Geek prn: Annual iPod and iPhone buyers' guide

I like the pictures.

Download Now: Our 2008 iPod + iPhone Buyers’ Guide

Mugr: searching for a missing person?

Looking for someone who's seemingly vanished?

It happens to families more often than one might imagine. Often the missing person is dead, but sometimes they've decided to take a very long walk.

One day soon you'll fire up a product like Mugr and let it work for a while.

There are a lot of images on the net.

Good and bad, of course.

XP shortcuts display path in NTFS Extended Attribute Comments

NTFS supports metadata for files that are stored in NTFS extended attributes. This includes Title and Comments. Sharepoint 2007 may read this data and use it, but I primarily use it as a modern version of the Dirnotes.com utility PC Magazine created for PC/MS-DOS in the 1980s. [1]

To display title and comments in file view RMClick on the explorer column title bar and select the attributes you want to see. Then set all folders to the same view.

There are some problems with these EAs. WinZip, at least by default in the version I have, doesn't zip them up. Some backup software will ignore them. The workflow for creating and editing them is very awkward (right click, properties, click tab, edit).

Today I discovered a feature however. If you view Favorites with comment enabled, you see the path to the original. That's handy.

Now if only someone would create a drag and drop utility such that if I dropped a Favorite on it I'd see the original pop up. Hmm. I wonder if there's a way to do this using ancient DOS Batch files ...

[1] Update 5/21/09: This may have unexpected consequences esp. on Windows 2003 server -- due to a very dark and old Microsoft hack.

Access 2007: It's really bad

I'm very unimpressed with Office 2007, but there are some good things. Word 2007, if you use the new lock-in proprietary never-extract-your-data nobody-can-read-it XML file format has some fixes to its primeval style and formatting problems. Excel 2007 is still Excel. Outlook 2007 fixes some ancient bugs (if you sort a category view it no longer breaks the view) and is only somewhat more sluggish than Outlook 2003. It might even work better with Sharepoint 2007. PowerPoint 2007 is as frozen in time as every version of PowerPoint since 1997 or so. [1]

And then there's Microsoft Access 2007.

I've been using this software intensively for months now, and it's really bad. We're switching back to Office 2003 and Access 2003. (Shades of everyone's Vista to XP regression, but we weren't dumb enough to do Vista.)

The way I use Access makes very heavy use of complex queries and some embedded functions with large data sets. In this domain Access 2007 added nothing of value and has some serious regressions. Access 2003, for example, had some ability to fix-up queries when column labels or even table names were revised. Access 2007 more often breaks the links and destroys the query builder view.

All the problems with Access 2003, like the fragility of links to external data sources (no relative links for example), remain. The only minor advantages are better handling of Sharepoint (SQL Server) 2007 exotic data types.

It's probably a bit slower too.

I've seen some regressions in my day, but Access 2007 is the biggest regression I've run into since WordPerfect bombed its Windows transition (with a bit of help from Microsoft of course).

Don't use this turkey.

[1] How could they not fix the "custom slide show" UI? PowerPoint source code must be seeded with antimatter mines.

Problems with made in China had drives?

The events of the last six months make it easy to believe that "made in China" is bad news for hard drives.

Data recovery firm sounds Mac hard drive damage alert | Reg Hardware

... Clarke blamed the problem what he described as 'poor quality control in Chinese hard drive factories' - an issue he maintained affects other hard drive makers in addition to Seagate. He also warned all hard drive buyers to avoid HDDs manufactured in China...

I buy it. I'd much prefer Thailand, Singapore, etc.

OX 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review

Mandatory reading for Apple geeks, all of whom will mentally underline one paragraph

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review: Page 4

...Why, Apple? Why!? Was there something horribly wrong with the existing menu bar—something that could only be fixed by injuring its legibility? Like the folder icons and the Dock, it's not so much a fatal flaw in and of itself. It's what it implies about the situation at Apple that is so troubling. What in the holy hell has to happen in a meeting for this idea to get the green light? Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs's iron-fisted rule—that there's always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be expressed in his presence and he'll (inexplicably) latch onto it and make it happen? Ugh, I don't even want to think about it...

Jobs gets the blame for most of the horde of bizarre UI decisions. We can only hope, like the last minute Dock overhaul, that they'll be fixed -- maybe by 10.5.3.

Meanwhile even Apple enthusiast sites are suggesting anyone with a life should wait for 10.5.1. My friend Andrew, who is usually blessed by the OS gods, spent the weekend rebuilding his laptop post a 10.5.0 update and he grudgingly admits his core apps are significantly less stable under 10.5.0 than they were under 10.4.10.

Personally, I'm thinking more of 10.5.2 -- and I like 10.5.

Update: this is part of why I like 10.5:

...In the screenshot above, I've scaled the remote computer (a Mac running Tiger and Apple Remote Desktop) to an extreme degree, but it's still fully functional and surprisingly usable even at this tiny size. The preferences dialog in the front belongs to the Screen Sharing application, as does the toolbar with handy "Send to/from Clipboard" buttons on it.

The Screen Sharing application is hidden in /System/Library/CoreServices, but can be launched manually and used to connect to another computer if you know the IP address. You'll be prompted for a username and password, with the option to explicitly request permission to share the screen...

I was disappointed to read that 10.5 screen sharing was VNC based. This scaling stuff is not part of any VNC client I've tried (and none of them worked well on OS X anyway). Sounds like there's more to it.

WiTopia personalVPN

We all know that it's trivial to intercept unencrypted 802.11 wireless communications.

Happily most cafe net sessions are too boring to interest the average hacker, but there are always kids with too much time on their hands. So I'd been thinking for a while I needed a personal VPN solution.

Personal VPN also comes in handy if you ever have to deal with an overly aggressive "webwasher" type environment -- the encrypted communications goes through a remote proxy, so if the proxy isn't blocked (big if), and if the right ports are open (bigger if) then you can bypass the "washing".

I decided to do a 30 day trial of WiTopia personalVPN. I paid the $40 for the one year subscription, I have 30 days to get my money back. I picked them because Tidbits recommended them as an OS X friendly solution. Their web site is improving quickly, a week ago it was pretty confusing. There are basically two products you get when you sign up for the personal VPN:

• PPTP VPN: This is built into OS X, though in 10.4 it works through the peculiar "Internet Connect" application rather than the network preferences (where I looked for it). Easy to use, requires no additional software. This style of VPN is disdained by experts for some security issues, but of course it only has to be better than nothing -- which is what everyone else at the Hotspot is using. It's the old "park next to the better bicycle" theory.
• SSL VPN: This requires a client installation.

The SSL VPN is their core product, the PPTP is a bit of a freebie. This is what they say about it (the writing could use some work, they are confusing IPsec and SSL VPNs, I think they left out a sentence somewhere):

... With the widely praised openVPN™ software at its core, our service deploys a 128 bit encrypted SSL VPN using the powerful and efficient Blowfish™ cipher. Depending on other factors, higher levels of encryption may simply bog down your processor without providing the security you might think. Versus an SSL VPN, PPTP based VPNs have their limitations and have been shown to have vulnerabilities. IPsec VPNs are superior to PPTP but suffer from tremendous complexity that can affect reliability and security. [jf - this is where they need to say they took a 3rd approach -- SSL VPN]... 

Lastly, we set up our own Secure Certificate Authority and "sign" your unique public key during setup. The private key is never released and resides on our secure systems. These must match before the service will activate and no one can ever see your data without possessing both keys This adds a step in the setup process, and was additional work on our part, but is superior to static or shared key approaches. Beware of any VPN service that skips it. [jf: The certificate security means WiTopia has to create a custom install for each customer. So if you want to use SSL VPN on OS X and XP you have a problem.] ... 

personalVPN™ is not just a VPN service. It's an Internet privacy solution. Beyond encrypting all your data to our gateway, we exchange your IP address for one of ours. To everyone on the Internet you are an anonymous user whose traffic originates in our data center....

So far I'm sticking with the PPTP solution. It took only a minute to setup on OS X, though I had to run Help to figure out how to do it. I haven't tried the SSL VPN because I don't like installing this type of software if I can help it. It runs too close to the hardware and is often flaky.