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

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.

Bad site! Bad site!

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...

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...

When is good audio quality not enough...

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...

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

For mature audiences only...

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.