Corporate iPhone: WLAN connection and Outlook web

The iPhone is a lousy business phone. Of course the BlackBerry ain’t so great either – the key difference is that the BB usually comes with a pass to the corporate exchange server. That’s a big deal though.

On the other hand, I’ve made some progress.

Briefly:

1. The iPhone’s support for WPA Enterprise let me connect quickly to our corporate LAN. It was a lot easier than connecting my XP laptop, but I’m not sure I have all privileges the laptop has – even though I’m authenticating the same way.
2. With the iPhone I can use the web interface to Exchange server. It’s hardlyl mobile friendly, but it runs on Safari/iPhone.

Connecting directly to Exchange server is another matter.

Even if it were officially supported, an Exchange connection would wipe my personal iPhone calendaring and contact information. The only way I know of to have both corporate and personal data on an iPhone is to sync corporate data with Exchange and Personal data with MobileMe. The latter, of course, is remarkably inadequate.

For now the Exchange connection isn’t available, but if it were it would be exquisitely painful to give up the power of Google Calendar in favor of MobileMe Calendar. I really do need a miraculous improvement in MobileMe …

iTunes iPhone Applications menu grayed out?

One of our iPhones had a grayed out iTunes Applications menu.

It would update existing apps during a sync when something else was going to the phone (like music or videos), but if no other sync was occurring apps wouldn't update.

I couldn't tweak any of the settings that limit which apps went to that iPhone.

Our other iPhone was fine.

The answer was here: Apple - Support - Discussions - "Sync Applications" grayed out in iTunes ...

I'd enabled 'Restrictions' on this particular phone, which is now used as an iTouch. I was trying to keep the kids out of trouble. I bet I'd restricted application installation.

Removing restrictions fixed the problem.

This may not be so much a bug as a usability problem. I think iTunes should display a message in addition to graying out the Applications tab.

Update 5/16/09: This really is a usability issue. It happened again, and it puzzled me again. OK, so it's a dementia issue too. Fortunately I have my external memory to search (my blogs).

Update 8/3/09: I just installed iPhone 3.01 and noticed the Disable Restrictions menu has an "installing apps" control. I think that's new in 3.0, maybe even new in 3.01. Glad to see this problem taken care of!

Reading netbook news - translated from German

I'm interested in ultra-cheap no-name netbooks (just wait 'till Linux/Chromestellation comes out!). So when Scoble mentioned the German Netbook news blog, I decided to try Google Reader's machine translation.

The Feed wasn't hard to find, in part because German is relatively close to English. I added it to Google Reader, then chose the Feed Setting option to "translate into my own language".

Here's an example of the result:

Netbooks with VIA Nano CPU finally come and not too tight! Tim Brown explains you in this short video, what we should see how the strategy of VIA looks and there ever been a rudimentary preview on ARM / VIA systems, and easily so sauklein ne animal and battery life are:

It's not exactly lyrical, but it's not bad either.

Ahh, but but most of the posts don't include the full content.

Here's where Google struts its stuff.

When I click on the link from Google Reader, Google sends me to a feedburner hosted translated page version!

Translated version of http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AsusEeePcNews/~3/509222929/

Reason*, but we live in interesting times.

So now I'm following my first foreign language blog.

Now I'm looking for a Korean blog on netbooks ...

*God just doesn't work for me.

Update 1/14/09: There are a few rough edges ...

1. Because the link out from the foreign language post goes to a proxy translator corporate webwasher blocks access.
2. The auto-translation feature only works when you view the blog in isolation, if you click on Google Groups folder and view it in the company of other posts you get the original language.
3. A link from a translated post always uses the proxy translator -- even when it's a link to an English source.
   

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.)