Build your site from Google web elements

Code fragments to embed bits of Google properties into any JavaScript compatible web site: Google Web Elements.

Note "JavaScript compatible". That rules out Google's all-but-forgotten Sites.

Louis Gray has the details (via Jesse Stay), he reminds us that YouTube is the most famous "embed" ...

... In a recent meeting I had with Google engineers at the company's Mountain View campus, I was told the expansion of Web Elements is an extension of the company's goal to be open and enable data to flow between sites, rather than keeping all the traffic for itself in a central location. But it is perceived that Google hasn't yet done a fantastic job of highlighting this available content, so, starting today, Web Elements on downstream sites will feature a Web Elements logo and click through to the service's directory...

I've updated the "translate" button on this Blogger-generated page (using the HTML/Javascipt widget) with the new Web Elements "translate" function. It displays correctly in the language of any visitor. Here's how one of my blogs looks translated to Hindi:

Not bad! On the other hand, their Calender embed is broken. They've replaced the "subscribe to calendar" button with an "Elements" button. WTF?!

They did better with the new "reader shared items" seen on the right side of this blog page and inline below. The new version now includes a portion of your "notes".

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AT&T call quality – down the tubes in the Twins

Until recently Minneapolis and St. Paul AT&T customers were spared the misery of the San Francisco and Manhattan iPhone users.

Alas, our day has come. Even as AT&T makes more noises about transaction-based pricing dropped calls have become a serious problem for me. I just had 3 drops in a 60 minute conference call.

I’ve installed AT&T’s free “Mark the Spot” app and submitted my first report. It makes me feel better, even if all it does is generate an SMS response from the death star. In the old days I’d have the more satisfying experience of joining a class action lawsuit, but the Bushies more or less cut that option off. Now we have to hope more US Senators start using iPhones. Those customers can get satisfaction.

I’m sympathetic to AT&T’s problems. The industry’s business model was predicated on their customers owning crummy phones that used very little bandwidth. That “tragedy of the commons” model collapsed when the iPhone landed. I doubt Verizon would have done much better.

AT&T does need to switch to bandwidth, transactional or tiered pricing. Problem is, they won’t be able to resist the temptation to shaft their customers during the transition. For example, if AT&T introduced tiered pricing but made SMS messaging a bundled component of transaction use, they might fashion a win-win for us and them.

I don’t see them being that smart however.

Sigh. I’ll put “Mark the Spot” on my home screen.

Office 2008 for Mac - first impressions and the PPT type lag bug

I've revised this post.

My first impressions were of Microsoft Office 2008 were very positive ...

I'll put my Microsoft disgust up against that of any other geek.

So watch out for the end of days, because I have something ni ... n... nuh ... not so bad to say about Office 2008 for Mac (about $80-90 on Amazon).

Look at this ...

Yeah, two PowerPoint windows open at once.

You're not impressed? Then you don't use Office on Windows, where the #$!$# Windows are glued inside the app window. You can't move one presentation or spreadsheet to one monitor, and a different one to a second monitor.

I must say more, even though it pains me so.

I could mention Microsoft's licensing, compared to, say, Nisus Writer Pro ...

Amazon.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition: Software

... Don't need Microsoft Exchange Server Support or workflow management? Home and student users pay for just the features they need. Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition comes with three licenses of non-Exchange-enabled Office 2008 licensed for noncommercial computers...

Three licenses. In case you're wondering, this is effectively 3 machine licenses -- you're not asked for a license for each user on a single machine.

The multiple service pack updates are a pain, but the install was smooth. None of Adobe's problems with non-admin users. The only gotcha is you need to go into Entourage (dead and rotting software) and make sure every feature is turned off lest it seize control from iCal (undead and rotten software).

Pigs not flying yet? How about performance. Office 2008 is responsive on my G5 iMac. The Apps are much more Mac like than, say Aperture -- or many of Apple's products. The file formats are de facto standards (I wish this were not so).

Ohh, yeah. No button bar. Thank god.

I haven't made heavy use of it. I'm sure there are bugs. Even so, it's good enough that I'm willingly using it. Never thought I'd say that about a Microsoft product*.

* Ok, So I love Windows Live Writer. But that was developed outside of Microsoft and seems to have been abandoned by the borg.

Then, about a month later, I tried to use Office 2008 PowerPoint on a real presentation. This time I was using my quad core iMac with Snow Leopard, my earlier experience had been on an old G5.

It was unusable. The keystroke delay is intolerable. I wasted an hour then gave up and finished the work using PPT 2003 on my seven year old XP box.

I think it might work well on a G5, but it doesn't work acceptably on Intel machines.

I'm removing Office 2008 from my machines. I'll install iWork.

Update 4/6/2010: I was working on a presentation that seemed fine. Then I added text to a graphic slide. Instantly all text input became extremely slow. I reset the theme and text lag cleared again.

I think this is a theme corruption bug of some sort related to PPTs that have moved from XP to OS X.

There are some Office 2008 forum discussions of the type lag bug.

Update 4/6/2010b: I think there may be both theme and master slide associated bugs. I don't see any way in the view master slide UI to remove master slides (reset to standard). There are few to no master slide related help topics. PowerPoint 2008 is not a serious product. I expect the user base is becoming very small -- basically academics who don't use Keynote. I've uninstalled Office 2008, I'm going to use Office 2003 in my Fusion VM and I'll evaluate iWork and Keynote.

Update 4/8/10: A colleague tells me that PPT for XP has the largest and most intractable code base of any Microsoft project. I'd not have guessed that; maybe it explains why the Mac version is so bad. Keynote does a nice job of importing PPT files, but for now I'm using Fusion. I will probably buy iWork.

Now I understand why Jobs insisted Apple develop Keynote, and why the other iWork apps followed Keynote.

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iPhone Voice Memos.app - the secret feature

I wasn't that impressed with Voice Memos.app when if first appeared with OS 3. I joined the chorus complaining about the audio levels -- or lack thereof. It only works if you talk directly into the phone or headset mike. The record button should be huge, instead the UI is given over to a pointless graphic. It takes too many taps to close a recording. And so on.

There was, I thought, only one good feature of Voice Memos.app. It's fast. iTalk Lite had great features [1], but it was too damned slow to launch and record (I'd have paid for the pro version if it were five times faster).

That was before I discovered the secret feature.

If you're wearing Apple's earset and you have Voice Memos running, one click of the microphone switch starts recording, a second click stops and saves.

So if I'm driving with my right earset in, I can click dictate and click again. No distraction, no multi-taps, no delays. This is a great feature. Now I love Voice Memos.

So, where the #$$!$ is this documented? My Google searching can't find mention of this feature. Heck, I can't find any documentation on Voice Memos.app.

This is classic Apple. Great feature, no documentation, only the wise know. Is it so they don't catch flack if an undocumented feature disappears? Is it some conspiracy to sell David Pogue's great iPhone book? (Sorry, I bought it already. I'm not buying every edition, so I don't know if this is in the latest one.)

PS. There is Apple documentation on some of the microphone switch's features. You can use it, for example, to decline an incoming call (hold 2 seconds) or to switch and hold (click once) or switch and kill (hold 2 seconds). No mention of Voice Memos.app though.

Update 4/28/2010: I still use and appreciate Voice Memos, but recently I tried to use iTalk Lite to record a hour call. It worked well until minute 45 when a background notification caused it to lock up. I had to kill it and that lost the recording too.

Best new Outlook 2007 feature: Do Not Save sent message

I don’t have a lot of warm feelings about the Office 2007 “Quick Access Toolbar” or most any new Outlook 2007 feature, but there is one killer feature that the two of ‘em together give you.

You can configure the Quick Access Toolbar so that you click a simple checkbox and any message you send is not saved!

Okay, so why should you care?

Well, for those of us who live by full text search Outlook “Sent Items” are a goldmine. I don’t bother sorting mine – every few months I dump a few thousand into my PST “Save” folder and make space on Exchange. I routinely use Windows Search 4 to find answers to important questions in seconds. It’s been my biggest cognitive computing boost since Google replaced Alta Vista.

Problem is, the Sent Messages also contain thank you notes, social messages, acknowledgements, and other noise. It’s tedious to delete those, so I typically leave them alone and only delete them when they show up in searches.

How much better then, never to save them at all. If only there were a one click method to not save those “thank you” notes…

Now there is …

 

Now when I send a simple email that I don’t want to clutter future search results, I just click ‘Do Not Save’. No more junk in my Sent Items list! (I don’t use email for anything very sensitive, so that use case doesn’t apply.)

In order to set this up you need to:

1. Start a new email message. This is the only way to see the email-specific “quick access toolbar”. (In Outlook 2007 the ribbon bars and quick access toolbars are distributed throughout the various Outlook data types such as Appointment, Tasks and so on. Yes, Outlook 2007 really is a train wreck.)
2. Click the Quick Access Toolbar customization drop down to the right of the toolbar and select “More Commands”
3. Customize as you wish (There are lots of interesting options, but many do not have distinctive icons. See “train wreck”, above.) Here’s where to find the “Do Not Save” control:
   

Update: Note that the Quick Access Toolbar you see when viewing a message is different from the Quick Access Toolbar you get when editing a message. Remember – Outlook = “train wreck”.

Killing an undead XP Active Desktop

Active Desktop rose from the grave the other day. It’s probably something that our corporate IT group unwittingly unleashed.

The symptom was that when I tried to drag an Outlook attachment to the desktop XP mumbled something about creating an Active Desktop bitmap.

Yech.

Active Desktop is only supposed to run when you’ve checked some boxes in the Display Properties:Desktop:Customer Desktop menu, but I had a bad case anyway. It was undead.

Of course there’s an obscure registry option to kill it forever. There usually is in the Windows world. I found 3 good articles with different sets of advice:

• Think and Create- How to Remove Active Desktop in Windows XP
• Disable Active Desktop feature in Windows. « geek-o-pedia
• How to disable Active Desktop in Windows XP - MyTechSupport.ca

Surprisingly, even knowing the registry key(s), I couldn’t find any article on support.microsoft.com. That’s usually a great resource. Here are the keys …

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoActiveDesktop
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\ForceActiveDesktopOn

Check out the above articles for the details. Everyone recommends the first key, one reference suggested the second key as well. I did both and, after a restart, my undead Active Desktop is back in the grave.

I assume Microsoft finally staked this vampire in Windows 7? Active Desktop was one of their dumber ideas.

Hold off on buying those Nehalem i7 Macs?

Via Slashdot, a Microsoft support document tells us the new Nehalem CPUs have some significant bugs...

Stop error message on an Intel Xeon 5500 series processor-based computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and that has the Hyper-V role installed: "0x00000101 - CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT"

...This problem occurs because spurious interrupts are generated on the computer that uses Intel code-named Nehalem processors. These interrupts are caused by a known erratum that is described in the following Intel documents....

I'm close to buying one of the Nehalem iMacs, but it's not urgent. So I can just hold off for a few weeks and watch how this plays out. All CPUs have bugs, and new CPUs can have grave bugs. If this is a bad one we'll find out soon enough.
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