Tech Blech!

How bad can an "automatic" upgrade get...?

2011-01-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

Pretty bad if you've got Norton Internet Security, their annual subscription service, and you follow their suggestion to upgrade to the latest version (I should have listened to that small inner voice that warned me against this upgrade, but I do want to keep my machine as secure as possible).

The actually installation and upgrade went quite well, actually: download a couple of files, reboot, and then the new version was up and running. The problem was that the ending message greeted me with the statement:

"You have successfully activated and registered Norton Internet Security, and now have 30 days of protection for up to 3 PC(s)."

30 days? I have a subscription that is currently active...right?

Wrong! In the upgrade process it "lost" my subscription and now Norton IS tells me that I have 30 days remaining on my subscription and that I can "renew".

Finding/getting help on their website is nothing short of semi-hopeless:

Their online chat service was broken (site not available)
Finding content on their website was very difficult... when I tried to send an email, they required the submission of a product key: finding where to find that was a drag.
I tried going to my account and finally found the product keys
Email constantly said "Please wait..." and never submitted
Finally, when I tried the Chat option, that worked, and the tech fixed the problem in about 15 minutes (kudos to him!).

Although they eventually did solve the problem, it cost me about an hour of time, when it should have recognized my existing license and subscription and upgraded correctly. Failing that, they could have at least given clear instructions by recognizing that it was an upgrade and sent me to the right place.

A big Thumbs down for: service unavailability, improper upgrade, misleading information

Thumbs up for: quick fix once I got through.

Why every Windows user needs a Linux CD...

2010-06-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

Even if you're a died-in-the-wool Windows supporter, you NEED to keep a copy of Linux around on a bootable CD. Here's why.

The other day, we experienced a power outage... brief, but it took down a couple of machines that I had yet to protect with a UPS (I know, I know... my bad, but I've only protected the machines with RAID drives in the past as they spend a lot of time checking the drives after a power failure).

In any event, a new Windows 7 desktop refused to boot after the power failure: the first Microsoft Windows splash screen displayed and then nothing except an ominous tock, tock, tock as it sat there doing nothing. I've heard that sound before on a machine that couldn't read the Master Boot Record (MBR - the very first part of the disk that the BIOS uses to start loading the operating system into memory). Fortunately, I had a recent backup of the system, but there was some work on the system that I had just completed, so I figured I'd use my Ubuntu Live CD to check out and save the few updated files (the idea of using Linux to save data on damaged Windows machines is not new: see here, and here for examples. Some of these articles are a little old and there's now even better support for Windows NTFS file systems)

Starting up Linux on your Windows machine is easy: insert your favorite Linux CD (I used Kubuntu 9.04) into the machine and restart the computer. You'll get an option to run Linux without installing it. The fun part is getting Linux to recognize your hard drive. Usually, it will be something like "mount -t NTFS /dev/sdb /media/windrive", but check out the references above for more details... that's not the point of this posting.

The amazing part is that -- once I loaded Linux and issued the mount command, there was a bit of a pause, Kubuntu recognized that the Master Boot Record was corrupted and then...

it automatically fixed the error!

Totally unexpected -- you could have knocked me over with a feather. I shut down Linux, rebooted the machine and Windows promptly started up just fine and a week later continues to operate with no errors. Saved me my latest updates and a bunch of time not having to do a clean re-install of everything on that machine. Terrific!

Now why can't Microsoft do that?

Why is a 2-year old Mac better than a new Windows 7 machine?

2010-04-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

Because the Mac seamlessly and effortlessly connects to a wireless network while the Windows 7 Just Doesn't, even after repeated trouble-shooting.

I'm visiting family in Boston and they have a wireless network. A few days ago, I fire up my MacBook Pro (about 2.5 years old, now running Snow Leopard), go to the AirPort (WiFi) preferences, identify the network ID, enter the password and -- snap! -- I'm on the internet.

This morning, I decide it's time to do a few things with my new Dell laptop running Windows 7 and I figure that setting up the wireless connection won't be too hard... foolish assumption.

First off, I have to find the right place to get things done. Dell has a "helpful" piece of software -- the Dell ControlPoint Connection Manager -- that I guess is supposed to make my life easier. After poking around a bit, I see that it doesn't even recognize that there's a wireless network: it has options for wireless (even including trouble-shooting FAQs), but none of the options for wireless networks are active... they're all greyed out and therefore not available.

So off I go to the Control Panel, hoping against hope that Micro$oft has improved this since Windows XP. What I learn after almost an hour of fiddling is that they've added lots of fancy-schmancy displays and options, but it's still just as bad as ever.

The bottom line is that the house where I'm staying has an old wireless router which uses WEP encryption (that old encryption that is so easily broken it might as well be transmitting in clear text). The good part about Windows 7 is that it know this is poor encryption, so they refuse to connect to the network, even though I've given it the proper credentials. The bad part is that they do so without any explanation whatsoever.

I wind up running the network trouble-shooter. The good part is it helpfully responds with a link to explain "How do I change security settings or manually create a profile?" The bad part is that this supposedly helpful page says nothing about manually creating a profile, which is what I'm supposed to do.

As is the way of Windows, the critical information may well be there, but buried so deeply that -- if you don't already know what the answer is, you'll never find it. In this case, you have to know to click on the "Encryption methods for wireless networks". It looks like just more general information about WEP and why that's a Bad Thing, but way down at the bottom, there is a detailed step-by-step approach to manually creating a network profile and forcing the connection to occur. The bad part is the instructions are flawed: three quarters of the way through the sequence, when I'm supposed to get the critical option to manually connect to the network, the dialogue closes and I'm right back where I started: no connection.

Sure... I've had some headaches with getting my Mac to work in development mode, but it's really nice to have at least one machine that Just Works when it comes to getting on the internet.

Two more backup failures...

2010-04-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

So after the dismal failure of Acronis, I tried another backup solution: a product called Backup Maker from ASCOMP Software. It had gotten some nice reviews, so I figured I'd try the free version and see if it was worth the upgrade.

I set it up to run overnight, according to their instructions. Unfortunately, when I came in to the office this morning, I found a couple of warning messages from Backup Maker saying that it was unable to backup a couple of Norton files.

Too bad: backup software that's supposed to run unattended shouldn't be displaying messages and waiting for an operator to respond. Figuring that I might have made a setup error and assuming that the backup program was now running happily in the background, I decided to go check on what it was doing and make sure that the settings were correct.

Too bad again: Backup Maker had completely stopped, complaining that it didn't have enough space on the backup volume that I had pointed to and it hadn't done anything. This in spite of the fact that there was over 400 Gigabytes of free space on that volume!

I also tried out a product call Synchronicity (by Create Software) which can be found on SourceForge, a major repository of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, to some). It didn't take me long to dump that one as well, The only way I could find to define backups was one folder at a time, rather than being able to select multiple directories from a file tree. And that was way too time-consuming. Maybe the option was buried in there somewhere, but I sure didn't want to take the time to find out. If new software isn't reasonably intuitive to me, I just drop it and move on.

So, two more backup programs byte the dust.

How hard can it be to write a backup program that just works?

How bad can it get...?

2010-04-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Well... pretty bad I must say.

The backups on my new Windows 7 machine fail about every 2nd or 3rd try. It refuses to make a backup to a local hard drive (moderately unreasonable, in my opinion: I should be able to put my backup data where I want to and then copy it off elsewhere, although something off the computer you're trying to backup is definitely the best solution), so I use a networked hard drive across my Gigabyte network. No other software has problems using this drive (a Western Digital WorldBook, a very nice little NAS (network attached storage) device with Gigabyte transfer rates and a Terabyte of storage at a nice price), but Win7 backup sure does. At midnight, it complains of a network error and shuts down the backup.

So I figured I'd have to try another backup program. I've used Acronis in the past, didn't particularly like it in Version 8, but there were several reviews that discussed it favorably and one that described how mightily it had improved.

So I figured I'd give it a whirl with a trial version... bad decision. It doesn't work and support isn't available

First off, it's a monster install: about 250Meg download and almost 500Meg to install - what in the heck are they doing with all that code?

Secondly, the company makes you jump through all kinds of hoops to get the download itself, what with filling out forms, getting a validation email, then more data, and finally the download. In the process, they give you a trial serial number which I duly copied and installed in the trial software. The one tricky part -- which will be a killer for many users -- is that they require a modification to your firewall software to let port 9876 through... this may be the problem, even though I modified Norton Firewall service in what I thought was the required fashion. But making users edit firewall rules is pretty arcane stuff and Definitely Not Recommended.

Thirdly, I setup a download following their instructions: to their credit, there are lots of options. To their discredit, the backup completely failed to run.

Finally, I went to their website and was completely unable to get support. Why is that, you ask? Well... they require that you register your product to receive support, but the registration page refuses to accept the trial registration key that they gave me. So: no registration, no support.

I'm guessing that it has to do with the firewall rules, but since Acronis doesn't provide an option to test the basic features and make sure that everything works as expected, there's no real way to tell this short of hauling out Wireshark or other network tools and I sure don't have the time to do that.

What a waste of time...

Linux Achilles Heel...

2010-03-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing that's holding back wide-spread acceptance of Linux on the desktop, it's the lack of a consistent application installation approach: in my opinion, that's the Achilles Heel of Linux.

The problem is there are several different installation packages (called package management systems) for the different flavors (distributions) of Linux. There's the deb package manager called dpkg, apt (used with dpkg), rpm, yum (used with rpm), and others, and they definitely are not compatible. Not only that, you've got to be really careful (read that as "know some of the internals of Linux-land") or you'll get screwed like I just did.

I'm using Dropbox (great product; more on that on another post - the free version allows you up to 3Gig of storage which is perfect for me) on my machines (Mac OSx and various flavors of Windows) and wanted to add it to my Linux box. I head for the Dropbox site, find the Linux download section and see all kinds of Ubuntu downloads. Now I'm on Kubuntu and I don't see anything specifically saying Kubuntu, but they've got a download that matches my version (9.04) so I give it a whirl.

First, I add it to my apt source files, which entails editing a file called "/etc/apt/sources.list or equivalent" (note the 'equivalent' part -- I still don't know what that could be). However, I've learned how to edit my sources.list file so I go ahead and do that using sudo (setting myself up as super user). The Dropboxers have done a nice job of listing all the options for the various flavors of Ubuntu and Fedora, another Linux distribution. Notice that there's a certain degree of special knowledge required already.

Once I've done that, I try to find Dropbox as one of the applications and it's not there; I try several things and nothing works. (By the way, this is a common occurrence when I try to use apt on my machine). I do some searching on the web and locate the information about how to use the deb package manager and run that command directly per the instructions. This takes several iterations because the Dropbox software has dependencies (i.e., other software packages that it needs to run) and those software packages have their own dependencies... I slog through this morass and get to a place where it lists a slew of dependencies and says to run it all with specific options and I do that (there's the Big Mistake). Everything is reported as "fine" and the installer requests a reboot to finish the installation. No problem, I think.

However, when the reboot finishes my KDE interface (what comes with Kubuntu - a blue-tinged interface) is gone and replaced with the Gnome interface (what comes with Ubuntu - a red-tinged interface). Folks, believe me... this is a Big Deal and one that is likely to cause me many headaches in the future. No warning... just "Boom" and the hammer drops!

By contrast, the installation for both Windows and Mac was a complete cake-walk: download a file, run it, and done! (As an aside, notice all the Linux terminology links I had to create just to talk about this subject!)

Now any Linux geek will likely proclaim: "You should have known better" -- and they may be right. But that only serves to prove my point: there's too much knowledge required to do a simple installation on a particular flavor of Linux to expect just anyone to be able to use the operating system productively.

Those same Linux supporters (I do count myself as one... I mean, I am running a Linux box because it gives me greater development capabilities beyond what I can find on Windows and even the Mac platform) may also point out that "Normal users won't be trying to install Dropbox on their machines" -- and they may be right. But the range of what "normal users" are trying and expecting these days is expanding greatly, so the Linux community had better get ready to deal with it.

As another example which most certainly applies to "Normal users", I cannot get the latest version of Firefox installed on my Linux box without resorting to source code compilation, and if anyone in the Linux crowd expects "normal users" to jump into that frying pan, they're just asking for more trouble. I know I won't try that route anytime soon.

I don't know what the answer is. I do know that's it's a complicated task because of all the different distributions there are and the amount of investment in what already works for certain groups.

I just wish it weren't so...

Nice solution to a Microsoft Outlook problem...

2010-03-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

Nothing frustrates me more (well... only a few things :) than a software developer taking away an option and not providing a way to undo that change, particularly when it is or should be a user choice.

Case in point: Microsoft came late to the security party and when they finally realized that their software was riddled with security holes, they took a rather heavy-handed approach to "solving" the problem. As everyone knows, email allows attachments, which are a great thing for sending files of various kinds to your friends, co-workers, and clients. That's great, but the bad guys figured out ways to package malware into various file types, including such things as Microsoft Access databases (.mdb), web address files (.url), and even compressed files (.zip).

What did Microsoft do? They dropped in a security "fix" that completely disallowed these and many other potentially harmful file types. And the didn't provide a way to undo (either temporarily or permanently) these changes. Once you've installed the security "fix", those attachments are completely inaccessible to you through Outlook. To gain access to them, you have to have another email client handy and that's a real PITA.

Unfortunately, I occasionally get such files from clients or associates whom I trust and I need to be able to open them... Uh-uh. Microsoft knows better than me and won't let that happen.

Today that problem bit me again and I found a terrific resource on the web that allowed to me take care of that in a very intelligent manner. A quick Google search turned up this page, which explained the situation nicely and then offered up a veritable smorgasbord of solutions. As always, there's a way to edit the Windows Registry , but that's not something you want to do regularly. If that is your cup of tea, see the section on the page titled ""Recent Outlook Versions". I started to do that and then happened to glance further down the page and found an even better solution.

In the "Tools" section, you'll find an Attachment Options link which offers an Outlook plug-in (or COM add-in) by Outlook MVP Ken Slovak. This does everything that Microsoft should have done. It installs quickly and easily, and adds a tab to your Outlook "Tools | Options" window.

There you can see all the file types that are disallowed, and allow them, individually (or all at once if you like to take risks). Even better, once you've downloaded a particular file that you were expecting, you can easily go back to this tab and disallow them again, so you don't accidentally allow the bad guys to get you.

Now that's intelligent design!

Bad site! Bad site!

2010-02-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

I recently switched to Norton Internet Security (NIS). I'd been using the free Comodo Personal Firewall and was reasonably happy with that, but ran into some issues and found community forum support to be too time-consuming. So I figured paying a bit might be worth a try. (And, I got one of those 3-user, 1-year packs essentially free from my local Fry's.) I looked at a couple of other packages but wasn't so happy with them, NIS got a PC Magazine Editor's Choice award so looked like a good deal.

My initial impressions of NIS were quite good: it installed cleanly, worked unobtrusively, and didn't seem to take much of a bite out of performance. But I'm beginning to wonder about Norton's support and about some of their design decisions. Here's the deal.

1and1.com provides much of my hosting and email, and their webmail service is at http://mailcluster.perfora.net. Unfortunately, NIS has decided in its infinite wisdom that http://www.perfora.net is infected with a virus and therefore it refuses to allow access to the mailcluster server. I looked and looked and couldn't find a whitelist feature anywhere so I sent off an email to Norton technical support.

What I got wasn't much in the way of support. Oh... they told me how to get access to the website, but the solution was like taking a sledgehammer to put in a tack. Here's the technician's response:

Hello John,
Thank you for contacting Norton Support.
I understand from your message that you are unable to access a specific website as it is marked by Norton as a non-safe web.
I am glad to help you regarding this.
John, Norton has found that www.perfora.net is infected by virus and this is the reason it has not given you the access.
If you still need to access the particular website please disable the firewall and go through.
Steps to disable the firewall in Norton Internet Security 2009.
1.Start Norton Internet Security.
2.In the Internet pane, if the Smart Firewall shows On, click the status indicator to turn it Off.
3.In the Protection Alert dialog box, select Until system restart from the drop-down menu.
4.Click OK.
I hope this resolves your concern.

Turn off my firewall until I restart the system?! How ridiculous is that... you would figure that Norton would be smart enough to: give a simple option for something like this instead of just throwing up their hands and saying: "Well, if you're going to access a Bad Site, then we'll expose your computer to any and all threats."

Oh... and the tech spelled my name wrong (it's "Jon", not "John"). I'm glad they were trained to use it twice as a "personal" touch.

Maybe I should have titled this post "Bad NIS! Bad NIS!".

It's a good thing it only cost $1.99...

2010-01-17T03:01:00.000-08:00

I love my new iPhone. Finally I have a phone that's easy to use, synchronizes with my ACT! contact management system (thanks to Companion Link), has good speech recognition so I don't have to key in lots of data... In short, I am definitely a happy camper.

That doesn't mean, however, that all is hunky-dory. For example, the Apple Contacts feature works nicely, but doesn't have a search feature (Hello, Apple). Therefore, I have to tap those tiny letters to get to the section I want and then scroll frantically (I have over 6000 contacts in my address book: that might be another story, but I won't go into that here:).

Anyway, to get around this problem, I bought Contact Find from the AppStore, thinking it would be the solution.

Wrong. It loads exactly 786 of my contacts and then simply quits... not much utility there. I sent a query to their tech support and after several days got a response back that I should reboot my iPhone and try it again. I did that, but no dice - the same problem occurred. Now my queries go unanswered so I have this useless app, since deleted.

Good thing it only cost $1.99...

Now that's easy money...

2010-01-15T05:09:00.000-08:00

I've got to upgrade my main computer, a laptop. I've been happily buying Dell for many years so went to their site, loaded up a machine and got a final list price of just over $2000 with a $270 discount. Seemed pretty reasonable.

Then I did a search for "Dell coupon" and quickly landed at the TechBargains site. What I found was a whole slew of Dell coupons, nicely organized into groups: coupons for Home/Home Office and coupons for Small Business (my category). There I found a coupon for the laptop I had selected - the E6500 - which gave me a 25% discount for a new total discount of $522.75, almost double what I had before.

Nice work, TechBargains! I'll definitely be seeing you again.

When is good audio quality not enough...

2009-12-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

When it's combined with poor mechanical quality, that's when.

A few months ago I bought a BlueAnt bluetooth headset (The Z9i model) on the recommendation of a friend who works at Radio Shack. After the purchase, I called my wife to get a quality check (she is very particular about call quality and immediately lets me know what she thinks about the sound) and she gave the BlueAnt a Thumbs Up. Sounded good to me as well, so I used it for several months and was happy with it.

After only a few months, I learned that the mechanical design / implementation leaves a great deal to be desired and I've replaced the BlueAnt with a Motorola headset. The problem with the BlueAnt is the mechanism they used to attach the ear loop to the headset. There's a little rubber "grommet" on the back of the headset and the end of the ear loop is inserted into that grommet. That was fine initially, but after only a few months of use, the rubber grommet expanded allowing the ear loop to rotate in the grommet so that the headset flip-flops on my ear. Not acceptable -- it feels as if the thing is going to fall off every time I lean to the side..

I tried applying a very low-tech fix: wrapping a small amount of scotch tape around the end of the ear loop.

That worked for a while, but when I had to add the second layer of tape because the grommet had expanded even more, I gave up.

Nice of BlueAnt to try new approaches, but this one sure didn't work. In spite of the great sound quality, this device gets a Thumbs Down rating.

Oh, you wonder where the disk space went...

2009-12-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

Discovered this morning that my Vista machine (business accounting) which is a very low-use machine was generating an overly large backup (55Gig)... and it just seemed to keep growing and growing...

I did some digging and found that the c:/windows/system32/config/RegBack directory was over 7Gigs of space!

Looking at the files, it's clear that some process is regularly creating backups of the registry

and they just sit there, building up over time.

I know that disk space is cheap, but that's not the only resource involved with simply letting applications use as much disk space as they want. As the size of "stuff" on the disk grows, there's also a cost in other ways.

The added time to transmit this stuff over the wire for backups increases. For example, even with a Gigabyte network installed, this takes time and eventually the window available for the backup is exceeded.
The added cost of keeping copies of this stuff lying around, as in backup copies. The extra 7Gigs of space expands to roughly 21Gigs of space on my rotating disk backups.
The added cost of purchasing and installing ever larger disks. My backup drives are beginning to reach capacity and this wasted space is definitely contributing to that.
The added cost of computing cycles - and human wait time - when I need to find a file on my system.

I wonder if these registry backups are ever used. And I'll bet that the programmers who put this together said to themselves: "Well, it's only a few Megs and disk space is cheap, so we'll just throw these out there in case we need them..." and didn't think about the fact that, over time, these 'few Megs' could turn into a real waste.

Nice idea to back things up automatically, but a little thought to the potential impact of such an approach and some automatic cleanup would definitely make for a better solution. Kinda makes you wish for a variation of the IBM System/360 Generation Data Groups where the operating system would keep a set number of files in a group, automatically re-numbering them as new ones were added.

Great little NAS box...

2009-12-11T17:50:00.000-08:00

The 351UNE box from NDAS is a great little network-attached hard drive. It's fast (1Gig network speed), flexible (network, USB, and eSATA connectors), and easy to setup & use. It comes in a variety of sizes, and you can even buy it from local dealers without a HDrive and add your own (I got mine at Fry's for $60.

If you get one, make sure you get the updated drivers from their website (V3.71 as of this post: http://www.ximeta.com and click on "NDAS DRIVER for Windows"); the older drivers do not work so well.

Even better, their technical support was astounding: I was working on a Saturday installing a couple of drives for a client and couldn't get them to work (older drivers that came with the hardware). I sent an email to tech support, fully expecting to have to wait until Monday morning for a response. Within about 20 minutes, I got phone call (!) from their sales rep. He apologized for not being a tech, but offered to do what he could. What he did was point me to the new drivers and - voila - everything was up and running.

Now that's a terrific combination: great product and even greater support...

Apple Time Machine Gotcha [FIXED]...

2009-12-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

Well... for whatever reason, my Mac thought that it's system disk was a Time Machine backup disk. That's because there was a folder called

backups/backupdb

in the system drive's root directory (i.e., click on your system icon in Finder, then click on the system hard drive and look for "backups/backupdb" in that folder).

I found the solution at this site -- nice to see I wasn't the only one with this kind of problem -- and deleted backups/backupdb. Now my install of Snow Leopard is working just fine.

So how come my system disk thought it was a Time Machine disk? Who knows... just one of those TechBlech mysteries.

Apple Time Machine Gotcha [Part 2]...

2009-12-03T14:51:00.000-08:00

Well... things are now getting more interesting (as in the old curse: 'May you live in interesting times").

I got a USB HDrive from my parts box, initialized it for Mac OS X, did a brand-new, full time Machine backup to the HDrive and thought I was ready to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Not so fast, my Mac says. When I try to install to the HDrive in the Mac, I get the message:

Mac OS X cannot be installed on "EDP24_HD". This disk is used for Time Machine backups.

Huh? This is the system disk we're talking about -- the one internal to the Mac itself. That's never supposed to be an option for a Time Machine backup. Maybe it's the fault of the cloning process... or something. Some research is definitely needed here.

Apple Time Machine Gotcha...

2009-12-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

In general, I've been loving my MacBook... it's small (easy to take to client meetings), has good battery life (unlike my Dell PC laptop), and easy to use (it's a Mac... right?). I have particularly liked the way that Time Machine works automatically and invisibly: I've used it a time or two to reach back into the past and find a file that I deleted a while back and had forgotten about but suddenly needed. This approach works better than a few simple disk backups and is like the "10-Tape Rotation" scheme I used for years when I was backing up to separate tape volumes: I always had the recent stuff plus backups extending back in time for up to 3 months.

However, I just ran into a little "gotcha" when I was upgrading to a slightly newer machine. Mac's also have this wonderful feature of being able to easily clone your hard drive. With a utility like SuperDuper!, you can also clone your machine onto another machine (on the same network). What's even better is that there is a free version of SuperDuper! which makes a complete clone of your machine onto the new machine (the paid versions offer you lots of options such which files/folders to exclude from the clone, thereby making things run faster).. very nice!

Of course, before I cloned the machine, I did a current backup onto my Time Machine drive, setup the cloning operation, and away we went. Took over 2 hours (I've heard that if you have large files on the machine being cloned, things take waaaay longer than if you don't: I had a pair of 2Gig compressed files so what was expected to take 20-30 minutes took much longer. But this is a minor whine, as everything else worked flawlessly on the clone).

However, Time Machine believes that this cloned machine is actually a new machine, and that's not good at all. It means that the new (cloned) machine no longer recognizes my Time Machine HDrive as the current backup drive and wants to start all over with a full backup. What that also means is t hat I can no longer go back to the files that are saved on my old Time Machine backup drive -- they are essentially gone.

I wonder if anyone else has had this experience; if so, do you know how to:

avoid the problem in the future or
access the old Time Machine backup "just in case"

Hopefully I won't need those old files, but you never know... that's what backups are for. Too bad Apple doesn't have an obvious/easy way to work-around this...

'Just browsing' ain't easy on the web...

2009-11-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

It's time to start thinking about getting ready for the holiday season, and that means picking out the remaining gifts that I need for family and friends.

It reminded me of the time when I was consulting full-time at various client sites in downtown San Francisco. I'd step out for lunch and frequently walk around just to get some fresh air. Frequently, I'd be walking down the street, see an interesting store window and say to myself: "Hah! That book [or piece of jewelry or...] would be perfect for my friend." and I'd drop in to take a closer look and frequently purchase just the right thing.

Now that I'm working more out of my office, I don't get out that much, so those opportunities don't present themselves as much as they used to. Making a point of going to a store and walking around with the intent of finding gifts somehow never gives quite the same feeling of getting that 'perfect' thing.

My local Starbucks barrista mentioned that it was a bit of a challenge to get what you wanted on the internet and it suddenly struck me that she was absolutely right: the internet is great for finding something when you know what you want, but it's not so good for casually looking around... for just browsing.

Stores are an organized jumble of different products from different companies all arranged higglety-pigglety according to the store's and the vendor's needs, and you walk from one aisle to another and you can go through a complete category change. Leather briefcases yield to belts and those to accessories and on to underwear... it's almost like a walk thru "The Medici Effect" in real-time with a corresponding unconscious effect on one's thinking about what to get for whom.

I wonder when someone will figure out how to implement 'just browsing' on the web?

Hard drive versatility at USB 3.0 speeds....

2009-11-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

For anyone who's had to copy/clone hard drives (something I occasionally have to deal with as an expert witness on a legal case), you know that it can be a pain. It's certainly not rocket science these days, but breaking open your system, finding an open bay with power, getting the right drive connectors, and then buttoning things back up can tedious, time-consuming work, not to mention backing everything out again when you're done. There are removable drives that have been available for some time, but they still have to be mounted in the correct housing...

Now there's a simple and fast solution: the SATA Quickport USB3.0 docking station from Sharkoon, a German company that focuses on various components and accessories. You plug in a naked SATA HDrive (either 2.5" or 3.5"), connect the USB and away you go at roughly 10 times the speed of a USB2.0 connection.

Everything USB reports that it should be available in about a week and sell for about $73.

Very nice!

For mature audiences only...

2009-11-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

You would think that with all the baby boomers retiring that companies could figure out how to solve some of the problems of the older generation. Often they solve one problem but introduce another one.

Case in point:

My friend's father lives on the East Coast in a retirement home. His dad is doing fairly well, but has some disabilities associated with his age. In particular, he's hard of hearing and so can't enjoy his music. My friend bought him a set of headphones which did a great job of solving the hearing problem: his dad really liked the sound quality and wanted to get them.

Unfortunately, the remote controller that came with the device (which is important for folks like his dad who no longer are as spry as they used to be) had control buttons so small that it was completely unusable.

When are designers going to look at the whole picture, rather than taking a myopic view and introducing more problems? Reminds me of what Geoffrey Moore called the whole product in his landmark book, "Crossing the Chasm" or the idea of empathic design.

When is a nickname just a pain...

2009-09-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

When it's a Microsoft Outlook nickname, that's when.

Outlook tries to be helpful. One of the ways it tries is by keeping track of the email addresses that it has seen. These are called 'nicknames' and they pop up when you're typing in an address so that you don't have to remember/type the whole thing. This can be very nice.

However, it doesn't work so well when you get an old email address in there and can't get it out. Then you may actually keep sending to the wrong email address repeatedly. That can be very un-nice.

This happened to me and there are three solution options that I've found: two of them not so nice and one quite nice.

The first two are from Microsoft:

1. You can select the unwanted nickname and delete it by pressing the {DEL} key. Unfortunately, even though I did this multiple times, it kept coming back like the unwanted guest.
2. You can completely delete the nickname file (see this Microsoft Knowledge Base article). It works, but it's like bulldozing your house to get rid of a cockroach. I did find a reference to a Microsoft nickname utility file, but it only went through Outlook 2000, which is pretty old now.

The last option is from a software company called NirSoft.

3. Here you can download a neat little nickname utility program. Works like a champ and you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater like Microsoft's solution. NirSoft has a bunch of other very nice utilities - check them out! For example, they have a little command line utility - nircmd - to perform many little small tasks, including an option to empty the Recycle Bin: very handy when I do my backups.

Makes you wonder how these features get added without adequate support. Seems to me if you're going to add a feature, you should make the assumption that it may not work at some point and give the user a built-in, supported solution to remedy the problem.

All in all, I spent quite a bit of time trying to solve this problem, which it should have been an easy fix.

What just happened...? Part 2

2009-09-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

Earlier, I reported that my scanner had gone haywire and I had to "fiddle" [technical term meaning "non-productive activity" -- see "fritter"] with the settings to get things to work.

Well... it's still acting strangely and I haven't (knowingly) changed anything -- not even the magical Windows elixir called Re-Boot). Today when I went to scan a one page photograph (still using the Windows WIA driver), it kept scanning the same page over and over and over until I cancelled the scan. Yet, scanning as a document it worked just fine.

On a hunch, I went back and tried the TWAIN scanner and -- even more strangely -- it now works just fine.

Hey, Microsoft (and other product companies, as well): I don't want all those fancy new bloatware features of Windows or Office: I just want what is there to work reliably so that I can get my job done without having to "fiddle" my time away.

Sign of the (computer) times...

2009-09-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Computer systems change... who knew?

This morning I went to my Starbucks for my usual morning wake-up. When I presented my card for payment, the gal behind the register scanned the screen for a moment then called the barrista over asking: "Where did they put the new Gold Card button?"

Now for those of you who may not know, Starbucks has a Gold Card which gives you a 10% discount on all purchases (I'm a charter member due to the fact that I get many lattes from Starbucks). The Gold Card has been out for roughly one year and it has always taken two swipes of the card to properly handle payment: the first swipe is to register the fact that you purchased something using the card and the second swipe is to actually collect payment, assuming that you've put money on the card. Ever since the Gold Card came out, there's been this little "dance" that we do: They swipe the first time and then ask me if there's money on the card to which I respond "yes" and then they swipe it a second time. I've gotten in the habit of handing them my card with the statement: "Yes and No", meaning "Yes there's money on the card and no receipt." Most everyone in any Starbucks store gets it pretty quickly and has some funny comment to make about how I must do this a lot -- part of the great ambiance that I like about Starbucks.

Anyway, I've always wondered why the two swipes and when they would change the system to fix this. Apparently they've now done this, because that's what her question was about. Together they look over the screen, touch a few buttons and can't immediately find what they're looking for. Comments like: "I think I heard that they fixed this..." Pretty soon they ring things up, and I walk out the door a happy camper... until I look at my receipt which shows no 10% discount.

This reminds me of countless such experiences I've had over the years. As a long-time manager/developer of business systems and processes, I cringe when the people who actually have to use the system aren't told about changes. A few years back, my local Lenscrafters went through such a change, and it was even more challenging than this one. Over the weekend, the store I went to had been upgraded from an old "green-screen" DOS-style application to a modern windows application. I knew something was wrong the moment I walked in to the store: it was usually organized and efficient with a small number of people waiting. This time there were a large number of obviously impatient people waiting around and clerks were huddled around the screens trying to get customers checked in. In one case, a sales assistant and the manager were trying to enter some data on a screen and getting error messages back -- they were unable to enter the basic parameters that they were taking for the customer's glasses.

Rather than being a "15-minute and out" process as was usually the case, it seemed to take 20, 30 minutes or more to get a single customer taken care of, thus the long frustrated lines.

When it was my turn, I asked about this. They showed me the screen: obviously some designer had decided to use all the Windows GUI (Graphical User Interface) widgets available and collect everything that they could possibly want -- the screen was filled to bursting with input fields, drop-downs, and even a slider or two as I recall. As I think back, the data checking was quite strong, as several inter-dependent fields had to be entered correctly (a good thing). However, as the employees told me, they had come in Monday morning and the old system had been swapped out and the new one installed -- with no warning or documentation or training (a bad thing).

They were apologetic, polite and supportive (good customer service to the extent that they could give it), but they were hamstrung by the new system and their lack of knowledge about it.

Which brings me back to this morning. When I walk back in and show them the receipt, they both go back to the register screen and start looking through the menus/options. While this is going on, one of them says: "They never tell us when they change things. Sometimes they'll change the entire layout on us."

On the one hand, as an IT professional, I'm rather critical of this: besides the customer impact, the employees are the ones who take the brunt of these sea changes: they don't have the right tools to do the job and they have to deal with angry/upset customers. And my gut-level response is to say: "How can they do this... This ain't no way to run a business."

On the other hand, as a business consultant/coach, I understand some of the tradeoffs that are a necessary part of business...

How many people have to be trained?
With a large temporary work-force, where do you most effectively spend your time, money, attention?
How much time does it take to prepare adequate training, must less deliver it in the field?
What's the cost of all this?
When is "good enough" really Good Enough?
How hard should the IT folks fight for what's "right"?
How do we know what's "right" anyway?

The real question is: was this a planned-out strategy or a knee-jerk reaction; hopefully the former.

And above all, my hat's off to all those employees that have to deal with these situations.

Signup Catch-22 - Finis...

2009-09-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

Well... that was more like it! The reset password email arrived promptly, I entered my new password, and was finally able to login. Whew!

Now let's see if the actual service improves on the Signup process...

Signup Catch-22 - Part 3...

2009-09-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

The saga continues: I'm getting the impression that SugarSync doesn't want me to sign up and start using their service.

I clicked on the "Activate your email address" and was taken to the proper page where they requested that I type in my password (set during the sign up process). I did so - several times. Each time there was about a 10-second delay (what's that all about?) and then they rejected it as an "invalid password". Now I know I typed it in correctly because I keep my passwords on 4MyPasswords [Disclosure: this is a site that I built and maintain] so it's not about forgetting my password.

What to do now? Well, they offer to reset your password... and of course they get you the new password by... you guessed it... emailing you a new one!

I wonder how long this email will take...

Signup Catch-22 - Part 2...

2009-09-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

Well...something finally started happening.

Sunday morning (9/6) I received a solicitous message from SugarSync that started with: "We noticed you have not yet downloaded the SugarSync Manager..." and ended with: "If you have any questions, please contact us at support@sugarsync.com." Nice but totally useless under the circumstances. Obviously some automated system message.

Much more helpful would have been a message saying: "We noticed you have not yet activated your SugarSync account..." but I guess they assumed that part would work fine.

Also interesting were the time stamps: their message says it was sent "Sun 9/6/2009 7:17 AM" whereas my system shows it was received "Tue 9/8/2009 10:21 PM". There's obviously something going on with their email system because that's a huge discrepancy and one I haven't seen with all my other email.

Needless to say, I just noted and then ignored the message.

This morning at "Tue 9/9/2009 1:49AM" I received my activation email -- it was sent on "Thu 9/3/2009 6:52 PM"(?!) Wow! I could have gotten snail mail way quicker than that.

Furthermore, it was apparently a "canned" activation message -- almost certainly the one I had hoped to receive immediately after signing up... and I have yet to hear back from my email to Customer Support. Maybe I'll hear something in another few days after their email system grinds along.

Reminds me of some email fiascos companies experienced in the late 80's and early 90's when large-scale, high-volume email systems were just being deployed. But it's certainly not something that any company -- particularly a new generation, Web 2.0 company -- should be experiencing today.

More as and when their email system turns...