User image propagation from OS X desktop to Gmail via iChat

This feels like it could be a security issue. It's certainly weird.

There used to be a photo of me that was associated with my Gmail account, it was displayed during Google Video Chat sessions.

Today, while testing iChat, I signed in to my Gmail account from my MacBook iChat client.

Afterwords, when viewing my Gmail account on my PC, I found that the Fast User Switching image from my MacBook had become my Gmail account image -- presumably because iChat uses that image as its default chat image.

The original Gmail account image was gone.

Evidently the "Jabber" transactions that seem to underlie Google/iChat credential exchange also propagated my account image to Gmail via iChat.

It's a good thing I don't have exotic tastes in user account images.

12/25/09: Still a problem. This time I think it propagated via MobileMe until it now shows up in my iPhone as my personal picture! The picture I used to have is gone.

iChat - weirdest computer experience

This was one of my weirder computing experiences.

I was testing iChat AV, connecting my G5 iMac to my MacBook through our wireless LAN. I was surprised to learn I could use our Gmail accounts for identity establishment.

The connection worked. I showed up on both sides of the video conversation, seen from different angles. There was something odd going on however.

The person I was seeing seemed less and less like me. The image was ... drifting ... in time ... backwards.

Soon I was looking at myself on one screen several minutes in the past.

Eerie. I felt as though I was seeing myself in another space-time continuum.

I have a feeling that the G5 isn't going to cut it. I think iChat might have worked with the G5 under 10.4, so I'm a bit suspicious about Apple (again)

I'll try with the AIM account to see if there's a difference, but I think the accounts are only used to locate IP addresses and ports so I don't expect anything to change.

Update: I tried the Bonjour chat discovery approach; it works on a LAN. There was no change -- the G5 pegged the CPU and gradually fell behind. I then set a bandwidth limit on both clients. At 200 kbps the G5 was able to keep up but the image was obviously inferior. At 500 kbps the image was pretty good, but the G5 gradually fell behind, after about four minutes the lag was pretty severe.

I also tried the Chax Input Manager to modify iChat preferences. I wanted to see if I could use it to make it easy for me to access and control my mother's Mac Mini. Unfortunately when I tested with Bonjour Chax prevented a connection. When I removed it the connection worked. Input Managers are often problematic, so I removed Chax.

So the good news is that there's no need for an AIM account any more -- a Google account works well. The bad news is that the G5 is pretty limited and that Apple's iChat doesn't degrade gracefully. Google's Video Chat does a far better job of adjusting to machine and network capabilities, but it's even less elder friendly than Apple iChat.

Update 2: On the same LAN I connected the MacBook to a 5 yo XP box -- an older machine than the G5 iMac with Google Video Chat. Both machines used the superb Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro webcams. (GVC won't run on the iMac, but in theory the iMac G5 and the old dual core CPU in the XP box should be comparable). GVC absolutely spanked iChat -- it was a far better experience. Unfortunately while iChat is not particularly elder friendly, Google Video Chat is absolutely elder hostile!

PS. Apple's Discussion Forum for iChat is for the 10.4 version of iChat AV. Abandonware?

Update 5/30/09: Just to add the general iChat debacle - if you enable any sort of "parental control" for an OS X account, even if you just lock the Dock, then iChat Jabber and Google Talk account options are mysteriously grayed out. No documentation, no explanation. What a steaming pile.

Update 7/13/09: How to configure auto-answer for iChat.

Safari 4: Google compatibility, PPC performance

I've tested Safari 4b OS X for G5 performance (where Firefox is noticeably slow) and Google compatibility (where only Firefox works).

It failed Google my compatibility test. When I pasted text into the Blogger BlogThis! window it rendered outside the window borders.

This is also true of Safari 3, and since I know there are of text pasting issues with S3 and Google's various products I didn't bother with any further Google testing.

On the other hand PPC performance is noticeably better than FF, which is slow in every way (especially keystroke processing). It's comparable to S3 or Camino.

I won't use Safari 4 any more than S3 -- I really need Google compatibility.

Eudora email archive conversion

I’ve painfully moved all the files that used to be on my XP box to the iMac. I’m still using Eudora XP with the files now on the iMac server; performance is quite fine.

The email archives, however, aren’t indexed by Spotlight. Not to mention that Eudora died about two years ago. I can read the Eudora .mbx (mbox variant) files with TextWrangler, but that’s not terribly useful.

So I’m looking into conversion options. I’d prefer not to import the entire multi-GB archive into OS X Mail.app; I expect it would keel over and die.

I used my custom OS X search tool to look for “eudora conversion” and came up with:

• Eudora vCard Export: get the nicknames out
• Eudora Mailbox Cleaner: this is the most used approach and it’s free. Note the warnings “Mail 2.0 introduced a new mailbox format which uses a SQlite database (~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index) in addition to the mailboxes themselves. Until the imported messages are added to this database, the imported mailboxes will appear to be empty in Mail. Select "Mailbox → Rebuild" from the menu in Mail to rebuild each of the imported mailboxes and all your messages will show up correctly. For a little less cumbersome way to do this, you can use the AppleScript included in the download to rebuild all imported mailboxes - please don't interfere with the script's progress until it has finished - the script is using UI scripting which has some issues.”
• Emailchemy: The personal version is $30. It has a wide range of export options.
• eMailman® – Conversion: links to just about every mail conversion option available.

I’ll probably go for one of these four. I want to research a bit more about just what Mail.app’s limits are.

Gmail’s undocumented POP3 download limit

Maybe this is why it’s “beta”.

Gmail’s POP documentation doesn’t mention anything about a message retrieval (download) limit.

In fact, there is one. It’s not new not new; I’ve found mention of it from 2007.

In my case I can download about 340 messages at a time. I think the limit is in place for a few minutes; I’ve been able to download about 3,000 over 9 or so sessions.

I discovered the problem while dealing with another geek tribulation (these things seem to come in multiples). I’d moved my ancient Eudora archive (abandoware) and, when testing it after the move, I saw my most recent messages were from August 2008.

So I tried again – but I was still in August. It took a few tries and cleaning up some other unrelated (but real) problems to sort things out.

Each time I fetch mail I get about 300-340 messages. It’s been that way for years, but I’d always assumed that was all there was. I didn’t spot the problem because I don’t read the email in Eudora, it’s just my local repository. Gmail is where I read and write.

Now I see that I’ve been slowly slipping behind the email wave front. Each time I downloaded I fetched about 300-350 messages, but there were always more in waiting. So the backlog grew.

This afternoon the backlog was seven months, but I’m down to two months now. I should be caught up shortly.

I haven’t noticed any particular limit with IMAP synchronization, so this may be a left over for a service they’re gradually deprecating.

Shame on Google for not documenting this limitation.

Google taketh away: no more calendar editing on the mobile web app

Five months ago I was able to use Google's web app to edit appointments. In particular I could mange invitees, something the iPhones inadequate Calendar.app doesn't do ...

Gordon's Tech: Google Apps calendar on the iPhone - the top secret web display

It's not the OTA blackberry-like iPhone gCal sync we want, but it's something ...

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: New Google Calendar features for the iPhone

... Google Calendar users in the US can now add new events, invite attendees, and see daily and monthly views of their agendas from the iPhone. This release also includes speed improvements for the iPhone interface....

... The iPhone Google App didn't show me the new calendar. I had to use the URL: http://www.google.com/m/a/faughnanlagace.com (our family domain) to see the new calendar.

Today I can add events using Google's natural language interface, but that's it. No editing, no attendees. I sync with my iPhone using the new Google Exchange server interface so I don't know if

1. This is a side-effect of activating OTA sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.
2. Google has permanently terminated this feature.
3. They've shut it down for repairs.

Very annoying.

Stop using Abobe Acrobat Reader

Another day, another huge Adobe security hole ...

Adobe Acrobat, Reader vulnerability affects Mac | MacUser | Macworld

Your first response might be to panic at the disco, but take a deep breath. Yes, the vulnerability affects all platforms, and yes, there are reported exploits in the wild, but don’t worry, Adobe will put out a patch for version 9 by, oh, March 11th, with patches for version 8 and version 7 to follow. Hey, that's only a mere nineteen days from now.

This is on top of their installer disasters.

I removed Reader from OS X 10.5 a year ago, and I've never missed it. Use Preview.

Karelia iMedia Browser - solving iPhoto and video library problems?

Macintouch mentions that Karelia has made iMedia Browser a free "BSD-style" licensed open source app (it's a component of their commercial Sandvox website authoring app) ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Karelia Software's free iMedia Browser 1.1.3 is a browser and viewer for photos, movies, music, and bookmarks. It includes support for iPhoto and Aperture image libraries, the iTunes library, GarageBand songs, iTunes and iPhoto movie and video libraries, major web browser bookmarks, Finder folders, and more. This release brings enhanced search (including keywords and comments in iPhoto libraries), a fix for a problem with redundant search results from iTunes, support for much larger iPhoto libraries, and other changes. iMedia Browser is free for Mac OS X 10.4 and up (Universal Binary)...

I'm going to see if this app helps with four problems I have that Apple doesn't care about:

1. My wife wants to be able to browse the family iPhoto library, but it's tied to my user account, not hers.
2. Network access to an iPhoto Library
3. Access to images scattered over multiple iPhoto Libraries. In this case Apple does "care"; Apple product management is obviously opposed to enabling iPhoto library management, probably to preserve Aperture's market.
4. Managing a video library. Apple has a half-baked (asinine, really) approach to video management distributed between iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes and the Finder.

Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro webcam for OS X and XP: I love it

I wrote a few weeks ago about choosing a webcam for some work projects. I ended up ordering a number of Logitech QuickCam Pro cameras; several model 9000 and several Vision Pros. The latter are marketed for OS X, but they also shine on XP.

I've made extensive use of the Vision Pro webcams. Today I compared the image to the built-in webcam on my MacBook and I was so impressed by the superiority of the Vision Pro I wrote one an rare "rave" review for Amazon. It's my first five star review in years ...

Amazon.com: Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac (Black): Electronics

I've purchased seven of these cameras, 5 for a team at work, 1 use at home, and 1 for my mother's Mac Mini.

Most of the cameras are on XP machines. As mentioned elsewhere these cameras install without device drivers on XP SP2 or later. Unlike the superficially similar but less expensive QuickCam Pro 9000 they do light balance and focus through camera hardware. That means we don't have to deal with flaky device drivers (rarely done well for OS X), and there's less demand on the CPU to manage the device....

... I've compared the video quality of this camera to the pinhole webcam that comes standard on modern Macs. It's light years better. There's really no comparison. It's better in low light, it's better at focus, it's higher resolution, there's far less image noise, etc.

The built-in microphone is superb. We get better sound quality using Google Video Chat and this device than we get with high end conference phones.

I'm a hard consumer to please, but I am very pleased with this camera.

Highly recommended.

Google Apps now includes Google Video Chat

I don't think this was always true, nor do I recall an announcement, but Google has added Gmail video chat capabilities to Google Apps accounts, including the top-secret free accounts.

Update: I was hoping all members of a domain would be "trusted" for Chat purposes, but that's not so. You still need to use Gmail's awkward UI to establish a "trust" relationship (invite to chat).

Also, this must be pretty new, because the Google App admin page still (incorrectly) says: "To use Chat, users must download Google Talk (Windows only)". Not so, Google Apps Gmail chat works fine in OS X.

XP doesn't like my OS X SMB share

XP really doesn't like my OS X 10.5.6 SMB share. I tried copying about 50 GBs of files from my XP box to the OS X SMB share over a 100mbps wired connection using xcopy and robocopy. I'd mapped a drive letter to the OS X share.

Problems included:

1. Time stamps aren't processed correctly. So even though date attributes appeared to copy correctly, both xcopy and robocopy interpreted the dates incorrectly (treated them as older than the XP source files).
2. After processing for a while the transfer would halt, and I'd lose all network connectivity (no ping responses). The usual error message was "the specified network name is no longer available", sometimes I saw "The semaphore timeout period has expired". It looked like the XP network stack had blown up. If I opened up a second terminal session, and just browsed the distant share things would restart.
3. Inevitably I'd start getting "Access is denied" messages with some files. They appeared to be file associated, but I could copy them in Windows Explorer. Once I got the message with a file it was persistent.

Wow. Really bad stuff. Following Microsoft's advice for network troubleshooting I tried setting the ethernet limit to 10mbps but the behavior didn't change.

I've had pretty predictitable problems with simply copying large numbers of files between XP machines using Explorer on many machines, but xcopy and robocopy are pretty reliable.

Something's definitely broken here, but danged if I can figure it out. My best guess is that the OS X SMB share is doing something that's cracking Microsoft's fragile SMB stack, but really it could be a network adapter hardware issue too.

I suspect I won't be able to solve this one easily. I'll try copying the files using the OS X machine and see if things work any better.

Update 2/18/09: I had no problems copying the files using the XP machine as a server and the OS X machine as a client. The date stamps on directories were also correct, I don't think the OS X SMB server sets copied directory dates equal to source directory dates.

My best guess is that the miserable behavior I'm seeing is not a hardware or network issue, but rather the result of bugs on both sides. My past looks into Microsoft's networking protocols have convinced me the "Heart of Darkness" has nothing on Redmond's legacy networking infrastructure. On the other side, I doubt Apple is putting a lot of energy into making OS X into a respectable SMB server.

Update 2/21/09: I’m now seeing crashes of the XP network stack, whether I use the OS X machine or the XP machine as the SMB server. Before the crash I sometimes see transfer rates slow. I can restore the stack by disabling my XP LAN connection then re-enabling it. I uses an new cable to directly connect the two machines (no router or switch) with no change – so it’s not a network problem.

I’m now copying files to an external USB drive which I’ll then move to the OS X machine manually. The process is exquisitely slow on the old XP box compared to throughput over 100 mbps LAN. The average real world throughput on the LAN was 6 Megabytes/sec, on my USB 2 XP connection it’s probably less than 1MB/sec.

I’d love to blame all of this on Microsoft’s SMB and Apple’s SMB implementation – that’s what I thought on 2/18. Alas, that’s too easy. This problem is too severe – and now I’m noticing problems restarting my XP box. It could be some nasty bug/virus/etc, but I actually suspect the motherboard itself is failing.

I’m not sure how old this machine is, I’m guessing about 2003. It is the first computer I’ve owned that died of old age while it was still quite useful.

Update 2/21/09: Now that I've moved everything and have been cleaning up the XP box, I notice I had Windows Search 4.0 set to index an iMac SMB share mapped to a local drive letter. Hmmm. That might put some extra stress on SMB. I'll see how things behave after removing Windows Share (I don't need it now for the XP box, I can use Spotlight on the iMac).

Update 2/22/09: I've been pushing GBs across the LAN using Retrospect Pro 7.1 (Windows) without a problem. I think the hardware is fine. I think the OS X SMB support is probably not immensely worse than native Windows SMB. Now I'm thinking I pushed the envelope a bit far when I had Windows Search 4.0 indexing a remote OS X SMB share.

Update 5/6/09: Replaced my NIC and things look much better.

VMWare Converter - turn your XP box into a VM platform

I love the competition between Parallels and VMWare. I very much hope they both thrive ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Along with last week's release of Fusion 2.0.2, VMware has released VMware Converter 4.0, a free standalone program that can create a VMware virtual machine from a physical Linux or Windows machine and can convert VMware virtual machines between platforms. This release brings support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft. Registration is required for free download...

My old XP box may be failing -- possibly due to a CPU fan issue (which would be fixable if I cared enough [1]). Time for me to move all the data off to the iMac server and then make a VM from what remains. Then, if the machine really does fail, migration to a new iMac or even the "legacy" plastic MacBook (by far Apple's best value) would be only a few hours work.

[1] It takes up a lot of space and power and it can't run most of the apps (OS X) I prefer. I'm not ready to throw it out, but I wouldn't mind replacing it with an OS X machine.

OS X Address Book to Google Apps Contacs using Google ActiveSync

I'm not the only one obsessed with integrating OS X, the iPhone and Google. I found a Google iPhone Help group thread full of fellow crazies.

From that thread I learned that OS X 10.5 Contacts, astonishingly, has its own private abilities to sync with Google Contacts, Yahoo Contacts and ... Exchange Server.

Huh? Why Address Book and not, say, Calendar?!

Good question.

Naturally, a fellow maniac is now using Google's iPhone oriented ActiveSync service to sync their OS X Address Book to Google ...

Google Sync iPhone = Mac OS X Address Book orphaned - Google Mobile Help

1) Go to your Address Book preferences, General Tab.
2) Then check the Exchange box and click on the Exchange button.
3) Enter your Google Apps username (first part e-mail in the E-mail field.
4) The password in the password field.
5) In the Outlook Web Access Server field, enter http://www.google.com/a/yourgoogleappsdomain.com.
6) Check the sync every hour box...

Holy Cow. I'm seriously tempted to try this. The catch is it's easy to backup and restore my OS X Address book, but it's very hard to restore my Google Contacts -- particularly their Group memberships.

Update: See Joe's comment below. I found similar comments elsewhere. This doesn't work with Google's version of Active Sync.

Update 7/1/09: Wade has an interesting comment. I may try this again with the current OS release but I'm also waiting for the new release of Spanning Sync 3 and its implementation of the Google 3.0 API.

Gmail iPhone web app has Google Contact and Gmail search. Who knew?

I can't find the post, but I know I've complained how weird it is that Google's iPhone optimized Mobile app didn't include search for Gmail mail or Google Contacts.

Wrong.

It's had Gmail search for months at least, maybe longer. Problem is, the search screen is in an odd place. It's way down at the bottom of the email display screen. You can double tap to to jump to the top of an iPhone screen, but I don't think there's a shortcut to jump to the bottom. This should either be at screen top or on the "More" menu.

There's also Contacts search. Go to Contacts from the main menu. Again, scroll to the bottom. Yes, there's a search button there too. Unlike the general Mobile App search function that runs against the iPhone's Address Book, this one runs against the Gmail Contact list. Like the newly improved web site search it searches all strings associated with a contact -- not just name and company.

None of this functionality is documented by Google. To be clear, these aren't related to the iPhone search function that Google actually markets -- that's an integrated search function that looks at the OS X Address Book as well as the web. These functions are much more useful. I'm exasperated that I didn't know about them.

Why so useful? Age and a congenitally bad memory for names. Age means that not only is my already bad name recall worsening, but the number of names in my Contact list is steadily increasing even as I'm expected to remember more of them on a daily basis. I'm over 1,500 contacts now; scrolling is not an option.

I'd love to have full text search across my entire iPhone, and it's aggravating that Apple doesn't provide full text search across the iPhone Address Book -- but again Google comes to the rescue. When I can't remember a name I can now search my full Google contact repository by city, by notes, by nickname, by any of a number of clues -- such as the names and keywords I attach to Contact notes. It's all part of my Google-powered prosthetic memory strategy.

Now if Google would be so kind as to move the $!$#!%#$ search screens to a more obvious and accessible location?!

Update 2/14/09: If you tap the "More" menu item you'll see a "Previous" and "Next" buttons in mid-screen. They hop to the top and bottom of the screen. Weird, but a good shortcut. I expect Google will soon split Contacts out into their own Mobile App screen; they're gradually doing that with Google Apps and Gmail. That will be handy.

Google books for the iPhone - not ready

Google has released an optimized version of Google Books for the iPhone. It sounds like quite a challenge. I tried it with Machiavelli's The Price and Sun Tzu's The Art of War (free only).

No luck. The search was surprisingly poor. Enter "The Prince" in Google and the first dozen or so hits are on the book, enter the same string in Book Search and you get an odd mix of texts.

Worse than the search, the OCR was pretty lousy, mostly because the underlying images were also lousy. Looks like the high speed scanner was having a bad day.

No threat to the Kindle here ...