways around this problem. Alas there are none. So my wife’s machine will have to have the .Net framework installed on it, along with every other computer in the house that might want to share files or use a printer.

XP SP2 has some essentials left out of earlier versions of XP, like a firewall. (It was sort of like building a house without putting a lock on the door!) Of course their default firewall sucks big time. We use ZoneAlarm instead. So there was a bit of head scratching trying to figure out how to get XP SP2 to play nicely with ZoneAlarm.

And of course there are the patches. There are patches to pretty much every program out there now and I will be weeks getting all the patches installed. I am sure there are patches to the Microsoft Office Suite, Quicken, Front Page and numerous other programs I use routinely.

The “experience” of XP is not usually too my liking. Life in Windows 2000 is a lot simpler. In XP they are so busy jazzing up the user interface and trying to make things easier that I can’t find the things I used to find in the same places anymore. The Control Panel is still there but it took some puzzling to figure out where the heck the things I want are in there. When I finally discovered the classic view things improved but it was a needlessly frustrating process.

And I hate retraining my computer. No, I still don’t want the incredibly annoying Office Assistant. I so have to dig into Excel’s options to turn the damn thing off permanently. I am annoyed by the dopey animated dog that hangs around when I do things like transfer files. Reinstalling Quicken brings back a plethora of advertising crap for services I didn’t want the last time I installed and I still don’t want. And Quicken still continuously bugs me about its services even though I tell it not to bother me anymore. There was one moment of relief. Mozilla Firefox is now at Version 1.0! I reinstalled it and copied my files from my D drive and I got all my bookmarks and cookies transparently.

But the new machine is still sweet. It takes about 30 seconds to boot up to the point where I can log myself in, and not much longer than that to be up and running. My Internet connection seemed a lot slower on the old machine. Now pages jump up most of the time. Despite the hassle I am already in a better place. I just wish it involved less work to turn my computer into a tool I can efficiently use. I think this is why people buy Macs. Someday I might join them.

September 19th, 2004 at 11:35am Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

This and that

So much happening in my life these days that it is hard for me to even catch my breath, let alone find time to blog. But blogging has been preying on my mind. I’ve wanted to blog but couldn’t because there was all this more important stuff! So this entry will be a bunch of random thoughts and concerns running around my brain at the moment.

First, my wife’s job with the Software Productivity Consortium will be ending in October. Has the Software Productivity Consortium, whose mission it is to improve the practices of the software community (or at least its members) stopped using computers? Hardly. Has she been fired for some sort of malfeasance? Not at all. She’s being outsourced. Yes the pointy haired bosses are firmly in control at SPC and have been for about a year now. Someone apparently had the “clever” idea to outsource the help desk. The mind reels. SPC is not some huge conglomerate; it has about 100 employees, most of them in Herndon, Virginia. People are intimately attached to their computers and their laptops. They depend on the help desk staff to keep all the infrastructure working and to get their computers fixed pronto. After the outsourcing is complete only a token contractor will actually be in the building. Most of the work will be done offsite, adding delay and frustration to SPC employees. It’s hard to imagine how SPC can save any money; it’s not like my wife is bringing home the big bucks. Anyhow the few remaining IT Help Desk staff were largely shown the door midweek. My wife gets to stay and try to do the work of four people until October 8th, which is her last day (if she stays there that long).

Meanwhile on Monday a contractor arrives to try to learn their business. My wife is a highly skilled IT troubleshooter. This is a woman puts together computers in her spare time for friends because she thinks it is fun. She can fix the most obscure Windows errors. So I’m not worried in the least about her job prospects. In fact I think we are both glad her job is coming to an end. Some company around the Reston area with savvy apparently lacking at SPC will likely snatch her up pretty quickly. In the event the economy is worse than I thought my GS-14 salary could carry us forward indefinitely. So the only real losers here are the people who work at SPC. They get to watch a stream of likely underpaid and largely offsite contractors cycle through their organization. Not one of them will do a lick more work than called for by the contract. I should know. I’ve seen many a contracting debacle in my years as a federal employee. I figure the SPC CEO must have marbles for brains or be a big George W. Bush supporter. It’s the only thing that explains such a complete lack of common sense. My wife is not alone. The employees, tired of working 80-hour weeks because their CEO wants them too, are leaving right and left. It used to be a great place to work. It’s hard on SPC employees to see dysfunctional management take over and drive a great organization into the ground.

Second, medical issues with my Mom are not getting any easier. It’s not appropriate to get into too much detail here but my poor 77-year-old Dad is being run ragged. It is good that they are in Riderwood and their life is somewhat simpler. Unfortunately my Mom pretty much cannot even boil water at this point. They really depend on that gratis daily meal in one of Riderwood’s many restaurants. My 84-year-old Mom seems increasing scared and paranoid. I hope my Dad will start getting some adult day care for her so he can get away from it for a while. I help when I can but I have my own family to take care of. In fact I see my mother as very close to needing a nursing home. Fortunately Riderwood has an excellent nursing home called Renaissance Gardens. I’m hoping her visit next week to see a shrink will help her get a grip. But with all the medications she’s on I’m not sure if antianxiety medicine or even an antidepressant would do her much good.

Third, school has restarted for my daughter Rosie, now in 10th grade. My wife and I have been dealing with all those school startup issues: new clothes, books, raids on Staples, endless forms that need to be filled out and checks that must be written. Her teachers increasingly require onerous “contracts” with students that we parents must sign. One small sign of improvement: the information form with all the relevant names and phone numbers is now actually entered into a computer. We got a preprinted form with last year’s information on it and all we had to do was correct it. It’s a small step but one of these obvious steps that should have been done years ago. All this contact information could be submitted and updated over the web.

Fourth, I’m getting a new computer! The parts arrived today. I just need my wife to assemble them. My current computer is about 3 years old and arrived with (shudder) Windows Me on it. The new one is nothing fancy because I don’t need fancy. What I do need is something that doesn’t take three minutes to boot, so my excellent wife worked hard to meet my requirements. The result: my computer will have a fast motherboard and disk drive. My computer will also have a writeable DVD drive. I don’t need a fast CPU. I have learned that fast CPUs mean little: it’s the memory, motherboard and disk drive that are the pokes. So I’m getting a 1.8GHZ Athlon XP AMD chip, which is still 2.5 times faster than what I am using now and likely overkill for my modest needs.

We’ve been feeling very geeky lately. August was our flush month for cash since we each got three paychecks. We budgeted about $1200 for new computer stuff. By buying parts we’ve gotten some amazing values. My computer will cost about $600. Rosie gets a 17-inch flat panel monitor (about $350 after rebate). Terri gets the computer toolkit she wants. And we purchased another printer because the old Epson C82 died almost immediately after the warranty expired. The new one is an Epson C84. Since our first Epson experience wasn’t good we bought this model somewhat reluctantly, and only because it got a Consumer Reports Best Buy recommendation. It had better last longer! Look for a rant on our disposable society coming up in my blog in the weeks ahead.

I also now have a 128MB USB flash drive. Boy, these little suckers are great and so cheap. (Mine was $25!) They are sort of like what PDA’s were in the 1990s: you don’t know you need one until you’ve got one. What’s on mine? Not much yet, but I have 14MB allocated as a backup for my Quicken data going back to 1992. I am looking forward to doing geeky things like installing the Firefox browser on my flash drive. I can take it with me wherever I go and have my browser of choice and all my bookmarks available! The possibilities of flash drives is yet another topic for a blog entry in the weeks ahead.

I’m still deeply involved in political blogging. I’m trying to make sense of these polls showing Bush getting a double-digit bounce coming out of the Republican convention. I’m torn between feelings of despair if these are real and my gut feeling that these polls are meaningless when other polls are showing perhaps the weakest bounce from any political convention in history for Bush. I actually woke up at 5 a.m. this morning worrying about this stuff.

It is so obvious to me that Bush is bad for the country on all levels. He has succeeded in nothing. Yet I have to wonder if our electorate likes to elect morons. Or maybe it’s the moron vote that Bush is counting on. My hope is that Gadflyer is correct and that the vast majority of people made up their minds months ago. If so it may be a nail biter of an election, but it still favors Kerry. Anyhow it’s no time for us Democrats to be complacent. If you don’t like Bush and you aren’t registered to vote please get registered if you still can. Dig into your pocket and support liberal 527s organizations like ACT. Spend some time if you can possibly find it to work in a precinct, make cold calls and go door to door. The election won’t be handed to Democrats on a silver platter. We’re going to have to work for it with every last ounce of our strength. But when victory arrives it will be all the sweeter.

September 11th, 2004 at 08:21pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | one comment

Boxed in by my computer

My office came together this week. On Tuesday I had it repainted and on Thursday I had the furniture people come in. They removed the 70s furniture and assembled modular furniture. I can now sit at my desk without my thighs touching the bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t have to elevate my arms to use the computer keyboard. All this is good and I appreciate the improved ergonomics. Clearly the computer is the means by which most of my work is accomplished so I have to be comfortable. I’m fortunate to have a boss more than willing to outlay a couple grand to make sure I can be productive. This would have never happened in my old agency.

But for someone whose job it is to be a web chief I find that in many ways a computer is a seriously inadequate tool for doing my work. Despite 25 years or so trying to perfect the personal computer using it is still a tedious, difficult and frequently frustrating means for accomplishing my work.

Nowhere is this more obvious to me than with my computer monitor. I have a 17-inch monitor, which is standard these days. But it’s not nearly enough space. What I really need is for one whole wall of my office to be a gigantic computer monitor with 600 dots per inch resolution. That’s because like most people in the management business I multitask a lot. I have way more things on my plate that I have to manage than can fit on a 17-inch monitor or can be managed using an Outlook Task list. I can, of course, ALT-TAB to numerous other screens to get the same information. But what I need is a big picture of all my work and literally hundreds of tasks I must coordinate. And I can’t get that from a computer.

So instead I’m ordering the biggest whiteboard I can find and having that installed on one wall instead. It’s low tech, but it works. People can come into my office and we can discuss things and we can doodle on the white board until we come to a common understanding. But even this is not quite sufficient. And that is because my team is geographically disbursed. I have three employees working for me in Reston, but I have two other full time employees working out west (Montana and Alaska), and a number of part time employees scattered across the continental United States. It’s not often that I will be able to get them into my office. So instead they fly into Reston a couple times a year where we work from large whiteboards with periodic forays to our networked PCs.

It’s not that industry is not trying to respond. We’re a Lotus Notes shop (not a good thing) and part of the Notes suite is this Sametime collaborative software. It lets us have a virtual workspace. It includes a whiteboard and a chat window. We can display PowerPoint slides to each other in real time. I can also share a program and they can see what I am typing into an application. It’s a pretty cool technology and a step in the right direction.

But what I really have to do is manage a lot of disparate ad-hoc requests from all sorts of people. Right now I simply write them down on a piece of paper and cross things out as I do them, but I am reaching the point after four weeks on the job where it’s not enough. Hence I need a white board. I need one huge mother of a white board. I need to scribble my tasks on the white board, erase them, rearrange them, prioritize them and basically see things from a high level macro and a detailed perspective at the same time. I can’t do that on a 17-inch monitor, at least not very easily. I need to be able to glance from one set of tasks to another set of tasks and see the relationships between them. I can’t do that with current computer technology either. And most likely I’ll be retired before that happens.

In Neal Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age” he talks about electronic billboards that are floor to ceiling. You can see them emerge today in places like Times Square, but these are still very primitive and lack the resolution I need. In the 2002 movie “Minority Report” actor Tom Cruise plays detective John Anderton who interacts with a computer by standing up and stretching his hands out into space. This is more like what I have in mind. But even this is not ideal. It still requires a lot of physical movement that is time consuming.

Instead I have to live with what the current technology permits. It increasingly feels constraining. While I am not a big fan of Windows technology at least it is reasonably consistent. That’s why it drives me nuts when I have to use a product like Lotus Notes that completely ignores Windows graphical user interface design principles. Something as simple as selecting a block of messages using Shift-Click then pressing a Trash Can icon doesn’t exist. I average at least 200 emails per day. But right now I have to manually delete each message. (Naturally the messages aren’t deleted immediately. They are marked for deletion. If you actually want to get rid of them you have to hit the refresh button (F9) and say “Yes” to a message asking you if you really want to delete them. More of my time is needlessly wasted by a bunch of designers who never envisioned how I would have to use their product.)

And that’s just Lotus Notes. Every software package has its own peculiar and annoying quirks. The Lotus Notes Sametime program, for example, does not start automatically when I start Notes, even after I configure it to do just that. I have to remember to turn it on after I start Lotus Notes. Computer viruses and new security mandates have made it impossible for me to shut down my workstation, or even install a new software package without someone from the help desk coming to my machine. At home my new and improved Quicken software keeps asking me every time I start it if I want to learn more about their bill-paying feature. I never do and tell it to remember this fact. But it never learns. I took the time to talk to their technical support people who shrug their shoulders and say it will be fixed in a future release. Meanwhile: deal with it. My antispam software (ChoiceMail) occasionally sends me duplicates of the same email. Pretty much every program I own, no matter how much I like it, has annoying quirks. They have the effect of continually interrupting my concentration. Instead of focusing on a larger task, I am down in the computer weeds trying to make my software behave like a human would want it to.

Increasingly the whole Windows graphical user interface feels annoying. Why does it have to be so hierarchical? I can understand the logic of putting programs in a Programs folder and my data and settings in a Documents folder but I so often find myself drilling up and down folders to where I want to. Why is it so stupid? With hard drives holding ten gigabytes or more routinely these days, does an old fashioned hierarchical folder based system make any sense at all?

A computer should be like a screwdriver. Using it should be instinctive. I am grateful that my Windows 2000 operating system at least doesn’t crash on my several times day like Windows ME did. But you shouldn’t have to be your own software mechanic to continue to use a PC. Security should just work. Viruses should be automatically detected and squashed. Hardware firewalls should be built into a card on the back of the PC. Software upgrades should be tested by a certification service and installed automatically. I shouldn’t have to know what file extension things are stored in. I shouldn’t have to traverse folders or have the computer spend minutes using a Find function to locate a file. I should give the computer itself no more thought than I give my car’s dashboard. When I am driving I never think, “Gosh, I should press the accelerator” or “Maybe I should press the brake to avoid crashing into the car ahead of me”. My computer should let me manipulate it instinctively.

Clearly we have a very long way to go. Meanwhile, I will have my old fashioned whiteboard. I will continually erase it manually and rewrite it. It will require me to periodically buy new dry erase markers from the supply store. But I will be able to at least track my work, prioritize it in a way that makes sense to me, and meet my deadlines. I doubt many of us can truly do that with our computers alone.

March 20th, 2004 at 10:07am Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

Modern Technological Miracles

I am in Michigan again, but this time my wife Terri and daughter Rosie came with me. (You may recall that last month I came up here by myself to help nurse my Mom through a difficult hospitalization and recovery.) We plan to sit down tonight with my parents and my aunt and uncle for a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

We drove to Midland from our home near Washington DC in about ten hours over two days. We’ve done this trip many times before since my parents moved to Midland in 1989. But I was struck by how the drive was both the same but so much different this time, thanks to technology.

For one thing, we never owned a laptop computer before, so we never had one to bring with us. Terri used most of her bonus money to purchase a laptop computer. It’s a neat computer which suffers from one fatal flaw: it appears to be defective. But she so wanted to bring a computer with her to Michigan that she delayed returning it for a defect free computer until we got home from this visit. Since the problem was that it was hard to get it to turn on sometimes, she has basically left it on all the time. It was the last thing to be put in our minivan for the trip north.

In the past the ten hours of driving would have been very tedious. When Rosie was really young it was especially a challenge to keep her amused. She quickly got bored with the books and games we provided. It meant lots of rest stops to give her a chance to run around. Now that she is 14 her tastes are somewhat different. A laptop computer in the car provided her a perfect entertainment device. Built into the computer was a DVD drive, so any of our many DVDs could be played. Her mother and I didn’t have to listen to the noise either because she had headphones that plugged into a port on the computer. She watched a number of movies on the way up, and we didn’t have to entertain her at all. She kept herself amused. When she wasn’t watching movies on the laptop, she could work on her writing with it, or listen to her music that she had copied to the laptop.

When she got bored with the laptop I had an opportunity to play with it myself. One of our projects for the trip was to work on our Christmas cards. What better opportunity to put together a family newsletter than while rushing up I-75.

Battery life would normally be a constraint for a laptop, but was no problem on this trip because of a power converter we purchased that that plugged into our otherwise unused cigarette lighter. Except when the car decelerated or wasn’t producing enough RPMs, the laptop ran off the car’s alternator. In fact it fully charged the battery before we arrived at our hotel near Pittsburgh.

Business men and women have been using laptops on the road for years, but we haven’t used one before. Our hotel offered high speed internet for $10 a night. We declined that option, but did use the phone in the room to dial up to a local Earthlink number and connect to the internet. So a few hours after leaving home I was able to check my email and surf my favorite sites from our hotel room.

Cell phones are another technology we have finally adopted. Both Terri and I have prepaid cell phones that we otherwise rarely use. Both came with us. I realized that our cat sitter didn’t really need to know the hotel we were staying at. It was simply a matter of making sure she had our cell phone numbers and we were instantly available. It is true that my phone for some reason could not pick up a signal where we stayed near the Pittsburgh airport, but Terri’s phone worked fine. All along the turnpike and into Michigan our cell phone signal was strong. While passing through Toledo I took advantage of it to call my parents to let them know when they could expect our arrival. A concern about getting a prescription refilled was speedily answered when my Dad called me back on my cell phone with a list of potential pharmacies at which we could stop.

All of this is really not that remarkable these days, but from my perspective it all seems both magical and amazing. One of the reasons I didn’t like driving long distances was my fear of getting stuck on the road in the middle of nowhere. With a cell phone this fear has largely receded. We can get help conveniently should we need it from the safety of our car.

As I noted there were a few technology glitches. Terri’s new laptop is defective and will have to be replaced, but it was functional in a marginal sort of way for this trip. The power converter from our engine to the laptop made annoying sounds when it wasn’t getting enough current. But traveling by car with a family doesn’t have to be a chore anymore. We are enjoying the fruit of twenty years of steady progress in the personal computer and electronics revolution. These really are modern day miracles, but most of us don’t appreciate them.

It occurred to me while driving that within a few years it will be not only possible, but affordable to travel and always be online. With increasing numbers of high speed wireless internet providers out there, and with options like Wi-Fi hot spots we should be able to find a last minute deal on a hotel reservation as we approach a city, determine if there are traffic delays on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in real time, or even do something as mundane as read our email while in the car. In Rosie’s case she could stay on AOL Instant Messenger while chugging down the thruway.

We’ll be always connected all the time. I guess this is a good thing and if it isn’t hopefully we will always have off buttons on these devices. When we were in Yellowstone National Park in August I was struck by how inaccessible the park was, both geographically and electronically. Most cell phones did not work in the park because there were no cellular phone towers. If you needed to make a call you usually had to queue up at the pay phone in the lodge. But even when I was in range I noticed that my cell phone was very smart, and noticed that I was in a different time zone and changed the time accordingly.

As Paul Simon sang, “These are the days of miracles and wonders.” I am enchanted.

November 27th, 2003 at 09:56am Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

Crying in my bier for Microsoft … NOT!

Microsoft is beginning to cry uncle.

Admittedly this is a strange thing to hear from the “innovators” at Microsoft. But it appears they are starting to realize that their software is, well, massively overpriced. It’s not very good either, but that’s not something they are going to admit, despite almost daily press articles about the latest security holes found in their products. Their web server, Internet Information Server, is so riddled with security holes that you have to be more than a bit nuts to install it today.

Anyhow according to this article in its SEC filing Microsoft is warning its earnings may be lower in the future because of the growth of the open source movement. For those of you who don’t know, open source is software that is free of license and cost, and is maintained and written by volunteers. Microsoft is having a real hissy fit about open source software. They are calling it unreliable, which is hardly ever the case. They are calling it anti-American because no one is making a profit from it. (Not quite true. Open source software is often a platform upon which companies add value by creating customized packages that work with it. Oracle is laughing all the way to the bank.) They are even pressing for laws and regulations that would forbid governments from using open source.

This would be laughable if they weren’t so serious and were not stuffing so much money into the pockets of congressmen. Nonetheless many federal agencies have figured out that open source software is not only free to use, and of much higher quality than what can be maintained commercially, but can actually be inspected and modified. Yes, users can actually fix their own problems! What a concept!

The Microsoft approach is, of course, to make you pay for the privilege of talking to one of their technical support folks and maybe, if you are lucky, getting a patch or a work around to allow you to get things done. Release their code so you can inspect it and fix it yourself? Not a chance.

But Microsoft is beginning to understand it may not have a choice. European countries are looking at using open source software exclusively. The article I referenced above says that Microsoft has come up with a “Government Security Program”. This will allow governments like the United Kingdom to actually look at Microsoft’s source code and maybe fix things themselves.

Clearly it takes a lot of clout to get Microsoft to do something like this, and governments are one of the few institutions large enough to tell Microsoft to piss off.

As a federal employee working on information technology issues I can tell you that using open source software is a no brainer. Not that all open source software is great, but much of it is excellent and of extremely high quality. Even if it is unlikely that I personally will go in and inspect the software if an error is found, it’s easy enough to hire people or a service that can do this if needed. But the main reason open source is a no-brainer is because you are no longer locked in to a vendor. No or low cost, higher quality software, and the ability to actually make permanent fixes sounds like a winning combination to me. Open source is creeping into my agency. We have some Linux machines. Some of our software is written in PHP, an open source scripting language. We also have a comments database written in Perl. Our Linux web servers, for some reason, don’t seem vulnerable to so many security flaws.

I’ve been playing with open source software for a few years now. It’s amazing what is readily available for free. On one domain I put up a free content management system. When it no longer suited my needs I replaced it with an even better free content management system. On a forum I run, I am using phpBB bulletin board software. It works great. And I’ve been able to do in and tweak it to do things I want it to do. This blog software is not quite open source, but it is free to use for personal use. And it’s easily inspected since it is written in Perl. And if Moveable Type no longer suits me there are plenty of quality open source alternatives I can choose instead.

I doubt Microsoft will go into bankruptcy court. But if they fail they will have only themselves to blame. Meanwhile I sense that their desktop monopoly is likely to crack in the next couple years. The software is there to do away with Windows and its whole Microsoft Office suite. It’s free and programs such as Open Office work seamlessly with Microsoft Office. I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft realized Windows can’t be viable operating system much longer. Perhaps like Apple they will build a new Windows around a solid Unix interface. I know I would be happier. At least my computer is more likely not to crash and work predictably.

Karma seems to work on many levels, including the corporate level. Microsoft: beware. What comes around goes around.

February 4th, 2003 at 08:03am Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments