Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter.

Buzz is up, though at the moment it's sluggish and it looks like Googel IM/SMS may have cratered along with it. Probably being hammered.

The Buzz site says it's being rolled out gradually, but I clicked the sign up button there and it seemed to add it to my Gmail. It looks like my Buzz followers include my Google Reader shared item followers (I'm following 43 people and 22 people are following me) plus my Chat correspondents.

The Buzz shared items are the sum of Chat status messages, Google reader shared items and Picasa image shares:

Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites.

"Connected sites" create posts in Buzz. Mine started out with Picasa public albums and Google Reader shared items. It's not, however, showing my Chat status messages as a "connected site" so there's something funny there. Those should really show as "connected sites". [I don't think Chat updates are doing anything at the moment].

I think that Buzz is the gathering point and Buzz posts don't go to Google Reader shared items or to Chat status, but really it's hard to tell. The site is semi-stable at the moment.

I've never had much use for Twitter, and it looks like I'll have even less use in the future - especially if Google ties this into SMS.

PS. Viewing the people I follow, I see that my "leonine" OS X 10.6 user account icon has now metastasized to be attached in Gmail's Buzz follower view to my corporate email. Where will it go next?

Update: I reviewed how these display in my Google Profile, and I decided it was a bit too much information to have publicly available there. My Google Profile is very discoverable, hence corporate. So I removed the connectivity to Reader Shared items. I'll explore this over time.

Update 2: I wonder if Google will even try to submit an iPhone Buzz app, given that Apple would almost certainly reject it.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion

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My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

OS X Address Book: How do you show all groups for a Contact?

Once upon a time, an early version of OS X Address Book allowed one to see all the Groups to which an address belonged:

InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed - Address Book: "the group setup window should appear,"

I don't believe there's a group setup window any more. It's easy to add an address to a group, but I don't think there's away to inspect or interact with an address and find out which groups it belongs to.

I often want to do this, particularly when I deal with duplicate address book entries.

Sigh.

I doubt Apple will fix this. If they ever do crack the hood on Address Book, maybe they could also fix the "Find Duplicates" function - such as provide a "show duplicates" option. Or at least document what the merge behavior really is!

Update 2/26/2010: Per Comment by Kate: "Simple. Select the address card you want to find groups for. Press the option key. The groups the address belongs to will be highlighted." Knowing the answer I searched on this, and found only one reference in an old version of Pogue's "Mac OX X" Missing manual series. How did Kate know this?

Update 2/27/2010: It's in the "manual" (online help). Of course. It's not even hard to find. I searched on "show groups" and found:

Select a contact in the Name column.

Hold down the Option key.

Address Book highlights the groups the contact belongs to in the Groups column. If you have a lot of groups, scroll the list to see all of the highlighted groups.

Total humiliation, total fail.

Sync heck: CalDAV vs Exchange Server - a Google Apple review

Two years after writing "Synchronization is Hell" I'm pleased to report it's been only a bit heckish of late for my iPhone and our family Calendar.

Three months ago I switched my iPhone sync to

• CalDAV to multiple Google Calendars, including my wife's family calendar, my personal calendar, and various school and sport and social calendars all shared via Google. (iCal also subscribes to these. It's useful when I want to see the most data, but it's not essential.)
• MobileMe for Personal Contacts. MobileMe manages Contacts sync for me across multiple OS X machines.
• Microsoft's "Exchange" (ActiveSync) for my corporate Contacts, Calendar and email.
• Gmail for my personal mail.

Yes, it's rather complicated. Life would be easier if the iPhone could handle multiple ActiveSync accounts - then I could also sync to Google using ActiveSync. I lost access to my Google Contacts when I switched my single iPhone ActiveSync client to the corporate server. I think I'm now ready to retry Spanning Sync, which I gave up on about a year ago and take another stab and "Project Contacts".

Despite the Contacts loss and some quirks, it's been a miracle to finally have work and personal and other calendars all in one place. I have a fairly full and complicated life, and being able to coordinate calendars this way has been genuine progress.

There are a few limitations with this I never see mentioned elsewhere -- so here's the exclusive list:

1. On my iPhone I can't move an appointment between calendars after I've created it
2. Exception handling is quirky. I can set an appointment in Google to workweek only, but it may not stay that way on my iPhone.
3. I can't invite people to appointments created on the iPhone CalDAV account, even though Google supports invitations. I can do invites with the ActiveSync account.

See also:

• iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
• Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.
• Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
• Address book sharing with OS X and MobileMe
• Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
• Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
• MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts

Update 4/14/2010: Currently my iPhone can't edit CalDAV synced appointments that have invitations. Really annoying. iPhone OS 4 will support multiple Exchange connections so I'll try using ActiveSync instead when that's out. I don't know if this is a CalDAV, Apple or Google issue.

Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7

Between Dell machines shipping with motherboard disconnected SATA cables, a Clampi Trojan on my Windows 2003 server, a mysteriously vanished backup [1], Windows 2003 blue screening on a new Dell workstation, a failed Acronis disk image and the horror of 64 bit Windows 7 it's been another fun week in tech.

Today was a bit better. I installed VMWare Player on a 64bit Windows machine and created a 32 bit Windows 2003 VM - giving it all four cores and 3GB of memory. After VMWare tools installed and I enabled hardware graphics acceleration it felt faster than on the prior 3 yo workstation lost to the wretched corporate refresh cycle.

Mostly easy, until I dealt with the second drive in the box. Even after I used shared folders to map to drive E:, and the ancient DOS subst command to assign a drive letter to the shared folder, I still couldn't write to the new shared folder. I could read, but I couldn't delete anything. If I tried, I got an "access denied" message.

Worse, it seemed I could write to the drive, but the data wasn't there. VMWare showed files as having been copied, but in Win 7 they weren't there. On restart the VM didn't see them either.

The fix was to right click the drive letter in Windows 7, choose properties then security, and allow "EVERYONE" full control of the E: Drive. Then Windows 2003 in the VM could read and write.

I suspect there's a less severe fix. After I left work it occurred to me that I should study the read/write permissions on the C: drive. I suspect the vmware_user (__vmware_user__) group has special privileges on that drive, I just need to study them and replicate them for the E: and F: drives.

I'll update this post with what I find.

PS. It's unnerving that my Google searches really didn't turn up anything useful on this topic!

[1] Retrospect Pro backup on external drive. It vanished! Dir *.* and Attrib *.* showed nothing with 325 GB used. Retrospect could find the files though -- it restored from the backup drive.

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My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup

Time Machine, among its other significant weaknesses, is ill suited to offsite backup – especially when it is used with Time Capsule.

If you attach an external drive to Time Capsule there is an “archive feature” that will shut down TC access and safely transfer the data to an external drive. Problem is, neither the drive nor the backup are encrypted.

Carrying around non-encrypted backups is not a good idea.

There’s a similar problem with a standard Time Machine external drive. If you swap them, you run into the same encryption problem.

The answer for an external drive is to use an encrypted disk image and mount that for TM backups. That doesn’t, however, work with standard Time Capsule archive behavior. I suspect one might be able to disconnect all clients and use the finder to copy the disk images to an encrypted disk image, but I’ve not tested that.

See also:

• Time Machine - Unable to Complete Backup bug on Time Capsule
• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule
• Time Machine- Fail first, then flaw discovered
• Time Capsule 10.5 Backup volume could not be mounted bug

Time Machine - Unable to Complete Backup bug on Time Capsule

I'm not a fan of Time Machine. I run into more TM bugs than I ever saw with cranky old Retrospect -- and I get less notification of problems.

Today I found a critical laptop hadn't been completing it's TM backup for about 2 days. It was showing a common, unhelpful, error message "time machine an error occurred while creating the backup folder".

David Alison's Blog has the answer for a standalone time machine. Turn off TM on the affected machine. Then navigate to your TM backup folders and look for something like "2010-02-01-134046.inProgress". Delete the "inProgress" file.

This doesn't work for Time Capsule though. TC won't let you delete the inProgress file. I couldn't find any report of a fix, save dragging the actual machine specific TC sparse disk image to the trash and starting over. (The official response to all similar problems, by the way, is to wipe the entire TC disk and redo ALL machine backups).

What worked for me was to turn off Time Machine on all the TC clients. Then I restarted the AirPort and then turned TM back on for the troubled machine. The backup chugged away for a while, and then it resumed.

See also:

• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule
• Fixing the Time Machine / Time Capsule 10.5 "Backup volume could not be mounted" bug

Windows 7 is OS X Warp(ed)

One of my work machines now runs Win 7. It’s the first time I’ve had to do more than play with it.

It helps to know OS X, but it also hurts. There’s a lot of stuff in Win 7 that’s a tasteless and ugly version of OS X. Take the desktop themes (please).

Hard to say if it’s really an aesthetic improvement even over XP. The XP interface feels light, sharp and clear by comparison.

Update: For example - "Program Files (x86)". Thousands of Google hits puzzling over that one. WTF were they thinking?

Update 2/4/10: OS X managed a smooth migration to 64 bit. I've had a few days of experience with the Win 7 mix of 32 and 64 bit ODBC, Oracle, Java, Microsoft Office, SQL Developer, etc. It's a train wreck. It brings back memories of early DOS experiences. This 2007 tech doc tells one part of the dreadful story.