Gordon's Tech

Time Machine backups of Aperture are not reliable?!

2012-01-24T21:18:00.001-06:00

I've restored my Aperture Library from backup twice in the past few months. Two months ago Aperture crashed when a bad block corrupted a file. I restored from Carbon Copy Cloner. A month later I figured a dying iMac drive was the root cause, and my backups weren't as robust as I expected.

After a mildly painful Apple service call i had to restore all my data from backup. I backup the server nightly to Carbon Copy Cloner and hourly to Time Capsule, so I had to pick a backup source. I decided to restore from Carbon Copy Cloner, though I did consider Time Machine. It seems to have worked.

Today I learned that I might have dodged a bullet. I was wise to choose CCC over Time Machine ...

Macintouch Backup
Derek L
...Thanks to Antonio Tejada for his note about Time Machine and Aperture. The combination remains unreliable for me, as I'd described in my comment on this topic last June: not all items in my Aperture library get included in my Time Machine backup. Although I've been able to temporarily repair it via forcing a "deep traversal", the problem recurred in fresh TM backup sets, on multiple disks, and through several point releases of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3 (I've never used any other version, and I also haven't migrated to Lion). I gave up on it and instead depend on Aperture Vaults.
Skot Nelson
... However, after having Aperture randomly lose some of my masters -- old photos from a concert that I hadn't touched in month and just happened to click on as part -- I no longer trust my Aperture library's integrity...
Richard Tench
... Seeing the warnings here about Aperture and Time Machine, I decided to do a test recovery (to my desktop). It failed due to permissions on the Time Capsule. Though one would think that's an easy problem to fix, it isn't. At the end of 2.5 hours on an AppleCare call, they were unable to help me. I was told that Aperture doesn't work well with Time Machine...

Sigh. I miss Dantz Retrospect. I'm grateful for CCC, but old Retrospect combined the reliability of CCC with the features of a true backup.

It's been noted that in 2012 Apple OS X development is the equivalent of Siberian exile. Time Machine work must be reserved for unwanted interns.

See also:

Backups - why you need two methods and abundant paranoia 12/2011
Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule 12/2009 (Time Machine is flaky)
Lessons from Apple Store out-of-warranty repair of a Seagate drive 1/2012
Lion continues to disappoint: the Duplicate/Save problem 1/2012
7 facets of a good Mac backup strategy « Haystack Software Blog 1/2012 - advice from the developer of Arq (backup software for S2) -- but absolutely correct. I do this and I'll evaluate Arq.

SharePoint 2010: migration of a SP 2007 wiki

2012-01-23T15:01:00.001-06:00

My business group has maintained a large SharePoint 2007 wiki.

Recently we had to migrate to SP 2010. The wiki went along for the ride.

I've seen some bad outcomes in software over the past 20 years. I mean -- really bad products.

I've never seen anything like this.

Wiki pages that look like they were edited by intoxicated baboons. Pages that can't be edited in IE 9, but can be edited in Chrome. Pages that can't be edited in Chrome but can be edited in IE 9. Pages that can't be edited anywhere, save as HTML.

SharePoint Designer is an option. I tried it. I shed tears for the lost spirit of FrontPage and Vermeer.

I despair, sometimes, when I see what Apple's interns are doing to iPhoto or OS X. Even they, even they, have never done anything like this.

This is the worst.

Microsoft, astonishingly, is truly finished. We really are in the twilight of the personal computer.

My MacBook fan was roaring. Again. Time Capsule edition.

2012-01-22T16:25:00.001-06:00

My MacBook fan was roaring. Again.

This time, however, activity monitor didn't show much going on. It wasn't a Flash ad running in another user account. I didn't have a print job stuck in the bowels of Apple's dysfunctional printing framework.

It had been doing it for weeks. Sluggish performance, slow fan pinup, then continuous running. Something was draining performance and making heat -- and it wasn't showing up in Activity Monitor.

Or, at least, it wasn't obvious in Activity Monitor. I did see something called fsck_hfs using up 10% or so CPU.

To make a long story short - the problem was a defective Time Capsule backup. My MacBook was running fsck_hfs, a utility that "verifies and repairs standard HFS and HFS+ file systems". When I saw this I thought there was something wrong with my system drive - but it tested out fine.

A SuperUser tip clued me in. My MacBook was trying to verify the integrity of my 150GB backup -- over a WiFi connection. This is a singularly ineffective strategy, it would have taken days to complete. The laptop never ran continuously for that long; and there is something about this process that makes a MacBook run hot [3]

If I'd known what to look [1] for I'd have seen something like this:

Except it would have shown 2-4%. It only got to 92% when I connected the laptop to my TC via wired ethernet. It got to 92% then stuck there. The backup was toast.

I then disconnected all users and tried deleting the .img file for my MacBook from TC. That failed because the Finder can't handle TB scale image files [2]. I then used AirPort Utility's very confusing Time Capsule UI to erase the entire drive and started the slow, painful, recreation of my backups.

My MacBook is quiet and responsive again, and fsck_hfs free.

That was painful.

Backup is an unsolved problem.

See also:

My MacBook fan was roaring. Why? 5/2008.
Obnoxious old Epson Scan bug: EPSON Scan cannot be started 2/2008
OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox 9/2008.
When Safari locks up - Kill Flash process
iMac G5: fans running more often 10/2006
osx - Why has my Mac been running fsck_hfs for two days now? - Super User - great discussion of this problem
Time Machine. Backup failed with error...: Apple Support Communities 9/2008

[1] I wasn't so direct, instead I wandered about searching Console error messages. There I found:

search console for com.apple.backupd (all messages)

Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@Molly.local/Molly_Internal
Backup failed with error: 21
Error writing Time Machine Information file: /Volumes/Molly_Internal/Stanford_MacBook_0017f2f04828.sparsebundle/com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist
Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Input/output error
Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Escanaba

While plumbing Console I discovered an unrelated error that distracted me for a while - a pile of errors like this:

Jul 20 18:27:55 localhost com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.SystemStarter): Failed to count the number of files in "/System/Library/StartupItems": No such file or directory

Googling on this one I discovered this is an old OS X bug, one some systems a routine update deleted this folder. I recreated it using terminal:

cd /System/Library
sudo mkdir StartupItems

That cleared up a bunch of Console error messages, but it didn't fix my real problem.

[2] Kind of amazing, but there you go. Apparently they can be deleted via terminal, but erasing through TC is safer. You can only erase the internal drive, if you want to erase a TC mounted external drive you need to move it to a Mac and erase it there.

[3] The MacBook runs hot whenever it does an 802.11n TC backup. I wonder how much of this is heat output from the WiFi/encryption systems.

Organizing kid school accounts with OS X: Chrome to the rescue

2012-01-22T12:52:00.001-06:00

In the twilight of the general purpose computer, I struggle to balance OS X and Apple tech, Google services, parental obligations, and getting work done.

Our iOS and OS X devices are parental controlled -- at least as far as they can be. Among other things, that means Google services are unavailable on child accounts. [1].

Schools, however, make increasing use of Google Apps [2]. This is how I reconcile that use case with our general approach to home computing:

You need the username and password for the school Google Apps account. Example: kid_name@school.mn.us.
Create a single non-controlled "homework" account on the primary homework machine.
Use Google Chrome, not Safari, for this account.
In Chrome create a user account for each child. For each account, from Chrome Preferences, choose to sync Google. You will be asked for the school user name and password.
Add gmail, docs and so on to the toolbar.

Each child uses this single OS X account with their own Chrome identity. Use of this account requires direct parental supervision. It is used only for homework. On personal OS X accounts our kids don't directly access our Family Google Apps domain, they use OS X Mail.app, for example, to get email. They don't know their Family Google Apps passwords.

[1] Partly by design and partly due to market disinterest, Google services are not compatible with OS Parental Controls.
[2] Alas, this transition occurred even as Google's Hyde crushed its Jeckyl.

OS X shared printing: Is it just me?

2012-01-22T11:45:00.001-06:00

Is it just me, or is OS X shared printing broken beyond all repair?

I spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with print failures on Leopard and/or Snow Leopard shared Brother USB printers using Apple provided drivers. The only reliable printing I've had with OS X was with an ethernet connected network printer. [1]

Yet another example of why general purpose computers are dying (and I've a lot more to say on that ... later).

[1] The very best, most reliable, printing I ever experienced was using Mac Classic, AppleTalk, and Apple's LaserWriter Select (not sure of product name) in the early 1990s. I'm planning to donate our Brother HL-2140 and buy a Brother networked printer.

Lessons from Apple Store out-of-warranty repair of a Seagate drive

2012-01-21T14:36:00.001-06:00

Mysterious application crashes, including corruption of Aperture file data, exposed bad blocks on a slowly dying 2 yo iMac drive. Modern drives aren't supposed to show their bad blocks, and of course they should never corrupt a file. So I knew the drive needed to be replaced.

The 27" iMac 11 (i5) is not user-serviceable. It can be done, but it's hard to keep dust out of the display. So I compared repair costs at FirstTech in Minneapolis to the Roseville MN Apple store. FirstTech's service costs were about $200, but Apple's service fee is a flat $40 (offsets the high cost of their proprietary designs). Both charge far more than retail for a hard drive. Apple dinged me $226 to replace a 1TB Seagate 7200.12.

The replacement drive is an ST31000528ASQ revision AP24 S/N 5VP9Z4TC. I was told it had a 90 day warranty. A comparable new drive from Amazon is $134, so Apple adds a $100 markup on the drive. (Of course I'd have preferred a 2TB replacement, but Apple out-of-warranty repairs follow warranty rules -- so no upgrades.)

Overall the Roseville MN Apple store experience was mediocre. Some of this is because of Apple policies, but mostly this store is bursting at the seams at this time of year. Apple needs more retail.

If I were to do it again I'd order replacement parts from a quality Mac after-market vendor and I'd do the repair myself, or I'd order the part and pay FirstTech to do it. When an out-of-warranty Apple repair makes sense, I'd look for a quieter Apple store.

Here's what I learned for future reference:

Apple wanted to keep my old drive. They can probably get money from Seagate. This was a problem because I hadn't secure-wiped the drive, and although my passwords are on an encrypted image I prefer not to have our family data floating around. I also wanted to reformat and stress test it myself, and decide if I could use it as an emergency store. Store management wrote that "I needed the drive for data recovery" and that let me keep it. (Not true - I had 2+ complete backups.)
I thought I was told the drive would cost about $160, but in retrospect that was probably my mistake. $160 would be low markup. In any case, get estimates in writing if possible.
When I went for an estimate I was told to expect a 3 day turnaround. In fact it took about 9 calendar days -- including 3 days to repeat the drive test and confirm the bad blocks. It took so long it ran into a business trip; the store was grumpy about storing it until I returned.
They expect to have a guest or maintenance account available for testing. I had none on this machine. They were able to test anyway of course, but this is worth knowing.
The machine had additional memory added, but the repair receipt listed the original memory. This was mildly worrisome but it came back with its bits.
The installed drive was formatted with the same OS as the old one - Snow Leopard.

I tested the drive with Tech Tools Pro. The SMART check on the prior drive showed no problems except out-of-range temperature variation. The SMART check on the new drive also shows out-of-range temperature variation! I hope this is a quirk of TTP and the iMac's thermal regulation system rather than a drive problem. The block scan passed 1,953,525,168 blocks, 0 bad. (Although no bad blocks should ever be exposed, the good block total will fall over time.) The overall SMART test also shows a tendency to read errors, though still within normal limits (Hardware ECC recovered, Raw Read Error Rate).

Lastly, I chose to do my restore from a bootable Carbon Copy Cloner backup rather than my Time Capsule backup (I trust CCC more). I'd never done a full clone restore on a Mac; it worked well but there were a few quirks...

During my initial testing I'd created a user account on the new disk. The default CCC restore would have left those files in place -- which is an abnormal install state. Also, the default restore seems to leave "more recent" files untouched, which might produce a mixed version system.
I set the restore to overwrite "more recent" files and to move non-matches to an archive folder.
After the install completed I deleted CCC_archive on the target system
After the restore it appears TC is backing up my entire system. That will take a week over the home wireless.

For extra insurance I'm going to leave my CCC backup untouched and rotate it offsite. My routine backups will be to an older CCC backup and to Time Capsule. In my initial testing however the restored data appears fine. I also have my original drive which is fully readable, I'll wait a month or so before I wipe that drive and stress test it.

Update: Time Capsule is trying to backup 340GB over WiFi; it's doing a full backup. This will take weeks. I've set my TC backup to omit all but Users, tomorrow I'll bring it to the computer and connect by ethernet.

Lion continues to disappoint: the Duplicate/Save problem

2012-01-16T09:13:00.001-06:00

I have a document open in Pages.

It's saved somewhere.

What is its name? Where has it been saved? If I "Duplicate", how do I find the "Duplicate"? What is the name of the "Duplicate"?

Apple's change to Lion's file management behavior is a significant hassle. Macintouch has a detailed list of complaints from numerous Lion victims.

It's worse than a hassle though. It's a scary sign of incompetence. If Apple's developers are capable of this level of judgment failure, what else might they do?

Lion to Vista comparisons are well deserved. I may keep Snow Leopard on our household machines indefinitely, which means I won't be doing much with iCloud. It also means I'll delay upgrading our hardware as long as possible.

NYT's Tedeschi misses the iOS Porn story

2012-01-15T07:51:00.001-06:00

Sadly, Bob Tedeschi, who should know better, missed the big story in his NYT article on Porn and iOS parental controls.

When he wrote that it was "an hour's work" to secure an iOS device I almost snorted coffee out my nose.

This is the article I wrote him:

re: Safeguarding a Child’s Mobile Device From Pornography
Bob, I'm surprised you missed the truck-sized loophole in Apple's iOS Parental Controls. Alas, by missing it you came to precisely the wrong conclusion.
It is not 1 hour's work to secure an iOS device. It is almost impossible.
The loophole is embedded WebKit. Disabling Safari does not disable WebKit.
Almost all free Apps, and many commercial apps, include links that will, when clicked, bring up an embedded WebKit browser. From that browser it is often only a few clicks to anything.
For example, my 15yo showed me how he could use the links on this travel app to bring up wikipedia, and from there Google.
Almost all iAds, and all Google platform ads, use Webkit.
This problem is common in apps that are rated for children.
The solution is simple. Apple should provide an option to block Webkit use as well as Safari use. They haven't done this because they aren't feeling any pressure, and their ad platform is already doing poorly.
I am sorry you missed a golden opportunity to put some pressure on Apple, but I hope in a follow-up article you might mention this.

You can write him too.

Update: I was amazed and impressed to get a personal response to my email - on a Sunday night! He's verified the issue and is now researching it. Wow. I am a fan.

iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work

2012-01-12T20:38:00.000-06:00

Apple promotes Aperture's seamless import of iPhoto content.

I've been skeptical, but I gave it a try on a plane flight. I added 21 images to a brand new iPhoto 9.2.1 Library and I created albums and events. I then gave descriptions to images and to both albums and events. Then I imported the images into Aperture.

The iPhoto.Events became Aperture.Projects. The iPhoto.Albums became Aperture.Albums. iPhoto.Folders became Aperture.Folders.

Eventually. At first the iPhoto.Albums were missing. They showed up minutes later on reopening Aperture. This took so long it feels like a bug.

Image metadata seems to have been preserved - titles, captions, etc. I've written about this previously for iPhoto, Aperture and Picasa Web Albums.

That's the end of the good news. All of the descriptions I added to Albums/Events were lost. Aperture Projects/Albums can't have annotations. So that description you wrote in iPhoto about the family reunion? It's toast.

Aperture's iPhoto import is feeble - and Apple's marketing of Aperture's iPhoto import is deceptive.

Apple does stuff like this though. I'm not surprised they did a crappy job on iPhoto import.

What's truly weird however, is that nobody besides me seems to care. That means Apple isn't going to fix this.

There are times when I know I live in the Twilight Zone. This is one of those times.

See also:

Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011 - still stuck today
Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement?: 10/2005 - seven years later, it's still not a full replacement
Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums

How to cancel or reschedule an Apple Genius Bar Reservation

2012-01-10T13:39:00.000-06:00

I don't think you can currently cancel or reschedule a Genius Bar Reservation from Apple's GB reservation site.

If you have iOS though, you can cancel or reschedule using Apple's Apple Store.app. It's not obvious how ...

Tap Stores
Find store where you have reservation.
Click Store then Genius Bar. From here you can create a new appointment, or cancel or reschedule an existing appointment.

I don't think there's an Apple Store.app equivalent for the desktop, so, like iMessenger, this is strictly an iOS service.

OS X opens Aperture every time I start

2012-01-06T21:38:00.001-06:00

Every time I logged into my Lion machine, Aperture started up.

I checked the Login items option on my user account. Nothing there.

Then I figured it was a bug with OS X 10.7 Lion resume. I deleted all the saved states, including Aperture's (Delete Specific Application Saved States from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Resume).

Didn't help.

Finally, something clued me. This wasn't a new Lion problem, it was the old 'launch Aperture when iPhone connected' bug. Same thing can happen with iPhoto or Image Capture or Preview or "Auto Importer". This particular machine is connected to a USB hub that had some iPhones attached.

I don't know the proper place to control this peculiar OS X behavior, but I do know it can be controlled through Image Capture. I opened that app, and clicked on the iPhones icons on the left side. For each one I set 'Connecting this iPhone' to 'No application'.

Problem solved.

10.7 Lion: Automation and AppleScript

2012-01-03T12:33:00.000-06:00

Surprise! Via Macintouch we learn that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has Automation features.

It is weird that Apple's official Automation documentation is hosted on macosxautomation.com which is "not hosted by Apple". Even though it's seemingly an Apple site (with a broken icon on page 1).

Even weirder for all of us who figured AppleScript and Automator were dead, is that Lion has a lot of AS/Automator features. Some show up on Apple's Lion Features page, but many do not. Given rumors about Apple's new focus on textbooks and iPads, it's noteworthy that Automator has many new ePub support features.

Apple is eccentric.

WordPress doesn't have a built-in table editor

2012-01-01T21:29:00.001-06:00

The WordPress visual editor doesn't include tables. Neither does Blogger of course, nor, for that matter, MarsEdit.

FrontPage had terrific table support in 1995. WindowsLive Writer has decent support now. Otherwise, web tables doesn't get a lot of love. RapidWeaver doesn't do tables. Sandvox isn't any better and neither is Apple's abandoned iWeb.

SeaMonkey inherits the table technology built into Netscape Composer in the 1990s. TextEdit does tables (!) and (unlike Pages) will export HTML. It's hardly a web page editor though.

DreamWeaver does tables - and costs $400 (though I qualify for the $150 teacher edition).

It's too bad. HTML tables are really brilliant. I'm guessing implementation is very expensive especially when tables are combined with CSS; the market doesn't support this level of complexity.

Parental Controls on iOS and OS X: what we do now

2012-01-01T19:49:00.001-06:00

A year or two ago I wrote about how Google and Apple have both failed Parental controls. Since then things have not gotten much better.

In response to a comment on an old post, this is the compromise I use for the children's accounts on iOS and OS X.

Google is blocked. I find Bing searches easier to track and control because it doesn't use https.
Children get our family Google Apps domain email through mail.app IMAP, not through Gmail.
Children access our family Calendars from their iPhones, not from the desktop. (I could use iCal on the desktop, but iCal is one of the worst pieces of software garbage ever produced.)
A 'Family and Learning' account can be accessed at any time. It has very limited net access, has WorldBook, has apps, iTunes, etc.
Each child has their own account. Parental control is set to 'automatic' with a few domains specifically allowed. I was never able to get domain specific filtering to work. After they are on the computer I review their browser history with them. They could of course delete specific browser pages, but I don't believe they have (the computer is very visible and public). I stopped reviewing log files because Apple's log file review UI is almost as crappy as iCal.
Because iOS apps have so many back doors to webkit, particularly via ads, we don't use any 'free' apps. Safari is disabled. For now we allow iTunes despite the content it provides -- the boys are getting older.

This works for us, but Apple's Parental Control support is lazy and incompetent. They simply don't care.

Android/Google, as best I can tell, are worse. Note that Google Gmail explicitly states all US users must be 14 or over (COPPA partly, but really this is a Google copout). i don't think Android OS includes any default parental controls.

I don't know how Windows 7 does. I suspect it's a bit better. I can't find anything about parental controls in Metro/Windows Mobile.

See also:

Manipulating JSON data in a traditional relational database (Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, Converters)

2011-12-31T10:34:00.001-06:00

While I wait to see if Pinboard can fix their Google Reader JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) import, and while I consider Google Reader Share JSON import into WordPress, I'm also exploring JSON import/export tools. If, for example, I could import JSON into FileMaker Pro or other data management tool I might be able to manipulate the archive and produce a more useful WordPress import.

StackOverflow and its kin have a good set of references on this topic. Note that CSV can manage only very simple JSON; we really want native importers similar to what Microsoft Access tried with XML [1]. I suspect one approach might be to convert JSON to XML then use Microsoft Access 2010 import.

Incidentally, this topic veered off unexpectedly into something that's actually relevant to my work life and a Strata conference I'm attending in a few weeks.

As of today here are some of my pointers ...

What is “JSON” and what does it have to do with distributed computing? « DivConq: great reference (see below for DivConq series on Access)
JSON - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I liked the comparison to XML [1]
JSON.org: points to libraries
18.2. json — JSON encoder and decoder — Python v2.7.2 documentation: If I have to use a programming library to manipulate Google Reader json files my choices are probably Python or Javascript and I prefer Python.
conversion - Convert JSON format to CSV format (for MS Excel) - Stack Overflow: JavaScript
convert from json to csv using python - Stack Overflow
Download JSON data and convert it to CSV using Python - Stack Overflow
python - Convert JSON to CSV - Stack Overflow
javascript - Python - convert csv file to JSON - Stack Overflow

For me this DivConq series was particularly useful because it placed JSON nosql processing in a familiar context - Microsoft Access.

Maybe I should start using Apache Cassandra to manipulate my Google Reader JSON archive and prepare it for WordPress processing. For example ... Cassandra Development Environment in Mac OS Snow Leopard « BigDiver.

[1] I doubt JSON has truly significant advantages over XML as a data interchange format (see JSON Example and wikipedia xml/json). Alas, nobody asked me. Fashion is more powerful than geeks imagine.

Pinboard imports Google Reader JSON exports

2011-12-28T10:07:00.000-06:00

Pinboard is the first service I know of that will import a Google Reader Social (shared item) JSON file:

Pinboard: howto page

Google Reader Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page. Select the Import/Export tab. Choose either items you have starred or items you have shared and click the Reader JSON link (the rightmost column)

When I stumble unexpectedly over something I've been looking for, I look for who else found it. Then I add them to my reading list. Google gave me only these references:

Google Reader Shared Items -> Pinboard, FeedDemon, Send to Pinboard… « cmiles – blog 11/5/2011
Pinboard Blog - Nov 2011 - "... Added importers from Firefox JSON format and Google Reader. Wrote scripts for tarring up user archives in human-readable form so people can download them. Removed Google Reader support (RIP, Google Reader, I'll mourn you til I join you)...

Pinboard has a feed, I don't know if importing will trigger feed actions (probably not)

See also:

Update: I paid my $10 and imported by Google Reader shared item JSON file. I have 3 days to cancel. I used Amazon payments.

Here are the results; as of today the most recent post is 7 weeks old. I may also try importing the JSON for my Reader shared items, which may produce some duplicates.

http://pinboard.in/u:jgordon - my pinboard collection - really my Google Reader shared items. Note my user name is a part of the URL, so it's nice that 'jgordon' was available. Posts show a title, a bookmark, and an excerpt. I think my GR annotations precede the excerpt. It's more like Google Reader Social than I'd expected.
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:jgordon/ - the public feed for my collection. I viewed this in Google Reader; gave me a real sense of deja vu. Alas, GR only pulled in 44 items.

I'm still studying the results. So far Pinboard is only showing a fraction of the JSON file, there are not tags, and every item shows with date of '9 weeks ago'. I don't see a convenient way to navigate across the entire collection.

Update 12/31/11: Pinboard has now imported 2 months of Reader shares - about 1100 items or roughly 1% of the total.

Sharing and annotation: Instapaper's supporting apps

2011-12-28T09:53:00.000-06:00

I haven't found a replacement for the rough annotation-share-feed ecosystem that had grown up around Google Reader Social (RIP). I've given up, for example, on using Twitter as a Reader Social replacement.

Yes, I miss Google 1.0. I even miss Microsoft these days.

So I'm continuing to explore the pieces of the post-Google world; trying to see where this micro-market may go. This is poorly tracked territory, but today I came across an unexpected guide in the Instapaper: Supporting iPhone and iPad Apps page.

Instapaper has an ecosystem, and although it doesn't have a feed, it will post to Tumblr, Twitter and Pinboard. Tumblr has a feed (barely), Twitter can be turned into a feed (awkwardly) and Pinboard has a feed (and, mercifully, it's not free).

So what can I do with these pieces? Can I archive the output of Pinboard as WordPress posts?

I'll find out.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: Pinboard imports Google Reader JSON exports

Update

I tried Instapaper's bookmarklet, but it hangs in Chrome with a "saving" status in the tab.

Recovering Shared Reader items: JSON import into Wordpress

2011-12-23T10:55:00.001-06:00

Google amputated a portion of my distributed memory, but they left me a frozen json remnant.

(Yes, we are living in a cyberpunk novel. Sigh.)

Across the net there are unanswered questions about what to do with these json archives. Google has been silent. I believe the Google humans who might help are ashamed or demoralized or fearful. Google 2.0 is not a happy place for them.

I want to represent my JSON archives as posts in a WordPress blog, perhaps with some kind of synthetic title. Then they will be available to search and link. Eventually I hope to add new annotations and shares to that archive, though there will be a gap of several months that will be difficult to fill.

This feels doable, but so far Google (the search engine) hasn't told me how. This is what I have found so far. When I do find an answer, I'm going to answer some of the dangling questions across the net ...

Dariel: wrote a Python script to import shares into ReadItLater
What are the good ways to import Google Reader Notes (.json) to Evernote? - Quora - an unanswered question
battis.net » Transmogrifying those Google Reader JSON dumps into something useful - Seth Battis wrote a "PHP script that converts (at least my) Google Reader JSON dump into an XML file that WordPress can import as a list of posts. With the tags and annotations converted over. In fact, with all of the data in the JSON dump embedded in the XML file (although WordPress doesn’t read all of it)."
Importing .json archives (Wordpress) - Stack Overflow - an unanswered question
osx - Json viewer for mac - Super User: a way to at least view JSON documents.
How can I Import Google Reader JSON archives into WordPress - Super User: I ask on SuperUser
A public question I asked on Google+: I ask on G+

I'll update this post as I learn more. Seth's contribution suggests a fix is close; he needs to tweak some of his code.

Update 12/25/2011: Seth writes that he won't have time to work on this further but he recommends downloading his php file from his linked zip. I'll have to learn how to run PHP scripts from my Dreamhost account, but I don't think that's too hard.

The cost of repairing a Mac is less than expected

2011-12-22T21:30:00.001-06:00

When my iMac 11,1's 2yo 1TB Seagate drive developed metastatic blockitis I was most unhappy.

It wasn't that the drive is dying young, just two weeks after my AMEX extended warranty lapsed. Two years is short for a drive, but this machine runs all the time and goes through two full disk backups every single night. The drive has had a hard life.

The fact Apple's diagnostics missed my drive's unmasked bad blocks is annoying. There's no magic to a disk scan; I shouldn't have had to buy TechTools Pro to make a diagnosis. Windows diagnostics have managed this for twenty years.

Worse though, is the cost of the repair. FirstTech, a well regarded local shop, gave me a $625 quote to install a 2TB replacement. (They can't get 1TB drives.). I was amazed, I'm used to paying $150 or so for a drive and doing my own installation. That's what I did when my old fully serviceable G5 drive died.

The problem is that the lovely 27" iMac is not user serviceable. Elegant quite design with special thermal sensor cables turns out to have a high post-purchase price. That's why I wrote ...

Gordon's Tech: Mac drive diagnostics: TechTools Pro and Drive Genius find problems OS X missed
... When you consider that iMac 27" hard drives are NOT user serviceable, the iMac is more expensive than it seems. The iMac G5 was entirely user serviceable. Design has its price....

I was wrong though. Today i checked what the cost would be for an Apple store repair. They quoted me about $200 for a 1TB drive replacement. (They don't do upgrades, only like-for-like replacements.)

How do they do that? Apple has a flat $40 service fee, regardless of the complexity of the repair. Apple offsets the ownership cost of their elegant designs by subsidizing repair. (In this case they have another advantage -- they have an inventory of 1TB drives with bundled thermal cables even as the world runs short of hard drives.)

I still prefer my G5 iMac's design -- but that was a hot and noisy machine. My 11,1 (i5, 27" 2009) iMac is quiet and cool most of the time. Apple's subsidy of post-warrany repairs makes that tradeoff more palatable - at least if you live near an Apple store!

Update 1/6/12: One warning: they will want to keep the hard drive. This fits with their out-of-warrantee repair following their in warrantee process. Apple should make this better known. It means if you bring your machine in for an Apple Store repair, you need to do a secure wipe first. Some additional tips:

Create an admin account with no password that Apple can use for testing. I didn't think of this, and my machine has guest account disabled.
They will want to recreate the problem -- even though I have to pay for the repair. Again, their out-of-warranty repair is basically in-warranty with a parts-charge and subsidized labor.

Mac drive diagnostics: TechTools Pro and Drive Genius find problems OS X missed

2011-12-20T21:19:00.001-06:00

I've been having suspicious application crashes lately. In the Mac world, that suggests a hardware problem. (Once upon a time software was the cause, but these days it's hardware.)

I knew from some backup issues that I had 3 unreadable files. That suggests my 24+ month old 1TB iMac drive is dying youngish. It was time for some diagnostics, so I plugged in my old Apple Keyboard and mouse. (Most non-trivial diagnostic work requires a wired keyboard and mouse; Apple's bluetooth keyboard/mouse drivers may be unavailable when needed.)

After I deleted the bad (non-critical happily) files I ran Disk Utility - but the drive passed. Then I ran my Apple Hardware Test - extended, and loop mode. Still no problems.

I didn't believe it. Something had to be wrong. So I checked out Disk Warrior, Disk Genius and TechTool Pro - 3 reputable diagnostic apps. They're all $100. Disk Warrior has a good reputation, but Disk Genius has a trial version. It found about 58 bad blocks -- out of 1.8 billion. That seems a modest number, but DG said I needed to replace the drive. (Incidentally, Disk Genius has a built in uninstall feature -- very nice. Yes, the Mac needs an OS level uninstaller.)

I decided to get a second opinion. Andy M clued me to a MacUpdate bundle, so I got TechTool Pro 6 for $50 (plust a bunch of other apps I don't care about). It one-upped Disk Genius; as it found bad blocks it told me which of them had files (none in this case).

TTP also found bad blocks - 56 (so two less than Disk Genius, but I don't make much of that either way).

I wasn't sure what to make of this. After all, 56 out of 1.8 billion is minuscule. Unfortunately, a modern SATA drive shouldn't have any bad blocks. The excellent TTP manual explains why ...

... TechTool Pro should not normally report bad blocks for these types of drives. The drive controller in them automatically tries to map out bad blocks as they are encountered. It will do this unless either the bad block is in a critical area that cannot be mapped out at the moment or the bad block table is full. If this occurs, TechTool Pro will report a bad block and you will ultimately need to do a low level reinitialization of the drive. When the drive is reinitialized, the entire platter is accessible so that bad blocks can be mapped out if possible no matter where they occur...

.. You can use Apple's Disk Utility to reinitialize your drive. Be sure to choose the Security Option to "zero out data." Choosing this option will map out bad blocks, if possible, during the reinitialization. This may take several hours (depending on the size of your drive). If the reinitialization is successful, the drive should be fine at that point. We suggest, however, that you do a Surface Scan a few times in the next month or two just to be sure no new bad blocks are developing. If they are, then the drive is probably failing and you should consider replacing it. If a low level reinitialization fails, this indicates the drive is faulty and needs to be replaced...

So the bad blocks I see now are probably a small fraction of the number that have already been mapped out. I'm seeing the overflow, including blocks that went bad after they'd been written to.

My i5 iMac is 24 months and 2 weeks old - so it's past even my AMEX extended warranty (by two weeks!). If the drive were user serviceable (like my old G5 iMac!) I'd simply replace it. Since it's not a user serviceable I'll probably bring a new drive and the machine to FirstTech in Minneapolis for a $200 24 hour turnaround replacement. I'll make a bootable clone before I do that. (My usual Carbon Copy Cloner backups are to an encrypted image for offsite transfer, so not bootable.)

~~If it doesn't I'll try the reinitialization~~. (See Update - this drive is on death row.)

Update 12/21/2011: Various notes and reflections the day after ...

16 months is a short lifespan for a hard drive. I bought this machine early in its lifecycle, I wonder if there will be more failures in this product line.
Modern drives don't write to bad blocks. Based on the dates of the files that were involved the involved blocks went bad in the past month. That fits with Carbon Copy Cloner not complaining until recently. (See my backup issue post for a twist to this story.)
I'm glad I bought TechTools Pro - I think I'll get good use of it. From what I know now though, I didn't really need it. In a modern drive a single bad block in a file, especially a relatively recently written file, means replacement. Carbon Copy Cloner told me 3 files were bad.
The TTP manual suggests reformatting. I suspect that might work if there was an initial formatting problem, but in this case I know existing blocks are going bad. This drive is on death row.
Carbon Copy Cloner complained about bad sectors in files during backup, but Time Machine didn't. That may be because Time Machine only reads files that have changed?
Most of the bad sectors are in unused parts of the drive. I suspect they were randomly distributed but were hidden by the drive OS as they were discovered in the parts of the drive that have been used (about 500GB of 1TB).
Drive Utility and Hardware Test didn't find any problems, but both Drive Genius 3 and Tech Tools Pro failed the drive and Carbon Copy Cloner complained too. The SMART diagnostics still pass the drive - even today! I'm a bit surprised; this isn't rocket science. Apple could do better. TechTools Pro gives more SMART diagnostics than Disk Utility -- my drive was complaining about heat (it's cold in this room!)
It's clearly worth running TechTools Pro or equivalent drive scan on a new drive then every few months. (11/23/11: TTP just crashed during a routine drive scan. I'm not impressed.)
I think Windows scandisk/chkdsk are superior diagnostic tools to Disk Utility.
TechTools Pro DVD includes an image for burning a PPC DVD. Nice touch. I still have an old PPC.
It's good to know the drive is dying before it dies. I have time to do extra backups and to move selected files to other machines -- including my Aperture and iPhoto Libraries and perhaps iTunes.
When you consider that iMac 27" hard drives are NOT user serviceable, the iMac is more expensive than it seems. The iMac G5 was entirely user serviceable. Design has its price.
Since I know the drive is dying I've disconnected my clone backup. It's my known good repository. I'll take it to my office then create a new clone, then disconnect that clone. I won't be saving data to this machine, I'll be treating it as a "guest" machine until I get it serviced. I may turn off Time Machine too.
OWC (Other World Computing - great Mac shop) showed me how to find my Model Identifier (System Profiler), it's iMac11,1. I can only go to 2TB of storage. I'm not confident that their options are correct however.

See also:

How do you upgrade the hard drive in the "Late 2009," "Mid-2010," "Mid-2011" and "Late 2011" (21.5-Inch and 27-Inch) Aluminum iMac models? - I'm glad I didn't consider doing this myself. I wonder if this is almost an Apple-only replacement.
Proprietary Cable can put the brakes on upgrading Late '09 iMacs. | Other World Computing Blog: I have an ST31000528ASQ - so Seagate. OWC says these drives will fit my computer's thermal cable:
- 1.0TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
- 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
- 2.0TB Seagate Barracuda LP

Backups - why you need two methods and abundant paranoia

2011-12-20T06:11:00.001-06:00

I can't say I feel good about my backups. I believe data wants to die; it wants to be free of the burden of order. Against the despair of data, even the best backup is barely adequate.

Consider tonight, when everything almost failed - Time Capsule and Carbon Copy Cloner alike.

The Time Capsule serves all the machines in our home over a wireless network. I was surprised at first that backup would work over wireless, but it does. Each machine has its own unencrypted disk image; one on the TC's old internal 500 GB drive, two others have images on an external 2TB drive. The TC sits in a closet upstairs; it's unlikely to be stolen but fire would destroy it. I have done 1-2 file Time Machine restores from that image, so I know it can work. The only test of a backup, of course, is a restore.

I don't trust Time Machine as much as old-time Dantz Retrospect, but it seems Apple has gotten most of the bugs out.

I trust Carbon Copy Cloner [3] more. Each day it clones my server, on which all the important data lives. It's more than a cloner; CCC keeps copies of changed or deleted files in "_CCC Archives". I've configured CCC to use an encrypted image it automatically mounts every night. Since that backup is encrypted I can take it offsite, which I do every few weeks. Ok, every month or two. Offsite rotation relies on me, so it's prone to failure. Still, even if the house burns, I am unlikely to lose more than a month of images and videos. I can live with that.

So I have two backup methods, both fully automated, both relatively independent [2]. If each is 95% reliable each day, then the chance both fail on a given day is 1/400. If the daily chance of a server drive failure is 1/1000, the odds of all three failing on the same day are about 1/400,000 [2], [4]

Tonight though, my data got within a few miles of the cliff it wants to meet.

My server has been having worrisome memory exception (EXC_BAD_ACCESS) crashes, and a TV show I recently downloaded had a file error [1]. There's something wrong on my 2yo i5 iMac; I need to run Apple Hardware Test (again). So I know my server data is at risk.

Time Capsule has had problems too -- it's reporting a "communications error" periodically. I think that error message is a scarlet herring related to the iMac issues, but clearly I can't trust that backup.

Happily there's good old CCC -- but when I restarted my server for the first time in weeks it reported a problem. The backup drive didn't mount. That was easy to diagnose -- I'd unplugged it. Probably when I was debugging my Aperture crash 3 weeks ago. Why didn't CCC report the error? Maybe it had crashed.

I wasn't that close to data loss -- but I was in a bad neighborhood. As paranoid as I am, I'm almost not paranoid enough.

It's good to have two fully automatic and completely independent backup methods. Data wants to die, and backup is still an unsolved problem.

-fn-

[1] Incidentally, you can't easily report a purchase problem to Apple until they process a charge, and to reduce transaction costs they wait a few days before they process. This is very annoying! Also, the UI for reporting a purchase problem is suspiciously clumsy. More on that experience when I see what they do.
[2] In reality they common failure points of course - me, computer memory, etc. There is the older offsite backup though, so complete and total data loss is probably less than 1/1,000,000.
[3] Donationware. I donated. I wish donation ware apps would let us set a 'reminder' so I could donate yearly. I suppose I should just make donationware donations every year on my birthday against the apps I use.
[4] I'd love to have automated offsite backup too, but I've never found an offsite vendor I trusted and I expect ISPs to eventually charge for bandwidth use.

See also:

CrashPlan (or JungleDisk) instead of Retrospect 8? (1/2010)
Online backup – the security problem (it’s not the encryption)
backup (50 or so posts on backup)
Retrospect 8.2 for OS X fails my latest review -- because it's been abandoned (11/2010 - I checked under the latest owner but it felt the same)
Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule (12/2009 - TM/TC are better quality now, but the documentation still sucks).
Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup (2/2010)
My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise (2/2010 - using hardware test)

Update 12/21/2011: I was closer to the cliff than I realized.

Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations

2011-12-13T20:34:00.001-06:00

Weeks after Google's Day of Infamy i'm still failing to fully replace Google Reader Shares. Recently I gave up on Tumblr, Posterous, the zombie version of Google Reader, and some screen-scraping attempts to turn G+ streams into feeds.

Lately I've been focusing on my @jgordonshare tweets and tonight I tried using ifttt to create a WordPress feed-equipped archive of tweets.

It was easy to setup the ifttt task to turn the tweets into WP posts. I used a "1 button install" Dreamhost [1] WordPress instance I've been testing. I had to turn on XML-RPC publishing (used by Windows Live Writer, MarsEdit, etc) and provide a WordPress username and password [2].

The ifttt doesn't trigger immediately after tweet creation. I assume it checks the Twitter stream every 15-30 minutes. I manually triggered a check from the ifttt dashboard.

Here's an example of what I got

Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud

... Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud...

Yeah, not to impressive. The problem is a tweet is simply a string, it has no special structure, no way to distinguish URL from my commentary from page title from annotation (not that there's room for all that). Tweets are much simpler entities than old-style Google Reader shares.

The experiment did work, but the result isn't terribly interesting.

So the quest goes on ...

[1] Use the code "KATEVA" or this link and you are supposed to get 50% off your 1st year costs and I get an equal saving as credit.
[2] Obviously you should create a user for this purpose and create a unique password. IFTTT has to know your credentials.

See also:

Dreamhost - apparently the kickbacks work 6/2010
Google reader shared items to Facebook 3/2009 - Google's glory days - before the Fall
Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed 9/2008 - Google's apex
My reader shares are back for now - thanks to Keakon 11/2011 - sweet hack, but a bit of a security risk
Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook 4/2010 - twitterfeed is still around
Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes 9/2008 - never quite worked, but an interesting example
Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes - 2/09 - fiddling
Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner 10/2010 - we assume Google will axe feedburner in 2012
FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader - turning twitter into rss 4/2009
Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011
After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011. I haven't tried Zootool yet.

How to learn what your current AT&T mobile contracted services are

2011-12-09T08:29:00.001-06:00

AT&T has the lowest customer service rating of American mobile phone companies. Of course that's like asking what's worse - Ebola or Rabies?

This is not because of their retail staff. They must give them powerful drugs, because, despite working for a moderately evil corporation, they're remarkably cheerful.

Their web site though, that's part of what makes them "Rabies" rather than just "Ebola".

For example, for the past few days I've been trying to follow up on some extensive bill slashing changes. In particular I've been trying to find a current contract summary for our family plan. I think I've found the best that ATT offers, but they have one of the worst web sites I've ever come across. [1]

As of Nov 2011 try this. Don't click on the tabs, but mouse over to see the substructures. Note you may have to authenticate repeatedly.

Go to your AT&T mobile account page. Look at the top menu structure. It will say myAT&T, with "tabs" like "Overview", "Bill & Payments" and so on. Depending on the services you use some are not useful, but they will still appear. The tabs that are useful for a mobile-only customer are
- Bill & Payments: see current bill statement
- Wireless: usage and recent activity
- Profile: user information
From user information look for "Contract Information". Click Customer Service Summary and Contract. Now you get a popup window. In there you find several options including two that, despite their names, both show a similar PDF (these links may actually work as shortcuts once you're authenticated):
- Wireless customer agreement: This is the real deal. CSS plus six pages that summarize your true contract [2]
- Customer service summary (wireless): Just the CSS
- Alternatively, AT&T's "Your Phone CSS" email provides this link with goes to a screen I can't find when I navigate the site, in fact it seems to be a outside of the tabs they define and possibly a separate web site: https://www.wireless.att.com/olam/loginAction.olamexecute?target=CSS. There's a trick here. Unless you read carefully, you'll hit the "continue" button -- that will just take you back to the main site. Instead, look for the link under the wireless number drop down and click that. You get the PDF contract summary.

Note that under the Wireless tab is a "Rate Plan" link, but it only shows voice plan.

So, in summary, to determine your actually currently contracted services for a family plan you need to print/view a PDF for each individual family member and do the sums to produce an integrated view.

I wonder if there's a medical term for the psychosis induced by dealing with AT&T?

Next up: How to track SMS use.

[1] The primary flaw is that AT&T mixes marketing with service. There are other reasons, but that's the primary dysfunction. What I want to know is mixed with what they want to sell me. A secondary reason, is that they choose not to invest in areas that allow customers to see what their contracts are. Those investments have a low return on investment and will not contribute to someone making VP. It's just a happy accident that it works this way.

[2] Update: AT different times I got different PDFs for different users. Only my wife, a secondary number, produced the full six page report when I requested a "wireless customer agreement".

Update 12/11/11: I've studied the PDFs in more detail. They are quite hard to interpret, particularly for a family plan, but, with some study, they do show the current contract. I think the "wireless customer agreement" is a copy of the original contract, but the "customer service summary" is the current contract.

Deleting Google Profile breaks picasa share links

2011-12-07T19:51:00.001-06:00

I recently deleted my Google Profile. The link explains why.

I expected consequences and I am not disappointed.

Today many of my share links to my Picasa albums have broken. The albums are still gone, but the share links don't work.

It's easy to see why. Here's a link I shared last week to one of my recent albums. I've bolded the problem (omitting the auth key)

https://picasaweb.google.com/113810027503326386174/WildcatVsEagleNov2011

Here's today's link to the same album ...

https://picasaweb.google.com/jfaughnan/WildcatVsEagleNov2011

When I deleted my profile I removed my 2007 identity: 113810027503326386174. With the advent of G+ that identifier was the basis of shared image links. When I removed G+, those links broke.

Fortunately I hadn't shared that many albums recently. I got singed, but not burned.

I feel like I escaped the burning house of G+ just in time. Future exits will be far more difficult -- if not impossible.

Google doc share links cannot be changed

2011-12-05T20:52:00.002-06:00

Google uses the secret share link feature in a few places. In several places the share link can be changed. I think of that as an essential feature; a way to correct a share mistake or deal with an escaped link.

Google Apps shared item links, however, cannot be changed.

Nobody talks about this.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who actually uses Google Docs.

Blogger is dying more quickly than expected

2011-12-03T11:46:00.001-06:00

I've been expecting Blogger to die, but since Google has been porting it to the "new look" I thought it had a year or two left.

Today when I search in Blogger I'm getting results sorted from oldest to newest, and search ends at 2006. I'm seeing this in both the old and new UI. In the new UI, of course, search is very limited; in particular you can't navigate large numbers of results readily.

Blogger is showing more of these inconsistent and failed behaviors. If Blogger were human, I'd say it had an untreatable cancer.

The good news is that WordPress.com's Blogger Import works fairly well -- though it omits all draft posts.

The bad news is that blogging is tracing the same trajectory I remember with web site authoring. In the 90s web site authoring tools were accessible to relatively non-technical amateurs. By the 00s that market had gone away, and quality "content management systems" were aimed at professionals and businesses. I'm seeing the same thing happening with blogging -- it's becoming a professional activity dominated rather than an amateur form of communication. The number of interesting blogs expressing personal opinions rather than muted convention is also diminishing.

These things are easier to understand if you live in a climate that has ice and snow and darkness.

Lion: Only 3.5 stars on Apple's App Store

2011-12-02T23:10:00.001-06:00

I have no compelling reason to move our family accounts from MobileMe to iCloud, though Find My Friends might be nice. Still, I'd probably do it -- except that I want to keep my iPhone and OS X Contacts in sync. Moving to iCloud for my iPhone means I need to move to iCloud on the desktop -- and i have only one Lion machine. Two others are Snow Leopard and a fourth won't run Lion at all.

I'd need to put Lion on the dual core MacBook, where it will run slowly even with encryption off. It should be fine on my i5 memory loaded desktop.

The bigger problem is that I'll need to upgrade software. FileMaker for sure, and probably a few other odd apps need Rosetta. The experience is guaranteed to be painful and expensive.

Apple's App Store is not encouraging. Lion gets 3.5 stars there, and the negative comments (only ones I bother with) are persuasive. That is, they complain about issues I know are real (such as software upgrades).

Meh. I'll wait until March or so. Maybe Lion and iCloud will both look better then.

Standard feeds for G+ Profile streams

2011-12-01T20:26:00.001-06:00

When G+ Profiles first appeared, I recall that public posts had feeds.

Those feeds disappeared. Now G+ is more of a walled garden than Facebook.

Russell Beattle created an RSS feed app for G+, but then Google's AppEngine price increases put him out of business.

Now Jeff Turner has one ...

Google+ to RSS Feed
This site is still in beta so it might go down from time to time. If you have any issues please submit a issue to Github Issues. I had to up the cache to 60 minutes so we don't run out of API calls in a single day.

Here's my (100% public) John Gordon feed via nodester: http://googleplusrss.nodester.com/107785880910936077757.

It renders in GR. Next I'll try using http://ifttt.com/ and Feedburner to turn my G+ posts into something I can own and others can consume. I hope Jeff can make a business of this somehow.

Markets route around aberrations, and the Net is routing around Evil+.

Update: I tried a feedburner version of Jeff's converter but IFTTT didn't like it. It complained "Feed has items without valid urls".

On the other hand, ifttt will share G+ Posts to Tweets using yet another G+ to feed service - Plu.Sr. Looks like there are more than a few of these! Talk about routing around evil.

So here I am on Plu.Sr, where first sentence becomes feed title: http://plu.sr/feed.php?plusr=107785880910936077757&short=true.

From this ifttt creates posts on my unused Posterous blog: http://jgordonshare.posterous.com/ -- but only if autopost is turned off.

I tried this one with Feedburner, but it complained: "The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 77: The reference to entity "T" must end with the ';' delimiter."

It's just for play at the moment, but it looks like we'll have some options. At least until Google terminates my John Gordon Profile.

I've also set up a ifttt action to http://twitter.com/#!/jgordonshare from my G+ shares.

Next step will be to get my wordpress microblog working. Then IFTTT will create wordpress posts, and that will in turn have a feed and a twitter stream.

iOS 5 on a 3GS - not bad

2011-11-30T22:14:00.001-06:00

I wiped a 3GS, installed iOS 5, and restored my son's apps and data.

I did it primarily to get iMessage - part of our assault on AT&T.

It's better than I thought. I expected more UI problems. I'm sure there are problems, but I expect those will improve with later versions of iOS 5.

If you have a 3GS I think it's worthwhile, but I'd wait until 5.1.

iMessage use on an AT&T iPhone without a SIM card (iPod Touch mode)

2011-11-30T21:35:00.001-06:00

iMessage is a very intriguing product. It's available as part of iOS 5 for iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone 3Gs, 4 or 4S.

On non-phone iOS devices iMessage provides non-SMS (iMessage) texting services to other iMessage users over either WiFi or, if supported, 3G services. That's like WhatsApp.app, but WhatsApp only works on a iPhone with an active voice service!

On iPhones iMessage has two modes.

In standard mode it supports SMS/MMS messaging as well as iMessage texting. iMessaging is the default when it's supported by the receiving device; you can see what will be used before you compose a message.

In an optional mode you can disable SMS/MMS messaging and go purely iMessage. You may want to do this, for example, if you choose not to pay for AT&T's extortionary "unlimited" plans. You will still receive SMS messages (20 cents each, including spam text), but at least you won't send any. (You can tell AT&T to turn off all but 'administrative texting' if you want to avoid spam SMS and spam SMS fees.)

In a world where SMS fees exceed AT&T's mandatory minimal $15/month 200MB/mo data plans, iMessage is subversive [1]. For our family, discontinuing our $30 month texting plan and using a combination of iMessage, Facebook Messenger and Google Voice/Text more than pays for my son's data plan and old 3GS.

Siri is nice (more on that in Gordon's Notes, soon), but iMessage is the biggest thing in iOS 5. I would love to know what AT&T thinks of it, and whether those thoughts are printable in a family blog.

Alas, not everything is quite perfect in iMessage and iOS 5.01. Apple's Discussion groups have many complaints about "waiting for activation". For example:

iMessage waiting for activation: Apple Support Communities
... To update on my iPhone-off contract, even though it says iMessage is waiting for activation, I can still iMessage my friend in Australia (and I am in the USA) So I don't know how it's working, but it's working great! Also, another one of my USA friends has an iPod touch with iMessage. It is working flawlessly..

We had no trouble at all with 3 iPhones with functional SIMs. In an SIM-free iPhone 4 in use as an iPod Touch, however, we got stuck at "waiting for activation".

The first time I used the device I think it sent messages, despite the notice. The next day, however, it could not send. I tried various tricks to no avail, including:

reboot phone
remove and restore my son's iCloud credentials and account.
play with location and time zone settings
create a contact card in iCloud with his migrated iCloud ID (@me.com) and specify that in iMessage

Nothing worked. A day later, however, his phone could again send and receive messages -- despite showing "waiting for activation".

I don't know how long it will keep working. Apple doesn't truly support use of a SIM-less iPhone as an iPod Touch, which further reduces the (suprisingly) low value of a used iPhone. I'm somewhat optimistic, however, that the current flaky behavior is a bug or a reflection of overloaded systems. I'll update this post as I learn more.

[1] If Apple integrates it with iChat on OS X, and provides a Windows 7 client ... hmm.

See also:

Martin's WordPress plugins

2011-11-30T08:29:00.001-06:00

I think my microblogging experiments will likely end with WordPress. It's a complex world to learn however. For one thing, there are hundreds of "plugins" available for WordPress, and no obvious way to tell the useful from the disastrous.

So I'm grateful to Martin Steiger for sharing the ones he uses on different sites ...

Essential:

- Chunk Urls for WordPress
- Germanix URL (probably not necessary for you)
- WordPress Database Backup
- WP Super Cache

Essential for sites with comments on:

- Akismet (default WordPress plugin)
- Antispam Bee (in addition to Akismet)
- Subscribe To 'Double-Opt-In' Comments (if you provide comment subscriptions)

Useful / additional features:

- Better Delete Revision
- Better WordPress Recent Comments
- Comment Form Quicktags
- Comment Whitelist
- Contact Form 7
- Country Filter
- Exclude Pages from Navigation
- Get Recent Comments (depreciated)
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Intypo
- Limit Login Attempts
- No Self Pings (maybe no longer necessary)
- Optimize DB
- Posts By Tag
- WP Minify
- WordPress Popular Posts
- Yet Another Related Post Plugin

On the way out:

- AbsoluteRSS (no longer necessary)
- AntiVirus (too many false positives)
- Flattr
- Google Analyticator
- Google News Sitemap
- PubSubHubbub
- Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons (sharing buttons slow down any site)
- Save Post. Check Links.
- RSS Cloud
- WP SUP

On my latest WordPress-based site, steigerlegal.ch, I use as few plugins as possible. Some are essential and some are needed if you wish certain features. In any case, I carefully read the reviews on WordPress.org and I try to use only plugins in active development. I have trust in some reputable developers such as Sergej Müller. I cannot review each plugin from A to Z but I never get plugins from dubious sources. Up to now, I have never had a security problem with any of my WordPress-based sites (although being careful cannot rule such problems out but it's a start).

iPhone cables and like things - Monoprice

2011-11-29T19:21:00.001-06:00

I advertised AT&T's $6.50 iPhone cables on a corporate social site, and a colleague responded with an even better deal from Monoprice: only $3.55 each when QTY 50 purchased. They're a big $4 for less than 10. Monoprice sells a $7 wall charger too.

These aren't no-name or counterfeit cables, Monoprice specializes in this sort of product:

Monoprice, (DBA. MonoPrice.com) Inc. is an eCommerce leader specializing in high quality cables, components and accessories for computer and consumer electronics. Established in 2002, we have built our reputation by the word of mouth of our customers. The Monoprice brand's greatest claim to fame is our consistent ability to deliver premium quality products on par with the best known national brands at prices far below the retail average along with unmatched speed and service...

I'd be willing to try them. I'm told Monoprice's thunderbolt cables are less reliable, but those seem hard for everyone to make. I'll be looking at them for future purchases.

iOS 5 updates and lost game data: wait for iOS 5.1

2011-11-29T07:57:00.000-06:00

I don't know how widespread this is, but it happened to us despite having a robust backup ...

Lost game data: Apple Support Communities

I just migrated my son from a 3GS to an iPhone 4 running iOS 5.01. I wiped the iPhone 4, reactivated it, then restored from a complete backup of his 3GS. His Harry Potter Lego saved game setttings were not preserved. He was, understandably, disappointed. I haven't evaluated his other games. In general iOS 5 migrations have been difficult, with more than expected work to reinstall apps, delete crashing apps and resume them, and restore accounts.

I suspect the problem is some combination of ...

a bug (of course), perhaps related to Apple's confused identity management infrastructure (Cloud ID, AppleID, StoreID)
a change in how applications are allowed to store data. If an app is not updated prior to updating, and the app stored data in a fashion that's no longer supported, then data will be lost.

I've moved three users from iOS 3 or iOS 4 to iOS 5, and it's been painful each time. Most credentials have to be recreated. ActiveSync account migration doesn't work at all; accounts have to deleted and recreated. Migrating Google Authenticator was particularly difficult (that's Google's fault though). Worst of all, for my son, is this data loss.

I don't know if Apple will fix this, but I recommend waiting for iOS 5.1 if there's no driving necessity to upgrade to iOS 5.

iOS 5 -- What Apple didn't fix

2011-11-29T01:15:00.000-06:00

My personal list of things that are still broken in iOS 5 (to be expanded):

Migration problems:

ActiveSync accounts must be removed completely, then restored when updating from iOS 4 to iOS 5 (this may be a new bug)
My son's Harry Potter Lego game data was not saved when I migrated him a 3GS to iOS 5

Alerts: Now there is a birthday alert, but it's a 1 week alarm. We need 2 week alarms for all events.
Colors on Calendars: Still can't control color assignment, still get colliding colors with ActiveSync calendars, color assignment algorithm still doesn't look across multiple calendars

Migrating MobileMe family accounts to iCloud

2011-11-29T00:03:00.003-06:00

I've started migrating family accounts to iCloud. This explanation from Apple Discussions is helpful ...

With a Family Pack, the master account holder and the sub-account holders can each migrate to an individual iCloud account by going to http://me.com/move and entering their email address and password (not www.icloud.com). The order they do this in is immaterial; if the master account moves first it can no longer administrate the sub-accounts. If a sub-account moves first the master account cannot create a new sub-account to replace it. Once migrated each account becomes a full iCloud account entirely separate from the others. The master account holder will get the 20GB storage upgrade free until June 30th 2012; the sub account holders will not, and will have only the basic 5GB.

I began with #2, currently using a SIM-less iPhone 4. He's got almost no data to lose.

I want him to continue to use my Apple ID however ...

... iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch must have iOS 5 or later. Note: When you are asked to provide your Apple ID during iOS setup, use your MobileMe email address and password. To use a different Apple ID for iTunes and iCloud, just go to Settings > Store on your iOS device after you've finished the iOS setup assistant...
... Inactive and expired MobileMe accounts do not need to move to iCloud. Simply use your inactive or expired account to sign up for an iCloud account and follow the onscreen instructions. See this article for more information...

and

When you first set up your iOS 5 device, enter the Apple ID you want to use with iCloud. If you skipped the setup assistant, sign in to Settings > iCloud and enter the Apple ID you’d like to use with iCloud.In Settings > Store, sign in with the Apple ID you want to use for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match). You may need to sign out first to change the Apple ID.

Following this path I learned that #2 will still have MobileMe Gallery, iDisk and iWeb Publishing through 6/30/2012 -- even after moving to iCloud. Better than I'd expected. No keychain sync though. I hope that comes back in some form.

I had to enter his iCloud (same as MobileMe) credentials to setup Facetime and iMessage on his SIM-less device. Although the phone doesn't need a SIM for this, it can't be in Airplane mode.

So far, it has gone better than expected.

Update: Thinking this over, I realize I need to update my machines to Lion before I move Emily and I. So this will take a while ...

Turning an iPhone into an iPod touch - keep the original SIM!

2011-11-28T22:26:00.001-06:00

The kids had used old iPhones as IPod touches without trouble, but apparently I'd never done a factory reset.

If you do that, the phone can't be used -- until it's activated.

You need a SIM card that was either originally used to activate the phone, or that works with a currently active phone:

Using an iPhone without a wireless service plan
Follow these steps to use your iPhone without a wireless service plan:
Insert the SIM card from your new, activated iPhone or one that was previously used to activate the original iPhone.
Connect the iPhone to iTunes on a computer connected to the Internet.Once iTunes activates the device, you're free to use the iPhone as if it were an iPod touch.
... It may be necessary to repeat this process after updating or restoring the device.

Yikes. If I'd known that then, when I got my 4S, I'd have asked to keep the old SIM card and had them give me a new SIM. Instead we just swapped the old SIM. (Not sure if AT&T will do this, it's an advantage of ordering you iPhone from Apple for home delivery.)

Lesson: When you upgrade your iPhone, keep the SIM card that was previously used to activate the device.

Update: On the brighter side, iOS 5 allows use of FaceTime and iMessage without a SIM card. You can't use them in airplane mode however.

Update 11/30/2011: iMessage behavior is flaky in a SIM-Less iPhone. More on that later. In a separate experiment on another phone I found a SIM card that had previously been used in a different iPhone worked to get pasts the iTunes check even though the number no longer existed and the SIM card was no longer valid.

Google's 2-step verification is (almost) the spawn of Satan - iPhone upgrade edition

2011-11-28T20:35:00.001-06:00

Two months ago I decided Google's 2-step verification was an incomplete mess unsuitable for use by non-geeks.

Today I decided it's the spawn of Satan.

This is what happens if you refresh an iPhone running Authenticator - either a new phone or restore from backup

Restore iPhone from backup
Authenticator settings gone
Per directions to account page for 2-step verification settings.
Discover, despite 30 day authorization, my computer wants authenticator token today.
Fortunately, I have my old phone. That works.
Realize that there's no support for authenticating a new phone. Ok, I'll just turn off the iPhone ...
Get the QR code. That works ... but
All the friggin' application specific passwords are gone -- all revoked.

Do you know how friggin' long it takes to enter all those application specific passwords across multiple machines and operating systems?! Can I scream now?!

Friends don't let friends use 2-step verification.

Update: A few minutes later and, for now. I see my (not) application-specific passwords and they still seem to work. So only almost the spawn of Satan. Google needs a workflow to support migrating from one iPhone to another.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: Implementing Google's two factor authentication - early days
Gordon's Tech: The massive security hole in Google two factor authentication - problems
Gordon's Tech: Making the most of Google's alternative "2-step" verification model - more problems
Gordon's Tech: Google Chrome sync does not work with 2-step verification - still more problems

Good habit: review sites with access to google services

2011-11-28T19:22:00.001-06:00

Through your Google Accounts page you can edit "connected sites" and "application-specific" passwords (they aren't btw).

I did this tonight. I was surprised at how long my list was. How did Facebook ever get access to my Google Contacts? They are diabolical.

I deleted most of the items on the list. This is one practice I want to make a habit.

AT&T sells iPhone cables for $10 with 3 for 2

2011-11-28T12:44:00.001-06:00

I've never come across an AT&T store bargain - until today.

Turns out AT&T sells their own iPhone/iPod/iPad charge/sync cable - for $10. As of today they also have a "buy two get one free promotion", so I bought 3 for $20.

Excluding obviously counterfeit $2-$3 cables (caveat emptor), I've not seen these cables on Amazon for less than $20. Griffin's powerblock/cable combo for $23 or so has been the best deal.

Since Apple's last two years of cables have been absolute garbage (separation at iPod end), my family needs some extra cables. Now we're flush.

ifttt, Google Reader Share, and Wordpress

2011-11-28T08:32:00.002-06:00

ifttt has a WordPress channel, including a post action.

Google Reader's share RSS feed is still active, and can be exposed with the Keakon extension.

So using iftt could I blog to Wordpress by clicking the Keakon-Share link in Google Reader?

Be a fun experiment anyway.

Google Chrome sync does not work with 2-step verification

2011-11-28T08:00:00.002-06:00

As best I can tell Google's two-factor ("2-step") verification is incompatible with Chrome sync. There are two ways it fails:

1. During initial authentication you are required to enter a full access password, the Authenticator token won't work. (Laughably, Google calls these 'application-specific' passwords. That's a lie. I wish they'd stop repeating it.) This defeats the value of the Authenticator's keystroke-logger protection.

2. You can't use your Google account authentication to encrypt your sync store. Maybe it uses the 'application specific password'. When I try this, Sync hangs - but tells me it has succeeded. Using a separate sync password works.

There are lots of similar bugs with use of two-factor. It's really not finished; I wonder if it's one of the projects that Page has terminated. I still use it, but I don't recommend it to anyone else. The illusion of security may be worse than no security.

Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails

2011-11-26T21:30:00.001-06:00

I got pretty far along on the Tumblr alternative to Reader Shares. I even created a kateva.org subdomain with a Tumblr IP A Record to give my Tumblr blog a kateva.org URL.

I tested with Google Reader Mobile and desktop, but the workflow for micro-sharing was too awkward. That looked promising, but all the posts were going to my original Tumblr blog, not the full powered one I'd setup for sharing.

What was up with that?

That's when I discovered the weird world of Tumblr primary blogs ...

Help Center | Tumblr
... What is my “primary” blog? Your primary blog is the one created when you sign up for Tumblr. It represents you (with its name, link, and avatar) when you follow or like other Tumblr blogs. You can read about blog management to understand the differences between your primary blog and additional blogs. Can I switch my primary blog? It’s not currently possible to switch or move your primary blog to another account. You can read about blog management to understand the differences between your primary blog and additional blogs....

Cue the ominous music. I could see where this was going ...

Blog Management | Tumblr
Each Tumblr account comes with a primary blog. A primary blog can fully use all of Tumblr’s social features including Follow, Like, Reply, Ask, and Submit. But, a primary blog cannot be password-protected and cannot be multi-user.You can also create additional blogs on your Tumblr account. An additional blog can be password protected for privacy and security and can be multi-user. But, an additional blog cannot fully use all of the Tumblr’s social features...
The primary blog that is made when you create your Tumblr account will always be the primary blog for the account. It is not possible to reassign which blog on your account is the primary blog. And, due the way in which Tumblr is architected, it is unlikely that we will be able to support reassignment of the primary blog in the foreseeable future. It is also unlikely that we will be able to support password protection on primary blogs....

Yes, it's all about that d*mn closed-world money-making social stuff.

The primary blog is the one that receives my shared items from Feedly. It won't do for what I want.

So now, like Posterous, Tumblr has failed.

Only Twitter and, perhaps, WordPress microblogging, remain.

Oh, and, of course, HiveMined.

No. Please. Not ... not ... Blogger!

See also:

Aperture 3.2.1 recurrent crash - EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)

2011-11-25T18:23:00.001-06:00

This ends well - because I have backups. Other than the necessity of backups, the main lessons of this post are;

Aperture 3.2.1 Libraries can become corrupted.
Aperture 3.2.1 has some wicked bugs.
A few debugging tips.
It is unwise to edit in Aperture until all import processing is completed.
How to manage when disaster strikes

This morning I did a routine import of 30 or so CR2 images from my Canon T2i using Aperture Import. Import completed normally. As images were post-processed I worked on some red-eye editing. I mis-clicked somewhere, and the spinning pizza of death appeared. About a minute later Aperture crashed, leaving this crash log ...

Process: Aperture [75650]
Path: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture
Identifier: com.apple.ApertureVersion: 3.2.1 (3.2.1)
Build Info: Aperture-201094000000000~2
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [41554]
Date/Time: 2011-11-25 09:15:19.689 -0600
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.8 (10K549)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: 0x000000000000000a, 0x0000000138d4d000
Crashed Thread: 23

I tried five more times. Each time Aperture opened normally, and about 30 seconds later, presumably as it resumed image processing, it crashed with the same error.

I knew I had backups, so I didn't have to panic. In fact, I have three backups:

Encrypted image with Carbon Copy Cloner to local drive nightly. This is a drive clone of course, but CCC also saves changed and deleted files in a 'just-in-case' folder. So it's a Clone+.
Encrypted image with Carbon Copy Cloner in my office that's 3 weeks old (offsite).
Time Capsule backup to a 2TB drive upstairs.

It was easy to demonstrate that the problem was in the Library. I option-launched Aperture and created a new Library. It was fine. I also removed my Aperture Preference files and Aperture still crashed on Library launch.

As an experiment I used EasyFind to locate the images I'd imported. I'd renamed them on import ("_Thanksgiving_") so it was "easy to find" them using EasyFind's package search option. I moved them out of the Aperture Library. This time it launched normally.

Whatever was wrong with Aperture, it was something related to processing the images I'd imported that morning -- or a problem with the images themselves.

I then used ImageCapture [1] to bring in the suspect images from my SD card. There were no problems. I added these to an empty Aperture Library. No problems.

By then my 45GB restore had completed so I put the images into the restored Aperture Library. No problems. Just to finish the cycle off, I again performed the red eye correction associated with the big crash. No problems.

One experiment I didn't do was use Aperture First Aid to repair or rebuild the Aperture database. Speaking of that kb article, I suspect this paragraph is relevant to my problem ...

...If Aperture does not open, it may help to defer creation of previews. Press the Shift key immediately after you start Aperture to prevent preview generation for that session. If a damaged image in your library is preventing normal opening, this may allow you to start Aperture...

i don't think the original images in my Library were damaged, but I do think something went wrong with Aperture's preview creation. Actually, I have a hunch that the problem is related to Aperture's face processing -- the EasyFInd recovery process I experimented with returned a number of face "thumbnails' -- but only a number. As though face thumbnail processing was not completed.

I hope the fixes I've outlined here will help others. The bottom line - be sure you have a full backup of your Aperture Library. I prefer two fully automated backup methods that have almost nothing in common. Backups are too unreliable to trust a single backup method.

[1] This app has its own really annoying bug. When used it stores the path it last saved images to. If you change drives it keeps asking for the old drive -- and tries to mount it. Dumb. Easy to delete preferences to fix.

Update: Terence Devlin - an Apple guru, also suspects the Faces process.

Update 12/20/2011: I suspect it was due to bit rot (bad sectors) on my drive.

WordPress.com - Blogger Import

2011-11-24T21:42:00.001-06:00

I'm continuing to examine exit strategies from Google 2.0 as I prepare to delete my TrueName G+ Profile [1].

Other than Gmail and Google Apps, my strongest Google Connection post Reader Social is Blogger. It hosts this post, for example.

I've considered Posterous and Tumblr, but both have fallen short. I think I'm going to have to learn the WordPress world, starting with hosted at WordPress.com and migrating to self-hosted.

I suspect that will take a while, but I'm starting to experiment, starting with an experimental import of tech.kateva. org to WordPress.com. It's not a complete import, draft posts are not included. For example, import dialog shows 3738 Gordon's Tech posts, but that omits 467 draft posts. For Gordon's Notes it shows 5754, so 1277 draft posts are omitted.

Wordpress also supports import of a Blogger Atom export file. I don't know if that will include Drafts, but I may experiment with it.

I can live without the draft posts, especially since I'll still have access to those drafts post-migration. I can plumb those that look interesting and abandon the others.

I don't expect any quick changes. In any case I own the domain kateva.org, so the changeover ought to be relatively invisible to my visitors (though I bet feeds will need to be revised).

If you'd like to inspect the results of the import, here's Gordon's Tech at WordPress.com - http://gordonstech.wordpress.com/. It's pubic but not-indexed with a temporary URL. The import went more smoothly than I'd expected, but it uncovered two surprises, both of which make me keen to move sooner than later ...

The "New" Blogger has no UI control to move to the earliest post. The "Old" Blogger UI has this.
Old Blogger doesn't show my 2003 Blog posts, it starts with 2004. WordPress imported them.

[1] I'll keep my John Gordon profile -- until Google deletes it as a TrueName violation.

Google's Omnibox and implementing Google search alternatives

2011-11-22T21:19:00.001-06:00

Since I'm distancing myself from Google 2.0, I was receptive to Phil Bradley's alternative engine advice. I'm testing blekko (spam free) and Duck Duck Go (no tracking). I believe both are wrappers that enhance Google search.

Naturally, this experimentation works best with Chrome's Omnibox. It's very easy to add search engines; Chrome 'detects' an engine during a search site visit and adds them to it's collection. You can make any a default, and define a text shortcut. Type the shortcut in the Omnibox, hit spacebar, and your custom search is ready.

I made Blekko my default, and assigned it the letter 'b'. Google gets 'g', etc.

While I was at it, I defined a search string for one a Google custom search engine that searches my own content (web pages, blog posts): <http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3Aphjhjp-tdfa&ie=UTF-8&q=%s>. I already had one for searching my dev team's Rally project.

I can distrust Google and still appreciate Chrome ... right?

Update 11/24/2011: I ran a search on moving from blogger to wordpress on both Blekko and Google. Blekko wasn't just a bit better. It was immensely better.

Porting a mobile number to Google Voice

2011-11-21T22:40:00.002-06:00

We had two kids on our AT&T family plan when AT&T hit us with their smartphone tax. The cost of each kid phone went from @$16/month to $32/month (estimated real costs) and that includes a data plan we don't want.

I think we know why AT&T is making these desperate price hikes, but we're not playing along. After reviewing several options we expect to save about $600 over the next two years with these 3 steps [1]:

Cancel the phone account for our youngest. Turns out he's not interested in either phoning or texting. He'd prefer we put a fraction of his phone bill into games and movies. In retrospect he could have waited another year. So we've canceled his account -- with a twist. We're porting his AT&T number to Google Voice.
Replace our $30/month family texting plan with a combination of Google Voice, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (yeah, it's still messy).
Canceled a now useless SmartLimits account.
Use DataMan Pro to help keep my son under his 200MB/month data limits. We disable Safari and YouTube on his phone, so iTunes is the main data drain. So far he's doing well.

When we canceled #2's phone I decided to salvage the phone number. It's a memorable local number and when I recently added a GV line to my business number there were no local numbers available. I ended up choosing an area code from my former home town - Escanaba Michigan. Since I was going to cancel his phone with a memorable local number, I decided to make it mine.

I followed Google's minimalist number porting directions. Unfortunately you can only do this with a mobile number [2] - at least for now. Here's how it went:

In Voice Settings:Phones I clicked the Change/Port link.
Checked lots of warning checkboxes.
I tried following the phone confirmation directions on the old Nokia that currently holds my son's SIM card. (We pulled it from his iPhone when we got hit with the rate increase.) It didn't work -- Google couldn't recognize the touch tones!
I put his SIM into his 3GS -- Google recognized those tones.
I filled out my AT&T account information.
I paid $20 into a new Google Wallet account (on my work account)

In theory the transfer will be done in 2-3 days and my old GV business number will work for about 2 months before dying.

In theory my son's AT&T number will disappear and that account will close. I'll check in 2-3 days. Of course since this is a family account things will probably be messier. He's not under any contract (no subsidized phone, he "brought his own phone"), but we'll see what happens. I'll update this post.

john

[1] Since we're paying for a data plan (200MB/month). [2] It's convoluted, but I assume you can move a landline number to a mobile number, then from there to Google Voice. I'm thinking about that ...
[2] Presumably we could move it to a family mobile account, then from there to Google Voice. Bit expensive and a hassle.

See also:

Update 11/22/2011: The next day my AT&T account showed #2 was gone. I tested the number and it called Google Voice. I called AT&T and was told the account had been cancelled. Since AT&T bills monthly service in advance (who new?) I've already paid for the billing cycle that ends in 6 days. There's no rebate on that $12 fee. Any expenses incurred this month (overage fees, long distance) will show up on next month's bill. So this went smoothly.

Google Apps and Google Account integration problems

2011-11-20T09:50:00.001-06:00

Over the past year Google has been consolidating previously separate Google Apps and Google/Gmail accounts.

For example, consider kateva.org. At one time if I wanted the Google Apps users jgordon@kateva.org to have Reader access, I had to create a Google/Gmail account with the username jgordon@kateva.org. They were separate services. After the merger they are supposed to be unified. The merge process was, unsurprisingly, rocky. Some things could transfer, some not. Relics of the discarded identity may remain in an orphaned Google/Gmail account with a peculiar URL.

It's still not working. Emily, for example, has problems authenticating with some Google services. Relics of her old identity produce odd error messages, especially with Google Reader. Some third party apps, don't work at all. Reeder.app for example. Seems she's not alone ...

Reeder
... Having issues signing in with your Google Apps account? Some users reported that changing the password did the trick. If this does not help, enabling 2-step verification and creating an application specific password should get Reeder working again. Please see this help article (Getting started with 2-step verification) for more information...

I wonder if current problems are tied to Google's troubled and incomplete migration to two factor authentication.

We'll try Reeder's fixes, though two factor is not something I want to inflict on Emily. I fear James Fallows and Ezra Klein greatly overstate the usability of Google's work.

Beyond this immediate glitch, these problems reinforce my sense of where Google 2.0 is going. The train has changed direction, and I need to get off. Unfortunately, Google 1.0 crushed the competition, so there's nothing to get off too. It's a 100 mile walk through the Sahara to the next watering hole. It will take years for niche vendors to move into the spaces Google has opened up.

Update: What I did to try to clear up the Google Apps vs. Google authentication issues.

First I found the email notification services associated with the account merger we performed in July 2011.

After the merge/migration of last July her old account data was associated with a modification of her old Google/Gmail username. The domain is gtempaccount.com, the username is the old email address with % replacing @:

emily%kateva.org@gtempaccount.com (not her real domain).

I entered her old password was taken to a set of dialogs similar to those I saw in July. The dialogs told me data was successfully migrated. There were bugs of course; Google is supposed to be able to show data associated with her current accounts and that failed. Nonetheless I felt reasonably sure what we cared about had been migrated. So I found the tiny "delete account" link, walked through the warnings process, and deleted the remnants of her old independent Google/Gmail account.

Then, a few minutes later, I tried logging into Reeder. It worked.

I never changed her Google password and I didn't try two step verification. All I did was delete the remnants of her old account.

I think this Google bug shows up after account mergers between Google Apps and Google/Gmail when the same password was used for both.

Navigon and the dark side of the iOS marketplace

2011-11-17T23:05:00.001-06:00

One of the downsides to the iOS App Store model is that vendors can change the rules -- and it's very hard to avoid an update.

NAVIGON used to bundle maps withe the purchase price. At $50 it was a good price, and even though there was no commitment to map updates they were updated. Yes, it was a 1.8 GB download -- but that was a rare event.

The price is even better than it appeared, because if a family shared an iTunes account the $50 covered all family iOS devices.

Now Navigon has moved to the in-app purchase model. The default "update" is "free" and only 48MB, but the maps are in-app purchases and they are not free. Old maps are removed during the "update" (and so are "favorites", which is not nice). I am not certain, but I suspect in-app purchases are tied to a phone and iTunes account, not to an iTunes account alone. So each user in a family will buy their own maps. (I seem to be the only one whose noticed this.)

This may not be a terrible deal for new users, but old users are moving Navigon to a 1 star rating.

Unfortunately there's no way to prevent app updates and no way to keep an old version of an app. iTunes will nag forever. So I made a copy of Navigon 1.8.2.ipa and put it in a safe place. That way when it's "updated" I can delete the update and restore the original.

PS. What should Navigon had done? Forget the evil "update" trick. Create and sell Navigon "Pro" as a separate app and stop updating Navigon 1.

Another iCloud sync issue - Google Calendar side effects ...

2011-11-16T21:03:00.001-06:00

Three lessons from this recent Google/iCal/iCloud synchronization problem

Google Calendar Known Issues - Google Calendar Help
... Setting up iCloud sync caused events to be unexpectedly wiped from Google Calendar for some of our users who were syncing information between iCal and Google Calendar. This unwanted deletion took place between 10/11 and 10/14. We have since restored deleted events and invitees. Please note we’re only able to restore invitees who are Google Calendar users; guests who are non-Google Calendar users (i.e. Outlook users, Yahoo! users) could not be recovered and will need to be re-invited manually. In response to the above issue, we have stopped deleting events if the delete request comes from iCal. Until further notice, deleting any event in iCal on Mac OS will not remove this event from Google Calendar, but all other requests like creating events or changing existing events will be synced properly...

Synchronization is H... Ok. You knew that.

iCloud has bugs. Ok, you knew that.

Google 2.0 doesn't give a s*. That's different.

My reader shares are back for now - thanks to Keakon.

2011-11-14T23:49:00.001-06:00

My Google Reader shared items are back. My memory is transiently restored ...

How To Restore Sharing Options And Old List Spacing In Google Reader
Reader Sharer is a simple Chrome add-on that restores the sharing functionality to Google Reader..

It's in the Chrome extension store...

Implemented features:
1. The "Your shared items".
2. The "People you follow" view.
3. The "Notes" view.
4. The "Your liked items" view.
5. Share/unshare an item (keyboard shortcut: Shift + F).
6. Share/delete an item with note (keyboard shortcut: Shift + D).
7. Like/unlike an item (keyboard shortcuts: L).
8. Display whether an item has been shared/liked or not.
9. Support both list view and expanded view.
10. Recover some old style for improving readability.

Features unavailable yet:
None?

Can't implement features:
1. Add/delete/display comments for an item. It seems the comment API is not available now.

Source code:
https://bitbucket.org/keakon/reader-sharer/

Currently has 6,400 users. That's far higher than I'd expected.

Source code on Atlassian bitbucket. I think a Firefox version is pending.

The author is "keakon". His blog is Chinese, Google tried to translate it for me but froze. I don't think Google translate likes Blogger's new dynamic pages.

Now if I could figure out a way to save this microblogging archive ...

iOS Calendar list view has a two year limit

2011-11-13T19:54:00.004-06:00

It's Nov 2011, and we needed to schedule an event in June 2014.

Emily tried her 4S with iOS 5. She tapped through to 2014 in the Calendar view.

In the List view, however, the date was Nov 12 2013, exactly two years from today. There's no way to schedule or view a date more than 2 years in the future in List view, even though Month view extends at least 3 years ahead.

Our iPhones sync with Google Calendar, so perhaps this bug only shows up with ActiveSync. It might be related to a perennial iOS bug: Event displayed under wrong date in "List" view on iPhone - Calendar Help.

Definitely a bug. I confirmed it's also present in iOS 4. It's been said before, but it bears repeating -- Apple sucks at calendars.

iCloud: how is it going?

2011-11-12T14:58:00.001-06:00

Apple, for about the fourth or fifth time, is trying to deliver network based services (their early attempts predate the internet).

This time it's iCloud.

I don't have any personal experience with iCloud. My family is still on MobileMe; at the moment I use it only to sync Contacts between iPhone, multiple OS X machines, and even an instance of Outlook running in an XP VM [1]. To Apple's credit, they extended our service period after introducing iCloud [2].

I haven't moved to iCloud because, although Apple 3.0 did well with iTunes, it has an abysmal track record with things like Calendars, Contacts, and Tasks. I don't know why. I assume it's because those were career killers at Steve Jobs' Apple. Maybe he wasn't interested, maybe he assumed the considerable problems were trivial compared to the things he cared about.

I'm hoping Apple 4.0 will do better, but iCloud is a Jobs-era project. So I don't expect it to start well.

So far there haven't been many iCloud reviews I trust. I suspect the people I do trust don't trust Apple -- so they're hanging back. Tidbit's Rich Mogull posted on his experience. It was miserable...

... within minutes I realized the enormity of my error as all my calendars, on all devices, simultaneously disappeared. Lacking a corporate calendar server, this meant years of old appointments, and months of upcoming appointments, were all gone...
... Since I’m good about backups, I figured I could restore from Time Machine. In a few minutes my calendars were back to normal... and a few seconds later they were all gone again. “This,” I thought to myself, “is bad.”...
... but as anyone who experienced a sync conflict could tell you (which was pretty much everyone) each device maintained its own data and made its own decisions...

Yep, that's what I expected. It's not that Mobile is any good -- Rich isn't joking when he wrote that every MobileMe user has had sync problems. Synchronization is Hell, after all. Rather that there's been no reason to expect Apple 3.0 to do better with iCloud than they did with MobileMe.

Elsewhere Calendar Swamp has given up on iCloud. That's two.

On the other hand, nobody has anything good to say about iCloud support for Contact, Task and Calendar synchronization.

So my best guess is, iCloud is doing as expected. That is, badly.

Now we get to see what Tom Cook cares about. Will he invest resources to make iCloud work? Heaven knows, these days I really want an alternative to Google.

I'll check back in about 2-3 months.

[1] Where one can use Access 2003 to manipulate calendar data. I use Google Calendar for our family's 15 (total) calendar subscriptions. It works pretty well, though I fear for its future.
[2] That's the way to sunset a service. Google hasn't done nearly as well with its recent service terminations.

iPhone alternatives to AT&T's texting fees

2011-11-11T21:55:00.002-06:00

AT&T is facing the end of SMS. So it is mandating data plans for even unlocked smartphones while raising SMS costs.

In our case, our unlimited texting fees are equal our family's two new and unwanted 200MB/month data plans. So we're looking for SMS alternatives. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I revised reviewed Facebook Messenger last week, but it's really more of an IM app than a texting replacement. Fortunately, SMS alternatives are a popular topic these days. Lifehacker did a review for iOS and another for Android recently; in fact both reviews are of interest to iOS users. Here are some of the services they listed and others I know of. I don't like ads, so I'm listing ad-free costs where applicable.

Google Voice: free (for now). Emily and the 3 kids all have GV numbers, though currently only i use the service regularly (I have two GV accounts).
Textfree: The web site is virtually content free. The iPhone app is TextFree with Voice, a year of ad-free texting is an in app purchase for $6. Phone numbers are also purchased in app. Facebook chat.
HeyWire: ad supported. iPhone app has ad-free in app purchase ($5/year) and option for "premium number" ($1). Facebook chat support.
textPlus: $3 to remove ads, $1 for premium number, credits cost money (for what?).

I gather the ads in these products are not necessarily child-safe.

Plugging these strings into Google turns up some related products (most can't receive SMS, some can send)...

Kik Messenger: No SMS, this is an IM app like Facebook Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
AOL Messenger

If an app doesn't come with a number though, it's not what we're looking for. We need to be able to receive SMS messages.

Lastly I came across some useful articles in my research:

New Trends in Messaging - William Dudley: An inside industry perspective.
How to Send Free SMS Text or MMS Picture Messages: most comprehensive review

From Dudley I learn that services with a phone number are called NUVOs (Network Unaffiliated Virtual Operators) and OTT (Over-The-Top) service providers, and that in the telecomm industry Sprint's decision to integrate Google Voice into their Android phones was a really big deal (giving up on SMS early). I also see why Apple's iMessenger is much more acceptable to AT&T than, say, Google Voice.

For our family I think we'll begin with Google Voice, even though it's not nearly as elegant a solution on the iPhone as it is on Android. My next choice is probably HeyWire, simply because two friends use it.

Update 11/13/11: I checked out iTunes reviews on PingChat!, Kik, and WhatsApp.

PingChat! and Kik seem to have high ratings, but the majority of the reviews are "13 yo girl seeking chat" (hopefully an FBI agent seeking pedophiles, probably a con man). WhatsApp costs $1, that seems to be enough to eliminate the "personals" reviews. WhatsApp is a Silicon Valley telephony app. I think I'll give that one a try first.

We may also create FB accounts for <13 yo children (COPPA violation) so they can use FB Messenger, but not give them the account passwords.

Enabling extensions slows Safari to a crawl

2011-11-11T07:35:00.001-06:00

When I enable extensions in Safari 5.1.1 on Snow Leopard I get severe keystroke lag. When I disable it the lag goes away. Lately this showed up while testing the Feedly extension.

It's not a new problem ...

I suspect it's worse in Snow Leopard in Lion; my now most 5.1.1 users are probably on Lion.

Frustrating.

Tumblr - a Google Reader social replacement?

2011-11-10T21:29:00.002-06:00

I liked many things about Posterous. Alas, it doesn't seem to have a revenue stream. Recently, in a desperation move, they tried to become more like G+ -- they even dropped post tags!

I also didn't care for the Posterous bookmarklet -- it pulled in too much of the source material.

Today I'm visiting Tumblr. It and Twitter seem to be the new homes for many of the Google Reader Social Diaspora. For example, both Twitter and Tumblr are on Feedly's one click share panel, but Posterous is an extra click away. That extra click kills. (Unsurprisingly the new Google Reader really only supports G+ well.)

Tumblr has the usual rich text edit options, but for microblogging I don't care too much about that. The bookmarket is impressive; better suited to microblogging than Posterous. The work of creating a Tumblr post from Feedly is very similar to creating a Google Reader Note/Share in the old Google Reader.

Tumblr will create tweets for each post and they do provide a (proprietary) backup. However there's no secondary posting; one of Posterous' best features is that they'll create a replica post on Blogger and WordPress. I've seen mention of ways to repost into wordpress from an RSS stream, or import a Tumblr export file into WordPress, but nothing that looks rock solid.

I like Tumblr, but I don't like the absence of an exit strategy.

Still, it's ahead of Posterous - particularly because of the Feedly support (wish Reeder supported Tumblr!).

Did I just reboot my bicycle light?

2011-11-10T20:33:00.002-06:00

This is kind of ridiculous.

I've been liking my Serfas True 500 bike light. It's one of the new generation of bicycle lights - compact, LiOn, charges from a mini-USB cable and power supply, and brighter than you can believe. These lights are a generation after the Ixon IQ that we were excited about in 2008.

Even if you're not a bicyclist you've seen these; in blinkie mode they are impossible to miss. In fact blinkie mode is so conspicuous its almost rude; I only use it in dim daylight.

These lights are amazing. Sometimes progress happens. It costs less than a replacement NiMH battery for my $350+ NiteRider gear of the 1990s, is brighter, 1/10th the weight, 1/10th the size and so on.

On the other hand, these are techie things. So progress is imperfect.

Coming home in the dark on a blustery sub-freezing night my Serfas was totally dead. Nothing - despite charging off my laptop just minutes before. Not good. Fortunately I use a Blackburn Voyager Click light as a sidelight (I go with one forward light, two lateral very bright white blinkies, and 1-2 posterior red LEDs and reflector), I made that an emergency front light. Aside from almost running over an off-leash wee doggie who dashed in front of me I made it home fine.

At home I plugged in the Serfas. Nothing happened. Not a blink.

Then, for lack of anything else to try, I pulled the battery. Looked fine, so I put it in. The light worked. It was fully charged.

So what happened?

Well, maybe the battery compartment wasn't quite closed. It seemed closed, but maybe it was a bit off.

Or maybe this light has an embedded OS and I rebooted it when I pulled the battery.

Could be either, but I like the second. This is one weird world we live in.

PS. The current generation of ultra-light and compact USB LiOn bicycle lights are amazing utility flashlights.

iPhone on a budget: The AT&T GoPhone PayGo Option

2011-11-09T16:02:00.002-06:00

AT&T is facing the end of their SMS lifeline. They're responding with innovations -- of a sort. For my family, their latest move is adding $35 a month to our bill.

So we're innovating too - by migrating away from SMS based texting sooner rather than later.

We're also looking at Paygo alternatives; moving the kids' iPhones off of our family plan. My friend Gordon F explained how it works, but see also a TUAW article of 8/11.

Here's the short version of Gordon's scheme:

Move your old number to Google Voice ($20 to Google) if you want to keep it.
Start with an AT&T GoPhone plan. You'll need any old AT&T dumbphone, borrow one or dig something out of the closet.
- Pay As You Go Online
- AT&T GoPhone - Prepaid Cell Phones
At the AT&T store get a GoPhone SIM in your dumbphone paying the minimal fee for the 10 cents/min voice plan.
Buy a $100 airtime card. This card has a 1 year expiration time.
If you want data, buy a $25 500 MB data package. This normally expires in 1 month, but then each month buy a 10MB $5/month on an automatic purchase plan. This causes the data package to rollover. Over two years total cost is $145 for 740MB.
If you want texting pay $5/month for 200 messages.

I've yet to way the costs of this plan against keeping the kids on our family plan and dumping SMS in favor of data messaging. I think the total costs will be close.

Update 111111: Must be in the air. Lifehacker did a story on this a couple of days after my post. I found some mistakes there and nothing new, but it's clear there's demand for data-free iPhones.

Microblogging with WordPress

2011-11-09T09:57:00.000-06:00

After dispensing with Posterous as a Google Reader social replacement, I'm looking at microblogging with WordPress. This seems a good start:

WordPress › microblogging WordPress Plugins.

Posterous - a Google Reader social replacement?

2011-11-06T19:50:00.003-06:00

It's tough to replace Google Reader Social (damn you Google). I've been generating tweets from Google Reader, but the workflow is awkward on the native web app. Tweeting from the feedstream is a bit better with Reeder.app, but still not good enough. In any case, Twitter isn't what I want...

Gordon's Tech: After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side
I'm looking for ...
Bookmarklet that generates posts with title, url, excerpt and annotation.
Must have an RSS feed.
Must have a business model that involves me paying for services received.
Either I have control over the data store or there's a way to create a read-only repository I can keep.
Reeder.app support, so I can use Reeder.app for IOS and Reeder.app for Mac, avoid Google's miserable UI, and prepare for migration to another OPML store.
Twitter integration so it tweets shares for those who are good with Twitter's limitations.

There are GR.oldstyle replacements under development, but for now most of us are looking at Tumblr and Posterous as microblogging solutions. For unclear reasons I've been experimenting first with Posterous.

Posterous does pretty well against my list...

Big time bookmarklet with title, url, excerpt and annotation.
RSS feeds, though these are being minimized in favor of (yes, you guessed) proprietary and closed pub/sub (like G+).
Business model that .... ummm .... ok, so they don't have a way to make money ....
Each Posterous post can generate a secondary post to my Dreamhost Wordpress blog.
No built in Reader.app support, but good support for processing emailed content. Google Reader will 'send to' Posterous but I don't like how it works.
Tweets on post.

In addition Posterous will import from Blogger and Wordpress but not, alas, from an RSS feed (or I'd pull in my Google Reader Shares).

Documentation is a bit hard to find, in fact, once you sign in to Posterous it's pretty much hidden. The Posterous 'faq' is a good start, but eventually I blundered my way to Posterous Help. It includes ...

A list of autopost (secondary post) sites: WordPress (XML-RPC only), Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz (!), Blogger, Tumblr (!), Drupal, Delicious - but not, of course, G+. A single Posterous post can produce many secondary posts. I believe the bookmarklet allows us to select a subset at time of posting.
Posterous is integrated with several Twitter clients, so can comment on Twitter.
Integrate with custom domain (so micro.kateva.org for example)
Adding a G+ button (this is an ugly hack, a G+ API would make this feasible)

Overall, it's promising.

Except ....

Except for my #3 item. They're "free". I don't like "free". Autopost alleviates some of the risk, but free is bad. It's not good that just two months ago they went from a focus on microblogging to trying to imitate G+.

See also:

Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass « PEG on Tech (1/10): To me this makes Posterous more appealing.
HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Posterous (9/2009)
Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network 9/11): Turns out a month ago they tried to relaunch as a G+ like service. Kind of ominous.

Update 11/9/2011: Thinking this over more. I see from comments on the Mashable 9/11 article that Posterous dropped tagging from posts. That's a real change in direction for a microblogging solution. I'm getting the sinking feeling that I would have loved Posterous in early 2010, but now their future is bleak. I'm not looking for a revenue-free small world version of G+. I'll review Tumblr next.

Update 11/24/2011: I searched. And searched. And I can't find any way to delete a Posterous Space. I do see how to delete accounts, but not Spaces. If there really is no way to delete a Space, short of deleting an Account, then Posterous is a crazy-most-avoid kind of place.

Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G)

2011-11-05T19:06:00.002-05:00

AT&T has significantly increased the effective cost of our family plan, partly through a covert and possibly illegal 2009 contractual change. It's effectively a 20% increase that's come due now.

I'm looking at alternatives. The most promising two are PAYG SIMs and, paradoxically, buying new iPhones on contract and selling them to China to fund use of the kids' old out-of-contract-but-forever-carrier-locked iPhones with the mandated $15/month AT&T smartphone tax.

Another option is to replace texting use. For example, we could sell the old 3Gs, buy iPhone 4s, have AT&T turn off texting (they will do that, albeit reluctantly), use iOS iMessage [1] among us, and use Google Voice for SMS as needed [2]. Dropping our $30 text and mobile-to-mobile plan would cover the cost of AT&T's covert rate increase.

Facebook Messenger is a cheaper option, particularly if one is going to use Google Voice for texting and disable texting on all phones.

So I ran some tests on my 4 and my son's 3G. (I'm still on iOS 4, waiting for at least iOS 5.01 and for all my apps to get settled in). Alas, Messenger needs work.

It's a slow app that takes a while to load. Messages are very fast (WiFi), but one message got stuck in the queue for a minute (!). It took only a few minutes of use to turn up bugs and performance issues.

So initial impressions are mixed, but we'll keep testing. I'm also researching alternatives. It's too bad Google is famously incompetent at iOS development (where did all their smart people go? Has any company flamed out so quickly?)

AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless

2011-11-04T23:41:00.002-05:00

AT&T promotes their "smart limits for wireless" $5/month service to limit phone use for family plans.

It includes limits on texting -- except AT&T no longer cells a limited texting plan. It's only unlimited or .25/message. So this is really only useful if you want to disable texting, but you can call AT&T customer service and say you want administrative texting only -- for no charge.

The "smart limits" includes limits on data use -- except they don't work on a phone that might really use data:

Does Smart Limits for Wireless work for restricting all web browsing / data usage?We’re sorry, but Browsing Limits and Time of Day Restrictions will not block or restrict data usage through non-Media™ Net internet browsers. Certain data-centric devices such as BlackBerry® devices offer non-Media Net browsers. In addition, Browsing Limits will not block or restrict a user’s data usage if the user is also subscribed to DataConnect, LaptopConnect, Tethering (connecting a wireless device to a laptop) or Blackberry services, while the user is in WiFi mode, or while the user is using iPhone 3.0 software or later.

It also includes number blocking (could be useful) and "parental controls" which, I suspect, don't work on smartphones.

This service must be a money spinner, but, really, its obsolete. Not coincidentally, it's very hard to actually locate the link that allows one to configure this plan. We had it leftover from when it made sense; I was keeping it in part for the data limitation issues. Turns out that was a mistake.

Since this plan doesn't limit iPhone data, it means if you're purchasing a minimal 200MB/month data plan for a child with an inherited smartphone you have no way to prevent them going over their data limit and running up major fees. The best you can do is disable access to Safari, YouTube and the AppStore (AppStore allows video views). Note when App Store is disabled you can't install or update Apps!

See also:

XWiki - Open source, LGPL, WYSIWYG

2011-11-04T10:57:00.001-05:00

A colleague pointed me to XWIKI. I really want to know how I missed this, version 1 was 2008 but it has roots back to 2003. I've been looking for an open source wiki with rich text editing. In some ways it's the OpenOffice replacement for Sharepoint.

It's LGPL, and sold into the enterprise. Good wikipedia discussion.

Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan

2011-11-03T21:51:00.003-05:00

This is the season for corporate evil. First Google nukes my memory, then AT&T Wireless messes with our family mobile phone plan.

So I'm replacing Google Reader share and my kids phone plan at the same time. So much for my cognitive surplus.

The boys iPhone use had been working out well. They've been using battered old iPhone 3G and 3GSs inherited from Emily and I. Added to our family plan each kid costs us are $12/month with no data and $7.50/month text [2]. The phones are parental controlled - so no browser access, but when there's wifi they get email. They also get Navigon for GPS (no data needed), lots of apps [3], music, tv shows [4], movies, etc.

That just changed. AT&T whacked us with an automatic $30/month mandatory data plan on a phone that has never used cellular data [5]. (and, coincidentally, knocked out the texting service when cellular data was disabled). I won't go through the sordid details here, but do follow the link if you're interested. If you're in MN, feel free to do like me and submit a complaint to our AG.

Supposedly the fee has been reversed [6]. Now I need a plan B.

We can rule out paying a monthly data fee in the absence of a contract. That's what AT&T is lusting after. With a subsidized iPhone they have to send part of that fee to Apple, with an 'bring-your-own-iPhone' (BYOI) they keep the whole thing. This is what they live for.

So the options are some combination of:

Sell the old 3Gs/3GS and use the money to buy two refurbished iPod Touchs. Buy cheap dumbphones for the kids. One guy uses his voice/text so little we could drop his coverage.
Study other vendors and see what their BYOI policy is. Consider switching next summer/fall and pay the exit cost for Emily's 4S.
Get an iPhone 4s and an iPhone 4 under contract. I take the 4s. Sell my iPhone 4 and the brand new iPhone 4 and accept the minimal AT&T data fee $15/month. Dump the text plan, have AT&T turn off texting for the kids, and use Facebook messenger. (since Emily and I can use Apple's messenger service).
Drop our family plan altogether. Kids use Paygo SIMs, maybe with jailbreaking. Emily and I go single with separate discounts and cheaper LOS. Could save significantly.
We're paying $30/month for family messaging unlimited with mobile-to-mobile calling. I think AT&T snuck that one in during a recent service change. They're good at being bad. If we do a minimal data plan for the kids, and I put iOS 5 on my phone, we can drop this money sucking item.
Jailbreak and use with T-mobile paygo

Hmm. There are some good options in here. I might start with #5 for now -- since the costs are about the same. Then I'll look at the other options.

Maybe I can make AT&T pay for making me think about this. And if I can help others, then they'll pay some more.

- fn-

[1] List $10/month plus another $2 in unlisted fees. In general true base charges from AT&T are 20% higher than listed charges. [2] Unlimited family plan/4. [3] Because FairPlay allows kids apps and any media to be shared, and iPhone games are inexpensive, an iPhone is the world's cheapest game console by a large margin. [4] The 12yo spends his chore money on Dilbert cartoons for $2/apiece. [5] Curiously when they did this they also disabled SMS/MMS. So SMS/MMS works without a data plan, but when a data plan exists it is used. Feels like a bit of a scam. [6] AT&T gets about $5,500 from our family every two years. In other words, our mobile plan costs rival the costs of operating a car. That may be why they reversed. Or not; we are small in their eyes.

See also:

Dear Aunt TUAW: What is this cheap iPhone data plan you speak of? An easy option for the 3GS and possibly a very good fit for the kid that has the 3GS. This deserves careful study.
PwnageTool - Wikipedia
Use an iPhone on T-Mobile with Jailbreak - 2010/9/22
Port your number into Google Voice FAQ - Google Voice Help: it costs $20 to port a number, but local numbers are hard to get. Plus losing numbers is very expensive for AT&T. So this is a cheap bit of revenge.
Gordon's Tech: AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless: This makes a paygo plan particularly appealing. There's nothing to stop a young person from running up huge fees.
H2O Wireless Unlimited - Prepaid Wireless SIM Card (Best Buy): sometimes these work in some iPhones in some regions - voice and text only. Worth an experiment

Update 11/4/2011: I bought a $15 data plan for one child, put the other's SIM in a dumbphone and discontinued worthless SmartLimits. So I'm behind $10/month for now. I'm concerned about tracking data usage even with YouTube, Safari and iTunes locked out. I'm planning to test a H2O Wireless SIM Card (no jailbreak or unlocking for AT&T phones, voice/text only) then test an AT&T PAYG SIM (voice/text). I'm also testing Facebook Messenger and looking to SMS alternatives. If I take the boys off the family plan I'll port their numbers to Google Voice (take that AT&T!).

Although the H2O website doesn't say anything at all about iPhone users, there's a MyH2O app on the App Store. However the H2O wireless cards expire after 30 days, so they're better suited to a heavy voice/data user than to our guys; there's really no saving over our family plan.

I still don't understand the AT&T PAYG plans. Their web site isn't too helpful. Is it really $30/month minimum, or is that somehow an initial payment with an expiration > 30 days? Consumer Reports tells us ... "AT&T's prepaid Go Phone service was among the lowest-scoring no-contract services in our Ratings."

BTW, Google search is a complete failure on this topic. The spammers have won.

Update 11/30/2011: How it ended. Victory! Lots of links to related strategies.

Fixing OS X Cmd-H problem (hide windows)

2011-11-03T13:38:00.001-05:00

In OS X the keyboard shortcut Command + H (Cmd-H) hides the current app windows.

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts: "Command-H Hide the windows of the currently running application"

This is a very old behavior. It made sense in Multifinder days; it's worse than useless in Snow Leopard -- it is inconsistent with Expose and Spaces. In Lion it's not quite so bad, but my fingers long ago mapped Cmd-H to "show history" in all browers.

I'm always hiding Safari, and having to unhide.

Grrr.

Today I realized I could do something about this. In keyboard shortcuts I mapped Cmd-H to Help, a system wide command. That's still a problem, but at least I don't hide my windows when I try to access history.

Next I'll try to remap the Safari shortcut for history to cmd-H, but even this is a big help.

Update: If I map Cmd-H to a system action like help file, it trumps mapping it to an app-specific menu item like Safari history. I decided to go with cmd-H for Safari, but outside of Safari it doesn't currently do anything. I might be able to use it for other app-specific menu actions. This will help!

After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side

2011-11-01T10:39:00.003-05:00

When a character in Charles Stross' Accelerando loses his prosthetic brain he's almost helpless; effectively amnestic. It's the future equivalent of not knowing anyone's number because it's all in your iPhone.

That's how I feel after Google amputated my Google Reader shares. I've got phantom prosthetic memory syndrome -- I keep trying to access a store that no longer exists.

On the bright side, it turns out I have 3 children, 1 wife and 1 dog. Who knew?

On the dark side, for a tech company being stupid is worse than being evil, but being evil AND stupid is even worser. (See, Google really has lobotomized me.)

Bad stuff, but it is time to move on. I've written my Dear Google letter, deleted the G+.app from my iPhone, switched my default search engine to Bing, and installed Firefox on my work machine. I'll work on remembering what was good about Google; we had some good times in Google's glory days.

So what replaces Google Reader social? [1]

At first, I thought it would be Twitter. So I stared using Twitter.

Wow. Martin is right - Twitter is a big step down from GR Shares. I'm sure I'll figure ways to use Twitter, especially after I go to iOS 5.0+, but it's no GR Share.

So what is out there to replace GR? Candidates include Posterous, Tumblr, and Zootool - though none of those seem to be true Reader Share contenders. The original GR team was wonderful.

I'll be looking around in future posts. I'll end this post with a list of what I'm looking for ...

Bookmarklet that generates posts with title, url, excerpt and annotation.
Must have an RSS feed.
Must have a business model that involves me paying for services received.
Either I have control over the data store or there's a way to create a read-only repository I can keep.
Reeder.app support, so I can use Reeder.app for IOS and Reeder.app for Mac, avoid Google's miserable UI, and prepare for migration to another OPML store.
Twitter integration so it tweets shares for those who are good with Twitter's limitations.

See also:

Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head

[1] I just bought Reeder.app for Mac to reduce the pain of Google's mangling of the GR's most basic feed reader functions.

Update: Curiously, the GR shares still exist. My old share page is up: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jfaughnan, it still has a feed, and items shared in 3rd party apps (Reeder.app, etc) are added there. The share links is simply missing in the redesigned GR UI. I can't consume this feed in GR because it hides it from me, but other people can subscribe to it.

Update 11/3/11: This is a hot topic on, ironically, G+. That's the best source for non-google ideas. Tumblr w/ secondary Twitter reposts seems to be the default choice (more on that to come), but other that are showing up ...

Netvibes - Dashboard Everything: aimed at megacorp, but has a free option (freemium)
Ditching Google Reader after the changes? This site makes it easy to use Twitter instead - The Next Web: Go hard to Twitter
A Parallel Universe In Which Google+ Enhances Google Reader: Ok, so this isn't a fix. Barring brane traversal.

Former Google product manager on the trashing of Google Reader

2011-11-01T08:15:00.001-05:00

A former Product Manager for Google Reader shares my feelings about Google's act of mass data destruction (emphases mine. I resisted the impulse to use blinking bold fonts the color of arterial blood.) ...

Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?

Google released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster. Since the general changes were pre-announced last week, most of us were prepared for the letdown, but actually seeing how it works end to end has made several flaws abundantly clear. Let's start with the obvious...

... When you log into Reader, what the hell do you think your primary objective is? Did you answer "stare at a giant header bar with no real estate saved for actual reading"? Congrats, here's your prize:

Reader is a product built to consume information, quickly. We designed it to be very good at that one thing. G+ is an experience built around browsing (similar to Facebook) and socializing. Taking the UI paradigm for G+ and mashing it onto Reader without any apparent regard for the underlying function is awful and it shows.

The only thing left with any color of consequence it the obscenely red subscribe button in the top left, which in keeping with the spirit of prioritizing the exactly wrong thing -- you don't even need to use very often.

Ok, before we get started - let me be very clear about one thing. I think integration with G+ should happen. Reader friends should be managed in the same place you manage G+, with the same metaphors (whether you think they're flawed or not). Sharing should utilize the same infrastructure and plumbing that G+ does. I am not objecting to any of these things. Google has clearly made its bets with G+, and Reader should be part of those plans.

The frustrating thing is that these pitfalls could have been avoided through a more thought out integration. As Kevin Fox has already pointed out, Google could have easily made it so that sharing was pushed through G+ (therefore giving providing content on G+, and gaining all the benefits of an integration), but also replaced shared items from People You Follow with a Reader-specific Circle.

It's almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don't really get platforms. Instead of improving the G+ API to support Reader as a fully functional 3rd party client (a la Twitter), they've instead crippled the product under the guise of improvements.

Google has long neglected Reader as a product. (Hey can someone fix Recommended Items? Please?) Reader was fortunate to have a passionate team that was trying to do the right thing for their users by continuing to innovate and build on the experience, but it's not hard to tell from the official blog that core updates died down a long time ago.

Reader never achieved the massively popular status of Gmail or Google News. But it did develop a fanatical following of users, and was one of the few places that Google was able to experiment with and learn about social features.

After I left Google in July, I heard that there was renewed effort around the project and that a new team was bringing some much-needed attention to the product. I expected them to give the product a facelift, and integrate G+ -- both things that needed to happen.

But killing off functionality that could have easily been built on top of G+, and missing the mark by so much on the UI... and then releasing them under the guise of improvements?...

The comment on "Google doesn't get platforms" is a reference to a famous "we don't get platforms" internal Google rant that was accidentally shared worldwide.

It's just astounding. It as though Google is trying to be a bizarro version of Apple. They're now making some of the mistakes Apple makes, but they've vastly uglier and the mistakes are much bigger. It reminds me of Windows 7 ridiculous imitation of OS X Spotlight replacing the imperfect but superior Windows Search 4 interface. Except this is much worse.

I had all the same reactions as Brian Shih, so I appreciate his doing the posting work for me. Google did need to integrate Reader with G+, but they chose an almost perfectly disastrous route. Their culture is broken.

This Google decision does have an upside. I'm learning Twitter, Posterous, Bing, Firefox ...

PS. Did I mention that the Blogger redesign is almost as bad? Label selection is one bad aspect among many.

Update 11/2/11: A former Google senior designer has offered to help salvage GR.

The end of Google Reader shares and the rebirth Gordon's twitter feed

2011-10-31T23:06:00.001-05:00

(cross posted to Gordon's Notes and Gordon's Tech)

Google Reader shares are gone.

I'm not going to switch to sharing via G+.

I will, however, be sharing via Twitter: John Gordon (jgordonshare) on Twitter.

That Twitter stream used to consist of feed-generated tweets from GR shares. Now it's the closest thing I have to an archive of those shares.

Now it will be the primary place I share -- with the help of the Twitter share bookmarklet.

Components of a knowledge share solution

2011-10-30T23:00:00.001-05:00

Both at work and at home i've been studying our current toolkit for sharing knowledge. At work I'm supporting our software development, at home I'm looking at a ways to share knowledge to support lifelong education of persons with cognitive disabilities, including formal public education and home schooling. Naturally I'm looking at similar technologies in both environments.

I've summarized a few of the components I'm thinking about in a table. I compared best of breed solutions to the best (not free!) suite I know of and to Google's offerings.

Function	Best of breed	Atlassian Confluence	Google
commentary, notices	Wordpress	yes	Blogger
Q&A	StackExchange	no	no
collaborative hypertext document	TWiki?	yes	Sites
PDF, other	FTP/HTTP server	yes	Docs, Share
Calendar/event	Google Calendar	no	Google Calendar
Social, networking	Facebook	no	G+
Subscribe/notify	RSS	RSS	?

Looking at this solution set it's clear that each has its advantages and weaknesses.

Atlassian Confluence is the best integrated knowledge sharing and collaboration solution I know of. It's not at all free, but it's inexpensive for 10 or fewer users and anonymous users can have read only access. I give Atlassian extra marks for actually publishing an easily discoverable price list. Unfortunately I don't think I can get Confluence running at Dreamhost, my net hosting provider.

Google, like Atlassian, is free for a small number of users and provides high performance anonymous access. Sadly, Sites is a great disappointment. On the other hand, I'm not impressed with any of the currently available open source wiki solutions. In many ways FrontPage 98 was better.

Lastly the best of breed solutions have advantages in terms of data freedom and ease of switching providers or changing knowledge base ownership. An integrated approach can also leverage StackExchange -- the net's best technology for question/answer based information sharing. Likewise a Facebook Page can engage customers and provide a secondary notification solution in addition to RSS/Twitter.

Any thoughts? Comments are most welcome.

PS. I've been looking at collaboration technologies for about 20 years -- starting with BBS software and a long string of innovative solutions. The functional list would have had answers 20 years ago. What's different is that the audience today is vastly larger.

Managing Apple Community email: where to unsubscribe

2011-10-25T21:30:00.001-05:00

In the old days it was easy to unsubscribe from Apple Community Support emails. Every email had an unsubscribe link.

That's the right way to do it.

Somehow, that got forgotten when Apple made their support community "Social". I'm getting emails from every thread I've commented on, and I couldn't see how to stop them.

This stuff isn't hard, but Apple blows it every time. Something about their culture.

Anyway, this page seems to be the trick. It was a bit hard to find:

https://discussions.apple.com/people/jgordon?view=watches

It lists all the items I'm (unwittingly) "watching". I clicked each one and removed it. You might be able to find it in in Apple Support Communities> People.

A dead MacBook Air power adapter is magically restored. SMC problem?

2011-10-19T12:42:00.002-05:00

The power adapter for my 6 week old 11" MacBook Air failed overnight (45W MagSafe power adapter with "L" style connector $80!). No glowing LED, no charging. Happily a friend's works, so I know the Air is ok.

Still, it's most annoying -- especially since today's lunch trip to a nearby Apple store ran into their Jobs memorial closure.

Naturally I'm inclined to believe this is a national disaster, but this isn't a trending topic anywhere. So it's probably just bad luck.

Researching this did lead me to a related topic of interest. It's safe to use a higher wattage adapter with the Air, specifically the current MacBook and MacBook Pro adapters ...

Intel-Based Apple Portables: Identifying the right power adapter and power cord--US:

... Power adapters for Intel-based Apple portables are available in 45W, 60W, and 85W varieties. Although you should always use the proper wattage adapter for your Apple portable, you can use an adapter of a higher wattage without issue.

For instance If you have a MacBook (13-inch Late 2009) that normally uses a 60W adapter, you can also use an 85W adapter with that computer. You would not use a 45W adapter with that computer; it would not provide enough power for that MacBook...

I've read elsewhere that using a lower power adapter might allow the machine to function, but not to charge.

The article, incidentally, tells us the removable AC plug on Apple's power supplies is a "Duckhead". Who knew?

Update: On the advice of Dan Swift (see comments), I tried a fix that I thought was 90% crazy. First I confirmed I didn't have a 'stuck pin' problem. I checked all connector pins were moving and out. Then I charged it for 30-45 minutes on a friend's 'good' charger. Then I tried my charger. Now it works again.

This is the weirdest thing I have seen in years. I assume there's no OS in the (bloody $80) charger, so I assume this is a MacBook PMU glitch that will need a firmware update to fix.

Thanks Dan. I've changed my post title to make this easier to find.

I've posted on this to Apple Discussions.

Update: It's back to not working, which feels saner to me. I did reset the SMC, which may help when "The MagSafe power adaptor LED doesn't appear to indicate the correct activity". So it's to the Apple Store sometime soon.

I did find an article on a similar problem from 2008 that tells me that firmware issues can alter charging behavior: "In certain situations when you connect a new 60W or 85W MagSafe power adapter to the MagSafe port of an older MacBook or MacBook Pro computer, the adapter may not charge the computer and the LED indicator light on the MagSafe connector of the adapter may not illuminate."

What happened to Google calculator?

2011-10-17T20:24:00.001-05:00

I entered an arithmetic expression into Google -- and I got back a search result!

For years Google interpreted and solved the expression.

It's been a while since I've done this, but not that long.

Is it really gone?

I can't find anyone else who's noticed ...

Update: Ok, it's working again. Phew. That was weird.

iPhone 4S battery life is half of what it should be

2011-10-16T16:44:00.001-05:00

Emily's new iPhone 4S can't make it through a day of light use.

I suspect a software issue with either IMAP or MobileMe or ActiveSync polling. Otherwise, hardware. I posted a question to Apple Discussion: iPhone 4S battery life is half of what to solicit ideas.

I'll see if a software notice appears in the next few days, and I'll post updates here.

Update 10/16/11: This post has a likely cause. It's apparently a longstanding iOS bug. Restored accounts may have problems with IMAP/POP accounts resulting in high server polling rates. The fix is to delete and restore the account. I did that on Emily's account, and on my first try with the restored account Mail.app crashed. On the 2nd try I had to reenter her password but it's working now. She is getting new email, but I didn't notice a problem before.

The missing iPhone and iOS 5 PDFs - found

2011-10-15T16:24:00.001-05:00

Pay phones. Fax machines. Printers. All vanishing.

Documentation too!

I went looking today for PDF documentation on the iPhone 4S and iOS5. I didn't find much, and what I did find was out of date or incomplete. The "User Guide" Safari bookmark in Emily's 4S pointed to a web site that didn't describe use of the camera controls on a locked phone [1],[4].

I found the iPhone User Guide For iOS 5 by Apple as an iBook, but it's ePub only. There's no Apple ePub/iBook reader for OS X [1]. Kindle, sure. iBook, not so much.[3]

Google failed me, but old fashioned clicking found support.apple.com/manuals and the iPhone User Guide for iOS 5 (pdf) and iPhone 4S Finger Tips. The Finger Tips PDF and physical handout do describe how to use the camera from a lock screen.

- fn -

[1] Double click the home button from the lock screen. Brings up sound and camera controls against lock screen background. Camera response time is now faster than most dedicated cameras; about 3000% faster than my iPhone 4. I figured this out on my own, but later found it in the user guides I located. Because we restored from backup I suspect we wiped out the URL that is part of the default iOS 5 install.

[2] Many recommend http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions. This is, obviously, an Adobe product. I try hard to avoid Adobe's sofware. With the exception of Lightroom the quality is poor and the installers are insulting.

[3] Yes, Apple's missing OS X EPUB reader is ... astounding. My response has been to only get Kindle books.

Update 10/16/11: In the 24 hours since I posted Apple has updated their manuals site and added links from the support page. Guess they were just catching up post launch. [4] The URL for iPhone help that I couldn't find is: help.apple.com/iphone.

Warning: iPhone 4 cases may not fit 4S

2011-10-14T20:37:00.001-05:00

Just got the AT&T 4S. I'm seeing the same problem with Speck Pixelskin reviewer had with a Verizon 4:

Speck Products | Speck Products PixelSkin HD iPhone Case | TPU iPhone Case
... I bought this cover for a Verizon iPhone 4 and the cut out for the ring/vibrate switch does not fit. It may be fine for the ATT phone, but not Verizon. It is advertised as fitting both, but it makes it look like the cover doesn't go with the phone...

On our new 4S the mute switch slot is too high. I wonder if the AT&T 4S more closely resembles the Verizon 4. Many cases will have similar issues.

I'm disappointed that Speck is marketing their cases as 4 and 4S.

The iCloud identity problem: manageable?

2011-10-12T23:01:00.001-05:00

My MobileMe account user name is different from my very old (.mac) Apple account user name associated with all my iTunes purchases.

These worlds meet with iCloud. Except ...

Getting started with iCloud, Apple's new sync service | Web | Macworld
...Can I merge Apple IDs into one iCloud account? Not at this time, unfortunately....

Sounds bad, but things aren't too bad ...

Apple IDs and iCloud (apple support)
...You can, however, use one Apple ID for iCloud services and another Apple ID for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match). You will get all the benefits of iCloud whether you use the same Apple ID for iCloud and store purchases, or different IDs for each...
... iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: 
When you first set up your iOS 5 device, enter the Apple ID you want to use with iCloud. If you skipped the setup assistant, sign in to Settings > iCloud and enter the Apple ID you’d like to use with iCloud.In Settings > Store, sign in with the Apple ID you want to use for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match). You may need to sign out first to change the Apple ID.
Mac:
Enter the Apple ID you want to use for iCloud in Apple () menu > System Preferences > iCloud. Enter the Apple ID you want to use for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match) in iTunes > iTunes Store...

This means that family members who share a single iTunes account (our case) can still have separate sync accounts.

I'll be taking my time before I transfer to iCloud, but this is better than I expected. Good for Apple.

How To Share Google Reader Stories to Google Plus

2011-10-12T21:46:00.001-05:00

This worked well! I thought it would only share publicly, but it allowed use of my circles to constrain sharing ...

How To Share Google Reader Stories to Google Plus
... These are the steps to add Google Plus as a service on your Google Reader. Once you've set this up, all you have to do to share an article is the bit in the last step...

Now if Reeder would support G+ sharing ...

My Google Reader shares also turn into a twitter stream, albeit a poorly formatted stream.

Corrupted Databases.db file prevents Safari quit in Lion

2011-10-10T13:14:00.000-05:00

Peace Freak figured out why Safari / Lion wouldn't quit. I had to force quit to shut it down. The problem was in Databases.db ...

Safari Will Not Quit: Apple Support Communities
... went to: ~/Library >Safari and dragged the content of that whole folder to a folder on the Desktop.
(Note: the user library "~/" is hidden in Lion. So make sure to click on finder > press and hold Option > click Go on the top menu > choose library) Safari would quit normally!
So the problem was one of the files in the Safari folder. I started putting them back in one by one and restarting and found that Databases/Databases.db was the culprit....

Brilliant. PF is my hero. Heck, I didn't even know the option trick to display the hidden user Library folder. I'd been navigating to it using the Go item.

When I did this Safari next opened with roughly 1 billion windows -- everywhere. Including many full screen windows. Option-Close eliminated all but about 20 that I had to close one at a time. Some full screen, some windowed.

Now Safari quits normally.

Looks like an OS bug, probably related to the "restore on restart" "feature". That "feature" was a terrible idea when IBM tried it with OS/2. It hasn't gotten better the second tim around.

Based on past experience I bet this one doesn't get fixed until 10.3.4; these kinds of niggling bugs tend to persist. I'll get in the habit of closing all my Safari windows before I exit, and I'll exit and restart routinely.

Google translate bookmarklets

2011-10-09T11:11:00.001-05:00

Martin Steiger says a lot of smart things (at least I think so).

Problem is he says them in German and English (probably French too. Darn eurolinguists.)

Google Reader does a decent job with his Mac blog, but that doesn't work with search or traversing older links.

For that I use Google's translation bookmarklet English button. Works with any browser. Unsurprisingly German/English translation works reasonably well. Sadly Chinese/English translation is useless.

iTunes Playlists: manually set the played and unplayed list

2011-10-06T20:19:00.001-05:00

[This tip doesn't save much time, but it's a reminder that iTunes is one of the last "power user" apps in the Apple consumer catalog.]

Starting in 2009 I began having problems with smart playlists. Sort order in iTunes wasn't being respected on the iPhone, playlists metadata didn't update correctly, and the last played and play count attributes weren't behaving as expected.

The problems seemed to vary over time, but podcasts were always a problem. Since I'm a huge In Our Time fan I felt this more than many.

Eventually I resigned myself to the bugs. Few people use iTunes' astoundingly well done smart playlists; they're a power user feature. Fixing them was never going to be an Apple priority.

Looking back I also wonder if Apple quietly changed the definition of "last played" around 2009, so that it was set only when a tune was completely finished. For music this would make sense; but the last minute of most podcasts is taken up with closing music and the like. Since I skip that for the next podcast, I would never "complete" a 45 minute program.

Without a working last played attribute I had to manually manage the list of podcasts that went to my iPhone. This minor chore bugged me until it occurred to me that the wonderous Doug's Apple Scripts for iTunes site might have a script solution. They do - New Play Count v2.0 will script the last played setting.

In the midst of doing this, however, I realized that the current context menu for a tune includes "reset plays" and "mark as Played"/"Mark as Unplayed". It's not a new feature -- I found a 2006 Google reference on this. I just missed it.

So I set all the podcasts I'd listened to as "played"; I didn't need the AppleScript. I created a simple playlist that only included IOT programs that were unplayed. Now I let my podcasts run to the end, so I'm hoping I'll eliminate that little chore.

Email to Task: Remember the Milk gets it wrong, Appigo and Toodledo do it right

2011-10-02T10:34:00.001-05:00

I use Toodledo's task service every day; sometimes through Appigo's ToDo.app, sometimes through their web interface. I'm a customer, but not a fan. I need Toodledo to add full text search with the web UI, a feature that ToDo.app has provided since day one. I've been asking for it for years, but it's only recently that Toodledo told me they have something in the works.

Toodledo does have one killer feature. I BCC my toodledo mail-to address when I send email with an important f/u task and toodledo creates a task with the subject line as the task name. I use this all the time. It's the analog of Outlook's ability to create a task by dragging and dropping an email, note or Calendar item to the task icon. (Surprise! Bet you didn't know Outlook did that.)

Since I'm no fan of Toodledo I considered setting up Emily with their primary competitor -- Remember the Milk. First thing I did was evaluate Services / Remember The Milk for Email.

They got it totally wrong. Their primary use case is not task creation, it's importing tasks en masse. Every line in the email becomes a task, including the email sig. At a high level they support "emailing tasks", but it's completely useless for my purpose.

Sigh. If I were wealthy, I'd build a task/web app that works.

In the meantime, I'm evaluating toodledo's web app. It's supposed to do search, but did they make the same mistake they made with their online service?

Update: Stop the presses. Appigo's own cloud service, which I've never take seriously, supports Creatings tasks via email, and they do it right:

When an email is sent to Todo Online, the subject line becomes your task's title/name and the body of the email will become your task's note.

Except it's not working. I created the mailto address for Emily but the emails aren't turning into tasks. I'll give it a bit more time before I open a trouble ticket. Opening a trouble ticket, of course, is a great way to evaluate a service.

Another bad sign. There's no "Help" or "Support" link in the Appigo Todo Online UI.

Update 2: The task to email problem was a 'confirmation message filtered into spam folder' problem. The bounces were going to Emily's email so i missed them. On the other hand, this is a good way to test a service. When I tried to cancel my ticket I got "Fatal error: Call to undefined function mcrypt_get_iv_size() in /var/www/kayako/includes/functions.php on line 3434".

They are missing Help and Support links in their Todo Online UI.

Update 10/7/11: Appigo's mail-in support requires authentication of the sending email address; users can have only one sending service email. Toodledo lets any address work. Appigo's support network seems to have been down for two days. Lastly, the more I see the absence of a help or documentation link on the online service they less I feel they are a real company. I am also, somewhat laggardly, realizing that Appigo has NO data export service at all.

Update 10/7/11b: I switched Emily back to Toodledo. She is continuing, for now, to use the Appigo Todo.app. It only took a minute to make the switch; there were a few duplicate tasks to delete. Emailing a task now works as it should. FWIW this is a free feature with Toodledo, but a Pro feature with Todo online. I miss full text search; I'm back to waiting for Toodledo to enable this. In the end though the functionality, the mailto implementation, and data freedom brought me back. We'll get the Pro account if it works for Emily.

Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom

2011-10-01T10:27:00.001-05:00

I really think Tinderbox ($250!) should have said something about this earlier ...

Tinderbox: The Tool For Notes
.... Tinderbox shares notes with with Simplenote for Web and iPhone access...

The big (Big) problem with apps like Tinderbox, Evernote, or MindManager and its kin is data freedom. Specifically, the absence of data freedom. There's no standard for the representation of attributes and relationships in a nodes and arcs graph app -- it's a fundamental knowledge representation problem [1][2]. Years of rich data get flushed away when an app dies.

When, not if. All software dies. Ask Lotus Agenda users. Or the users of, and this is far from a complete list, Ecco Professional, InfoCentral, PackRat, Sidekick, Arrange (Common Knowledge - MacOS), InfoDepot, In Control, Cross-Ties, Palm Notes, Commence, Ascend, Arcadia (OS/2!), GrandView and MORE, Inspiration, Outlook Notes, and so many, many, many more.

Assyrian clay tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal have endured for thousands of years, my GrandView notes didn't do so well.

Data can outlive software -- but only if it's portable. Not forever of course, but maybe until the end of civilization [3]. JPEG images are in the running, video not so much. UTF-8 text files are serious contenders.

The SimpleNote ecosystem is based on UTF-8 text and RTF files with optional markdown formatting. That's why I like it - the core data store can endure. It's accessible from iOS device, OS X, XP, W7, Dropbox [4] web -- everywhere.

Still, notes alone, even with tagging and search, are not enough. I want a way to layer arcs upon the text nodes.

I could almost do it using MindNode Pro. I could attach SimpleNote notes to MindNode nodes and keep both MindNode file and SimpleNote files on Dropbox. Problem is, it's awkward to attach and create files to MN nodes. The icons are too large and the node doesn't inherit the file name -- and I need a keyboard shortcut to create an external text file on demand.

Doesn't that text icon seem a bit big to you? It can be resized, but it always defaults to enormous.

I haven't given up hope that Markus Muller will accept my suggestions, but I'm reluctantly leaving MindNode Pro on the shelf while I watch where he goes with it.

Tinderbox though -- if it could actually use SimpleNote ... and if it could become Dropbox compatible ... and if I'm careful about how I manage and distribute Tinderbox specific metadata ... That's interesting. It's a heck of a lot of money though, and I fear using its full power would put me into deep data lock.

See also:

ATPM 10.10 - ATPO: Deep Tinderbox: 2004 view -- but gives a good sense of how it works

Update: MaysonicWrites points us to Dave Winer's World Outline project, I think as an example of a liberated data solution to managing some kinds of information.

- fn -

[1] Consider HL7 RIM 3 and the challenges of CDA/SNOMED model integration. Ok, so nobody knows what I mean by that. Trust me, it's relevant.
[2] Ok. There is a standard. It's called the hyperlink and HTML. This post is long enough, but I'm tempted to look for late 1990s book on hypertext I have somewhere, and to summon a BYTE article on a hypertext version of Gopher from the 1990s. I suppose software archeology is a hobby now. I am disappointed that we don't have wiki-like personal information tool that uses HTML/RTF/text and hyperlink as the information store, WordPress API as an authoring option, and the ability to migrate the repository from local drive to cloud.
[3] Outrageous you say! What could last that long? Well, yes.
[4] I'm a late adopter, but increasingly a fan.

Consolidating Contacts: From Outlook to Address Book via MobileMe and the 5th Circle

2011-09-30T19:59:00.001-05:00

This option is, for now, only open to the few people who have MobileMe accounts. Maybe iCloud will add something like this. I'll pass it on for the record.

The time had come to consolidate my work and personal contacts. No, I'm not changing jobs. A change in work policy meant I could no longer sync my iPhone to Exchange. I need my work contacts on my iPhone to do my job, so I needed to consolidate.

This is what I did. I bit imperfect perhaps, but it was reasonably fast.

Using Outlook 2007 at work I copied all my Contacts to a PST file. That copy action makes Outlook resolve Exchange format email into standard email format. Took the PST home.
Use Address Book export to save an archive. Turned off MobileMe sync on all machines. Put iPhone into Airport mode.
Started up my VMWare Fusion XP with Outlook 2007 standalone. Using MobileMe on XP I did a sync to MobileMe.
In Outlook 2007 standalone I imported the PST file Contacts (1012 items) from the external PST file into a new subfolder of Contacts. I then did another sync to MobileMe.
Switched to OS X then turned MobileMe sync back on. It said there were 1007 (not 1012) items to install. When it was done, there 1002 "cards" in a new "Group"

Note that, at face value, I lost 10 contacts during the import process. However, Outlook still showed 1012 even after I repeated a sync there. It's mostly likely 10 contacts won't sync, but it's also possible Address Book does some kind of duplicate merging on import -- but doesn't add the correct recreate Group-Name relationship.

I then ran Contacts Cleaner from Spanning Tools (App Store, cheap). It found 635 "conflicts" (issues, really), of which a surprisingly small number were duplicates. I set to work cleaning that up (Contacts Cleaner has an annoying habit of flagging academic suffixes as "bad".

After an initial cleanup I went back and forth between OS X and XP/VM, each time repeating a sync then running Contacts Cleaner. It only took a few minutes to find problems and settle things down.

Some data is lost of course. Sync must have its price. I made liberal use of 'Categories' (now we'd call these 'tags') to slice and dice my Outlook Contacts. They are all gone now. That is sad.

On the other hand, OS X allows a Contact to be associated with more than one Group. I can make use of that. It's too bad MobileMe Sync didn't try to turn Categories/tags into Groups. (And too bad you can't edit group assignments on an iOS device!)

There was only one funny thing. I've seen this once before. I created a Smart Group for all Cards that had no Group assignment. Over 1,000 showed up unexpectedly. I quit and restarted and all was well. It's a good idea to quit and restart Address Book after a large update.

Once I had things sorted out between my XP and OS X sources I turned on my iPhone and let it reconcile to the new addresses. I found some oddities on searching while Spotlight sorted out the additions.

The iPhone sync added more duplicates! Yes, Synchronization is Hell. I'd almost be disappointed if it weren't.

Back to Contact Cleaner again and I returned to 1805 total contacts. Even so, I readily found a contact that wouldn't sync to my iPhone. I made another backup of my Address Book.

So I turned off MobileMe Contacts sync. That should have removed all Contacts from my phone, but quite a few remained. I had to remove my MobileMe accounts and add it back. Yes, even though we've yet to develop artificial sentience, we have developed artificial dementia.

All were back on my iphone, but we were back to 1043. Clearly, we had a problem. I removed more duplicates but ended up with only 1804. So I restored from backup.

I was in the 5th circle of sync hell, but I've been here before. Call me Dante. I used advanced MobileMe sync to forcibly replace everything on MobileMe with what I had on my home server. I confirmed MobileMe had 1805 contacts, then reenabled Contact sync on my iPhone. Then I forced sync from MobileMe to my other two Macs. At last all showed 1805 contacts [1].

For now. Synchronization is Hell. I don't think iCloud will be any better. In fact, I expect it to be worse.

[1] I'd written previously that Address Book for Lion didn't show a count of cards. It does; you have to scroll to the very bottom of the address (card) list to see it.

Google App upgrade heck: conflicting email accounts

2011-09-29T10:40:00.001-05:00

Google continues to upgrade old Google Apps accounts. It's part of their mandate to unify identities. The new Google (G+) is ruthlessly focused on owning our identities. That's not all bad, because the alternative is probably Facebook.

Still, it's pretty bad.

This has unexpected consequences. I used to use a Google Apps email address as a backup for my personal gmail address. Different accounts mind you.

Now Google doesn't seem to allow that. They seem to be enforcing a 1:1 relationship between Google Account and email address....

Alternate email addresses can only be associated with one Google Account at a time. In some cases, a person who shares an item with your alternate email address will be able to see your primary email address

This seems borderline insane, so perhaps this is a conversion bug.

Or not ...

PS. To make things even more interesting, the Google Apps account was a Dreamhost managed (ISP) extension to their services, and it wasn't supposed to have any email (DH managed email). Yech.

Update: Even though there was no gmail service associated with my Google Apps email, it was newly associated with a Google account. So it had to be. I created a new email address through Dreamhost and made that a recovery account for my primary gmail account.

Lion points: easy connection to Enterprise WEP

2011-09-29T08:16:00.004-05:00

I won't be upgrading my 10.6 machines to Lion (10.7) until sometime in the spring or summer of 2012 - at the earliest. When it comes to Apple's OS updates, I've never regretted joining the 3rd wave of adoption.

Still, Lion does some things well - like killing Intuit's Quicken and opening up the market for better alternatives. Mission Control and Full Screen are a big part of why the MacBook Air 11" is the world's best personal computer. Some of the best features, though, don't get much publicity.

Take, for example, Enterprise WEP. I don't know the full details of how this works, but I think it's some kludge that runs a VPN like connection through insecure WEP authentication. It's a bear to configure with XP, and I'm not sure Windows 7 is much better.

I didn't think my MacBook would connect to it. Sure enough, my manual configuration efforts all failed. Then, as a lark, I tried the "automatic configuration".

Poof. It connected. Works great.

You're not all bad Lion, even if you are a memory hog.

Tables for Blogger: newly buggy Google Spreadsheet embedding

2011-09-25T11:39:00.004-05:00

One of my frustrations with MarsEdit is the lack of table support. (Another is the weak management of images. Windows Live Writer has the reference design for both.)

Blogger's newish editor is no better. No table support. Tables are a bit of a lost art [2]; recently I had to summon the ghost of Netscape Composer (SeaMonkey) to add tables to a blogger post. [Update: I think AppleWorks used to 'save as HTML'. Pages doesn't. However, I discovered, Apple's bundled TextEdit.app for does tables (fixed widths only, 10.6 and 10.7) and exports as pretty clean HTML.]

This morning, apropos of nothing, it occurred to me there might be an alternative. Google Spreadsheet does tables (including, now, both vertical and horizontal cell merge) ... I found a reference (warning - the reference is obsolete)

Publishing Google Spreadsheet to Blogger - Google Docs Help
Go to the top of right of the spreadsheet view. Press the 'Share' button. Then, click "publish as a webpage". Then, click "publish this document". At this point, it is published. If you want to embed it, click "more publishing options at the top of the mock pop-up. Then, choose 'html for embedding'. Finally, generate the embedding code."

The reference, of course, is obsolete and so is Google's online documentation. I call this the Facebooking of tech -- there is no more documentation.

Here is how it works with the new editor.

Click on the Google Spreadsheet "Collaborate" menu item.
Choose "Publish as web page"
Click "automatically republish" and enable publishing (top half of dialog as of today).
Then, from bottom half of same dialog, where it says "get a link" click on the "web page" drop down and choose "HTML to embed in a page" from the intriguing list of options [4]

It publishes as an iFrame [3]. It's only partly implemented -- the obvious Named Range drop down was empty even though I created a Named Range. I tried the undocumented range specification as below ...

But although that worked when I viewed the shared web page I still got the entire spreadsheet when I tried their generated embed code. So there's a bug in there somewhere.

------

Yech. Since this functionality is clearly not finished in the new editor, I hope they'll get this one together sometime soon. I suspect it worked better in the old spreadsheet editor.

BTW, this is what the generated HTML sort of renders as. The markup is CSS infested and hence unreadable. In the old days FrontPage would have generated easy to follow table markup.


.	cell A1	B1 + C1


.	cell A2 and A3	B2	C2
.	cell A2 and A3		B3	C3
.	A4

-----

[1] It sucks that they use div tags instead of p tags to mark paragraphs.
[2] The web made a bad decision when we started using CSS rather than table embedding for dynamic layout.
[3] Incidentally, how I embed iframes for Google feed lists into an old web page.
[4] Interesting list of web publishing options!

My G+ Profile - open to connect

2011-09-23T08:06:00.001-05:00

My blogs are pseudonymous, but it's not hard to find my true name if you click around a bit. I just prefer that my corporate colleagues and customers don't suffer the full range of my opinions and speculations.

Which means, since G+ is open, I'm good with sharing and corresponding there. I typically share with my "extended circle" (circles and one removed) -- just a bit short of public. I use LinkedIn for purely corporate and teaching connections, Facebook is where I tell kid stories, so G+ is the intellectual slot. It's a good match to the blogs.

If you're interested, here's my profile [1] and my "John Gordon" circle.

[1] Note the URL has the number of this beast: 113810027503326386174. Just call me 113.

(cross posted to notes and tech.)

Google Reader may yet live: signs of buzz/G+ integration

2011-09-20T22:18:00.001-05:00

Today Google added G+ search to their newly opened Google Plus services.

First thing I did was search on "Google Reader" for signs of life in one of my favorite Google products. I'd recently put it on my death list due to long dangling half-finished work that encrusts Reader.

I found several optimistic signs, including this post: Tracy L. Crawford - Google+ - Google Reader Shares have a G+ link!.

In my case it's that the "options" drop down in posts shared by people I follow says "View this shared item in Google Buzz". If I try that it actually shows in G+.

Seems like some Buzz/Reader integration is underway. What you see may depend on whether you have Buzz enabled or not.

Keynote.app for OS X (iWork)

2011-09-20T07:55:00.011-05:00

I've made a stepwise transition to Apple's iWork suite for OS X. Apple's App Store made it easy; module prices are low and I could evaluate each iWork app separately. The license allows me to install on any number of 10.6+ machines on my account. Keynote.app, for example, cost $6/machine.

I started with Numbers.app nine months ago. My needs are not great, but so far I've been pleased. Of all the apps it comes closes to its Office counterpart. Since Excel has always been Microsoft's great software achievement this is strong praise. The main competitor to Numbers.app, however, is not Microsoft. It's Google's Spreadsheet. With offline support for Google Spreadsheet Mac users have two good alternatives to Office. I'm not sure which I'll go with.

This week I switched from Nisus Writer Pro to Pages. That's a surprisingly big jump. I'd forgotten that Pages is more of an desktop publishing app than a word processor. I'm not sure how well it will work for the family. I'll post more on Pages over time.

This post though, is about Keynote.app. I'll update it in bullet form as I use it to present a lecture this week. Below are my initial impressions.

There's a lot of UI continuity and functional continuity with PowerPoint. My initial impression is that the base functionality is a simplified subset of PowerPoint.
On my machines performance is much better than Office 2008 PPT (the latter was unusable). I suspect PPT's code base is a mess on any platform.
Importing a relatively simple PPT took a fair bit of cleanup. Slide component alignment varied. Diagram overlays scattered.
Exporting to PPT worked much better than import (mercifully).
Applying themes to single slides or presentations is much better than PPT (big plus).
Bug: I was unable to italicize text on an imported PPT. Seems Keynote assigned the text an exotic font that lacked italics or bold. It's a bug because the UI implied I could italicize, there's no error when you try, and the substitution is odd. The fix was to 'View Masters', consolidate masters, and change the Master Slide font.
Themes made a mess of an imported PPT. I'm disappointed in the Themes -- they're often tacky. Almost Microsoft tacky.
Consolidating Master is well done. View Masters, if you delete one you're asked to choose another to apply. Really helped clean up an ugly PPT file.
The default fonts in text boxes for my imported PPT had an odd font. I had to use the Format>Advanced>Define Text for All Masters to fix it.
Bug: Unpredictably, when creating a new row, I get a very odd bullet point. It looks like a Satanic glyph.
Bug: Keynote/Lion can run into issues with window positioning and external displays. There are also weird behaviors with save/versioning. These look like a mixture of Lion and Keynote bugs.
The default font for presenter notes is ridiculously small. There's no UI way to change it but you can hack the theme. If you make the font large, however, you can't read it in the fixed and narrow speakers notes display -- and long notes are mess when printing handouts. I hope this is fixed in the next release; it needs real work.

Update 10/20: Exporting as PPT -> "An unknown error occurred". Right. Not the only keynote bug, but certainly a bad one. Apple doesn't do very many industrial quality apps, and this isn't one of them (yet).

Resolving ghost printers in Win7 - delete redundant print queue

2011-09-19T13:51:00.002-05:00

My corporate Win 7.64 box had a printing problem. Everything looked fine, but jobs sent to some printers didn't appear.

I was also seeing "ghost" printers -- they displayed in Windows print dialogs, but they didn't show in Control Panel "Devices and Printers".

For example, from the print dialog I saw "biz-c1" and "biz-c1 (copy 1)", but from the control panel I saw only "biz-c1 (copy 1)".

I think this glitch came from running an XP or 32 bit Win 7 printer installer on a 64 bit machine.

The printers that had this problem had an extra context menu entry "delete print queue". After a I deleted the "older" (non-copy 1) queues this context menu item disappeared! (Google was no help, this was my closest hit.).

The transient "delete print queue" menu item worked to fix the print dialogs. They again show a single queue. Even better, my printing was restored.

I assume this is a bug in Windows 7 that Microsoft knows about. There has to be a reason that the "delete print queue" option appeared on printers that had a redundant print queue. It's odd that it's not better documented however.

Facebook Pages: Only Administrator status updates go to fans

2011-09-18T20:23:00.001-05:00

There are many books and web pages that try to explain how Facebook works.

Alas, even the most topical material gets most things wrong -- confusing messages with stream updates for example. It doesn't help that the rules change constantly [2]. Even Facebooks own, very limited, documentation is often dated. For example ...

Facebook Pages: How to manage a Facebook Page - Facebook Help Center:
... Your Page [1] can now post status messages - short text-only messages like those found on user profiles. Soon, these statuses will appear in fans’ News Feeds...

I don't know when this was last revised, but Page updates have been appearing in my News Feeds for months.

Ultimately, the only documentation on Facebook is Facebook. It's mind-boggling that this works for them. Suggests most of humanity has given up on understanding how the modern world works; which means that modern services need not be understandable.

If you want to know how something works, you have to experiment.

So I did this experiment on one of the Pages I administer. These Pages are "Liked" in my Profile.

I posted from two non-admin accounts (Emily and mine) and 1 admin account. I found.

When a Person posts an update on a publicly accessible Page it is public and viewable to anyone on the net, regardless of one's FB privacy settings. This is obvious in retrospect, but I suspect most people don't know this.
When a Page posts an update it goes to all subscribers.
When someone you "Friend" posts an update on a Page you subscribe to you will receive a Wall (stream) update notice.

What I couldn't test is what happens when someone who is not a "Friend" of mine posts an update to Page I "Like". I suspect, in this case, I will not receive any Wall update.

So for the Pages I administer, if I want a status update to be received by all "Fans", I need to post it "as the Page" rather than using my personal account.

john

[1] In Facebook lingo a "Page" is something belong to an organization or celebrity or business. Individuals have "Walls". "Pages" have "Fans", regular people have "Friends".
[2] For example -- until today Facebook sharing has been symmetrical. If I "Like" someone they are notified of my shares and I'm notified of their shares. We have mutual access. Ok, I'm simplifying, the notification rules are constantly changing.

Nisus Writer Pro, OpenOffice and Rosetta - why I bought Pages

2011-09-16T19:16:00.001-05:00

I've been a longtime user of Nisus Writer Pro. There's a lot of good things about it, but what I most like is the native file format. NWP uses RTF, the closest thing we have to a standard document format.

What liked least, though, is NWP's .doc import. It's slow and troubled.

Today I discovered something I liked even less. Our MacBook fan was running full tilt, but I couldn't see any explanation. Process Explorer didn't show anything grabbing CPU -- at least nothing I could recognize.

Then I sorted by memory allocation -- and I found OpenOffice.org taking up a very large amount of memory. Process Explorer told me it was running in Rosetta as PPC code.

That made no sense. OO wasn't running; it's not even installed on that machine Mail.app, Safari and Nisus Writer Pro were the only apps running. So I quit them one at a time. When I finally quit NWP the OpenOffice process died.

A few moments later the now Rosetta free 10.6 machine cooled down. The fan went silent.

There's not much on this around the web. Google found only the one post ...

Modified OpenOffice source code
Nisus Writer Pro (versions 1.2 to 2.0 inclusive) use modified OpenOffice code to help with the import/export of certain file formats. Under the OpenOffice license any modified copies of the source code must be published and made available. The source code used by Nisus Writer Pro can be downloaded below.

I'm on 1.4.2.

I think that explains why their .doc import was so slow and problematic. NWP was spinning up Rosetta code. It also explains months of mysterious battery killing machine baking problems.

NWP has now switched to LibreOffice (2.0.1)
Changed: import: switched DOCX/.doc file importers from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. This fixes a variety of problems, including cases of garbled text, formatting bleed, etc. Also made some other fixes to import process.

I suspect they had to do this to run on 10.7.

I could pay the money to go from 1.4.2 to 2.0.1 -- but I feel like a chump.

I'm buying Pages for $20, or about $6/machine.

Related

Gmail and iOS: When I say DELETE I mean DELETE

2011-09-16T13:36:00.000-05:00

I thought I had this figured out long ago. When I deleted an email from my iPhone, it would be deleted from my "Exchange" (ActiveSync) GMail account.

I was wrong. It works that way for my corporate ActiveSync account but not for Gmail. The iPhone button said "DELETE" but the messages were being sent to "All Mail". My "All Mail" archive was infested with spam.

I thought this was a matter of some fiddling with Gmail or iOS Settings. That's wrong too. At this time if you use ActiveSync (Exchange Server) to sync Gmail with your iOS Mail.app delete on the iPhone will always Archive in Gmail - regardless of what the Mail.app UI indicates.

This doesn't seem to be documented. There's (misleading and confusing) documentation on iOS IMAP behavior, but I couldn't find anything official. There is, however, a long old thread in Google's forums about this, degenerating at times as to whether this is a bug and, if so, whose bug it is. (IMHO - Google's bug.)

The only fix is to stop using ActiveSync for email and return to Apple's default IMAP based Gmail account setup. In that mode there's an iOS settings control to change Gmail Archive behavior. That works.

I suspect I solved this back when I used Apple's preferred iOS Gmail/IMAP setup, and didn't catch the recurrence when I switched to using Google's preferred Gmail/ActiveSync setup.

Fixing Lion's "application downloaded from the internet" bug

2011-09-15T20:14:00.002-05:00

OS X warns users the first time we open a newly downloaded application. The message is "xxx is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?"

It's a helpful warning. Problem is, for some apps I installed into Lion, it shows every time I open the app. Annoying.

I suspect the bug is that I installed them from my Admin account, but am using them from my non-admin everyday account. A permissions bug in other words. OS X usually has these, no reason for Lion to be different.

The fix for me has been to copy the app to my desktop. Then delete it from the Applications folder. Then drag it back to the desktop. This changed the permissions to read/write for me and ended the warnings. I then tested from my admin account and didn't get warnings there.

Not a bad workaround until Apple fixes this annoying bug.

Update: Thinking about this more, I bet the bug hits if you install from Admin, but never open the app from Admin. Next time I do this I'll switch to my Admin account and open it there.

Banks that support Direct Connect (OFX) with iBank

2011-09-14T21:32:00.001-05:00

IGG, the makers of iBank for Mac, list banks that support "DirectConnect" (OFX transactions without website login). This is the kind of information I want when evaluating a bank. (Any bank that supports DirectConnect with (ugh) Quicken should also work with iBank.)

The list is dated 2008, but i'm told it's regularly updated. I hope that's true and that they market this more prominently.

Lego Universe for Mac

2011-09-13T18:06:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to install Lego Universe on the Mac. It's a software monstrosity. I'm guessing a botched port of a windows app done by a low bid offshore team.

Lego is becoming a four letter word.

Update: It didn't work. I suspect it can't run on a non-admin account. During early installation the data input fields were partly scrambled and inaccessible. I deleted it and cast a spell upon Lego. The locusts are coming guys.

Services manager for OS X

2011-09-11T22:47:00.000-05:00

MacOSX : Services Manager: Apple's top secret utility for managing OS X services.

More from OS X Hints: Better management of OS X Services - Mac OS X Hints

Toodledo: How you can give me the search I need with your current architecture

2011-09-10T10:27:00.002-05:00

I've been a Toodledo web app customer for years. I use their web task management service with Appigo's ToDo.app.

It's an old relationship born of historic necessity. Toodledo and Todo don't approach tasks and projects the same way, there's the usual awkwardness of dueling data structures. These days most people would want to use Toodledo's cloud service with Toodledo's iPhone app or Appigo's Todo.app with their Todo online.

I've lived with the two for a while though. I appreciate Appigo's elegant iOS client, and it rarely fails me. That reliability means a lot. I know what works with Toodledo and what doesn't; I only use what works. On the other hand, I admire Toodledo's wide range of task integration and data liberation policies, especially the ability to mail myself a task. That's huge.

On the other hand, I need Todo's full text search. I've been pestering Toodledo to provide full text search of my tasks for (literally) years. They won't do it. So I have full text search of tasks on my iPhone but not on the web. On the web I can only search within a field (default is the task title).

Frustrating. I'm ready to leave both of them for something better. Still, I'll make one last try to persuade Toodledo that they can give me 80% of what I want without abandoning their current infrastructure.

Toodledo, here's the search I want built using your save search function, where "term" is the string I want to search on.

See, it's not so hard. You can do this with your current infrastructure by

1. Let me save this search with a name.

2. Let me make the named search my default search.

3. Provide a checkbox that means "search all fields with this string". Check it and gray out two of the fields leaving me one to type in (there are more elegant UIs obviously, this one has the fewest changes).

Thanks for considering this!

Update: Even simpler. Just let us save this as the standard search.

Update 9/12/11: This time Toodledo had a different response to my inquiry: "This is on our to-do list, but it is our policy to not comment on our roadmap or delivery dates for future feature improvements or bug fixes.". Joy!

iPhone calendar bug: list view one day off

2011-09-09T09:42:00.001-05:00

Odd bug! My iPhone's calendar list view was one day off. The day view was fine.

Fix was to turn off google calendar sync to remove those calendars. Then turn it back on.

New one!

Making the most of Google's alternative "2-step" verification model

2011-09-08T21:05:00.001-05:00

It's been almost five months since I implemented what I then called Google's two factor authentication. My original enthusiasm waned significantly as I better understood what Google had done, and how they'd stalled.

Now I'm in a more or less grumpy but stable relationship with Google's "1.4 factor" security model. I wouldn't call it "enhanced" so much as "alternative". If you're not careful, you may end up less secure than when you started. It is definitely not for everyone -- indeed, it's for hardly anyone who uses anything but Google's web UI to access Google services.

I'll share here how I currently live with what Google calls 2-step verification. First, I need to explain what it really is. Disregard Google's labels and descriptions; they're dangerously misleading.

To begin with, consider two kinds of access to Google Services (mail, calendar, documents, etc):

Browser based access to Google's services (Ex: Google Docs, Gmail, Google account, Plus, etc)
App based access to Google's services (Ex: IMAP/Mail.app, G+/Google Plus.app, Calendar/Calendar.app)

When you sign up for "2-step" you get two kinds of authentication for browser based access to Google services and one kind of authentication for App based access (including many of Google's iOS apps, such as the brand new blogger.app [1]).

Yeah, it's a mess.

There are two kinds of password/token access to Google's browser based services, including the ultimate service -- your Google account security controls:

Combination of a standard user-defined password and a token (app created or SMS messaged)
"Break the glass" emergency one-time use verification codes for when a token is lost

For App based access you use your Google Account to create one or more long (high entropy, secure if not captured) passwords. Contrary to Google's descriptions, these are not application specific. They're just alternative passwords for non-web services. You can create one and use it for fifty apps (iOS, OS X, XP, multiple machines, etc, etc) or you can create fifty. You can revoke these, but good luck figuring out which to revoke. In practice, if you think you've been compromised, you have to revoke them all. (It's possible that if Google thinks you've been compromised it would revoke only the password used. I'd still revoke them all.)

These Google-generated passwords are powerful. You can't use them for browser access, and you especially can't use them to get to Google Accounts, but you can use them for API access to all mail, all calendar, iOS access to Docs, etc. The more you create, the harder it is to keep track of all all of them, and the more vulnerable you are. Most of us, however, need these. Often.

So here is what I now do

On my work machine, which is not a trusted machine, I use only web access and I require Google to ask for a token at all times. (There's a bug though. Unpredictably Google will decide to trust the machine for a month. As I mentioned, Google seems to have lost interest in 2-step! Even on a "trusted" machine, however, you need a token to mess with security settings.
On trusted machines, including my OS X personal machines and my iOS devices, I use the same Google generated password for all apps. I create it once and store it in my encrypted 1Password database. (In the past, before I realized how this worked, I created many "app-specific" passwords. I'm gradually removing those to improve security and simplify revocation.)

See also:

-- fn --

[1] Wrong! It actually follows a newer practice. It uses a web UI for login. When you try a generated password it requests the browser password then redirects to a (crude) web UI for token entry.

Converting Email from Eudora OS X to a modern format - the TidBITS review

2011-09-07T22:10:00.001-05:00

My Eudora archive is in PC format. So converting to OS X is even more of a pain.

A pain I'll have to face sometime. As Eudora fades away conversion options narrow. So sometime soon ...

Today Adam Engst published the comprehensive conversion guide based on his experience with a million message archive. It's not pretty (emphases mine) ...

TidBITS Networking: Converting Email from Eudora: Why I No Longer Live at the P.O.
... Before you get started converting your Eudora mail, there are two cleanup tasks I recommend taking first (and another that I discuss in the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner section below). ... Before you convert your mail, you should compress your mailboxes, to make sure that any deleted messages that haven’t yet been removed from the actual mailbox file are not exported with the rest...

Second, if your Eudora Folder is anywhere near as old as mine, it dates to the classic Mac OS, where the / character was perfectly legitimate in filenames. If, like me, you used / in some mailbox names, you’re going to want to rename those mailboxes before converting them, since some utilities will see the / and create a new mail folder, thinking it’s a Unix directory...
... Apple Mail features a built-in Eudora importer that provides the most obvious approach for importing your Eudora archive. If it were the only option, it might be acceptable, but in my testing, it missed converting at least some very old mailboxes. In those it did import, it failed to bring in attachments, messages status, and labels. Worse, in many mailboxes, it appeared to duplicate messages...
... Apple Mail can also import Unix mailbox files, so the question becomes, how do you convert Eudora mailbox files into Unix mailbox files (the two formats are similar, but not identical)? There are a number of options here, including the standalone program Emailchemy and a utility called EudoraExport that’s embedded in Eudora OSE. I had good luck with Unix mailbox files created by EudoraExport...
... now that I have my entire Eudora archive in Apple Mail, I think I’m going to leave it there as well, in case I ever want to move it somewhere else. I’ll stick with either the version of my Eudora archive created by Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (which maintained some message status, along with attachments) or Eudora OSE’s EudoraExport (which didn’t maintain message status, but did bring in attachments and which seemingly found about 120,000 more messages). I’m not a fan of Apple Mail, but its future is guaranteed and I don’t need to use it for anything but access to this email archive...

I'm surprised Apple Mail can handle an archive this large, though Adam tells us search is very slow.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: Migrating mail from Outlook Express to OS X Mail.app: Using Eudora
Gordon's Tech: Converting Eudora email: 6/2009. Obsolete now, Adam covers same topics