FusionOne was so far ahead of its time it collapsed on itself before people even knew how to sync. I loved that service and it was my first experience in losing a cloud-based app you truly deeply love. I had to break up with it.

Later on I discovered Plaxo. And here is where the story gets interesting. You see, Plaxo has been around a while and they used to sync contacts and calendar events very well. I'll forgive their whole Pulse thing and I was hoping they would go back to the basics of solid syncing. However, as of late, Plaxo has changed their service offerings and have screwed the usability pooch. I used to be able to sync my calendar with my Google Apps accounts. One day that stopped and I started getting this error message:

What Plaxo tells me but it's so artfully vague, I don't know what to do with it.

I thought I needed to change my account settings. When I try to do that, I get this:

Yeah, I have no idea what to do with it either

So then I read the online help and made sure I followed the instructions:

Nothing about Google Apps versus Gmail

It took me chatting with a service rep to discover they only support Gmail, not Google Apps. I'm fairly certain this was never clearly communicated and I made a basic assumption most of us who use Google Apps for personal domains make: "Google Mail" means both Gmail and Google Apps.

I saddled up and went on a quest to find a better solution for syncing. My first stop was Soocial. Soocial will sync contacts between Outlook and Google, but they warn you it's still experimental. Also there are many reports online of lost contacts and duplicates. Even better is they completely ignore the calendar, because, you know, nobody would ever want their calendar synced with their contacts.

Then there is bolt-on-ware for Outlook like gSyncit and CompanionLink. gSyncit is updated so often it's a little scary. When not updated, it deleted my wife's contacts several times. It also takes so long to sync her calendar she'd rather just put the event in two places. CompanionLink seems more reliable and I'm still testing it, but I don't think I can do multiple Google accounts with it.

I have an Android phone now and I could sync with HTC software but that's not what I need. I need reliable could-based syncing. And yeah, I know I could pay Google $50/year per user for their sync tool, but come on, I'm talking about my personal domain here. Like I'm going to shake down my wife, children, and mom for that. They already pay me enough in protection money; there's no need to break any bones over this.

So what's a boy to do to sync? The answer: there is no answer. When you get down to it, even if you pay Google, their support is practically non-existent. There is no real free alternative to Google Apps. Microsoft has aggressive pricing for similar paid services, but their track record at maintaining consistent online services is only slightly better than the average elementary school.

When you think about it, it's all about the groupware problem. Outlook defined a way for email, calendar, tasks, notes, and contacts to all work together. Nobody has successfully figured out how to distribute an online service that takes all of those elements and as seamlessly mesh them into something you can easily port your information in and out of.

We are at an impasse.

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• Google Sync: The Easy Way to Sync your Calendars, Email, and Contacts (itcboisestate.wordpress.com)
• How to sync your Google Calendar with your phone (en.onsoftware.com)
• Sync Windows Phone 7 and Google Mail (devicemag.com)
• Eric: Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office: Hands On (pcmag.com)
• Google upgrades Apps connector for Outlook (infoworld.com)
• How to Sync Android with Mac (brighthub.com)
• NuevaSync Review (allaboutsymbian.com)

Palm/HP is giving away $1 million in goodies for developers to port their apps over to webOS. I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased. I have a Palm Pre and I love my phone nearly as much as my own children.

Head over to Palm's development site for details.

My hopes for HP's involvement with webOS development are high. My wife has an Android phone and it's not bad but it certainly doesn't have the usability of my Pre. However, since I've had it, a few things are lacking:

• No voice dial. By this point, it's silly it hasn't been implemented yet. So many pedestrians are needlessly exposed to me finding numbers by hand. Just saying.
• No support for appointments received in email via POP or IMAP. Only Exchange appointments actually work. Appointments received in other mail services result in an error message. Come on dudes!
• No basic photo editing. Before I upload any photo to any online service, I should be able to perform basic cropping and resizing.
• Basic file management. I want to be able to rename files and organize them without connecting to a PC.
• Audible still hasn't created a client for the Pre. I've been an Audible customer for years and I'm about to give up on them altogether.
• 4G. Duh.

With layoffs pending at Palm and HP admitting phones are their highest priority for webOS, I probably won't get my wishes. I will also probably end up on an HTC EVO, which  is a great phone, but it's still Andriod-based and so many things about webOS have spoiled me.

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Gosh, I remember when I first got Facebook. It was so little and cute. It had big, round, watery anime eyes and just begged for attention. I would play with Facebook for hours and not once did I have to water a crop or make flair. Like everything else, Facebook isn't so cute anymore now that it's grown up.

First of all it keeps wanting out of the yard with my dirty laundry in its mouth. I've set up all of the fences and thought I had every hole covered with a checkbox. I turn around and the damn thing has dug another hole. Some of these holes are where anybody can see in. So now I have to check the yard nearly every day to make sure Facebook didn't go and start plowing under the fence.

Lately I noticed that all of the training time I put into Facebook has gone out the Windows. It keeps changing how it looks to me. I thought I understood what it wanted and how to get it to do tricks. Then one day, bam! Facebook had gone and changed its appearance, but in a completely non-consistent way. I was totally lost when we started to play. I thought one thing and it took me somewhere else. I learned the hard way that I had to keep going home and starting over just to get Facebook to behave like I wanted. For example, when we played "fan page", Facebook would only play if we started from home.

I will admit, if you get a Facebook, it's much nicer than a MySpace, which is a terrible investment. All the MySpaces I've had experience with were unruly, untrainable, and could not be housebroken. Some MySpaces are so horsey they can't even fit in a netbook and reek of talentless band urine. You can't do much with Myspaces other than tolerate them for what little they offer.

Facebooks have much more potential. It's why it's so disappointing when they crap all over your feed. Taming them in the ways of the feed is time consuming. I spent hours blocking unwanted behaviors only to have Facebook offer me virtual flowers and Russian singles. It doesn't know when to stop.

The worst Facebook behavior is wallet chewing. It really wants at my wallet. Just when I think I have it under control, I'll catch it trying another way to get to it. And it's not just straight wallet snatching either. It's subversive. You won't catch it in the act but hear about it on the news.

Every Facebook owner should know the following risks:

• Facebook can turn on its owner at any time. It also cannot be killed by ordinary means. Always keep this in mind when playing with it out in the open.
• Facebook is prone to spreading diseases. If you play lots of games with Facebook, don't be surprised when your Facebook catches some sort of virus. I recommend regular dipping in new passwords.
• If you do like to play lots of games with Facebook, don't be surprised when your friends start ignoring you. Not everyone thinks a Facebook is cute.
• Never, ever, let Facebook on the couch. It will never get out of the ass-groove.

Good luck with your own Facebook. Remember there are no bad Facebooks, only stupid people.

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People surprise me a lot, and not by jumping out from around corners. If I've learned anything from my time in tech, it's never get involved in a holy war. Sure, when I was green and there was a full-on Mac versus PC debate on a mailing list, I'd stick my n00b neck in there like a bear cub looking for honey. When I read ZDNet news regularly, there wasn't a Mac or PC article that didn't have the other side trying to bring the holy war to the article comments. That's also where I noticed an invading third party, the Linux people, make periodic drive-by comments. After a while it occurred to me these arguments were never playing out. Windows people went back to virus cleaning. Mac people went back to making sweet, sweet love to their computers. Linux people went back to eating food from their moms' fridges.

The only thing that has changed between then and now is both Microsoft and Apple brought the holy war to their respective ad campaigns. I guess they finally gave the people what they really wanted.

The technological holy war is not new. What is it about technology that makes people so emotional?  It's not like there's a Sicilian and death on the line. This emotion tied to technology, especially computers, is disturbing. It's like being a moderate near a political rally. It's interesting to watch the two sides but you don't want to be there when the batons come out. I refer back now to one of my favorite HCI books, The Second Self, by Sherry Turkle:

Young children see almost everything in the world as alive in one way or another. This "animism" pervades the child's thinking until the development of concepts that help draw the line between the alive and the not-alive. Childhood animism has two faces: it makes the world friendly and understandable, but it can make it frightening as well. . . . We are drawn to what frightens us, we play with what disturbs us, in part to try to reassert our control over it. (p. 33-34)

Turkle observed children interacting with a Merlin and a Speak & Spell. She noticed, as the title of the book suggests, children behave differently when interacting with technology. It was more emotional. Most of us grew up with small electronics and computers; I had my first computer 31 years ago. Because I've had so many, I'm a little detached from computers, aside from my pure unadulterated anger at shit not working.

Emotionally siding with the companies making technology seems like a logical leap. The companies are the creators, near deities to some. In my political analogy, they are the parties behind the vapid candidates representing them. Once we make something such a part of ourselves and our personal identity, certainly the creators take on god-like states.

Yesterday I read "Sorry, Adobe, You Screwed Yourself", an article with enough traction to be a meme. Look at the raw emotion in this quote:

Adobe had multiple chances to prove their worth to Apple and they failed miserably. They ignored the OS X version of Flash. They ignored Photoshop – witness the rise of Acorn, Pixelmator etc.

Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

I suggest pulling back the shiny outer layer and remembering we are talking about a couple of modern American businesses.  They are more dysfunctional than your distant relatives and their products are only "good enough" to make it to market. It's not like Apple has never had quality issues and it's not like Adobe hasn't tried to shut out competition. Any expectation of loyal behavior from any modern company is misguided at best. Companies are slaves to their shareholders. Decisions are rarely made beyond getting through the quarter until the next earnings announcements. I'm certainly no close friend of Adobe, but I think the Apple people protest way too much. It seems we're living Turkle's idea of animism but applied to the companies who make our beloved tech. It's time to back away from Apple and Adobe and get some fresh air; it's just another in a long line of holy wars.

Other tech holy wars of note:

• The Church versus Copernicus
• The Church versus Galileo
• Screw it, The Church versus pretty much everyone at some point
• Edison versus Tesla (Must Read!)
• CP/M versus DOS
• OS/2 Warp versus Usability
• Windows versus Mac
• Linux versus all lesser operating systems
• Framemaker versus Microsoft Word
• Doc-To-Help versus Robohelp
• The Beatles versus Apple
• The Department of Justice versus Microsoft (and nobody cares now)

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Yes, it has been like this since the first time I posted it.

When not doing my real job, I pursue the Great Purge of 2008. I appear to be behind schedule so it's like most big IT projects. In my defense, proper purging is predicated by planning, precision, premeditated patterns, and pre-medicated posturing, especially when it applies to paper. So here's a little story:

Once upon a time, there was this woman who started a construction business with her husband in the late 1940s. Even today the little construction-company-that-could is still in business. She kept meticulous records. Every receipt, invoice, check stub, statement, IOU, and tissue she filed away. As time passed, boxes multiplied like bunnies. One day, the volume of paperwork was so incomprehensibly insurmountable, her family intervened and non-hilarity ensued. By "one day" I mean last year. By "woman" I mean my grandmother. I can only shake my fist at the sky and yell "why do you mock me bloodline?!" for I too have been stockpiling my own paperwork. The end.

Here I sit scrawling a shockingly long article about my own horde of paper. A couple of notes before I begin: first, not a single company has sponsored this so all opinions are my own. Second, the criteria I use for what is acceptable for my life may not work for everybody, so before you shred those Confederate land deeds you found in your attic, make sure you know what you're doing. I'm just trying to share helpful advice.

Starting At the End

As the title suggests, I formed a plan around future-proofing. Future-proofing is ensuring any product from a process is easily accessible in the future. For example, books printed on high-quality paper will last longer than books printed on toilet paper. Feel free to experiment. Admittedly, this is an over-simplified definition but I'm doing home and home-office documents not files from Area 51.

Naturally when we talk about paperless, we mean going digital as in paper to computer. If you assumed something else, please let me know how you are reading this blog; I'm intrigued.

Before I jump-start my purge, I have needs. And I have requirements too:

• I need to comply with tax retention laws.
• I want to store documents in such a way that I can open them in the future without going through hell.
• I want to be able to search my documents.
• I will need redundancy to protect all my hard work.

Simple, right? Here is how I addressed each of these requirements.

Retention Laws

You can do a Google search and find tons of opinions on retention. My advice is just call your accountant to ensure you comply with both federal and state. Most experts say you need seven years of personal tax information and ten years of business tax information, but ask definitely ask your accountant. Just because it's on a random website doesn't mean it applies to your situation, or for that matter, true. Got it?

Document Formats

I know I'm going to scan documents to be saved digitally. I learned my lesson about document formats while working in IT many years ago. Remember Wang word processors? Exactly. For a while there was a niche specialty of doing Wang-to-anything-but-Wang file conversions. In addition, I personally have a bunch of documents originally formatted in Wordstar that no longer can be read with the original formatting.

This is the first gotcha when it comes to a paperless conversion: Not all scanning software saves documents into a future-proof file format or even into a file. It's true. A lot of the documentation management software that ships with document scanners or is sold independently saves files into a proprietary database. This is obviously not future-proof and it's pretty annoying to be permanently chained to proprietary software.

Enter PDF/A. Go to the PDF/A website and read about how it's an archiving standard. Your best bet in storing your files in something you can access them from in the future will be the PDF/A format. Because it's a recognized ISO standard and large companies and governments are actually using PDF/A, your chances in the future of accessing and/or converting them is much greater than if you go with bad software.

Searching Documents

PDF/A files are stored in plain text. That means they are searchable by definition. However, when you scan documents, they are saved as an image. So your document management software should ideally allow you to store metadata about each file as you scan. For example, you would type key words like "bank statement" and "prison record" to be stored within the files. In addition, good document management software will also do a quick OCR scan of your document and save OCR copy within the PDF file.

Redundant Storage

My final requirement is to have enough file storage. Because I know I'm going to scan a bazillion documents and then save them, I need a lot of hard drive space and an equal amount of backup space. This takes planning because I'm not made of money. Things would be better if some publisher would just accept my open book proposal, but wishes aren't ponies or something like that.

The Plan

So here is my plan for getting this all done:

1. Obtain a document scanner: to be addressed in part 2 of this series.
2. Buy beer: this helps lubricate the robotics that will be actually feeding paper into the scanner.
3. Obtain document management software: to be addressed in part 3 of this series.
4. Obtain file storage and backup: to be addressed in part 4 of this series.
5. Actually do it: to be addressed in part 5 of this series.

Who knows, I might get all of this done.

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You may not realize it, but your IT coworkers are also helping with user experience with each decision made regarding network topology. Until I began working for Sprint, I didn't see the connection between network design and interface design. Well, I didn't see it beyond the obvious general rules of thumb: page load times, load balancing based on traffic, and server-side versus client-side scripting. However, my recent projects have underscored the importance of big picture thinking when it comes to user experience.

A recent rollout of ours involved retail store software. My small part in this project was to ensure new contracts and changes to existing contracts generated properly. What seems like a small part of the user experience is actually as critical as credit credit card approval, inventory accuracy, and proper customer data entry. I will discuss this part in a future article, but the point is each of these many systems all work together to provide the user experience in the retail stores.

For my team, after the initial design and implementation of the contract building system (Adobe LiveCycle), user experience came down to server response times. My end-user is actually retail store employees. Sprint customers' experiences are what I'm trying to improve. So by having an intuitive interface naturally the retail employee can quickly help the customer. However, response times are equally important. I really couldn't tell you how many interlocking systems we have to make a transaction happen, probably several dozen. I can tell you that our milliseconds added to the other milliseconds from the other systems means a transaction can take between fifteen and thirty seconds to process. Our end goal became not about how to generate contracts or where to store them; those were easy design decisions. We spent around eight weeks troubleshooting CPU performance problems and increasing transaction processing speed. In the end we measure our success by response times.

On my particular project, performance tweaking took as much time as the actual design and development.  This was a new product and we had no benchmarks to work toward. After deployment, it became apparent that transaction speed was paramount to the success of our project.

I'm now thinking in new ways when it comes to initial development of a system. Traditional flowcharts of network topology use various network layers (see illustration) and protocols to demonstrate the type of connection among all of the servers and clients. I'm now thinking in terms of not only HTTP over TCP/IP over Ethernet, but also response times based on production conditions. Response times are tangible and you can use that when considering building out a solution. Load and performance testing of the server to the maximum number of transactions you expect should also help you determine if your servers are capable of handling what you predict.

Response time factors in packet sizes, LAN speed, distance, number of transactions, load balancing, and any overhead. Once you get a formula worked out for your solution, test constantly. This is the lesson I learned. Server response times directly affect whether a customer will leave happy or frustrated from our retail stores. While it's not the fun interface design, it's just as important.

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Adobe's LiveCycle Diagram

Adobe's website says this about LiveCycle:

Adobe LiveCycle® ES (Enterprise Suite) software is an integrated server solution that blends data capture, information assurance, document output, process management, and content services to help you create and deliver rich and engaging applications that reduce paperwork, accelerate decision-making, and help ensure regulatory compliance.

Huh? Think of LiveCyle as an information hub. Many types of document sources can be used to pass information into LiveCycle and then it can spit out that information into several formats based on pre-defined templates. In other words, LiveCycle is a gigantic single-sourcing tool. You can also use LiveCycle to manage publishing workflows. That means you can assign content creators, editors, and publishers.

One thing I noticed about Adobe was they couldn't (or wouldn't) articulate what LiveCycle actually is. It's a modular framework for content management. You can pretty much make it do what you want it to do, but out of the box it's close to useless. Adobe will kindly sell you modules for LiveCycle that will connect your installation to your existing document repositiory, for example. The workflow tools were very impressive. I think that was my favorite feature demoed by Adobe. However, workflow management is also part of additional module. We didn't buy it so I can't play with it.

In our case, our final product will be PDF files. This is something LiveCycle does exceptionally well, naturally. I am still learning the principles by which the template system works, but what we are doing is using database data and static text files for content. That content will be inside an XML file and sent to the LiveCycle server as an HTTP request. LiveCycle will receive the request and run it through a template and send back a perfectly formatted PDF file. There are many reasons for our decision not to use LiveCycle to collect the data directly, but if we wanted it to, it could. In addition LiveCycle's output could be more than just a PDF file. For example, we could have it place content on the website and the content can be specified down to the individual customer. That would take more modules and more money.

The templates in LiveCycle are all XML-based. There is a nice GUI to protect you from having to touch XML code unless you need to some very specific but unsupported actions. This is where things start to get murky for me because we are in the preliminary phases, but from my understanding, LiveCycle's templates do not support CSS. I won't comment on this right now until I verify why no CSS is being used in our project. However, LiveCycle works best with PDF files, which do not support style sheets either. So it may be just our project. I'll know more next week.

So far LiveCycle is impressive in its potential. But getting it where you want it may take a lot of time and resources. I also think there is such a need for large content repositories to organize and output information, more products to compete with LiveCycle can't be far behind. The Linuxhead in me wants to see if you can cobble something together that does the same thing with existing Linux solutions, but I'll save that for my bucket list.

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What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

…

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

You're in the White House, dudes! That's the highest of high levels. It doesn't get any higher than that. Besides complying with the Presidential Records Act, try not tweeting (click graphic to see more) about how the President is sending missiles into Sudan or is going to travel using the backroads to Camp David.  While it's refreshing to see an administration attempting to operate in a more modern way, I think ignorance of security is inexcusable. I hope these aren't the same guys who are also tasked with national infrastructure security (see Hackers Lurking in Obama's Web Site):

Hackers have registered bogus accounts on Obama's online community, my.barackobama.com, where they are posting images designed to set off a chain of events that lead to malicious Trojan horse programs. These programs are stepping stones used by hackers to download more and more malware onto a victim's computer.

The problem on Obama's Web site is not unique. Hackers and the operators of popular Web sites are often caught in a cat and mouse game, with the bad guys constantly finding a new way of uploading malicious programs just as soon as one avenue of attack is closed. Social-networking sites want to give their users as many cool ways of enhancing their own Web pages as possible — my.barackobama.com lets users create their own blogs — while at the same time reining in any misuse.

"The U.S. Presidential campaign has shown the world how governments can leverage Web 2.0," Websense wrote on a company blog outlining the issue Monday. "However, this … is yet another opportunity to spread more malicious code."

What's good for Silicon Valley is not necessarily good for national security. I hope the administration starts to show some interest in keeping information locked down and malicious code away from government tech.

Now I have to call Adobe Customer Service and beg them to please bestow on me a new serial number.

I'm done with this. I was contacted by somebody from Madcap today. I'm going to give Flare a try. At this point I either switch products or risk a mental health crisis.

Words cannot describe how much I love FrameMaker. I use(d) it to write everything, including mundane office dribble because I love structured documents and Microsoft Word has turned a once usable interface into tabbed hieroglyphics. RoboHELP on the other hand is now just Robohelp and hasn't changed much in years. It's not the best documentation solution, but it beats many others and has some cool features strapped onto it by Macromedia before Adobe ate them too.

Why People Hoard Violent Hostility Before Driving Home

Last August, I noticed that my installed, and perfectly functional, Adobe Technical Communication Suite 1.0 was working fine one day and the next day the serial number stopped working. This was because some update made Adobe Captivate reject my serial number. This happened on both my desktop and my laptop.

I thought I would call Adobe support. Looking back, I now see the folly of my youth and inexperience. I miss the old carefree me who doesn't cook blood-boiling hatred for Adobe's customer support methods and people.

Naturally, the support is in India. I'm okay with Indian support as long as the company they represent actually empowers them to do things. From what I've experienced, Adobe has empowered their Indian call centers to say "no" with various inflections as well as transferring me back and forth between customer service and technical support.  I have been told I need to pay for support. I have been told I need to completely reload all of my Adobe software. I have been told that I should know why my serial number doesn't work.

And Time Flies

Starting in August I called several times to kick-off a mind-numbing cycle of ignorant troubleshooting. My complaint is the serial number stopped working. I upgraded to Tech Comm Suite 1.3, hoping for a new serial number and never received one.  I'm told the old one will work for 1.3, but alas, it's not that easy. Adobe support's response to all of this is to have me uninstall and reinstall everything over and over for the next few months. Seeing how this is a suite of products, I spend more time following "Steve's" broken English instructions than I do getting real work done.

So now it's January 2009. Obama will be sworn in soon. Yet I am not getting Hope or Change from Adobe. We're still going back and forth on the phone. People say they will call me back and never do. I can't even guess as to how many call-backs were promised to me that just didn't happen.

I used to sing Adobe's praises for all to hear. InDesign is my publication designer. Dreamweaver is my prototyping and quick site building workhorse. However, FrameMaker is the ultimate documentation tool for me. Robohelp is a great addon that helps me just give customers what they want.

It's not like I don't want to be an Adobe customer. It's more like they resent that I still live and breath after I buy the product. This particular problem, from what I understand, is not uncommon. Damn that man who keeps calling and whining about his serial number.  Damn him back to FrameMaker 5.5 and don't let him upgrade again, they say.

You Can't Fight City Hall

With every call, I'm polite and I understand that each person at Adobe tech support is special in their own way. I'm sure "Ron", who was kind enough to hang up on me "accidentally" just needs a hug. And there was "Annona" who was very stern in insisting I had to pay for support to fix my serial number.  I don't yell at these people. Special people need a special place so they aren't operating machinery.

If I could affford it, I'd move to MadCap Sofware. They seem to have some interesting products. I would like to try their Robohelp and FrameMaker killers, Flare and Blaze.

But the expense of software conversion for small independents like me is enough to cause marital problems.

I'll stay with Adobe, but I'm angry with their support and I'm more angry that they know their support sucks and they are not taking steps to correct it. Maybe they're jonsing for a future bailout. Who knows.

I just know that after 6 months, I have an unresolved issue with a serial number for a product I've purchased and then upgraded. I've been treated as if I don't matter to Adobe and I can't use the software I purchased.  Thanks Adobe! I can now have a blog post about it.

• Old content brought over — check
• New template brought online and rebranded — check
• New content to be generated — writing it now
• Old site links converted to new links using htaccess — I'll get back to you on that one
• Integration with my social networking sites just to make sure we all get along.
• RSS redirection (must Feedburner be use for everything?)

Now I will be adding content and tweaking the site in such a way you'll think it's a "Can you see the differences?" game from Highlights.

Gotta Love MS SQL server.

So why does it seem so important to automate voting when we know voting machines will be high-profile hacker targets, the voting system is already under constant manipulation (see the latest ACORN antics), and people continually question traditional voting methods? Voting machines have been a conspiracy theorist's dream since they were first introduced, probably because nobody can really say for sure that input equals output. It's taken on faith that companies like Diebold have good coders and security methods.

However, the more they are used, the more voting machines will be questioned. For instance: Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack.

The report, titled "Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System," was apparently released Thursday, just one day before California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is to decide which machines are certified for use in California's 2008 presidential primary elections.

The source-code review identified four main weaknesses in Diebold's software, including: vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to install malware on the machines, a failure to guarantee the secrecy of ballots, a lack of controls to prevent election workers from tampering with ballots and results, and susceptibility to viruses that could allow attackers to an influence an election.

"A virus could allow an attacker who only had access to a few machines or memory cards, or possibly to only one, to spread malicious software to most, if not all, of a county's voting machines," the report said. "Thus, large-scale election fraud in the Diebold system does not necessarily require physical access to a large number of voting machines."

The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said.

The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.

In conclusion, the report said Diebold's voting machines had not been designed with security as a priority. "For this reason, the safest way to repair the Diebold system is to reengineer it so that it is secure by design," it said.

I noticed they are using commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) virus software. This is an indication that these machines are running Windows or another standard operating system. A custom operating system should have been created from scratch and kept as secret as missile launch codes. Another surprise was the lack of controls over ballot management.

Overall, we are looking at incompetence on a grand scale. The government is reposnsible for creating standards for vendors to follow (see How the Government Handles Information Security). Diebold is responsible for providing a product that is so high-profile and so politically volatile that it should withstand the toughest scrutiny.

To me, this proves that we are not ready to rely on computer-based voting machines. Security is a cultural afterthought and our government has proven itself incapable of protecting national interests much less secure information. Until such a time that leaks stop hitting the New York Times, China stops getting defense secrets, current immigration laws are enforced, and politicians show they have some grasp on technology, I would rather trust my fellow citizens to manually count the votes.

I've been using MusicMatch for several years now. It's always been superior at MP3 file management with super tagging and its presentation of my library of 100GB worth of music. (I did stop using it for ripping CDs last year for Exact Audio Copy for superior control over the ripping process.) However, as I ripped more of my library, MusicMatch performance became an issue. There were times it would crash before even opening or it wouldn't exit cleanly, causing me to reboot. I hate rebooting. MusicMatch support was horrible. That will teach me to buy a lifetime of software upgrades and have any expectations of support.

So Yahoo now owns MusicMatch and created the most abysmal software update since Windows ME. Instead of adding new features, they have removed the ability to edit all but a few tags. In addition, I spent about 3 months of weeknights organizing my tags for consistency and making sure every single song had album art. I deleted my old low-quality MP3s and ripped new ones. Now Yahoo Jukebox doesn't display half or more of my cover art.

The upgrade required I use this "migration wizard". It improperly copied tags and changed my capitalization of artists with all caps. For example, it couldn't migrate "AC/DC", which came over as "Ac". In addition, I now have about 500 songs listed in my library with the track number in the artist field. Some migration.

So I opened up my hand dandy Tag&Rename tool. If you don't have this for your MP3s, it's a great tool for managing MP3 tags. So the tags haven't changed. The only thing I can figure right now is that Yahoo Jukebox creates its own database from the tags. iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player all see the songs properly. I give Yahoo a big fat "WTF?".

It's not all bad. Yahoo Jukebox loads much faster that MusicMatch did. It still uses the same organizational layout of MusicMatch, which I like the best. I have to use plugins for Winamp to get even close to that. iTunes seems buggy and crashes a lot on me. As for Windows Media Player, I hate the way it handles album art for folder images.

Also very annoying: during the installation, the Yahoo Jukebox installer kept crashing, repeatedly. The crashes happened when it tried to install something having to do with Windows Media Player. I'm assuming it was the licensed music crap. Anyway, I uninstalled my K-Lite Codec Pack just to see if that was wrong. It wasn't. Then I re-installed Windows Media Player 11 and that fixed it.

I tried to report the crashing to Yahoo. On the migration page, they have a link to contact support if there is a problem. That link, BTW, is broken and takes you the Yahoo general help page. I've had issues before with Yahoo's supposed customer service. Yahoo has tons of little products and services that receive very little in terms of support. I could go on for a while about Intellisync for YahooMail, which is practically useless because of buggy sync issues.

Like me, if you are a MusicMatch subscriber and want streaming music to bang your head to while trying to beat deadlines, the upgrade is worth it for the fast streaming and music selection. It's much better than MusicMatch's previous offering. But I'm so irritated with Yahoo Jukebox, I will continue to rely on Winamp. I don't need the aggravation.

"It was insulting to hear the AT&T customer service reps tell me they had been overwhelmed by the iPhone response, since they had so long to prepare," Gillott said. "They obviously didn't test problems like mine where my family plan would only allow three phone lines and not a fourth."

Gillott said AT&T should have insisted that it activate phones in its stores, which it does successfully with other phones at the rate of 3 million a quarter. Apple, meanwhile, has been good at activating iTunes and iPods online, so it apparently won out in the decision to require iPhone activation online through iTunes.

"AT&T should have said absolutely, no way, this is a phone and not an iPod, but Apple clearly won the argument," he said. "There was too much back and forth between the two of them."

I agree. AT&T and Apple both had enough time to prepare. However, there are at least 53,000 (according to the article) people with no instant gratification. Is it annoying to wait up to 60 hours or longer to activate your new phone? Yes. Is it as bad as waiting on an organ from a donor to be flown to you? Uh, no.

The only thing I've seen hyped up more than the iPhone is sex. However, let's be honest about it: it's freakin' cool. The reviews are promising as pointed out in this review roundup. The PDA market has been so stagnant for so long. Smart phones are not smart. My Treo 700p irritates the crap out of me, but it's been a better choice than other smart phones.

Of course, I can't get an iPhone unless I pay out of my own pocket for it. I have a company-provided cell account so it would be stupid of me to go get another phone on my own just because it's pretty and stores most of my MP3 collection. (Actually, I would be stupid to go back to AT&T after I left them in a huff for billing incompetence several years ago.) So I will just admire them from afar as I watch all of the cool kids play with theirs. It's funny how the iPhone's release instantaneously makes my Treo look like it runs on vacuum tubes and requires a switchboard operator.

Now, Apple has some recent black eyes in support. But I imagine their support for the iPhone will be much better than Palm has been lately. Read through the customer comments on the debacle known as the 700p Maintenance Release at Palm's Blog. Yes, they released a faulty maintenance release that bricked some phones and introduced a new bug on the 700p. Good times.

One thing that is still not fixed on my 700p is the Voice Dialing from the bluetooth headset. The Palm Maintenance Release did make Bluetooth more stable, but I still can't use it for Voice Dialing. How stupid is that? My wife's $99 Motorola Q does, but it has its share of issues too, like the battery not charging when it is plugged in.

The point is that the PDA market itself has been rather uninspiring for years. Smart phones are just PDAs with cell phones glued to them. The iPhone represents innovation that should have been there years ago. Now cell phone vendors are going to play catch-up and while cell phone service companies try to change customer expectations from free phones to actually shelling out money for something that doesn't fall apart right before the contract expires.

Honestly, I wish my 700p could handle multi-tasking without rebooting. I wish my Bluetooth headset could initiate Voice Dialing. I wish the Blazer browser would blaze in hell. I wish the Palm OS didn't have connotations of an old man sitting in front of the barber shop complaining that his rheumatism is flaring up and he can't switch between applications.

The success of the iPhone should usher in some competition and innovation. So go out and buy one or two and help those of us who hate AT&T with every fiber of our being to have more choices.

This packaging decision is baffling for two reasons.

• This is the only one of the new Office versions that doesn't include Outlook. Even the bare-bones Office Basic includes Outlook. Does Microsoft think that its home customers don't want a full-featured personal information manager? Do they think that Outlook is somehow too complex for home users?
• This is also the only Office version that includes OneNote. The implication, I guess, is that Microsoft has decided to position OneNote as a student tool and downplay its usefulness to business users.

After everything Microsoft has done to revamp products over the years, you'd think they'd learn something along the way. Outlook is one of their few excellent products. OneNote is also a solid and useful application. So they have structured their product packages to make people who appreciate both products have to pay for one of those in addition to the Office license. See the product editions here).

OneNote is great for business users, not just students. OneNote-like functions are already integrated into Word for the Macintosh (see Microsoft Word for Mac 2004 Highlights). So the Macintosh Office team is actually adding real value to Word while the Windows team is apparently going to try and have the 2007 release limp by without much new innovation. Keeping OneNote separate is a demonstration of short-sighted profit-maximization with little long-term value added to the overall Office package.

Outlook, in spite of past security problems, is the most useful application in Office. I don't know of another tool that gives you as much support for information you use daily like email and contacts. However, Outlook has been slow to evolved and some features in Outlook Express are actually better than the big brother version. For example, Outlook Express will change your signature automatically based on the email account you are sending from.

Microsoft is trying to milk every penny possible from Office since Office is its main bread and butter. Sadly, this mentality continues to generate negative PR as users get frustrated at limited new features that don't justify the steep license fees. The perceived value of Microsoft Office is diminishing as the price goes up. I will probably not upgrade to Office 2007 unless I see features that really make my life easier. Having to buy OneNote or Outlook as an extra is not a good start.

The Desktop Linux Client Survey 2005, released this week by the Open Source Development Labs, found that the lack of a powerful e-mail application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop.

A lack of application support is also holding back Linux, according to the survey of more than 3,300 users.

The second paragraph in the quote is scratching at the surface of the real Linux problem. The Linux desktop will succeed when software makers actually develop and market software users can buy, install, and count on for future updates.

I support my church's computer lab for the school. Linux would be a great option if the kids didn't need software that's only available in Windows. That's really the problem when you think about it. There is so much software out there for education and very little of it is geared toward Linux.

I also remember Adobe releasing a version of FrameMaker for Linux that had a stupid time limitation on it. It was just a port of their UNIX version, but I can only assume they saw it as a support nightmare since Linux font management and printing is ugly. I also assume Adobe saw no profit in having Linux products and silently let the FrameMaker experiment go.

I love Linux, don't get me wrong. But when I need to write documentation for my clients and develop online help, the software I need is only available in Windows. For example, even FrameMaker is limited to Windows and official UNIX releases. The Macintosh version of FrameMaker didn't make the OS X cut.

Microsoft and Apple spend a ton of time working with application developers. Who in the Linux community is actually working with the software companies? I think that the very thing that makes Linux special–the community itself–is also keeping it from succeeding with application developers. That is the fact that since it is a community, there is no centralization. When the Linux community comes together, it comes together in committees, conventions, and large online discussions. I can see how software companies fear death-by-committee and would rather work with a company who has a vested interest in seeing the OS succeed with consumers as much as the software company wants it.

Linux is larger than a single company and exists because of computer enthusiasts. To a degree, a single company failure in the Linux community doesn't mean Linux fails. That's both good and bad since Linux still lives but it keeps Linux from setting operating system standards. Instead, much of what goes into Linux is imitation of commercial systems. As a result, it is an alternative rather than the first choice of consumers. In order to make it the first choice, it has to do things no other OS can do and it must meet modern usability standards. Linux can't do that as a follower. Otherwise, at the desktop level, it will always be in the shadow of Windows and Mac OS X.

Until software companies see how they can make money producing software for Linux, there will be nothing to market to the masses. Companies make software based on business cases–not because they love to play around with Linux on the weekends.

We've known each other for how long? Five years? Really? It's been that long. Wow. When we met, you had such big plans for yourself. You were going to help me with all of my synchronization needs. Remember how I used you to synch between my work PC, my home PC, my laptop, and my Palm IIIxe? Those were good times. You even told me that you would improve the mapping of data between Outlook and my Palm so that it was better than Intellisync. I still have that email.

Lately, I get the feeling you don't care anymore. Sure, you're business model needed work, but you don't seem to have that same enthusiasm for synchronization you used to. In fact, I've had problems recently that you seemed to not be able to help with–like that time I installed my business card scanning software and it created new forms in Outlook that you didn't support. So half my contacts were ignored during synchronization. Then there was that issue with my Microsoft OneNote files. You can't seem to keep them synchronized without corrupting the files. It's not that I don't appreciate the effort, but you need to think about how it makes me feel to continually recover files I'm supposed to be synchronizing from backups because they get hosed. Surely you understand how frustrating that can be.

There is no easy way to break this to you, but I'm seeing somebody else. No, it's not another online synchronization service. I've determined that's not my kind of scene. They close shop regularly and leave me with unanswered security questions. Instead, I'm going to synchronize my Outlook with Easy2Sync for Outlook. We work so well together. Yes, it's German, but then again, I like Germans. But that's not the issue. I mean I was seeing SyncPST for a while, and it didn't play well with my Windows configuration. The interface wasn't compatible with my Windows skin. It was the only program to ever do that to me and I felt a little confined.

So now, I can synchronize Outlook with a program. For remote purposes, I have to have a VPN into my network at home, but I don't mind so much. Especially since I'm not asked for subscription money every year–no offense. I mean, I'm sure you intend on providing good service for the money, but it just doesn't come across that way.

As for my files, I'm going to use something called SynchronEX. Yes, that's another German, but I like the program and I can even use it with Linux. That's flexibility you never gave me.

Ultimately, you were easy, but you caused problems with my data and charged me for it. I need to move on. Yes, I have to configure a dynamic DNS for my home network. Yes, I have to configure these programs. In the end, though, I will have complete control over my synchronizing and none of my data will be stored on a server far, far away.

Thanks for the good times. I wish you well in your new business modeling. As for me, I'm taking more control over my life.

At American Express, for example, job seekers are greeted with this warning: "At this time, the system does not support Mac environments. If you don't have access to a PC at home or work, please check out a local public library for Internet access, local Internet cafes, or the nearest government Work Force Center."

The financial-services company, like a number of other well-known businesses, uses an outside talent management company, BrassRing, to manage its online job applications. However, the current generation of BrassRing's software doesn't support Mac browsers. A company representative said it hasn't incorporated Mac support because clients haven't been clamoring for it.

The bottom line is that this is not exclusive to Macintosh users. This is the deployment of ActiveX controls as the only way to deliver specific functions. During the design of these Web services, the designers basically said that Internet Explorer users are the majority and everybody else is just going to be excluded.

In some ways, .Net is a bundle of over-promises that I'm still not sold on. I've designed Web-based applications and in initial developer meetings, always discussed the pros and cons of .Net versus other technologies. The biggest justification for .Net consistently repeated to me is quick development time. I can see that. There are a gazillion libraries in there. But many of those limit the end-users to Internet Explorer for Windows.

The companies mentioned in the article paid huge amount of money for their sites–probably millions. You would think that browser compatibility could have been a part of that. The reality is that the designers and the company executives made a conscious decision against reasonable browser compatibility and I'm willing to bet it all has to do with the initial decisions around the development platform.

The browser was intended to deliver text across the Internet, and it's good at that. So good that people began to piggyback other things onto their HTML code in order to try to exploit a mechanism of enormous popularity to deliver applications. That's where the problems began.

In one sense, it is HTML and HTTP themselves that have let us down. They stopped evolving, stopped trying to grow – and have been coasting, resting on their laurels for years. By now HTML should have evolved a cross-platform mechanism for designing rich controls and multiwindow applications. It should have moved beyond request-response and standardized a bidirectional communication mechanism so that only data need be transmitted. The overwhelming popularity of software such as Instant Messenger and Napster prove that bidirectional communication is possible, and very desirable. Instead, we have frames and a refresh tag.

It's a good article. Read it all.

w00t!

That cost equation could result in there being more dumb terminals than there are USB Flash Drive / OS dongles, all in the interest of convenience. Adding it all together and averaging across the population might truly result in PC costs reaching the sub-$100 level. You'd pay under $100 for your "flash drive" OS and plug it into any terminal, which are commonplace due to the low cost of a machine stripped of all peripherals save for USB port in the front. Furthermore, you'd get something vastly more portable than a laptop.

I've been thinking about this for a while. The idea of having a portable, bootable environment you take with you anywhere has many advantages besides cost. While cost for the consumer is a factor, there are other things to consider.

First, if you have a dumb desktop and laptop that both boot to a portable drive like that, you would never have to sync your data. You could back it up, but you could take all of your files, your software, and your preferences with you. Working on the plane, or in a hotel, or in a remote office could be just like working in your personal office. You wouldn't even need to worry about multiple licenses for specialized software like PhotoShop, Microsoft Project, or Dreamweaver. You would take that software with you everywhere.

Security is another benefit. The entire bootable device could be encrypted. The dumb terminals would only access the device after some kind of authentication like password or even biometrics. Since you would take your operating system with you, public terminals no longer are a security risk from the perspective of you accidentally leaving personal information on it. The public terminal owners would no longer have to spend time and money on operating systems and software licenses and, most importantly, virus removal.

Business would love this concept because the idea of a corporate standard hard drive image to a much simpler type of image. The image would be the same for everybody regardless of the hardware because for this to work, there would have to be a standard in place for the terminals to be able to read the devices. Businesses would also have much more control over the user's environment and could manage software licenses, distribution, and configuration issues (e.g. VPN access, mapped network drives, etc.) more efficiently.

The downsides to moving in this direction relate to hardware standards for the dumb terminals and the assumption that companies like Microsoft won't try and have a variation that's all their own. Standards don't come easy, and users have to adjust to a new way of computing. However, this idea appeals to me and I think the practicality of it will override the downsides in the long run. Start looking for this concept to become more real the larger that USB flash drives get.