Winner of Slate's bluetooth headset review

The best Bluetooth cell phone headsets settled on the "Plantronics Voyager 520". I have a cheap Motorola BT that I really dislike. If I get another one I'll have this review at hand.

An RTF surprise: 850 KB to 40 MB

One of the reasons I really like Nisus Writer Express for OS X is that it uses Rich Text Format (RTF) as its native file format. If you're going to use anything other than Word the application must have the option of using either RTF or DOC as its native file format. Nothing else is acceptable at this time, though one day perhaps the OpenOffice file format will see wider use.

Today I discovered a surprising downside of Microsoft's version of RTF.

I have an 849 KB Word 2003 DOC file that contains a fair number of screen shots. I know Word is very good at bitmap compression, so I just pasted them in. I didn't bother creating PNGs and importing them (PNG is by far the best standard file format for screen shots).

I exported to RTF from Word and the output file was 40 MB. Obviously the images have expanded a bit, about 45 fold! I assume they're now uncompressed.

By comparison I created a PDF, choosing "High Quality" for the JPGs. The resulting file was 735 KB, but the images showed some JPEG compression artifact; they were not nearly as sharp as the original Word file.

I'm very curious to see how large the file will be that Nisus creates. Can RTF support embedded PNGs? Will Nisus convert the native Word images to PNG?

Update 10/8/07: I tested using Nisus Writer Express, opening the .DOC file and saving it as RTF. Nisus' RTF version was 1.4MB, so it was about 100% larger. That's a lot better than the 4500% increase in Word's RTF version. I'm not sure what kind of compression NWE is using. Incidentally, NWE could not render Word's Table of Contents for this document, and every time it starts up it nags me about a PAY upgrade. Great way to really annoy the customer.

The Fall of XP: Windows Live, Onfolio, WDS and emergence at work

I have not been happy with Apple lately. It is just as well, then, that Microsoft has chosen this time to remind me of that the "Dark Side" really means, as well as providing an interesting example of emergence at work.

I've written recently of how my work XP box has been experiencing accelerated entropic collapse. I've made progress on addressing many of the contributing factors, including realizing that Microsoft has two currently marketed products called "windows desktop search" with superficially identical interfaces but different functionality, bugs, and update schedules.

A problem remained however. Outlook was periodically crashing with varying error messages. Some of them, however, implicated Onfolio, my favorite Windows Feed Reader*. I couldn't figure out the problem, so I tried reinstalling. I downloaded the installer from the Windows Live Collection, but it quit with a meaningless "network error" (clearly a red herring). So I tried uninstalling, but the uninstall would hang shortly after asking me if I wanted to remove my feed list.

It took me a while to uninstall the damned thing. I had to restart a few times, then, when it hang, I went through every XP service running and, one at a time, I turned them off. After I was done with that it completed. I don't know if disabling all the services did the trick or if it simply timed out on the hung process and killed it, moving on.

I then reinstalled successfully from the Windows Live Toolbar "Gallery", searching for Onfolio and choosing "run" rather than download. We'll see if that works.

I simplified Onfolio's behavior as much as possible. In particular there's a "Windows Desktop Search" integration feature in Onfolio that allows WDS to search Onfolio Collections. Since I believe WDS, Onfolio and the Windows Live toolbar are all somewhat buggy, that kind of integration is just asking for trouble. I disabled it, I haven't done much with Collections anyway. I'll stop using them. Onfolio also installs an Outlook add-in I could remove, but I'm not sure if that won't cause more trouble.

Which brings me to emergence and the Fall of XP. Microsoft's Vista has not been well received. I'm sure SP1 will help a great deal, but it will still remain slow on older hardware. Microsoft really wants to migrate people off their old hardware onto new hardware and Vista. The problem is XP has been too good -- even though it's a crummy user experience compared to OS X.

The answer, of course, is to make XP unstable.

Is this a deliberate Microsoft strategy? I doubt it. It doesn't have to be deliberate. Microsoft has only to cut back on QA testing, increase the pace of software delivery (Windows LIVE), increase the rate of security patch delivery  and let nature take its entropic course. This is an emergent strategy, but it works just as well as a Machiavellian scheme.

XP will die faster than most people expect.

* OS X has great thick client feed (Atom/RSS) readers and lousy publishing tools. Windows has the world's greatest blog authoring tool and lousy feed readers. Shame.

Macros live in Access 2007

I've found Microsoft's VBA strategy to be just about incomprehensible. I don't know how anyone gets Access VBA apps to run, particularly given the profusion of obsolete class libraries, obsolete and partly implemented object models, etc. (Does 2007 have a VBA action based code generator? I can't recall. If so that would help ..)

On the other hand, Access 2003 has an incredibly archaic, and non-VBA related, "macro" facility that does work -- though it's little changed from the 1980s. To my surprise, the same facility was retained in Access 2007, and Microsoft has an article on it: Automate applications with macros in Access 2007. I use Access 2007 for some work projects, so I'll probably try these out.

What to do when a drive shows some flakiness

A friend asked what I do when a drive throws a sector error. Do I junk the drive?

The answer is "no", but I do torture it. I did a lighter version of this recently when I started hearing suspicious "whirrrrrrr - tick" sounds from a laptop drive (seek error sounds). Here's the full OS X regimen; the XP response is pretty similar (scandisk instead of Disk Utility, etc).

1. Do a mirror backup (Carbon Copy Cloner, etc) and a Retrospect backup (that's what I use routinely).
2. Test with Disk Utility.
3. Run Apple's drive diagnostic in loop mode (hardware test).
4. Reformat using a secure format (write 0s, so it write tests every sector).
5. Test with Disk Utility.
6. Restore from mirror backup.
7. Test with Disk Utility.
   

If you start in the morning you can probably get it done within a day. Replacing the drive takes longer than a day, so even if a replacement were free this is worth doing. If the drive passes step 2 it will likely pass all the tests, so the chance of wasting a lot of time is pretty low.

See also (XP centric): Gordon's Tech: Lessons from another XP disk crash

Power a digital camera when outlets are unpredictable

Ben Long has written a good essay on remote power solutions for a dSLR, including solar options. I've asked him (comments) how he approaches backup in these settings. Does he use a battery operated CF to CF copying solution?

FriendFeed: what's the point?!

I tried FriendFeed:

Keep Track of Your Friends' Shared Items: "FriendFeed is a start-up that wants to solve this issue by letting you enter your usernames from different sites and combining all the data in a single feed that could be easily shared with someone. You can also invite your friends and subscribe to their data. The service makes a lot of sense if you use it from a social network like Facebook, so FriendFeed has a Facebook application."

I don't get it. I was able to add one of my blogs as a feed, but I could only see how to add a single blogger feed. I don't see how to delete a FriendFeed account, once you have one it's there forever.

There's probably more than I can see, but if there is more then they have serious usability problem.

Don't bother.