Palm Pre is Exchange sync based

Microsoft now has monopoly control over the standard for corporate data synchronization:

Ars talks to Palm at CES, gets under the hood with the pre

... The device supports over-the-air Exchange ActiveSync for contacts, email, calendar, and tasks. 'We use EAS at Palm, so we live and breath and eat it.'...

This has more than a few implications. See my Gordon's Notes rant on the big problem.

It means, among other things, that a huge amount of the value of a smartphone is whether or not it will be granted access to the corporate Exchange server. It also means that it's rather hard to image anything but Exchange server at the heart of any modern corporation ...

But now I digress into Gordon's Notes opinion territory.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a vendor preparing a utility that would be installed on a PC and would

1. Read/write Outlook data.
   Publish Post
2. Provide a local Exchange ActiveSync service so one could connect to the machine via TCP/IP and sync that way?

Update 6/10/09: See comments for some useful definitions. For example, old ActiveSync is now called "Outlook Anywhere" and it's implemented as Outlook-style RPC over HTTPS. This page provides Outlook-centric implementation details and links to Microsoft references.

Google alerts will now deliver to a feed

I missed this one.

I haven't been that interested in Google Alerts because I'm trying to decrease email inflow, not increase it. By contrast Yahoo! and Live Search both have feed options associated with search creation. (So does the NLM's PubMed academic search engine, but that's a bit esoteric.)

I just realized today that there's a "Deliver to" option on the Google Alerts page called "Feed".

I had to select it twice to make it work (user error?) but my search on "godson netbook chrome google" [1] now has a feed which I've added to my Google Reader feeds.

PS. Google Reader now has a "translate to my language" option in feed settings. Anyone else notice that Google's on some kind of new exponential growth track?

[1] Why this search? Godson is the english version of a code name for China's internal chip development, designed to fuel a new generation of ultra-low cost laptops for the Chinese world. For the rest, see (Gordon's Notes where my deluded ravings live):

• Laptop, batteries not included
• Squeezed: Microsoft, Chromestellation, netbooks and the price trajectory of calculators
• Chromestellation
  

Copilot vs. LogMeIn for supporting your parent's Mac

I hope this is what I asked for some time ago -- a version of Copilot that will let me control my mother's machine whenever I want, without her having to do anything or even know about it ...

Copilot OneClick for Macintosh - Joel on Software

... The new Copilot OneClick feature lets you preinstall the software on all the computers you connect to frequently, so every time your dad calls up needing help with the accounting software running his Ponzi scheme, you just click one link and you’re logged onto his computer.

As usual, it works through all kinds of firewalls, proxies, and NATs without any configuration, it’s protected by 128-bit SSL, and there’s never anything to configure.

Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth.

Copilot uses VNC, so it's very slow. Nowhere near as useful as Citrix or Windows Remote Desktop. Alas, for OS X VNC is about as good as it gets. It's enough for troubleshooting if you're patient and if the screen sizes are reasonably similar.

Update 1/8/09: See also - Computer support for persons with special needs.

Update 4/25/09: As advised in a comment on this post, I ended up using the free LogMeIn instead. I installed the LogMeIn client on my mother's dual core Mac Mini running 10.4. I then installed the (theoretically optional but actually essential) controller client on my MacBook running 10.5. It's quite slow, but I'm able to control her computer with no action required on her part other than turning on the machine. Copilot wasn't price competitive, and it required my mother to do too much. With LogMeIn she has only to turn on the computer.

Update 6/7/10: LogMeIn stopped working. When I upgraded the Safari plugin on my MacBook running 10.5 it crashed Safari. There's still no 64bit support for Safari on OS X 10.6. I think LogMeIn has given up; I uninstalled them. I reviewed CoPilot again, but there prices for what I want have gone up a lot. I don't have any working solution at this time.

Turn a 1st generation iPhone into an iTouch

A friend has an abandoned flaky first generation iPhone she donated to our kids (it visited water at one time).

We're using it as an iTouch. It works reasonably well despite some odd bugs. The trick is:

1. Use Data Reset to wipe completely.
2. Sync with iTunes Library.
   
3. Put in Airplane mode.
4. Re-enable WiFi. The 2.2 software has this capability since some airplanes have WiFi service.

I turned off location services and push though the first should be irrelevant in airplane mode.

Now it's a somewhat slow and memory poor iTouch -- but free. I sync it with our iTunes Library so it inherits the games and media from my iPhone. (You can sync DRMd music to an unlimited number of iPod/iPhone devices from one Library, but I think you can only sync apps to five iPhone/iTouch devices.)

Blogger in draft: much better with Safari

After a hiatus of a few months I've again begun using Safari with "Blogger in draft " (I don't recommend trying Safari with regular blogger). I figured since Chrome uses WebKit that Google might have fixed some Blogger problems.

It's much improved, though there are obvious quirks especially with "BlogThis!". The pseudo-HTML view is now clean, without the carriage return/span/paragraph tag mess of months past. I love the ability to resize the editing panel beyond Google's mail slot standard. This is a feature available only to Safari (and Chrome?).

It's probably worth a cautious look. I'll report back here if/when I run into problems.

Update 1/7/09: Nope, not quite. Too many odd problems. For example, when I quote a series of paragraphs extra line spaces are introduced that I have to manually remove.  Not to mention that the creaky old BlogThis! blogger bookmarklet works quite poorly with Safari.

It's back to Camino/Firefox again.

Enabling spotlight search of OS X mail.app with Gmail IMAP

I've been using various flavors of OS X Mail (mail.app) with Gmail for years. The setup, particularly mapping to local folders, has had its quirks, but it's worked well for Emily. For my part I usually use Gmail directly, and, for reasons of inertia, I use an old copy of eudora/xp to archive my email on a home machine.

Recently, I tried doing a search of my Gmail respository from OS X Mail. I got almost no results. Gmail, by contrast, returned hundreds of hits.

It wasn't hard to figure out the cause of this discrepancy. The default mail.app IMAP setup doesn't actually store messages locally. It only creates a local store for messages that have been read locally, and only those may be indexed by Spotlight.

To create a searchable IMAP repository, you need to change an advanced setting ...

Mail.app Proper Set up on MaxOSX for IMAP

... Next go to Advanced, and the defaults for Enable this Account [checked], Include when automatically checking for new mail [checked], Compact mailboxes automtically [checked and greyed out], the location of the account directory, and Keep Copies of Messages for Offline Viewing [drop down menu with All messages and their attachments selected] should be fine...

I had to restart Mail.app to activate this setting. Then I let it run overnight, pulling in and indexing 45K messages. My Spotlight searches now work against this email archive.

There's still a problem with Mail.app search of Gmail files -- the Gmail tag/IMAP folder mapping means messages may be replicated between folders. (Because a Gmail message may have many tags, but an IMAP message can belong to only one folder.)

A workaround for image uploading to Microsoft’s Sharepoint Wiki.

There are some good things to say about Microsoft’s Sharepoint based Wiki.

There’s also, sadly, one very bad thing. The approach to image embedding is lousy.

Happily I have found a convoluted workaround that uses one of my favorite apps – Windows Live Writer …

1. Create a SP blog that will hold the images that will be referenced in the wiki.
2. Use Windows Live Writer to post to the wiki-image-blog. Drop your image into WLW, resize it as needed, etc. If you like, use WLW to write your image associated wiki text first draft as well.
3. After you post to the Wiki, copy and paste image and text into the Wiki editor rich text field.

This takes surprisingly little time, far less than any other option I've read of. I admit, it is convoluted!

Update 1/11/09: I've been doing this for a while now. It's bloody brilliant, even if I have to say so myself. You can take advantage of the wiki-image-blog to attach a bit of metadata, including labels, to help with image reuse. If you read this and know anyone using Sharepoint 2007, I suggest send this on to them. They'll be forever grateful.