Your Technology Slavior

Microsoft owns the "Ribbon" look-and-feel

2006-12-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

One of the great innovations in the upcoming Office 2007 is the Ribbon navigation bar. It finally allows anyone to utilize hundreds of features available in Word and Excel, without hunting through multitudes of menus, dialog boxes and sidebars that keep popping up. But what Microsoft giveth, Microsoft taketh away: recently they announced that the Ribbon concept can be licensed from Microsoft to be used in third-party products, for free. Note, the license is not for the code that makes the Ribbon work, or for icon images inside the Ribbon - the license covers Ribbon-like functionality. So if you wanted to create an application that works similar to Office 2007, under Windows, Mac or Linux, you would need to apply for the license.

Although the license is free, there is a catch: if you accept the license, you also accept many "must-follow" guidelines which ensure consistent implementation of the Ribbon across the globe. Another somewhat more contraversial catch is that you cannot license Ribbon for competing software, on any platform:

The license excludes products or components that perform primarily as software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, contacts and databases, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of them.

This may seem reasonable from Microsoft's perspective: they've spent years testing and developing the Ribbon UI concept and they don't want to just hand it to someone else to compete with them. Unfortunately, this leads to a slippery slope of owning UI concepts, which are never so black and white. For example, the Ribbon borrows heavily from the concept of toolbars; many people have used toolbars in a number of configurations (including Microsoft themselves). What makes a toolbar no longer a toolbar but a license-infringing Ribbon?

This move also ensures that software like OpenOffice or Thunderbird will have to use different interface to Office 2007. This will place a greater support burden on companies that decide to switch to alternatives.

Moreover, historically Microsoft's Office UI has been copied over and over again, giving competing applications consistent look and feel (Microsoft is not alone in this, just ask Lotus and Adobe). Even webmail providers have emulated Outlook's interface to make it easier for their users to get used to the new system. Microsoft has not complained about this sort of thing in the past as it benefited indirectly: wide usage of their UI concepts validated the Office suite and ensured it was the "gold standard" of usability and the safe choice. This also helped standardize the Windows GUI across variety of applications. The new licensing arrangement sets a bad precedent for application development not just on Windows, but on any platform.

Zune debuts at #2

2006-11-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Zune replaces Sandisk as the second best selling digital music player. It grabbed 9% of the unit sales, with a 13% of the dollar value due to its higher per-unit price. Some are calling this a successfull launch, but I think it's still too early to call: many of the early adopters would have bought the unit in that first week, so we may see a significant drop in sales in the following weeks.

One indicator of this is Amazon sales ranking: when Zune debuted it was in the top 10 best selling MP3 players, although it has slipped to # 17 only days later. Of course, the fact that there is only one model of Zune is working against Microsoft, since Apple covers the gamut with Shuffle, Nano and full-sized iPod.

A few unnoticed Zune foibles

2006-11-09T17:04:00.000-08:00

As the Zune marketing campaign ramps-up some of the info on device is starting to get out. Some of it is disappointing:

Zune will not show up as a removable drive in Windows - this is somewhat perplexing; this type of functionality can be very useful and many people rely on it. Most of Zune's competitors can be used as external storage devices.
Weird pricing on Zune Marketplace - I am not sure how this works in practice but Walt Mossberg reports that "the point system is deceptive. Songs are priced at 79 points, which some people might think means 79 cents. But 79 points actually cost 99 cents." I don't see how they could have implemented something like this without upsetting a lot of customers.
Songs shared through Zune are marked as "played" after only a minute of a song has been heard. If you stop playing the song at that point then restart later it would be counted as the second play. You only get three plays in three days to listen to songs people send to you.
If you share your own unprotected content (like a plain-jane MP3 file) it is covered by the same 3-by-3 limitations on the receiving Zune.
You cannot pass a beamed song to another person, nor can you be beamed the same song twice.
Zune is bigger than the 80Gb iPod, which has almost three times the storage and double the battery life (without using wireless on Zune).
You need a special Zune player to manage Zune on your computer, Windows Media Player won't work.
Zune's central "wheel" isn't a wheel, it won't turn nor is it touch-sensitive, it's just four buttons in the shape of a wheel.
There are no extras like games, calendar or alarm; there is no FM or Line-In recording either. It also has no support for podcasts.
It only works with Windows, no MacOS or Linux client (iPod works with all three).
Many other small oddities that were widely reported, the device won't be able to play PlaysForSure or iTunes purchased music, the only wireless functionality is to send music to friends (no wireless sync for example), bigger screen but same resolution as iPod so it doesn't look as crisp, etc.

I still want to check it out in person. It's really too bad they only have a one-size-fits-all model, I'm sure in the months to come they will be releasing new models.

Creative's latest device sounds better than God

2006-10-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

Creative has just released an external X-Fi adapter called Xmod that aims to improve the sound of your music, in every way possible. This time around, vague marketing statements such as "better sounding" were not deemed sufficient to sell this product - Creative boldly claims that with this small $80 device your MP3s will sound not just better, not even near CD-quality, but they will sound better than studio quality! Take a gander at the picture below:

If this image is accurate then MP3s with Xmod will sound better than the day song was recorded in the studio. Of course, I'm sure that's not what they meant to say. Wait, there's more text following the chart:

Imagine being in the studio as your favorite artist records a new album. The sound is real and live the way it was meant to be heard.
When that album gets mass-produced on CD, it is compressed to fit the format. And the sound quality of that original performance suffers.
When you further compress the songs into MP3, you'll notice an even greater loss of sound quality. Your favorite album now sounds flat and lifeless.
X-Fi technology breathes life back into the songs. It restores the details, expands the music to surround sound and creates an experience that goes beyond studio quality.

The feast of inaccuracies in this snippet of marketing copy continues throughout the Xmod promotional text. For example, the statement when that album gets mass-produced on CD, it is compressed to fit the format is completely off the mark. CDs are not compressed, at least not in the same way MP3 files are compressed. Music on CDs is compressed but in a very different way which has nothing to do with the limitations of the CD format. CD format has a very wide dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and the loudest parts of the song) but through the method of dynamic range compression the CDs today are "compressed" into the louder parts of the dynamic range so that songs sound louder, although they lose the fine definition in their sound (on why this practice has taken off in the recent years see Loudness War).

There are algorithms to remove dynamic compression after the fact, although they are far from perfect. This may be what Creative's engineers were trying to solve but we'll never know from their marketing materials. Creative, as one of the biggest players in PC audio, is doing a really poor job of educating the customer and is selling on hyperbole alone: Would you like your MP3s to sounds better than they did in the studio the day they were recorded? Where do I sign up?

USB flash drives and security

2006-09-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had a great pleasure yesterday to participate in TechForum's live weekly radio program, discussing security and removable drives. Many thanks to Priscilla and Scott for a great show, filled with good ideas and great questions.

I wanted to expand on a few of those ideas. iPod slurping (the act of using an iPod on someone else's computer to syphon out huge amounts of their data and take it with you) can be a great threat in an enterprise environment. But even worse, I believe Dan brought up the idea of using the iPod with a full-blown Windows installation to get around security measures on the host computer. Taking that a step further, you can now do this with any USB flash drive by installing a modified (read, most likely illegally patched, mock picture courtesy of Tom's Hardware) version of Windows XP that can help you do pretty much anything with the host computer, for good or evil.

And as the technology gets better and better things will get even more interesting. During the show I mentioned a postage-stamp-sized USB flash drive - it's made by Sony and called Micro Vault. Despite its dimunitive size, it can store as much as 2 Gb of data. It's very easy to misplace something of this size. Most employees will treat their corporate laptop with some level of care and protect it from being lost or stolen. The same cannot be said of something so small that it's likely to go through more than one wash-cycle in its lifetime. Yet for the enterprise the consequences of losing that USB drive could be as costly as losing any number of laptops.

Zune vs iPod, a few interesting notes

2006-09-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a few comments on the whole Zune hysteria that may have been overlooked.

Firstly, due to the vertical orientation of the Zune promotional photos some people think that Zune has a wide-screen aspect ratio which is not true. Both iPod and Zune use 4x3 letterbox. iPod's screen is half an inch shorter diagonally, here's Zune's display shown on top of iPod for comparison:

When it comes to Zune's physical size, it is pretty much the same width as iPod, but a bit longer. This image accurately shows their relative sizes:

Some people assumed that Zune has a higher resolution screen which is untrue; both devices use QVGA (320x240). Something I thought was deceptive about the press photos of Zune is the image below. The device screen in the photo must have been composited digitally, after the shot was taken, as the apparent screen resolution in the photo exceeds that of 320x240. This is probably one of the reasons people think Zune has a high-res screen. After adjusting for 320x240 resolution the press photo in question (on the left) looks quite a bit duller (click for the full-size image):

Now, we just need to know Zune's MSRP!

UPDATE: MSRP was announced at $250 and a few unfortunate annoyances have also come to light.

Apple Newton beats up on Samsung Q1

2006-08-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

I love technology and I love gadgets. My accountant probably shakes his head whenever he goes through my expenses. But I have also been sorely disappointed that with all our progress in what our hardware can achieve today we have woefully neglected the key piece of the puzzle - the usability of these devices. The gadget landscape is littered with examples, from my HP hw6515 handheld that excels at collecting dust in my office, to my Motorola DCT6412 PVR, the most crashtastic piece of hardware I've ever owned.

CNET UK made a great point few days ago by pitting Apple Newton (circa 1995) against Samsung Q1, the latest object of techno-lust. I remember Newton fondly, it was a quiet and elegant device that was a joy to work with. Samsung Q1 is the opposite, it's garish to the max. You've got the video, the audio, full Windows XP, colour screen, etc. But the question becomes which is the better device for the end-user, the user that needs it to be a) portable, b) run a long time on batteries and c) be stable. Watching videos is great but you won't be doing that if the battery life lasts only 2.5 hours and you also need to get some work done during the day!

CNET gave Apple Newton the nod in the face off, and although this was a tongue-in-cheek comparison the point they were trying to make is crystal clear!

Marketing gone nuts

2006-07-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Michael Gartenberg posts a picture of a huge billboard on the Bronx Expressway overpass that reads:

Hi Steven,
Do I have your attention now?
I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful, poorly-endowed slimeball. Everything's caught on tape.

Your (soon-to-be-ex) Wife,
Emily.

p.s. I paid for this billboard from OUR joint bank account.

Turns out to be a viral marketing campaign for a CourtTV show. Tsk tsk tsk...

Sign-up pages smarter than you

2006-05-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

There is one fight on the Internet that has been going on for a good number of years - spammers versus webmasters everywhere. I am not talking about the annoying email spam but the niche spam that targets website forums and comment sections. This type of spam can turn a vibrant community into a ghost-town in a matter of weeks. Today Engadget had to disable their comments section due to excessive spamming.

Most commercial forum and blog spammers use these attacks to register users with "interesting" URLs in their user profile, then post small nuggets of wisdom on random threads, stuff like where you can get the cheapest Viagra, or how to make millions playing poker online. This whole process is automated - scripts locate your site, sniff out what type of software you use to run your forum or blog, then apply appropriate methods to create a user account and then deposit their poop all over your site.

To respond to this abuse web application developers started adding those annoying "Type in the letters you see above" traps, where letters were drawn on an image that you had to read in order to retype them - no ability to cut and paste text, which also means automated scripts couldn't "see" what was written on the image.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for spammers to find their way around it - soon, spamming scripts were upgraded as well so that they literally scan the included image and "read" out the letters present. Web application developers responded by making the images ever-more elaborate, with backgrounds, random lines going through them, etc. It's gotten so bad that some of these CAPTCHAs as they are known (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) cannot be easily read by computer or a human. Often I have to refresh the page several times until I get a CAPTCHA that I can decipher.

For a demonstration of why CAPTCHAs are getting so ridiculously complicated take a look at one CAPTCHA decoder, with analysis of the common CAPTCHAs out there and their weaknesses - at least now you'll understand!

How unfair is AdWords?

2006-05-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

Robert X. Cringely has a very intriguing write-up on Google's AdWords program and how it may not be as democratic as most of us assume. Generally speaking, if you bid on rarely used words then you should be paying less per click on that word due to the lack of demand. This enables many small web publishers to profitably sell all types of content.

Unfortunately, it seems that Google does play favourites when it comes to pricing, and we are not talking about small discounts for large advertisers. All this happens with some really fuzzy math:

Luis decided to sell his program online using a Google ad campaign, targeting terms like "physics equations," "equation editor," and of course "LaTex." Because he didn't expect much competition selling equation editors, Luis thought that he could get most of these words for about Google's minimum price, which in the UK is 1p. In practice, though, he found that the minimum price was 3p for most words, and that minimum shortly jumped and then jumped again until some words cost as much as £2.75 (about $5.15). Since there was no competition for these ads, Luis couldn't figure out what was going on, and frankly, Google wasn't much help. They said that his words had low "Quality Scores," which meant that the minimum charge per word had to go up by the amount specified.

Google would be wise to keep in mind the customers that made AdWords a success - long before Amazon started spending millions of dollars on advertising with Google it was the small web publishers that proved the concept for Google and helped make Google what it is today, the number 1 Internet search site. Google may be able to make more money in the short term catering to large companies but taken together small businesses have enough pull to potentially send droves of Google visitors elsewhere.

XUL picking up speed?

2006-05-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

It has been reported today that Linspire and Ajax13 will be teaming up to bring Ajax13's web apps directly to Linspire desktop, via AjaxOS system. This at surface sounds like a great news for web apps everywhere until you actually read into it.

Ajax13 has put out such classics as ajaxWrite and ajaxTunes, enabling you to turn your web browser into a relatively capable word processor. As long as your browser is Firefox, that is. You see, despite the company name (Ajax13), and application names (ajaxWrite) these are not strictly using what most people understand as Ajax. These apps rely on XUL, which is the building block of the Mozilla project and its off-shoots like Firefox. In a way this is even worse than developing an IE-only web application - at least with IE you would allow more people to use your app.

So that brings me to the momentous occasion of Ajax13 teaming up with Linspire to bring this XUL-application-goodness to Linspire users. Sounds like Linspire sees something in Ajax13's approach to web applications, something that the rest of us morons don't (I use the term affectionately). Great press for Linspire and even better for Ajax13, winning a valuable partner for their web apps. That is until you realize that Michael Robertson started both companies and is chairman of Linspire and chief executive of Ajax13. A very smart way to generate publicity!

AIM for Windows Mobile

2006-05-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

I wanted to install Windows Mobile AIM client onto my Crashinator (tm) PDA and lo and behold AOL wants to charge me $20 to install their IM client onto my device. This is the same software that's free for pretty much all other platforms.

After some digging around I realized this is a relatively recent decision by AOL, the software was previously available for free. So if you look hard enough you'll be able to find it for download for free. Google will even lead you to AOL's own "free download" page, except with the broken download link.

Fortunately, this being the Internet and AOL being as disorganized as they are you don't have to slum it in the seedier Internet locales to get this software - apparently AOL's UK division does not agree with AOL US policies and offers the download for free to their UK customers. Yes, the exact same download. Get it from:

http://www.aol.co.uk/aim/wince/index.html

Thanks AOL UK, you got the right idea!

Small Screen Livin', part II

2006-04-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

In part I I wrote about reasons for giving up large screens and how to make those small screens even smaller by using Large fonts! Well, the next tip will claim some of that space back!

To recap, on a 10" screen the desktop space becomes a scarce resource and you want to manage it properly. The biggest space hog is the Windows Task Bar. As useful as it is it simply consumes too much space on a 10.6" widescreen when Large Fonts are enabled (this makes the Task Bar a few pixels fatter). You can move it around of course. Docking it the left or right edge of the screen sounds like a great way to utilize the widescreen aspect ratio. Unfortunately, I found it consumed too much space in those configurations as well so I set out to find a replacement for the Task Bar! I needed something to provide me with:

A list of running applications
Access to my frequently used programs (although not essential)
Access to certain system tray (system notification area) features

The first likely candidate for replacement was something that worked similar to the way Mac OS Dock functioned. A set of icons docked to the bottom of the window that expanded as you moused over them. There are several implementations of Dock-concept for Windows and I started trying them all, some of which were free utilities.

I started with the free apps, of course! A lot of them did a very good job, I especially liked MobyDock. Others I tried were AquaDock, AveDesk, RocketDock and Y'z Dock. Unfortunately, most of them were meant to be used as program launchers, rather than replacements for task bar. I needed to switch between programs currently running rather than just launch programs. As I said, MobyDock came closest to what I needed but unfortunately it was really unstable. It would work quite well until I put my laptop into Stand By or Hibernate modes. After waking the dock would start acting up.

I finally decided to try the grand-daddy of dock applications on Windows, the ObjectDock. They have a free version called ObjectDock, and another that costs $19.95 called ObjectDock Plus. After trying and playing with the free version (which pretty much did everything I needed) I soon upgraded to ObjectDock Plus, without even thinking about it.

ObjectDock is great - well written, extremely stable and very versatile. I do encounter a problem occasionally where the dock doesn't stay on top and is shown behind other windows but in those rare circumstances I just need to restart the program and the problem is fixed. It's worth noting that my laptop runs non-stop, hibernates a lot and is restarted maybe once every two weeks so any software that tries to replace system components like ObjectDock needs to be extremely stable to work well.

Here is the image of my typical session, the left group of icons are shortcuts and docklets (I only need four), and the right group shows my running applications:

The applications will "bounce" in the dock when asking for your attention (like IM messages arriving in the background), and you are able to right-click on the applications in the dock to access their system menu. You can even drag and drop to re-arrange the order they're displayed in. Mousing over the dock will enlarge the icons and show large name for each application. Unfortunately, you cannot drag and drop from Explorer onto the icons to restore that application's window but I soon got over it.

The four special icons on the left side invoke (in order from left to right) the Programs Start menu list, my personal shortcuts list, battery indicator with much higher resolution than the default Windows four-state battery icon and the toggle that hides/shows the Task bar when I need to access a system tray icon not normally visible here.

ObjectDock is very customizable and versatile to fit pretty much anyone's workflow. In my case it enabled me to get the most out of my small screen and made me even more productive than I was before. I highly recommend it! If you know of other Task bar replacement tools that work well for you I'd love to hear about them.

Part III will bring you even closer to the small-screen-Nirvana...

Small Screen Livin', part I

2006-04-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

I love large, bright spacious LCD monitors! There's just something special about surrounding yourself with desktop space to use as you see fit. I'd love to have two (or even three) 24" widescreen LCDs working in tandem, allowing me to work uninterrupted and focused on the task at hand and not managing my windows.

My laptop's screen measures barely 10 inches across. Most people see that as a tremendous handicap and the barrier to switching to a smaller laptop and shrinking their traveling weight. I have to admit I had some serious concerns too. I was used to hooking up my 15" laptop to a 21" LCD to get more room when not on the road, so would I be able to put up with 10" screen at all?

What finally pushed me to go ultra-light was the enhanced battery life combined with the incredibly more portable setup. Since my battery can easily last 5 hours (with WiFi enabled) most of the time I leave my AC Adapter behind. And since the laptop is really small and light I don't need heavily padded laptop bag to keep it safe.

Once I made the move the first week on the small screen was a bit scary. It helps that most widescreen ultra-portables sport fairly high 1280x768 resolution, which in itself is not that bad. After only 2 days I was already used to the lack of physical square inches and my old laptop screen looked simply gigantic. I did make some changes to my setup to make this possible, I hope these tips help you as well.

Large fonts

Your average computer screen displays 96 DPI (Dots Per Inch), some going up to 120 DPI. 120 DPI screens are a lot more "dense", pixels are closer together and fonts appear smaller yet sharper. Ultra-portables will pack even more pixels per inch, reaching 140 DPI. That is a pretty high number so the default Windows font sizes, designed for screens with 96 DPI, look very very small. I find that switching to Large Fonts designed for 120 DPI screens helps in making the laptop a lot more useable. Unfortunately, you will lose some screen real-estate since any text now will take up more pixels but you will still benefit from sharp text due to the high native DPI of the screen. To change to Large Fonts go to Display Control Panel, switch to Settings tab, click on Advanced and select Large size under DPI Settings. Note, Windows will ask to be restarted whenever changing the font DPI.

Some Windows programs out there (although few in numbers) are written to expect everyone to run their desktops at default DPI setting. These programs look a bit out-of-whack when run with Large Fonts, and sometimes they are not even usable; dialog buttons will be shown below the visible area of the dialog box so you cannot click on them. For this reason some people don't like to switch to Large Fonts, thinking it breaks certain programs. The truth is that it is those programs that are broken and their publishers don't test them properly. I rarely encounter programs that exhibit this broken behaviour, and when I do I consider myself lucky. If the program has this very obvious bug it probably has many others so I save myself aggravation and look elsewhere.

So now that you made this change you will actually have even less usable screen real-estate than before, albeit somewhat easier to use. I will outline how to claw that real-estate back in the part II...

Windows Mobile and iPAQ hw6515

2006-04-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

I was into PDAs before either Palm or Microsoft entered that market. Of course, I'm talking about Newton MessagePad by Apple, recently voted one of the worst gadgets ever by Laptop Magazine (which was the month I stopped buying Laptop Magazine - I mean, are they serious?). Well, after spending a considerable amount of money over the years and going through numerous Pilots, Palm Pilots, iPAQs, back to Palms and Symbian, I am currently using one of the latest products from HP, iPAQ hw6515.

My Symbian device is two years older than this iPAQ, a Sony Ericsson P900. As a PDA it gets 6 out of 10, and as a phone it doesn't do too much better at 7/10. So when I got my latest iPAQ with built in GSM/EDGE/Bluetooth/GPS I was really expecting to see some appreciable advancement.

As a PDA Windows Mobile has matured and does very well. It still has many small annoyances sprinkled throughout but overall I can cope. I would say it gets 8/10. But I was more curious to see how it does as a connected device and as a phone. Well, after a few weeks of use I have to say that this is one of the worst phones I have ever owned!

For example, the device has a clear plastic screen cover that is supposed to shield the screen while you use it as a phone. Unfortunately, Microsoft really did not integrate the keyboard well enough with the phone part of the device so that you are constantly lifting the screen and hitting a small nub of a button displayed in the corner.

Even though the device has an OK key on the keyboard it does not work that often. It will close some dialogs, while on the others you can use the ever-so-tiny Tab key to nudge the focus to the Close/OK button on the screen and then use the OK key to close it. But the worst are stupid notification popups that have a tiny Close button in the corner that cannot closed with any combination of Tab/OK key pressed. This is great if you're just about to dial, or are in the middle of a phone call.

Sorely missing from the tiny keyboard is also a Back/Cancel key! For example, you can conveniently press Joystick Up to see if you missed any calls, but guess how you go back to the phone dialing pad? Open the screen cover and use your nail to tap the tiny OK button to dismiss the list. If you press the OK key or the Phone key on the keyboard you may dial the entry displayed in the list. I thought hang-up button would be useful for this purpose but unfortunately it will just stop an active GPRS connection and return you to the Today screen.

Otherwise, phone application is almost devoid of features! It took me a while to figure out how to enable speakerphone (on P900 just flip the lid open). Speed dial is hidden under the joystick. Every so often I get a weird error popup on the screen - Rogers (my network provider) suggested I reset the device on a regular basis to avoid those (grrrreat!). Today I had a pleasant experience of the device locking up as I pressed on the Call Answer button to take an incoming call. So reset again, wait for reboot and hope I can call the person back in time.

The device does have other redeeming properties, but its phone functionality is pretty abysmal. I have stayed away from Windows-based phone device for years fearing exactly this type of scenario. This year I figured they had enough time to sort out the bugs and reviews were generally positive. I just don't understand how Microsoft hasn't gotten this right after all this time.

Update 5/14/2006: I would feel bad if I didn't update my experience with this phone after using it for another month:

The phone has built-in profiles to switch between silent mode, meeting mode, etc. It is activated by pressing and holding the power button. Unfortunately, every once in a while when I switch to a regular (non-silent) mode the device decides to turn my volume all the way down and disables vibrate. To cap it all off, the volume icon doesn't change to indicate silent mode - so you really have no idea you're missing calls. This certainly shakes my confidence in this phone.

My call waiting feature has stopped working, and not on the network level! I can hear the incoming calls beep while I'm talking to someone else but the screen no longer gives me a dialog box that lets me switch calls, the phone simply shows nothing on the screen. The worst part is that after I finish the current call there is no record of me missing or receiving the missed call! So I have no idea who I missed unless that person leaves me a voice mail.

Additionally, the locking up still happens: every once in a while when I press the green Answer button to answer an incoming call the phone responds by locking up. Just solidly locking up. That's gotta be the worst time for a phone to crash and it's happened about 6 times so far. I then have to pull out the pen, perform a reset, wait for it to boot up and call back.

Finally, last week I decided that hw6515 is a great PDA/email device and a bad, bad phone, even for a light phone user so I have placed an order for a proper small phone to accompany me. The irony is that I have not installed any downloaded software on my hw6515 so the instability I'm seeing can only be blamed on HP, Microsoft, Rogers or all three together.

Why Microsofties love their jobs

2006-04-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

To continue on the topic of love/hate relationship most of us have with their jobs I wanted to highlight Microsoft and their unique approach to job satisfaction. In the past 5 years or so, most Microsoft employees I met or talked to have had nothing but good things to say about their employer. This is no small feat, considering that most large companies intentionally or unintentionally make their employees feel small and inconsequential.

Regardless of what you may think of Microsoft, the Evil Monopolist, they truly try to empower their workers, both personally and professionally. They spend an amazing amount of money to achieve this goal and it doesn't end with fooseball tables. One of the more interesting programs is their Management Excellence Foundation Program (MEFP) offered for free of course to their managers across the organization. To participate you need to take a week off work, completely disconnected (you're not supposed to keep on top of your email during this period) and immerse in a 7-day dawn to dusk course with fellow Microsoft peers. Trevin writes about it in his blog:

This particular training is off-site in Bellevue and is meant as an intensive totally immersive training. Each day started at 7am for breakfast and went until at least 10pm, and most days going much, much later. I'm purposely not going to give away too much about this program as much of the benefit you get is from not knowing everything that is going to happen throughout the duration of the event. I was apprehensive at first to blog about this, but I feel that this is important enough for the company that I simply have no choice. I don't say this lightly: This course has completely changed my professional life.

When you are working for a company that gives you this much power to control your life many other perks become secondary and leaving Microsoft for another job that much less likely. High tech or otherwise, companies should take employee development very seriously since in the end it will help their bottom line as well.

How much do you hate your job?

2006-04-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

I bet not as much as some of the people working for McDonald's outsourced drive-through service. Imagine yourself sitting in a cubicle thousands of miles away from the said drive-through and receiving non-stop customer requests asking for a double-double with cheese (obviously, I haven't been to McDonald's in some years).

Instead of listening to them on your walkie-talkie they are reaching you via Internet, and you follow through on their order by punching it into your computer. This in turn gets sent to the McDonald's assembly line for just-in-time delivery. Michael Dell would be proud! I honestly cannot believe that this makes them more efficient but I'm sure they've done studies...

The perks of working for the McDonald's call center include such gems as

Software tracks [employee's] productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations.

And you tell me I'll actually get paid (minimum wage) to enjoy this environment? Sign me up!

Your handy secret flash stash

2006-04-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

I find that when traveling with my laptop (whatever its size) one thing that I always want on me is some type of external drive space, either for quick exchanges of data with colleagues or to ensure that your most important files are backed up somewhere other than the laptop's internal hard drive (knock on wood and all).

I'm fortunate enough to have drawers full of USB flash drives, of all shapes and sizes - a veritable United Nations of flash storage. One of my favorites is SanDisk's very flat metal-clad flash drive with U3. I realized one way to have this drive with me at all times is to use my laptop's PCMCIA slot, which generally sits empty (in a laptop the size of Fujitsu P7120 that can seem like a lot of empty space begging to be filled up). Here is a simple way you can stash your own slim USB flash drive inside your laptop.

To start, you need to find a dust-blocker plastic insert that usually sits in PCMCIA slot (some laptops use a spring-loaded flap instead, in which case you need to beg your friends for their plastic insert). You will need to use a power tool and dremel out an empty area in the middle of the plastic insert.

The bit on the right was cut out from the bit on the left. My plastic insert had a solid plastic throughout, but some others will be a lot easier to carve out. On this black insert you just need to sever the diagonal support.

Next, just slide your USB flash drive into the PCMCIA slot, with the insert in place:

Voila! Your flash drive is ready and waiting any time you need it. There are some caveats of course. Firstly, I am not responsible for any damage this arrangement does to your flash drive or the computer, but it has been working for me without problems. Heat hasn't been an issue either (flash drives can take a lot of heat). I will write about another way to expand your drive space via PCMCIA slot very soon.

Of course, you can stash all types of items into your PCMCIA slot (I suggest experimenting with liquids!) but generally memory cards are a good choice as they're resistant to heat and will not get lost in the laptop's innards. If you want to store items such as some extra emergency cash or spare keys to your house you may want to look at products designed for this purpose.

Bose is a brand consumers trust the most?

2006-03-31T20:31:00.000-08:00

It was only a few days ago I ranted about Bose selling top-dollar systems on their marketing prowess alone. Someone at Bose decided at some point that spending money on marketing is a lot more efficient than spending money on product development. So what you end up is a cheap speaker system that's worth the money you paid for it just for that "Bose" sticker. Most people knowing all the facts would think that this type of scheme can't last that long and that eventually people will catch on and the brand will tank. Well, those people should think again!

Bose was just selected as one of the top brands consumers trust the most. The air is thick with irony: consumers trust Bose more than almost any other brand, despite the overwhelming evidence that they're being taken for a ride. This really sends wrong signals to the industry as a whole - building a brand is not just more important than investing in your product, but you don't need to work on your product at all, just spend all that money on some top notch marketing types and let them conjure it up from thin air.

Ajax for Ajax's sake

2006-03-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

I, like many of you, have been waiting with bated breath to see what Michael Robertson would put out when ajaxWrite debuted. We all expect a lot from him, since his many ventures made waves in the industry in the past few years, from MP3.com to Linspire. Well, ajaxWrite fails to impress on several fronts:

The point of Ajax is not to reproduce functionality of desktop apps to the letter - it is to expand and enable users to do something they couldn't do before. ajaxWrite can do little more than Windows owners can do with WordPad. What if you don't have Windows? Well, pretty much every OS includes a similar app that lets you create simple documents right out of the box. The cool thing about Writely was not that it really felt like a desktop app; that is secondary. The cool thing was centralized storage, collaborative features, RSS notifications when document was changed, etc. That is what web applications are meant to do.

That leads me to the second major drawback of ajaxWrite - it runs only on Firefox! Now, as a long-time Opera user that obviously irks me more than your average Firefox user, but that alone would not be so bad if this was a temporary limitations while they improve the application. But unfortunately, I believe this is a permanent handicap as ajaxWrite relies on XUL to create the user interface. XUL? There is an X in Ajax, but it's not for XUL! Using browser-specific technologies (Mozilla-based developments are the only ones that support XUL) is exactly how not to build web applications. There really is no difference to the end user if you use XUL over ActiveX. I hope this trend stops with ajaxWrite and its siblings. Let's not worry so much about reproducing the desktop look and feel but focus on creating new and compelling solutions.

Review: Fujitsu P7120 laptop

2006-03-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

At the core of my mission to lose traveling pounds is my new laptop, Fujitsu P7120. I have researched it thoroughly before buying and have now been using it for over a month. I am a very picky person when it comes to laptops - certain things have to be just right, or it just plain won't work for me. Keyboard layout is one of those criteria - Toshiba may have great hardware but until they completely revise their keyboard layout I simply will not be able to use their machines. I need the keyboard layout to be as standard as possible, otherwise I will constantly fight it as I switch between machines (and I'm talking from experience). So on paper my new laptop fit all those criteria and I finally bought it, sight unseen.

Before reading my review to see if you should consider it please take a look at other reviews that helped me make the decision - I'll try to not repeat what these fine people already wrote: Omar's review and NotebookReview.com review; these discuss the laptop from a very practical point of view and gave me enough information to jump in.

What I got

My model cost me about $2450 Canadian before taxes, with high capacity battery, DVD burner and 1 Gb of RAM. I think it's important to upgrade the RAM to 1 Gb to compensate for somewhat slower CPU and hard drive, which I'll mention below.

From the outside

The laptop is incredibly small - it is smaller than a letter-sized sheet of paper. It fits into the smallest laptops bags I have - currently I use it inside an 12" Powerbook Incase bag, fits in nicely width-wise, with a couple of inches to spare on top, which allows me to stuff gadgets in the top pockets without exploding the bag.

The laptop screen has no locking latches to worry about - just pry it open! This design works very well for a laptop of this size, I've had no problems with it so far.

The keyboard is great for a laptop this size - I can actually touch-type at full speed, and I'm a quick typist. Thankfully, Fujitsu did not mess about with key locations: Ctrl key is at the far left (where Fn key should never be!); I also appreciate having the second Ctrl key on the right side and wide Shift and Backspace keys; Del key is on top row, while the Windows key is nestled between Fn and Alt keys - all good as far as I'm concerned. There are a few minor drawbacks: function keys have no separation between F4 and F5 and F8 and F9, while Del key should really be the right-most key on the top row, not Pause/Break, that's really all I can complain about.

Most of the ports are on the left side of the unit, with a few present on the right and headphone and microphone plugs on the front - the backside is reserved for the battery and the two speakers. WiFi toggle is a physical On/Off switch, I prefer these as there are instances where Windows goes out of sync with button-style WiFi toggles. The same switch controls the Bluetooth as well. It's worth noting that the WiFi switch and Power button are accessible both when the screen is closed and when it's open.

Operation

One of the many outstanding features packed into this box is actually something that's not included inside - there are no fans to speak of! I don't know about you, but long time ago (we're talking 10 years ago) my laptops rarely made any noise, but as years went by laptop fans became bigger and louder and what's worse, widely accepted. But when you turn this laptop on you simply won't hear anything, even the trackpad buttons are extremely quiet. I appreciate the effort Fujitsu must have had to make to eliminate any active cooling, it's definitely worth it.

Laptop boots up very quickly, and integrated fingerprint reader works great to log you into Windows without typing passwords (you can still type passwords if you should lose one or more fingers you enrolled for authentication). Trackpad is quite small but works very well. One annoying aspect of the placement/size of the trackpad is that resting your middle finger just below the space bar can register as a touch on the trackpad and your mouse pointer will do some crazy acrobatics across the screen so I learnt to keep that finger elsewhere!

Screen is very good - it's sharp (1280 by 768), and very bright utilizing the new LED backlight technology that also extends your battery life. The nice thing is that it can be adjusted from very bright to almost completely dark. I did find the resolution a little too dense for my liking so I switched to using Large Fonts in Windows, which consumes a little more screen real-estate than Small Fonts do - I changed a few settings in Windows to compensate for this, and installed some new software and have to say that I'm actually happier with my setup now than I was on my previous 15" laptop. I will blog about that at some later time!

The laptop can run fairly warm (although nothing like my previous barn-burner), but usually it's relatively cool. To increase the comfort level when used on your lap, Fujitsu has padded the bottom of the laptop with a suede-like material that protects your legs from any hotspots. Works really well I may add!

Battery usage is great - I easily get 5 hours out of the battery, with WiFi on and screen brightness at about 80%. If you disable wireless you can get even more. I have the laptop configured to do nothing when the lid is closed and to hibernate when I press the Power button. This works really well for me. It also means that I rarely restart the laptop - it generally hibernates a few times a day and I restart maybe once every couple of weeks to give Windows a break. The system hibernates its 1 Gb of RAM relatively quickly, which was a nice surprise as I was concerned about the speed of the internal 1.8" hard drive.

Performance

I do a fair bit of programming and this was one of my main concerns before I finally decided to buy this laptop: it's powered by a Ultra-Low Voltage 1.2 GHz Pentium M. For someone doing fairly intense builds on a regular basis this sounded mighty scary. Omar's review took some of those fears away and I'm glad to say that I really had nothing to worry about. My old laptop was powered by an AMD 1800+ CPU and this machine to my eye is faster in every way so far. This is despite a slower hard drive as well. Of course having clean Windows install without pre-installed crapware certainly helps. My builds using both Borland Delphi Pro 6 and MS Visual Studio 2003 (yes, yes, I should upgrade) are all quicker on my new machine!

I also loaded some videos for consumption while travelling (documentaries and a few of Bob Cringely's NerdTV) and they play amazingly smooth, and look superb when viewed full screen on this bright unit. And with unit's great battery life I'm not afraid to play them as long as I want.

If you're a gamer than I really have nothing to offer yet - I haven't tried any 3D games or software on this machine, I doubt it can keep up with today's games with the integrated Intel MA900. This is something that you have to consider very carefully: from my research on ultraportables there is really no laptop that will have a good graphics engine coupled with things like great battery life and silent operation. This may change with time, but I'm sure the gaming industry will do its best to ensure that only $300 desktop cards can come close to rendering their latest titles. That type of horse power doesn't lend itself to easy integration into ultralight notebooks.

Conclusion

I might have given up a few niceties when I switched to this laptop (like the larger screen), but what I gained back was certainly more! My new screen may be smaller, but it's brighter and sharper. I shed almost 4 pounds from my traveling weight which allows me to take my new laptop with me more frequently. Some of you may not care, but for me the unexpected bonus is that I can now also wear nicer clothes as my new laptop bag is feather-light. That certainly sealed the deal for me!

Origami aka UMPC

2006-03-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

Engadget has posted a very funny editorial on the recently released Origami:

Here we go again. In its unending capitalistic quest, Microsoft is determined to figure out how to sell people their nth computer. Today, its ideal consumer's computing inventory looks something like this -- a couple of desktops around the home, a notebook for those mobile jaunts, a Media Center PC for controlling the television experience serving up Windows Media files to an Xbox 360 or lesser Media Center Extenders, and at least a Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone device.

But, wait. That could leave an unacceptable seven minutes and 34 seconds during waking hours when you don't have a Windows license at your wallet-handling fingertips.

Indeed!

Dealing with email

2006-03-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

I've been an email addict (for better or worse) some 15 years. I am intimately familiar with email architecture, MIME standards, transport mechanisms and language encoding problems but it seems as much as I know about email I am still unable to make any meaningful progress in how I manage email. I remember once a couple of years ago I actually had my Inbox empty for about a day and I was so proud of myself - unfortunately this state of bliss lasted all too briefly.

Managing your email can really make or break your productivity so it is interesting to see how some of the busiest people in the world deal with it. Fortune magazine interviewed several top CEOs [via Email Overloaded] to find out how they stay in touch and some of the comments are downright unbelievable. From the super busy

Marissa Mayer (VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google) receives 700 to 800 emails every day (her assistant handles many of these), takes 70 meetings a week, works on her email after 8pm and gets by on 4-6 hours of sleep. On weekends, she spends at least one 10 to 14 hour session on processing her accumulated email.

Carlos Ghosn (CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan)) spends the first week of every month in France, the third in Japan and also fits in a week in the US. He has three assistants who screen his email, passing to him only the items that they know are of great interest to him. He gets up by 6am and uses the time before his first meeting (8am) for thinking. He does not take his work home with him, allowing him to take a fresh look at things, from a different angle.

to near-ludite CEO of Goldman Sachs (my apologies to Hank, ludite is not a bad word!):

Hank Paulson (Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs) has never used email, but is a “huge voicemail user,” receiving about 200 voicemail messages daily, which are not screened by his assistant. Although he has no time for small-talk, he returns every call right away. This past Christmas, he spent 10 days hiking in Chile, and appears in most of the family photographs with a satellite phone at his ear. He gets up at 5:30am and is in bed by 10pm.

And you thought you had problems dealing with email!

Bose, not so hot after all

2006-03-18T18:48:00.000-08:00

This may not be news for many of you but I stumbled upon it recently. I'm no audiophile by any means although I have spent my share of dollars over the years in audio technology. I do not own any Bose speakers but I was surprised by the level of animosity audiophile community has against Bose. And now I see it may be for a good reason: Intellexual has a thorough review of Bose Acoustimass system and they are not kind to it. Bose's specialty seems to be innovation through marketing and they conclude

Bose equipment, even the flagship LifeStyle 50, resembles the sonic performance of the 11-year-old Aiwa minisystem in my garage. For $500, the Wave Radio is an overpriced alarm clock. If you're impressed by it, have a listen to a Henry Kloss radio for a fraction of the price! For $1000, the Bose 3-2-1 can not be described as anything less than a crime against sound reproduction. The message I want everyone to take from this lengthy review is that Bose, like Bang & Olufsen and Nakamichi, sell lifestyle and designer products whose prices are very heavily saturated by image and appeal. They are by no means, no means at all performance products. They have no cost-effectiveness, no bang-for-the-buck value, and draw no respect from any true audio enthusiests. If your goal is to appeal to and impress housewives, then this system gets the job done, but if your goal is high fidelity, high performance, high endurance, upgradeability, and fair market value pricing then I would very highly suggest you look elsewhere.

Colour me surprised!

Lightening your laptop

2006-03-17T21:24:00.000-08:00

I want to start on a topic many of us fixate on daily, our laptops. I just went through a drastic transition myself and hope that sharing my insights will help you make changes yourself.

I love to travel light, there's no better feeling (no really, I can't think of any right now). The most obvious item weighing you down on travels is your laptop - I used to use a "thin-and-light" 15" laptop weighing just over 6 pounds. I don't know if 6 pounds qualifies for light, but the laptop was very quick with very good 3D capabilities. Unfortunately, to power all this functionality it run really hot and the battery life was around 2.5 hours. For the same reason the AC Power Adapter was quite a brick. I had it with me whenever I travelled, but when it came to walking the conference halls I opted to leave it in my hotel room rather than spend a day lugging it around, especially since the short battery life would often leave me stranded with a useless anchor in my bag.

Finally, I realized that to be really mobile I needed to take some drastic measures and give up my 1400x1280 screen to shed some pounds. I have done this before - I used to own a ThinkPad 701c, one of the coolest laptops I've owned (and still have). So I made the move and started converting every gadget I own to an ultraportable version of the same and I have been very happy with the results!

One thing I realized was that a lot of the technology I bought or hacks I made were not generally known, especially within the context of mobile computing. I'll share what I can and maybe help some of you make the switch!

What now?

2006-03-16T17:11:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my new blog - expect a healthy dose of tech and business musings, some of which you may even find helpful.