The Surgery

I read the following blog entry with interest: Crossing the Windows pain threshold by IT Wire’s Sam Varghese.

Sam asks, When does one reach the tipping point, the point at which one will not rest until one changes operating systems? Or, to put it another way, what kind of pain threshold are Windows users willing to tolerate before they cry out to be rescued?

Valid questions indeed.  Personally, I reached the tipping point about 18 months ago, when Microsoft introduced the Genuine Advantage validation tool.  This was the beginning of the end for me.  Microsoft seemed to be saying to its customers, “Thanks for buying our software. By the way, we don’t trust you to use it lawfully, so we’re going to make sure it’s encumbered with oppressive distribution restrictions.  And bloatware which slows down your system, makes more demands on your time and randomly returns a ‘false positive’ on your legitimate installation anyway.”

Forget the dual-boot, Sam.  I say just go single-boot Ubuntu.

I am quite happily running my Ubuntu machine without anti-virus and anti-spyware software. (Although I do have server-based anti-virus - ClamAV - and server-based anti-spam - SpamAssassin - running on my mail server.)

With Ubuntu I can read mail, surf the web, download and listen to podcasts, watch funny videos that people email me, create documents, spreadsheets and corporate presentations.  I can Skype, I can send instant messages with MSN, Yahoo and the likes, I can open Adobe Acrobat documents, print them locally, across the LAN and over the internet, and even waste hours with the Ubuntu distribution of Google Earth.

The only limitation with Ubuntu and other alternative PC distributions is that the mainstream development community isn’t always releasing applications to run on these platforms. Windows and Mac are still the desktops of choice for most users.

For me, some applications can’t be replaced. The few core applications which I use for business and pleasure, and can’t do without, include Adobe Photoshop for graphics editing; Adobe Audition for audio editing; and Macromedia Dreamweaver for website design. In my opinion these are the best tools for the job, but they aren’t yet available for the Linux desktop.

However what frustrates me even more are the proprietary, redundant applications which don’t need to exist in the first place, that manufacturers force us to use.  A classic example is Sony’s SonicStage and Disc2Phone applications, which you’re forced to use to transfer audio between your Mac/PC and your portable music device… despite the fact that your file browser of choice would do a perfectly acceptable job.

So what does this mean?  It means that I’m forced to maintain a working Windows machine, to support these applications.  In Sam Varghese’s language, although I’ve reached the tipping point, I still can’t abandon Windows.  I’d love to, but I can’t.  Not just yet.

Yesterday I started the Mozilla Thunderbird email client on my Ubuntu machine and two new windows appeared, sort of like this:

“Huh?” I thought, “I’m not running Netscape.” Attempts to close, and force close these windows were unsuccessful.

I rebooted, started Thunderbird again and there they were, taunting me with their tenacity. I Googled the words “Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent Thunderbird” and here’s what I’ve been able to determine.

Thunderbird has a built-in feedback agent which “activates” whenever a problem is encountered. It lets you send memory trace information to the software engineers that maintain Thunderbird. This information alerts engineers to potential problems and gives them an opportunity to repair buggy code (if that’s what caused the problem) in future releases of the software.

You can’t close the Feedback Agent if you don’t wish to take part in their feedback programme, without first answering a few questions. You can click “Next>” a few times and then select “Don’t Send”, and you can also turn the agent off altogether:

It’s a bit annoying the first time it appears, but remember that software engineers rely on feedback from users to ensure smooth-sailing when it comes to future product releases; especially free software like the Mozilla project.

For more info see the MozillaZine Quality Feedback Agent website.

A few weeks back I spoke to Oscar Trimboli, Microsoft’s Group Manager for Real Time Collaboration products in Australia and New Zealand.

We spoke about the new Unified Communications products recently launched by Microsoft.  Here’s Oscar’s blog entry on the interview.

This interview went to air on Tech Talk Radio Episode 35.

Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy techno-social experiments like ATRAC and SonicStage? Good grief. The latest so-called Walkman phones come with proprietary “Disc2Phone” software for transferring music from your PC or Mac.

Why? Excellent question my friend.

When you connect the phone to your PC via the supplied USB cable, it looks like a USB storage device; you should just be able to plug the phone in and use your file explorer of choice to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card. This is as complicated as it needs to be.

Sony, we don’t want more programs installed on our systems just for transferring files between devices.

Unfortunately the “Playback failed” bug that I (and many other owners of SE mobiles) reported only seems to be fixed by using Sony’s Disc2Phone software to transfer files between PC and mobile.

And of course it only comes as a Windows installer, despite the alleged “PC Suite” software. (It definitely doesn’t install on my Ubuntu desktop which happens to run on a PC.) So now I find myself maintaining a Windows machine simply to move MP3 music files and podcasts to my telephone. Well … not maintaining it exclusively for this, but you get the picture…

Also, pity help Mac users unless you’re running some form of Windows virtual machine, like Parallels. No Mac software to be seen.

Similarly, the latest TTR Gadget of the Week is the new Sony B100 MP3 player & music recorder… looks like a great little unit, and at least they’ve done away with ATRAC, but you still need to use proprietary software (SonicStage) to copy/move files.

Helloooo Sony: we DON’T NEED PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE to move files around! It’s cumbersome, slow, feature-bloated and unnecessary. And you forgot the right-mouse-button support. Again.

The “Ericsson” half of the SE-combination is doing a great job. It’s a beaut little phone. But Sony, however, is really letting the side down.

What the….!??!!

On Tech Talk Radio we’ve had Odd Spot segments which are funny, sad, tragic, bewildering, pointless, controversial, political and even perplexing.

I think that this week’s Odd Spot fits all these categories.

In Sydney on Saturday the 14th of July, a man allegedly drove over seven mobile phone base stations in a stolen army tank because “he believed mobile phone waves had ‘harmed his head’.”

The full news story is called “Tank-rampage caused by mobile phone tower radiation” and has been published by CNET.

I added a post to the official TTR blog after this week’s show, but there are heaps more photos on my Flickr account which were sent to me by an anonymous listener / contributor. This contributor works for one of the organisations which sustained damage to their network equipment.

All I can say is … well, I can’t say anything. I am without speech. The offending tank driver is obviously suffering a mental illness and it’s lucky that no-one was seriously injured. Imagine the different outcome if field technicians had been working in or on any of these base stations when the tank ploughed through them. I’ve spent countless hours at radio base sites like these and I can assure you, the last thing on your mind when you’re swapping a board or resetting a power supply is that an Armoured Personnel Carrier is about to drive through your workplace!

It’s also worth noting the resilience of the phone networks, and the “minor” effect that this incident had on subscribers. An Optus spokesman said “there had been only minimal disruptions to services”.

More news stories on the same incident:

• The Age: NSW man refused bail over tank rampage
• NineMSN
• Yahoo!7 News
• The Australian: Man goes on rampage with tank in suburbs

… plus Odd Spot audio clip from this week’s Tech Talk.

I bet you can’t wait for next week’s Odd Spot! :-\

I just upgraded my email client from Thunderbird version 1.5.0.12 to 2.0.0.4.

At the time of writing this post, the new version had only been released for a couple of weeks. You can’t get this version by clicking “Help / Check for updates“, but you can download it directly from the Get Thunderbird website.

To the average user, there are a few subtle but very welcome improvements.

What is Thunderbird? Thunderbird is a free, open-source email client for Windows, Linux desktops and Max OS-X. The installer is only about 11MB and it’s easy to setup, migrate mail and address books from other applications like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and in my opinion has the best Junk Mail handling of any client-side email application.

The “Why I use Thunderbird” Diatribe. For many years I was a Microsoft Outlook user… Corporate/Workgroup mode at work, POP3 mode at home. I booked meetings, published journal entries, used the TAPI dialler in Microsoft Contacts and collaborated with the best of ‘em.

I was also employed for many years as a developer to write client-side and server-side applications for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, which may have clouded my judgement somewhat.

My love affair with Microsoft Outlook came to end after I saw Mozilla’s Thunderbird being used by a colleague. It’s simple, lightweight, costs nothing and does most of the things you need on a home email application. I was an overnight convert.

But there were some things I sorely missed in Outlook. We all have individual things we like, and particular ways we work with computer applications. I’m pleased to say that some of the features that I, personally, have been missing are now being included in Thunderbird.

So what’s new? This isn’t an exhaustive list of what’s new in Thunderbird 2. It’s a list of features I’ve noticed, that I’ve thought “Cool!”, “About time!” or “Hey that’s useful!”

• Privacy Protection / Remote Images. Thunderbird has always blocked remote images in HTML email, requiring you to manually click a “Load images” button if you trust the message sender. There’s a new link in version 2 at the top of the email form which says “Click here to always load remote images from… (trusted sender’s details)”. This is a great innovation and saves time when you receive regualr emails, from a newslist for example, which contain images. Clicking this link creates a new Address Book entry for the sender of the email, if one doesn’t already exist.

• File in Recent Folders. This is one of those features I lamented the loss of, moving from Outlook to Thunderbird. After reading an email, I always file it in a folder (unless I just click delete). In older versions of Thunderbird, you had to drill-down into the folder structure using the “File selected message” button, i.e. there wasn’t a “recent folders” list when you clicked this button. Now there is a “Recent Folders” option when you click “File selected messge”… a huge time-saver and good addition to the application.

• Move back one message / forward one message. Again, in Outlook the “Next item / Previous item” buttons were invaluable on the email form for quicly scanning your emails. In earlier versions of Thunderbird there were “Previous Unread / Next unread” buttons, but if you had “read” items in your Inbox these buttons were unavailable. The guys and girls at Mozilla have added “Go back / go forward” buttons to the email form, which make message navigation a bit more flexible.

I’ll post more new features as I stumble across them. In the meantime, have a look at the Thunderbird 2 Release Notes for a more extensive list of improvements.

I received a letter from Three a few weeks back. Seems they were happy to throw a new handset at me, for another two years of customer loyalty. Who was I to argue?

(Incidentally, hear my discourse about disposable technology with Graeme on Tech Talk Radio.)

After having a quick look at the handsets and plans on offer, I decided to upgrade from the $49/month plan to the $69/month plan, and get the “free” Sony Ericsson W850i.

This thread is primarily about my initial impression of the phone and some of its more interesting features. You would have already anticipated that the phone can make and receive calls, send text messages, store numbers and such things.

The First of two handsets. The staff at Three were very helpful and keen to sign me up for another two years. I unpacked my new toy as soon as I got home.

Here’s what was included in the box:

• The phone
• Manual
• PC Suite CD-ROM
• Handsfree adapter cable, which runs out to a 3.5mm in-line socket (cool)
• Handsfree ear-plug headset thingy
• Charger
• USB cable
• 1GB MS DUO memory card, already fitted in the phone — good that this is supplied by Three, to suppement the phone’s internal 16MB. The phone will support MS DUO cards up to 2GB.

Here’s what wasn’t included in the box, but would have been nice:

• A pouch, cover or protector of some sort … even a basic flimsy one would have been good
• A USB adapter so you can plug your MS DUO card straight into your PC. These are inexpensive, and I’ve already got one, but a lot of people would find one of these useful I suspect, especially if they’d never owned a Sony Ericsson.

Anyway I dropped in the SIM card, plugged in the charger and powered up the phone. It’s a WCDMA “3G” handset (not HSDPA) and operates on the GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 and UMTS 2100 MHz bands. My handset found the 3 network straight away and connected without any issues.

I copied the contents of my SIM card over to the phone memory, which worked a treat. (My last phone was a Sony Ericsson Z800i so details in the contact cards were formatted correctly.)

Everything worked as expected. Except the camera. I received a strange message when trying to start the camera, which said “another application is running”. There is an option to view running applications - I checked but there was nothing listed. After wasting considerable time I decided to do a Master Reset, which didn’t fix the problem either. After a phone call to 3 Customer Care I took the phone back and they exchanged it, no questions asked. The camera worked on the next one.

This “application is running” issue with the camera appears to be quite common, if you Google the error message. Maybe it’s caused by the carriers’ branding of the handsets? The only solution appears to be a return-to-depot replacement at this stage.

Speaking of carrier branding, the other strange thing is that there is no “power on” LED which blinks at you. That is to say, it’s there in the phone, but doesn’t do anything. So when you leave the phone in a dark room for example, you can’t find it by the blinking LED which should be working on top of the phone. You also don’t know if it’s turned on or off without picking it up and pressing buttons to make the display light up. A bit annoying.

Walkman Phone. Yes it really is a Walkman phone. Press the orange button below the screen and this accesses the Walkman controls. Opening the “My Music” folder, you can navigate tracks by Artist, Album, Track, playlist or online channels. For MP3 files, it gets all this information (as well as the thumbnail album-art image) from the ID3 tag in the file. Very cool. I like the interface.

I have noticed, however, on several podcasts which I am playing from the memory stick, that the phone gets about 20 or 30 minutes into the track before it simply stops with either the words “Failed” or “Playback Failed” in the middle of the screen. These same tracks play fine on my old JNC player and the media player on my PC. More investigation needed.  Don’t throw out your MP3 player just yet.

Supplied PC software. Yeah, whatever. Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy social experiments like SonicStage? The phone looks like a USB storage device to your PC; just plug the phone in and use Windows Explorer or the Ubuntu File Browser to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card.

Supplied phone software. The current software version of the phone is CXC1250570 - R1ED001 - 060831.

The phone does have a very clever “Update service”, which allows you to take advantage of its internet connectivity by checking the Sony Ericsson website for software updates. Select this and the phone says “Searching for update” while it connects and checks the internal software version against whatever is current. Apparently my phone “already has the latest software”. (So much for fixing that MP3 problem with a software upgrade!)

There is also a reminder feature, which can prompt you once a month to check for software updates, or even check every time the phone is powered on.

Send to blog. This would be a tremendously useful feature, if only we knew how to configure it for something other than Blogger. There’s a context-menu item when viewing photos: click More > Send, and in addition to “Send as Picture Message”, “Send as Email”, “Send via Bluetooth” and “Send via Infrared”, there’s a “Send to blog” option. Awesome! Except it tries to connect to Blogger and set up a new Blogspot account.

After considerable Googling I have been unable to find where and how to change the settings behind this (otherwise) very useful feature. Any takers?

I have changed The Surgery’s Permalink format, and a few permissions problems on the web server that were bugging the hell out of me.

Click on the “My WordPress Installation” page for more details.

I’ve started a new page about my recent WordPress installation.

If you’re interested in hosting your own blog server, check it out.

But why, I hear you ask, would you want to run your own blog server? Why not just use Blogger, or a site hosted by WordPress, or MySpace, or any of the other hundreds of blogging sites available?

The answer is partly for the technical exercise, and also for the flexibility you get by running your own system.

Click the page link to read more…