iPhone 3.0: Apple fixes tune scrolling

I was briefly tempted to install iPhone 3.0, but I checked Macintouch. Lots of issue reports, so I'll wait at least a few more days. I'm trying to be strong.

Meanwhile, I read that Apple fixed something I'd found very annoying. The iPhone is now a better iPod, especially for podcasts ...

iPhone 3.0 Update: 10 Hidden Features - PC World

... Previously, while listening to a song, you had a simple dot on the song bar to rewind or fast forward. But now in the 3.0 update, you can scroll through songs at various speeds. Put your finger on the scrolling point and it will start glowing. Now, if you drag your finger left or right, you will scroll through the song at 'high speed,' and if you do this movement while dragging your finger down the screen, the speed decreases to 'half speed,' 'quarter speed,' or 'fine scrubbing'...

Navigating a podcast is pretty annoying on iPhone 2.0. I often miss my iPod scroll wheel. I really appreciate this particular fix.

Windows Search 4: Cannot select drive or folders (grayed out)

I recently reinstalled Windows Search on a freshly imaged corporate XP laptop.

I was dismayed to discover that the only thing showing in my “Indexing Options” / “Included Locations” list was an unused Outlook Express account. When I clicked ‘Modify’ to get to “indexed Locations” and “Change selected locations” (notice some labeling inconsistencies here?) Outlook didn’t show at all and all but one uninteresting folder on my C drive were mysteriously grayed (greyed) out.

The Outlook problem went away with a restart and a review with Outlook running. I’m having complex and intractable issues with Outlook/Exchange authentication, so I can’t make too much of this one.

The mysteriously unselectable grayed out C drive folders persisted however, and the Windows Search 4.0 Troubleshooting Guide was of no use. My clue came when I clicked down into the tree display. Turns out the UI is misleading; even when a folder is gray it may contain searchable subfolders.

Once I saw that, luck played a role. By chance my mouse rested on folder, and a yellow contextual popup appeared. The message told me the folder was not marked for indexing.

Aha! The original disk image was flawed. Somehow the default “allow indexing service to index this disk” had been altered. I opened the context menu for the C drive and checked the appropriate box.

Windows Search 4 now worked.

Update: Incidentally, the machine transition revealed that I'm utterly dependent on Windows Search. I can no longer work without robust full text search and a powerful collection of search operators. A new dependency ....

Configuring Outlook 2003 to use Contacts for email in an Exchange Server environment

I recently had to migrate to a new machine using old Office software (don’t ask), so I had to rediscover how to fix a common problem with Outlook 2003.

When you first start Outlook 2003 in an Exchange server environment it’s not configured to look for email addresses in your Contacts folder.

If you right click on your Contacts icon you’ll see, somewhere in a mess of tabs, one that says “Outlook address book”. In it you’ll find a checkbox “Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book”, but it will be grayed (greyed) out and uncheckable.

Turns out, as described here, you need to …

1. Tools/E-mail accounts
2. Choose “View or change existing directories or address books”
3. Click Add …
4. Click Additional Address Books

You should then see an option to add your Outlook Contacts. I suspect, however, you can’t add any old Contacts folder from a PST file, it must probably be the Contacts folder you synchronize with Exchange server.

Once you do this if you return to Outlook the check box will no longer be gray and Contacts should be checked.

Windows Live Writer: moving between machines (yech)

I love WLW, but it has an Achilles heel. On XP it’s pretty much impossible to move your configuration data between machines.

Of course that’s true for almost all of  Microsoft’s products, but we expect better of WLW. On the other hand, I hear rumor there’s a configuration migration service built into Vista (some OS), so maybe it works fine there.

I found out about this after I switched machines. I have the old data of course, but I’ll just migrate manually. It would be nice if the WLW were to build in a migration utility, but for now here are two somewhat useful references:

• Backup your WLW Settings: a post about this utility, but the utility is quite old and hasn’t been updated
• Migrate Windows Live Writer data: reveals location of the files, unfortunately key data is in the foul pits of Hell, aka the Windows Registry.

There’s some accessible data in ..

• C:\work\My Weblog Posts (path will vary)
• C:\Documents and Settings\[userid]\Application Data\Windows Live Writer

You might imagine you could copy your older WLW posts and drafts to C:\…\My Weblog Posts and WLW would be able to browse and search them, but that doesn’t work. It can open them if you double-click on them, but there’s a cache/index missing somewhere.

Happily, if you copy our old posts and drafts into the new WLW folders (ex: C:\work\My Weblog Posts) and delete the XML cache files WLW will rebuild them and find all your draft and new posts.[1]

[1] I got messed up here because when I forgot to point the “My Documents” folder to my personal file store. So WLW was only looking in My Documents. I copied the data from My Documents then pointed My Documents to c:\work then launched WLW.

Update 6/17/09: Corrected my mistake about posts recovery.

Why is Safari 4 so slow, when the beta was fast?

Safari 4 feels much slower than the beta version. I often run into typing problems on my MacBook -- I type far ahead of the cursor when working with Blogger's Gmail's rich text editor.

I never ran into that with the beta version.

Did Apple mess something up?

Probably.

Deep dive into the Palm Pre

An escaped image is giving techies a deep look into the innards of the Pre. Turns out the PalmOS is based on OpenEmbeddded Linux which in turn incorporates OpenZaurus which is descended from the 1990s Sharp Zaurus PDA.

And you thought the PalmOS was built new in 2 years. Not so. The genius of the thing is how much GPL software it contains.

The Pre continues to please, with positive reviews from Mac folk like Scott Gruby. Maybe I'm not the only one who needs a phone that excels at basic PIM functions (see Andy, I'm not always a market of one). I think Apple made a mistake blowing off the entire personal productivity domain.

One big caveat however. I fear the cloud. The Pre is a cloud phone -- it syncs with Google, Facebook and other Cloud properties. That's a problem for me.

Nisus Writer Pro 1.2

Three years ago I wrote a review of Nisus Writer Express. I recently updated to last November's Nisus Writer Pro 1.2 so I figured I'd supplement my original review.

In general, I'm a contented user. I wish I could use it more, but most of my printed writing is done with Word on an XP box. I use it for limited writing on OS; I've never really given it an acid test.

Over the years I've had two medium and one big issue with Nisus.

The first medium issue is that earlier versions didn't manage Word .DOC images well. Nisus would open the document, but when it saved the documented the images were not compressed. In particular, Nisus did not implement even PNG compression. I don't know if this is still a problem, but I've never seen mention of a fix.

The second medium issue is that even at NW Pro 1.2 you still can't save in Open Document Format.

The major issue is that the 10.5 update broke Nisus Writer Express and Nisus didn't provide a free fix. NWE was the only significant Mac app I use that didn't work in 10.5. It smells like Nisus was doing something programmatically fishy, and so they ought to have provided a free patch.

On the other hand Nisus uses RTF as a native file format, so Nisus documents are more likely than any other word-processing format to be readable in 10-15 years. The Style implementation (Pro version) is simple and excellent (aside: spit upon the Beast), and now that moving Navigator/TOC entries moves document blocks is a very reasonable outliner as well. It's the closest thing to an integrated wordpressor/outliner I've seen since FullWrite Professional. (MORE, bless its heart, was fundamentally an outliner -- though it was a better word processor than most.)

One of the strengths of OS X is that we have choices about word processors. Microsoft Word of course, but also Pages, Nisus Writer (Express and Pro), Mellel, and about 3-4 others (honorable mention to MORE's reincarnation - OmniOutliner). Nisus Writer's RTF support, style sheets, performance, and outliner features mean it's worth a close look by anyone who can avoid Word.

Making sense of Google's user created "My Maps"

I've long been frustrated by the awkward design of Google's personalized May Maps. The service feels crude, and I'm unsure how long the data will stay around.

Today I decided to try and learn a bit more. I recommend the introductory video (a very young sounding narrator) and I really recommend "Browse the directory". Turns out that's not, as I'd imagined, a directory of maps (why should it be?). It's a directory of Map tools that make "My Maps" much more useful.

I'd like to see what I can do in terms of Minneapolis St Paul trails, and maybe get some use of the msptrails.org domain I registered a while back.

Update: Well, I gave it a good try, but it's still a toy. For example, there's no way to edit a map you've created; you can't revise or extend a line. I'll wait until Google puts a bit more energy into this one.

Migrating my MacBook to a 500 GB drive

I'll try to update this with a bit more detail later, but I want to write this minor post while the details are fresh.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro from a 120GB Fujitsu to a 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive (totally bare from Amazon, just the drive in a plain brown box). I followed the directions provide by Apple, this is not a hard procedure.

I bought the 5000 rpm drive because I mostly care about reliability, low vibration, low temperature, and capacity. From what I read in this older MacBook the 7200's effective performance boost is very small and some 7200 drives have quite a bit of vibration (seems idiosyncratic).

I won't repeat Apple's directions, except to say they left off one little bit. I think this set of directions is more complete.

Briefly then ...

1. I considered creating a disk image clone on my PPC iMac then using firewire disk mode on the MacBook to clone the image over. Andrew, who is generally reliable, warned me of some issues related to using a PPC to clone an Intel Mac drive (endian?).  I had a very cheap 2.5" USB enclosure I'd used with a 80GB drive; it worked perfectly well with the 500 GB drive. I did discover that Intel and PPC Macs use different partitions for their boot drive. Intel Macs default to GUID partitions, PPC default "Apple partitions". So maybe that's the difference Andrew warned of. I did all the partitioning and cloning from my MacBook.
2. I used Bombich Software: Carbon Copy Cloner [1] to clone from my MacBook. It took about 2-3 hours; it would have gone faster if I'd remembered turn off spotlight when cloning.
3. Apple's directions omit one key step and tool. You need a T8 Torx driver to remove the metal shell that's wrapped around the disk. Maybe if you buy the replacement drive from Apple it comes with the shell? Anyway, if you have a Torx driver it's an easy task, but if you don't you're stuck.
4. Apple's not kidding about the metallic foam shield that's glued on the RAM cover you remove. It's not easy to get the shield back on, you need a non-magnetic plastic card to push it down so you can get the metal band back into place.

The first boot seemed to take an eternity. It was much longer than usual. I think the systems was adjusting to the new drive. Once it started it rebuilt some caches then completed. I almost gave up -- so be patient.

So far so good. The drive is quieter than the original Fujitsu and it feels more responsive (could be imagination, it's a 5,000 not a 7,200. I might put the original in my mother's Mac Mini, though if I'm going to bother with that hard to service job I might as well buy another 500 GB drive.

Now I can carry more media around, and I can play with more virtual machines...

[1] CCC is free and comes from a trusted developer. It now incorporates ads. Since users spend a lot of time checking up on the CCC process this is a fantastic ad platform. I donated $10 via the web site. I rarely use CCC, so I try to make a donation each time it works for me.

The Newton lives in the iPhone's CPU

Not exactly news, but still worth noting. The Newton's CPU lives on in the iPhone ...

AppleInsider | A closer look at iPhone 3G S Cortex-A8 ARM and PowerVR chips 

... The Cortex-A8 class is referred to in general terms as ARMv7, not to be confused with ARM7, which was actually a third generation ARMv3 used in the Apple eMate300 a decade ago. Previous generations of iPhone and iPod touch used an ARM11 processor, part of the ARMv6 generation.

Apple partnered with its British equivalent Acorn in the late 80s to adapt Acorn's RISC processor for use in mobile devices, forming the ARM partnership. Apple subsequently used a third generation ARM6 in its first Newton MessagePad in the early 90s...

Experiment with VMWare -- for free

I have sinned, but I have seen the light.

Now that I've joined the Church of the disposable image, I need to catch up on some basics. I've been using Fusion and Parallels w/ Windows 2000 on OS X, but the Windows VM world is new to me. So I'll have a few posts on that topic.

Since I've committed to Fusion on the Mac I'm experimenting with VMWare. Their primary end user product is VMWare Workstation, which is inexpensive for academics. This appears to be similar to Fusion on OS X. There's a generous 1 month free trial.

The surprise, however, is that you don't actually need to pay any money at all to do quite a bit with VMs. Both VMWare Converter and VMWare Player are free. VMWare Converter (Windows) will convert an existing machine, such as an XP machine, to the VM format and VMWare Player will execute these images. [Update: OK, not quite! See below.]

This isn't something VMWare markets. VMWare's web site doesn't list VMWare Converter as a possible source for VMWare Player images and even the VMWare Player wikipedia article doesn't mention this.

VMPlayer (Windows) will run their "appliances". -- and more besides ...

... Open Microsoft virtual machines, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly called Live State Recovery) images, Norton Ghost 10 images, Norton Save & Restore images, StorageCraft ShadowProtect images, and Acronis True Image images. In this process, the initial virtual machine or image is left untouched in its native format and any modifications are saved in a much smaller VMware-formatted file that is linked to the initial image...

So you can turn your existing Windows environment into a VM and play with it - for free. I think you can also run a VMWare 6.5.2 VM on Fusion but I'm not sure of that.

There are a few VMWare Player limitations, it doesn't enter full screen on startup unless you tweak a setting and it's essentially undocumented. I've also run into device driver issues, I can't see how to install the VMWare tools for example. It's really a bit of a toy but it's free. There's an upgrade mechanism to VMWare Workstation

If you want to download the Win 7 RC .iso file and turn it into a VM without installing it I think you'll need VMWare Workstation -- though if you have VMWare Fusion maybe you could prep it on the Mac then move it to VMWare Player.

VMware Converter comes with lots of documentation. Cough. Actually, it appears to be about as undocumented as VMWare Player. Must be a corporate policy.

I think there are two ways to run Converter - standalone and client server. I did the standalone conversion. I installed it on a machine and directed it to send the resulting image to a network share.

I clicked "convert machine" and followed the defaults. The one place to pay attention is where you're asked to select the target VMWare product. The default is some corporate product, you need to change to "VMWare Workstation 6.5.x".

A reasonably big VM takes rather a while to convert - overnight is typical.

More later...

Update: Ok, now I see the catch. Unless you install VMWare Tools you can sort of use the VMWare Convert image, but you can't go full screen, toggle out of it, some drivers don't work, etc. You can get VMWare Tools from VMWare Workstation, but there's probably a reason VMWare doesn't bundle them with Player. I say "probably" because I think VMWare is rather vague about the whole think. In any case I'll be using Workstation for my further experiments. (You might be able to install VMWare tools via Fusion. I think this is actually legal, since the point of VMWare Player is that it lets you use completed images and if you have a license to Fusion you can can complete them there.)

Update 1/21/2010: I experimented for a while, but I found VMWare on XP much less consumer-friendly than VMWare on OS X. In retrospect that's not too surprising. VMWare/Win is a corporate product, VMWare Fusion (OS X) is a consumer/geek product.

A sislaw’s Pre review

Sislaw Nettie (sister to sislaw Martha and to Emily) has a Pre.

I trust her reviews far more than the pro reviews – am I the only one to notice that Amazon’s product reviews are much better than those printed in magazines?

Like me Nettie misses Graffiti One. She likes her Pre a lot, but unsurprisingly the battery is troublesome. iPhone users can feel smug about the Sprint crapware infesting the Pre. NASCAR … brrrrrrr

My Little Pre « Nettie’s World

…I can’t delete the Sprint NASCAR app – other posters on the Pre forums yesterday confirmed this. RI-DI-CU-LOUS. So now I need to see if there’s any possibility of hiding it, although the thing I object to most strenuously is the fact that it’s taking up my 8GB space in the first place, of course.

6. Battery life. It wasn’t a very promising feeling when I woke up on Sunday morning. The battery had been at nearly 100% when I turned out the light (I had spent 10-15 minutes cleaning up contacts -more about that later) and all apps were closed. When I picked it up to say “Good morning dear Pre” the battery was at 65%! For 7 hours of (nothing?) — all I could think was that the WiFi connection was what was dragging it. The Pre forums also complained about poor battery life – and some constructive posters also provided tips, a few of which I’ve put into practice like dimming the screen a bit, syncing email a bit less frequently, turning off IM and WiFi when not needed. I think I also have to do more reading on better management of lithium ion batteries in general – a few posters said things like, “It typically takes a new battery a week of so to condition itself for maximum results” — is that really true…

No, I don’t think the “week or so” story is true – more like wishful thinking. Maybe Jobs was right about the battery cost of multitasking, though I could believe the Pre OS might be more energy efficient than OS X.

Nettie, if it makes you feel better my iPhone battery will run out by day’s end if I talk more than about two hours during the day (it’s almost a year old now). In airport mode it will last a few days even if I use WiFi occasionally.

Condolences on the Sprint crapware Nettie. Apple was in a stronger bargaining position with AT&T, though I’ve hear rumors AT&T has been fighting mightily to put their garbage on the iPhone. Rumor has it Jobs arose from his sick bed to smite them (ok, I made that up).

VMware academic discounts: Fusion and Windows Workstation

Post-Waterloo I'm a VM geek.

So, as a part-time faculty person at the U of MN I was pleased to see that VMware has large academic discounts.

VMWare Workstation is $114 academic ($190 list), Fusion (Mac - I use this) is $40 academic ($80 list).

Google's summary of their OpenID and federated authentication approach

This is what enables me to auto-authenticate with Facebook when I'm logged into Gmail. I've linked the accounts from Facebook using this Google API:

Google Code Blog: Google OpenID API - taking the next steps 

... the user is not just signing in using her Google Account, but is also sharing specific information from her Google Account with the Relying Party website. This information may be either static fields (using Attribute Extension) such as the user's email, first and last name, preferred language and country, or allowing access to any available Google Data API such as the user's Contacts List, Web Albums, or Calendar (using OAuth)...

I am concerned about authentication bugs causing me to be locked out of my Google account, so I'm proceeding with some care.

Fixed: Post 10.5.7 WiFi problems and XP IP address conflict bug

File this one under requiem for a geek and complexity crash.

Sometime around I updated our MacBook to 10.5.7 it developed a WiFi connection stutter. It would connect to the family network, pause, disconnect, and reconnect. On the second reconnect it would ask for the network password even as it took the correct password from the keychain and displayed it inline (so if one hit return it would connect).

Before the update, about 3-4 months ago I experienced some odd XP networking issues, sometimes including messages that there was an IP address conflict 10.0.1.5 - yet that address did not seem to be in use. I was seeing other problems at the same time, so I set hat aside.

Today, when walking new our Airport Express, I noticed our iPhone-converted-to-iTouch was only showing 2 bars in its network display. It clearly wasn't connecting via the closest WDS station.

With that last clue I decided to inspect our older-device 802.11 b/g Airport WiFi WDS network.

After installing the latest Airport Utility update I discovered that while our Airport Express light was green it was not, in fact, authenticated on the network. It was in a twilight state. At some level it was connected, but at another level it was not.

That could explain the MacBook stutter, since the MacBook is often moves between the Extreme and Express domains and could connect to either one.

Power cycling the Express alone didn't fix it, so I moved it next to the Airport Extreme. This time it did show up. I tweaked some settings, including auto-setting the clock to time.apple.com (I thought this used to be set, but was turned off on both my devices when I inspected them. Is it new?)

That's when I saw the Express was assigned 10.0.1.5, which may explain the odd XP address conflict message and networking issues.

Now the MacBook WiFi network address stutter appears to be gone.

Simplify is one of my post complexity-crash themes. There's too much emergence in the modern computational world, and too many ill-defined membranes.