Circadian

I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me. I have great high-tech devices in my home. Why am I so interested in something that does less?

I read an article two days ago lauding the forward thinking (at the time) Mac Portable – essentially a Mac Plus in a sixteen pound carry case with an LCD screen. The next day, a discussion of Mac Plus love. And both made me a little wistful, thinking about the fun to be had by putting together a machine like that, from craigslist and ebay purchases and making it do useful work.

I have an old PowerMac 6400 in the basement. It’s not quite in the same league as those others in terms of antiquity, but it’s certainly old. Maybe I’ll bring it out this evening, after I’ve cleaned the living room, and set it up again. I’m not sure if I can make it do much, but really, isn’t that the point?

Some people out there have upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard, with less than stellar results, and that is sure making the Apple haters happy.

By my reading of the message boards and reviews, about 9 in 10 of the problems are related to third party software or hardware. When Snow Leopard runs into a driver that won’t work with the system, it puts it in a quarantine, and lets you know that it has done so. Nice, but that means that the hardware that that driver was driving no longer works as expected.

My take on this is that Apple has been the underdog so long, they don’t know how to deal with being popular all of a sudden. Back in the day, they could make changes like this one without fear of problems because back then, none of these vendors supported using their gear on a Mac in the first place. Of course your printer won’t work anymore, the vendor never intended for it to work on a Mac! I’ve yet to hear much complaining from anyone out there whose Mac is equipped with strictly Apple software and peripherals. Using iWork and iLife with your iPod? You’re probably one of the many, many people whose upgrade has been utterly smooth sailing.

What could Apple have done to prevent this?

For starters, they could have avoided playing into Microsoft’s hands by trying to one-up the Windows 7 release. Microsoft has a great OS on their hands this time, perhaps the best Windows that has ever existed, and they’ve made it freely available to power users for so long, they’ve had plenty of time to work out the majority of bugs from it, and so have the third-party vendors. You can be sure that HP is going to have all their drivers in a row for the October 22^nd release of Windows 7, whereas with the rushed Snow Leopard, they did not.

Second, Apple needs to let go of some of that secrecy they love so very much. We love Apple products, and if we know what’s coming ahead of time, I suspect that most of us will still buy them. If they had allowed Snow Leopard a nice long gestation period, with an open beta, or at least an appropriately lengthy release to all the vendors who wanted a copy, they’d not be in the boat they’re in now, patching up software and reputations simultaneously.

Finally, get with the vendor program. Don’t see those people as competitors or the opposition – they’re your partners. If you and they work together, you both sell equipment. It’s a win-win situation, three wins if you include the purchaser who can know, with certainty, that the toys they love will work with the computer and OS that they love, in advance. It’s time to be a little less like Linux and a little more like Microsoft in this regard. The big boys want to play in your market, and you’re making it harder for them to do so with any success. So lighten up, open up, and make these relationships into real two-way streets. For your own good and that of the industry.

I just hope that Apple can learn these lessons in time for OS X 10.7, in the future. Because  good will is hard to earn in the first place, and harder to win back after you’ve let someone down.

And to all the haters? Best to keep mum. It’s just one month before Windows 7 comes out, and people like your parents buy new computers that won’t work with their ten year old software and fifteen year old scanner and… well, you get the idea.

Some days, I feel like that guy from the old DSL commercial, who, when his wife says “I thought you were surfing the Internet”, he responds “I’m done…”

More often than not anymore, I find that my craving for new content outstrips those who create the content. I’m spoiled by the fact that most of the blogs that I like to read are updated at least once a day, and usually multiple times throughout the day. But things tend to slow down on weekends, and all of a sudden I find myself without an external source of stimulation. It’s a bit boring being online in those periods, usually, though occasionally I’ll find something new and dive into it with both feet, and just immerse myself in getting caught up.

It’s like that with web applications, too. I see why so many people want little applications for their smart phones – who wouldn’t want an app that takes you right to what you’re looking for with no fuss and no intermediary steps. It’s what desktop applications have done for years and years now, before the advent of ubiquitous web applications.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the allure of web apps – they’re almost entirely cross-platform by nature, necessitating little in the way of tweaking to work on Macs and Linux just as well as they do on Windows. And yet…

There must be plenty of others like me out there, who don’t mind lugging our own laptop around, who crave an application that will do exactly what we’re looking for, without the intermediary of a web browser. Why else would there be such an excellent variety of applications for Twitter, and Word Press, and slowly but surely Facebook?

It must drive those folks crazy, though. Facebook is first, last and always an application designed to put advertisements in your face. So a program that lets you just do what you wanted to do, like seeing the updates that people have put on their pages, must make them utterly crazy.

Anyway, that’s my take on things. I think that I’ll be happiest when, like the iPhone ads claim, there really is “an app for that” for everything I find of interest in my life.

I guess it’s not impacting every mobile Apple user, but it’s sure got me down…

I updated to version 10.5.8 of OS X the day it became available, and now I wish I hadn’t. I’m almost ready to reinstall my OS and just patch up to 10.5.7. The problem is with the wireless. When I’m not plugged into power, my speed drops. Drastically. Our cable modem gives us typically between 4600 and 5100 kbps. When I’m not powered up, I’m getting between 150 and 250 kbps.

It’s ridiculously slow, and the ping times are roughly comparable.

It’s enough to make a guy want to install Linux on the darned computer and see if it doesn’t behave better – at least until 10.5.9 comes out…

In a previous post I mentioned something about going pure command line under Linux. One of the things that you can do from the command line is to post to your blog. And that is what I did to get this posted. And I did it from the Mac command line, to boot

I am, as some of you may know, an unabashed Apple fanboy. I love the Macs that we have in our house, my Macbook, the old-skool eMacs. Heck, I’m even harboring an old PowerMac 6400 down in the basement that I’m tempted to put into use as a non-networked workstation for nothing but writing.

Part of what makes the Mac experience so positive is that the engineering on everything is so solid, from software to hardware, interface design to underlying operating system. Even when things do fail, the service is fast and efficient. The software is designed so that, if you do things the right way, things are significantly easier to to in the long run. They’re just well-written, engineered packages.

And that’s just the problem.

One of the things that I miss from Linux is the wide variety of ways you can do things. If you are perverse enough, you can run your modern, dual-core system with a text-only install of Linux, and do very nearly everything you’d normally do with a full graphical interface. Or you can choose between a dozen different user interfaces, and each of those is endlessly customized.

Some day, I’ll be ready to upgrade my Mac to something new. I might get into an iMac, when I do, and then I’ll go back and find an interesting Linux distribution to put on this Mac, the one I’m typing on right now. Because you know what, in four years, this will still be very much a serviceable machine, full of life.

Sharepoint Portal. Twitter and it’s enterprise class cousin Yammer. Intranet sites. Blogging.

All solutions in search of a problem. We have a culture at my place of employment that says that information travels by three means. Informally, by phone, formally by email and very formally by hard copy memo. As such, we have a really hard time trying to get people to use the tools that we’ve invested in, let alone the ones that cost us nothing.

We put a lot of time and money into Sharepoint Portal a couple years back, and I have been tasked to figure out how to leverage it for the district. There are a few people, and I do mean a few, that are big supporters of the program, and think that what it does is just what we need to get organized. One of them is one of our server admins, who has read up on it, and thinks that it can be everything to everyone. I’m not sure he understands that not everyone is quite so process-oriented as he is. Unfortunately, the other proponent is our Superintendent. He wants everyone to use it and love it like he does, but so far has not applied much pressure to do so, and as such few have adopted it.

What has gone viral, as they say, is Yammer. Our Instructional Tech manager brought it into the district, and it grew from the three or four people he invited to use it to over a hundred over the course of the summer. I’m having a hard time understanding it’s utility, however, in the grand scheme. It’s basically Twitter for small groups and businesses. What it does it let people post little updates and snippets that others can read. How this differs in any way from a threaded discussion group, either in Outlook/Exchange, in Sharepoint Portal, or almost any of the free forum software packages that we could be using. Theoretically it limits people to 140 characters like Twitter does, but I’ve seen people write small novels in Yammer, so that functionality is beyond broken. Given that it also doesn’t allow us to save what people say, just in case we’re ever sued, it’s hard to see where it’ll go from here.

For years, the district has also had an intranet site – an internal-use only website honestly – where we put information that was for employee eyes only. When I went to upgrade our server this summer, I talked to our new web hosting company about setting up an intranet site there instead of hosting it internally. The most important thing I learned when I did that was that of the five things we hid behind the authentication of our intranet – four of them were accessible by way of the public-facing website as well. And the fifth? Will be now. All the time invested in making sure we could secure some portion of the website, and now we’ll probably never use it.

And finally we come to one that’s near and dear to my heart. I keep a blog, sometimes, so I understand the allure. But recently one of our executives decided that, rather than emailing everyone when she had something important to say to them all, she’d just post it on her blog. Apparently the general take in the room was “well, now I’ll never have to read anything she writes ever again.” Nobody was interested in reading her blog. They weren’t interested in setting up RSS feeds so they could be updated when she updated it. They wanted to stay with what they’re used to, what they know, and what has worked forever – email.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I just felt the need to talk about it, I guess. I wish there was some better way to help everyone that I work with to find their way with regards to new technology. I wish there was a way to give them the desire to learn how it can be better applied in their office or classroom. But I think, at this point, we’re going to have to stick with my usual methodology – give them the tools, explain how to use them, and let the 2% who’re interested use them, and use them in ways that make other want to use them as well.

But it’s so hard to invest the time in something that just lies there, looking limp.