Sun xVM VirtualBox: free VM for OS X windows work

Via TUAW. It's a free OpenSource app now maintained by Sun. It won't have the support of VMWare Fusion (current leader) or Parallels (contender), but it includes an RDP server for remote access to VMs and it's supposed to support "any x86 based OS" on Windows (least interesting), Solaris (of course), Linux or OS X.

I think this would make most sense for someone with a copy of Windows 2000 who wants to run Microsoft Office 2003 and one or two other compliant apps. (Disabling net access for the VM seems adviseable, though Win2K is probably not a major OS target any more. Who knows, it might now be safer on the net than XP, especially if, like me, you run XP without antiviral software). [1]

That would be me, except I already have a license to VMWare Fusion. If I didn't, I'd try this.

[1] Because the antiviral software causes more problems for me than the viruses. I use Firefox with NoScript, stick to good neighborhoods, and use XP as little as possible.

Google Spreadsheet gotcha: beware open editing

I don't think this is obvious, so I'll toss out a warning.

Google Spreadsheets can be shared for viewing (only) at the worksheet (tab) level. This is an advanced option after you click on the share button.

That's fine, but there's a trick here.

The Spreadsheet security model applies to the spreadsheet, not the worksheet. So if you have standard account-limited editing sharing the worksheet behaves as expected.

The catch comes if you enable the new "anyone can edit" option. This works when you can keep the URL a secret.

If you're sharing a worksheet, however, you're exposing the URL.

The combination of sharing a worksheet and open editing means anyone viewing the worksheet will be able to edit the entire spreadsheet if they click on the 'edit if you have privileges' link.

Google should make the security and sharing models both worksheet specific. Until then, be careful!

Three Apple support articles

Three Apple support articles worth scanning ...

• Archive and Install explained: read the tips and scan the list of what's moved. Apple recommends a file system repair first. The option is not available on update CDs.
  
• File sharing: Claims only public folders are shared. I thought 10.5 allowed sharing the shared folder too (I don't have 10.5 yet).
  
• Resetting sync services: I just know I'll need this one day. Nobody has sufficient respect, or even fear, of synchronization.
  

Microsoft Office Document Imaging - a little known gem

If you have any Windows version of Microsoft Office, you have some version of a little gem of an app almost nobody knows about.

It's called "Microsoft Office Document Imaging" (MODI). There's an icon for it in your Office Tools folder, along with truly exotic beasts such as "Picture Manager". You'll also probably see an icon for "Microsoft Office Document Scanning", which is basically a shortcut to the scanning dialog in MODI.

The Wikipedia article on MODI claims MODI was introduced in Office XP:

Microsoft Office Document Imaging - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) is a Microsoft Office application that supports editing documents scanned by Microsoft Office Document Scanning. It was first introduced in Microsoft Office XP and is included in later Office versions including Office 2003 and Office 2007.

Maybe, but I used to be very familiar with the Xerox-authored document imaging app that was once bundled with Windows 98 and 2000. This looks awfully similar to that twenty year old app.

MODI feels like ancient code, crafted by lost Giants who dreamt in assembler. It's blazingly fast on today's hardware.

It's also the simplest scanning application I've ever seen. Remember to click the 'prompt for additional pages" checkbox and even on a single page scanner it will assemble the images into a single TIFF. It even does quite decent, and very fast, OCR. If you have Adobe Acrobat you can readily convert the output to PDF, and if you don't you can probably "print" using freeware products.

Or you could just leave it as TIFF.

I use the B&W settings when scanning expense receipts on an old personal scanner I brought to work (nobody wanted the scanner after I bought a higher end model). Very nice results.

Devilish Dealings: How to get a corporate discount on an AT&T iPhone

Several months back I switched our family plan from Sprint to AT&T. My wife needed a new smart phone, and since I wanted iPhone 2.0 w/ SDK we decided to change rather than pay full price for a new phone.

I detailed the transition a few months back: Gordon's Tech: A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone.

It wasn't, in retrospect, a good business move. Our phone bill has gone up by about $40 a month because AT&T charges much more to call Canada (mother!) than our (legacy) Sprint Canada calling plan. Our phone usage is also awkwardly between AT&T call plans, so we end up with unwanted extra minutes.

Oh, and don't get me started about AT&T's vile rebate strategy.

Ah well, more adventures in phone pricing. And people think only physicians prefer to avoid transparency ...

Now, we do benefit from a 15% discount available through my employer, but iPhones don't qualify for these discounts. So I was figuring we'd lose the discount.

Except ... there's a small loophole. We may not lose it completely.

AT&T's current billing system associates the discount with the primary number on a family plan. So if the primary number isn't an iPhone, the discount should be retained.

Emily is staying with her BlackBerry Pearl for the moment. So today the very friendly staff at my local AT&T shop swapped her number to the primary position, and made mine secondary. They had to manually tweak the rollover minutes so we didn't lose those, though so far they're pointless.

In theory, all I need to do now is pickup an iPhone 2.0 sometime after June 9th and activate it via iTunes. The discount should continue ...

I'll update this post with what really happens. Satan usually comes out ahead in these games ...

Google Calendar Outlook Sync is making a mess of my calendar

I was pretty happy when Google's official Outlook calendar sync arrived.

Not so happy since.

I'm synchronizing my aged Palm T/2 to Outlook (home), and Outlook to Google Calendar. I'm getting multiple instances of some events -- with the metastatic replicants all one hour early. All day events are turning into 24 hour events that spill over into a 2nd day.

It's a ruddy mess.

Update 5/20/2008: I prefer not to think about sync problems, but here are some clues to what's going on:

• There's some kind of a time zone bug in the gCal/Outlook 2003/Palm chain. It could be an emergent bug, so it doesn't show up if you just live between gCal and Outlook 2003. It may be related to changes in US time zone transitions and the hacks that were put into Outlook 2003 and Palm to work around this.
  
• There's another problem that may be even more intractable. I believe Outlook, gCal and Palm take different approaches to events that are either 'all day' or 'no time'. That is the events are associated with a day, but not with a particular time of the day. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays etc. I would not be surprised if Outlook were the "bad actor" with a particularly odd implementation of date-associated events, particularly date-associated recurring events. Since Outlook is 'in-the-middle' of this transaction set that's a bad problem.

If I were really going to try to stay with Palm I'd install Outlook 2008 and see if the problem improved. Truth is, of course, I'm hanging on the cliff edge with aching fingers, bleeding nails, and gritted teeth for iPhone 2.0.

For now I think the problem is most severe for events I create on gCal, so I'll treat gCal as read-only and do my authoring on the Palm or Outlook.

Update 5/24/2008: I confirmed data was correct in Outlook 2003 and the Palm, then I set Google Calendar Sync to update gCal from Outlook. It wiped all existing data and created a new set. Recurring appointments are ALL off by one hour. Non-recurring are fine. I confirmed time zones are set correctly in Outlook, my desktop and in gCal. This is a gross bug, there's no way QA could have missed it. So it's back to looking at the commercial non-Google properties. I'll have more to say on this in a couple of Gordon's Notes post.

Windows Live Writer - gallery of plug-ins

The world's greatest blogging tool has a new and improved Plug-In gallery. (The Firefox Blog widget is prominently featured.)

As fond as I am of WLW, it does pain me to praise it. It's a Microsoft Live product, and there's no OS X version on the horizon. It's a bit much to load VMWare Fusion and XP only to run WLW, but I'm tempted.

There's nothing comparable for OS X. Ecto showed promise once but every time I've tried it I've been disappointed. In particular it made a mess of Blogger posts; WLW handles Blogger quirks and bugs as well as anything can.

Update 5/20/08: The WLW Firefox add-in is not compatible with FF 3! Wow. Wish I'd thought about that before I upgraded. I'd have held off on my XP machines.