MidKnight Gallery

With a recent announcement by Google, you can almost hear the air getting sucked out of .mac’s sails.

Say what?

OK. .mac is Apple’s much touted, and honestly, underdeveloped mail hosting service/sync service/online disk space/remote access service that was recently rebranded as mobileme/.me. Frankly, it’s a bastard stepchild. While I’ve had legitimate uses for it and it’s premium pricing (just wait, I’ll explain), most users have never needed most of what it offers, or could easily get it for free. The biggest thing going for it lately was .mac-based syncing for the iPhone, that offered a compelling reason to shell out the bucks.

Well, Google is now offering exchange-server based syncing called Mobile Sync that works with a number of smart phones – including the iPhone. With it, you can keep your gmail-based contacts and Google calendars wirelessly synchronized with your iPhone. And it’s free.

OK. It’s hardly the end of the world. There are still a number of advantages that .mac has, but Google sync just made it a lot less compelling.

Pro’s for Google Mobile Sync:

• Easy to share calendars with other people and fairly easy to see other people’s shared calendars as long as they’re on Google. Google calendars has it all over iCal here.
• Reliable. You don’t have to deal with the vagaries of Apple’s built-in syncing services. Google has the server, Google keeps the calendar. Any changes you make to it after using the calDav tools like Calaboration to give you direct access to your Google calendar in iCal will be reflected within minutes no matter where else you look at your calendar. The calendar and contacts are synchronized over the relatively tried and tested (yes, I’m grinding my teeth saying it, but credit where due) Exchange activesync services. Since the current Apple Address Book app in Leopard natively syncs to any specified Google Mail account, this gives you a completely different channel to keep your mail and contacts and calendars synchronized on your phone and desktop. It also makes them available via the web, while letting you use the interface (web or local) that best suits your way of working.

Cons:

• Privacy. Well – there are some who worry about Google and privacy. I understand these concerns, but don’t worry enough to not use them where they’re the best tool for the job.
• Five Calendars synchronized. You can have more than five calendars, but only five of them can be synchronized to your smartphone. I solved this by grouping what used to be separate calendars together.
• Ease of setup. If you have a new computer and iPhone – great. No problem. However, if, like me, you have a bunch of contact and calendar information already, then .mac is still the clear winner here. Between consolidating calendars, backing up data on the phone and the computers, exporting out individual calendars to import into Google cal, importing them, etc… it’s hardly a painless synchronization  or one-click export. If, on the other hand, you already use Google and never used iCal anyway, then you still have the option of viewing the calendars in iCal. This is useful because a lot of programs in OSX are aware of the address book and the iCal calendars.
• .mac plays better with mail programs than GMAIL. Especially the built in Apple Mail.app. Go figure. That said, this is true because Google does a few non-standard things to make tags work within the folder paradigm that most mail programs use.
• Doesn’t replace the “Back to My Mac” functionality. – though as I recall LogMeIn now has a free mac program that allows you to get some of that (remotely controlling your computer) for free.

So… getting all this to work can be a little harder than .mac, and you still don’t get to synch bookmarks, but it’s free, and it works. For people like me who’ve had a .mac address for years, well, we’re not giving it up. At this point though, I can’t really point to mobileme sync as a compelling reason to push .mac/.me/mobileme.

The kind of iPhone app I’ve been waiting for the longest….

One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.

This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:

That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.

Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.

Just a thought.

I’ve seen this several places now but the best summary is at Ars Technica. I’ve heard plenty of people say the naysaying was just as bad when XP was introduced.  Well, it was pretty bad, but not this bad. Not “We’re trying to figure out ways to sell Windows 2000 with new computers because people just want to avoid Vista and many of the businesses with custom-built apps won’t certify them on Vista without a lot more time stomping bugs” bad.

Ars Technica, the source of many fine articles related to computers, just published an excellent little primer on how to keep your computer secure. It includes information for Linux and Mac users as well.

I’ll admit. Some of my home stereo gear is old. As in better than fifteen years old. So?

It works.

It also makes no difference to what I’m about to discuss, which is: It is wayyyy too complicated for normal people (non-technical adults who are not gadget-geeks of some sort) to work their TV / home theater setup.

Case in point: Our widescreen gets cable piped directly in. It also gets the DVD player and VCR piped directly in, and echoes the sound out to the surround sound receiver.

So far so good. Unless I really want to listen to my iTunes library I never, ever change my stereo inputs. Turn on the TV and select the right input and *bam* there ya are. TV goodness.

But, we stumble into the first conceptual obstacle. You see, the TV remote, like many remotes supplied these days, is a universal remote. This means it’s universally useless for anything except perhaps the TV because the one critical feature you need for any other device (separate play-pause buttons, forex), are just not included on the remote surface, and the TV is complicated enough that little widdy biddy buttons require you to squint through bleary eyes.

The conceptual problem comes when Unsuspecting Normal Average Person with a Life picks up the remote, and, following your instructions turns on the TV and the stereo and cannot get it to change from the TV tuner.

Someone, recently handling the remote, must have hit the “dvd” button, and so neither the remote nor the TV care that you are mashing down the “source” button to change the input. The geeks response, knowing that the remote has multiple modes, will be to switch the remote back to TV mode.

This is NOT intuitively obvious to the normal average person. I’ll have to look at getting one of the programmable Logitech remotes because I’ve been told they actually really work – and divide up the settings by what you’re doing rather than by what device you need to control at the moment. The upshot is if you’re “watching a DVD” it controls the stereo volume via the volume buttons, sets the TV to the input designated as “DVD”, and the play controls manage the DVD player – all without you constantly switching modes.

The next common bugaboo, and one I’ll fix at my house with a little piece of RCA patch cable, is the famous “why is there no sound?” Receivers and pre-amps have many input selections. When my Onkyo was made, equalizers were common, and commonly hooked up at the in and out ports for “tape 2″ (in case you actually bought two separate tape decks). For the EQ to do it’s job the receiver had to route sound back out from its selected input via the tape 2 “record/out” jacks, and listen to the tape 2 input no matter what the original source was.

Needless to say, if you don’t have an EQ or a second tape deck there are probably no cables there. The secondary consequence is that accidentally turning on “Tape 2″ effectively mutes your stereo, with very little indication that it’s even in Tape 2 mode as you’ll still see the input for “Tape 1″ or “Video 1″, etc.

Earlier I posted about my “tanstaafl” related issues in getting filtering and proxy services set up.

Good news: I finally got it all to start reliably. It’s still a bit quirky about restarts for log turnovers though.

Nevertheless, I stumbled into something else incredibly useful, and after a few weeks of trying it out I will be shutting down my own filtering.

The service is called openDNS. Their purpose is to replace the sometimes flaky DNS service that comes with your ISP (Hi, Comcast!) and provide an alternate means to look up addresses on the internet. This means that every time you try to look up www.apple.com, their computer takes the web address and sends back the numerical address, much like looking up phone numbers in a phonebook by name.

The side benefit of this is that you can also specify corrections of typos, define what kind of websites you don’t want visited from your household or office, and specify what exceptions you want to allow, becausethey control what computer you connect to when you ask for a website.

Specifying what you want to block follows the same categories used in DansGuardian, and the logs give you a nice list of sites that have been denied. What it doesn’t do is let you know who in your network made the request, give you a weight for how strict to be within a category, or let you see what sites have been visited that were not blocked.

I can deal with those weaknesses, as it simplifies my computer setup and makes it a little more difficult for the kids to work around the restraints (I still make sure I eyeball their activity and computers on a regular basis). It has one other “plus” – the instructions. They have excellent documentation that should go a long way in helping you set up your router or computer to use their DNS servers as well as tracking changes in the IP address your ISP hands you.

Best of all, it’s “free.”

Well, not completely. They make money by sending mistyped or flat-out wrong domain names to their own search and ad results. 

A client of mine recently received an email purporting to be from the Department of Justice (and another one from “the IRS” ) relating to claims made against their business. It had some official-looking language about case numbers and claims filed by so-and-so, and noted that a copy of the complaint was included “in the pdf below.” They were suspicious for several reasons, and asked me to check it out.

Even if you expect the IRS or DOJ to email you out of the blue with this kind of thing, addressing the recipient by the wrong gender is a big red flag. The other thing that made me immediately suspicious was the “pdf” file was zipped.

The ZIP format is an incredibly useful compression and archiving standard that was even more important back when internet access was typically via modem. The downside is that if the package is really a virus installer it will not only unpack the virus files but execute them, infecting your system. For this reason any decent virus scanner will search through .zip files as they come in, but some viruses still slip through, especially in email. Also, PDF files are already compressed so there is little benefit from further compressing them (technically speaking – the graphics are already compressed. You may save some space by compressing the text more). Someone legitimately sending a PDF – or any document small enough to reasonably email (a word DOC file, etc.) – will almost never go out of their way to zip it up. Laziness, if nothing else, practically guarantees this.

As a matter of nettiquette, never email someone a .zip file without warning them ahead of time, and if you receive one without a prior heads up from a known, trusted source, be very suspicious. One of the nastiest infections I cleaned out looked like it came from a trusted source so the client opened it up without checking with the sender.

To wrap the story up, I took a snapshot of my Vista installation under Fusion, and looked at the zip file.  As expected, the antivirus software immediately caught it and archived it.

It’s been over a year since Apple shifted over to using the intel chipset in their machines, and every end of he computer product line now uses them. Adobe finally got an intel-native version of their apps out (only to be delayed in making CS3 Leopard-compatible.), and I could play EVE online if I only had the time.

I said a while ago that time would tell, as it wouldn’t be easy.

Apple sure made it look that way though.

It’s been (just over) a month with Leopard. I’ve used four different installs (including a troubleshooting install) on five separate computers, three of them mine.

All and all, I love it. I’ve got my Mail Act-on back up and running for easy mail sorting. Inquisitor works again in Safari. Candybar has been updated and replaced Pixadex, including dock modification for those not happy with the default dock. EVE online works great on my MBPro, though I just don’t have the time. Quicklook is absolutely indispensable. Spotlight searches work quicker, and searches make more sense. Back to my Mac and the built-in screen sharing work well as can be expected across various networks.

I love it. Don’t regret it for a second.

That said – there are a few issues (other than my initial blue-screen – thanks again Logitech) that really annoy me:

1) Groups and Permissions on updates. In Tiger and earlier versions of the Mac OS, every User had a group created for it of the same name. When updating, Leopard does not change the existing user group or any related permissions in your home folder. So far so good, this makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is why this group didn’t get entered into the groups available to Leopard when it was busy wiping netinfo, so that every file in my home folder was associated with an unknown group, instead of staff. Fortunately it’s much easier to change groups and home folders for a user account than it used to be.

2) ACL’s. Two of my machines had rogue ACL’s creep up out of nowhere, one of them twice, that would not allow me to delete files without authenticating first to get root privileges. Of course, this prevented things like calendar updates through iSync as well. Worse, the man page didn’t get updated to reflect the new ACL commands available that allowed removal of ACL’s without having to isolate ACL-infested files from those that aren’t.

3) Stacks targets – with a set of drawers icons and some creative sorting I’m now working around this, but *shrug* I shouldn’t have to work around this to get a stable visual cue.