David Alison's Blog

Arq and Glacier - Affordable Mac Cloud Storage

2013-05-23T11:28:00.000-04:00

After the near miss I had in losing a considerable portion of my personal digital library I decided to do something about it and look into a cloud based solution for keeping my files safe. I’m still using Time Machine locally to back up nearly everything, I just wanted a final line of storage just in case.

I’ve been using DropBox for years for my documents and miscellaneous files. I have several Google Apps for Business accounts that store my emails and shared docs and spreadsheets. The code I write is versioned and stored in GitHub. For the most part I live off the cloud already, the only thing missing was my large collection of family photos and videos, which totaled nearly 140GB.

iCloud is cool and all, and I love the way it keeps my little iPhone photos synced, but at $100 / year for only 55GB, this is a pretty expensive solution. I looked at a variety of different cloud backup solutions and found them to be ill-fitted to my needs. While many of them have plenty of capacity and are pretty affordable, they usually require a rather heavy backup application to be running in the background monitoring changes.

Amazon to the Rescue

I’ve always been a huge fan of Amazon Web Services and specifically Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), a cloud based storage model. Amazon makes S3 incredibly resilient, providing a 99.999999999% durability rate. Though I’ve used Amazon S3 extensively myself as a software developer for my online services, I had never used it for storing personal data. Since up to 1TB of storage costs $0.095 / GB / month to store, my 140GB collection would cost me just a little over $13 / month to keep safe. That was a little steeper than I wanted.

Fortunately Amazon introduced another variation of S3 storage called Amazon Glacier. Designed to be just as durable as S3, with Glacier you cannot pull the data out very quickly without incurring some additional costs. This wasn’t an issue for me since this collection was really just a deep archive and backup to my backup. The advantage is Glacier is very affordable at $0.01 / GB / month. This meant my 140GB collection would cost me $1.40 / month on Glacier. Perfect!

Transporting the Files with Arq

The next challenge was getting the files up to Glacier from my Mac Pro. Amazon designs their services as something a programmer or systems administrator would access, not the average end user. I considered writing some scripts that would push my files up to Glacier but that seemed like too much work. Besides, it turns out somebody has already done that: Haystack Software’s Arq.

Arq's Main Window

This $29 download (30 day free trial) makes it really easy to just select what you want pushed up to your Glacier account and let it manage moving it up to the cloud. The interface is very spartan, which is actually great. You just need to have established an Amazon AWS account and signed up for S3, and Arq will take care of the rest.

One of the more reassuring features of Arq is that they have released the restore tool as an open source project on GitHub, providing some peace of mind.

The Restore Tool is available as open source

I set up Arq to run at 3AM, dropped the key photo and video folders on to it and let it run. It took a few days through my Cox Cable connection to get everything up to Glacier. If I add any new photos Arq picks them up on the next sweep and pushes them to Glacier.

Restoring from Glacier Takes Time

If you want the files to be readily accessible, then Glacier probably isn’t your best bet; you should use S3. Restoring even a single file from Glacier can take up to 4 hours before it even starts. This is one of the side effects of Glacier and why it’s best suited for deep, long term archiving, whereas S3 is better for files you need rapid access to.

Glacier Restores require great patience

For $29 up front and $1.40 / month, I’ve now got highly durable cloud copies of all my photos and home videos. Sure beats the panic I went through a few weeks ago.

Got a great cloud based backup / archiving solution people should know about? Drop a line in the comments. I’d love to know how others are handling this.

Upgraded your Mac to an SSD? Enable TRIM

2013-05-20T10:32:00.000-04:00

As I wrote last week, the SSD upgrade for my Mac Pro went very smoothly. There were two important things I found out after I started reading the comments from that entry:

An SSD is a good performance upgrade but the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 provides incredible performance. Though quite a bit more expensive than a standard SSD, if you want the absolute best performance for a Mac Pro you may want to consider it. At 820MB/s it is over 5 times faster than the SSD I just installed. Hat tip to Eytan for pointing this out to me.
After adding a 3rd party SSD to your Mac, you need to investigate TRIM support. Derek brought up the issue in the comments and I spent some time investigating it.

What is TRIM?

TRIM is effectively a garbage collection model for SSDs. There is some great information on it on Wikipedia’s TRIM entry. The bottom line is that without TRIM enabled the performance of an SSD will suffer over time. This is something you’ll want to address.

I contacted Crucial technical support to ask if the Crucial 512GB M4 SSD I purchased supported TRIM. Crucial told me I had two options: occasionally "clean" the SSD or enable the operating system to send TRIM commands to the drive. The cleaning process sounds... tiresome. You restart your Mac every couple of weeks, holding down the Option key during the reboot, then let it sit at the boot menu for 24 hours as the firmware cleans the SSD.

You can however turn on TRIM support through a series of Terminal commands and script execution or by using a free utility called Trim Enabler.

Trim Enabler - just turn it on

Running Trim Enabler is pretty simple. Download and install it from the provided DMG and then flip the main toggle button to On. Once this is done you will need to reboot your Mac and TRIM will be enabled. You can confirm this by checking your System Information application and looking at the Serial-ATA entry for your SSD:

TRIM Support is enabled

Based on this information available you will need to restart and run Trim Enabler again if you upgrade OS X to the next point release. If you’re not sure, after an upgrade simply check System Information to ensure TRIM is enabled.

Got a tip for maximizing SSD performance? Drop a note in the comments!

Update: I always get the best comments. In case you don't read them, Hendrik pointed out that not all SSDs are created equal and that Sandforce based SSDs have built in garbage collection baked in. OWC SSDs in particular should not run Trim Enabler. Your mileage may vary. Clearly for the Crucial SSD I installed it's needed but if you install an SSD check with your manufacturer to see if it needs TRIM enabled in the OS.

Upgrading a Mac Pro to SSD

2013-05-17T10:22:00.002-04:00

Mac Pro circa 2008

I bought my Mac Pro 5 years ago and other than the hard disk failures I just had with my add-on drives, the machine has been rock solid. I’ve kept it up on every version of OS X that’s been available and it runs Mountain Lion like a champ.

Even though my Mac hasn’t slowed down with age, it feels relatively slow ever since I added my new 15” MacBook Pro with Retina display to the mix. Between the 16GB of RAM, stunning display and ridiculously fast SSD, the new MacBook Pro seemed to run circles around the larger Mac tower.

Upgrading the processors didn’t seem reasonable. It already has 12GB of RAM and for the way I use the machine that provides plenty of headroom. The one area I figured could see dramatic improvement was by swapping out the 320GB boot disk with an SSD drive. This was the route I took.

Finding the Right SSD

I did a lot of reading on SSDs, looking at Amazon reviews and finding guidance from a variety of different sources where I primarily focused on SSD reliability. Since my Mac Pro only has a 3GB/s SATA interface—not the 6GB/s that most of the SSDs support and what comes on a new MacBook Pro—I wasn’t too worried about performance. I knew it would be dramatically faster than the conventional magnetic drive I had humming away in the drive bay.

Icy Dock adaptor and Crucial SSD

I ended up settling on the Crucial M4 512GB drive. One of the fundamental changes I wanted to make was to move my iPhoto Library to the SSD. That meant making room for an 80+ GB file bundle, which is why I went with the bump in capacity.

The first step in upgrading to the new drive was to ensure it would even mount in the drive rails of the Mac Pro. The SSDs are generally delivered as 2.5” laptop drives. Turns out what you need is a 2.5” to 3.5” SATA drive converter. For that I went with the Icy Dock enclosure. It’s a plastic box that is in roughly the same shape as a 3.5” internal drive and fits perfectly with the rails on a Mac Pro. If you do this upgrade be careful - there are lots of 2.5” to 3.5” converters out there but not all of them will line up the SATA interface with the Mac Pro’s drive system.

Installation with the Icy Dock takes just a few minutes

Installing the drive into the Icy Dock takes all of a couple of minutes. Simply open the box, line up the SATA connectors with the SSD and plug it in. Snap the lid on and it’s ready to be mounted to the Mac Pro drive rails. Once mounted—there are 4 #1 phillips screws—the drive slides right in.

Prepping the Drive

With the drive installed I fired up my Mac Pro. The drive is not pre-formatted so I needed to get to work on that. Since this was going to be a direct replacement of an older drive, I decided to try cloning the original to this new SSD. For that I chose Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC is a nice tool for not only creating a complete duplicate of a drive, but also providing incremental updates to keep a cloned drive current. This is critical if you want to be able to recover from a drive failure in minutes, not hours. For now, all I needed to do was clone the drive.

CCC saw the new drive and recommended that I use the Desk Center to create a Recovery Partition on the new SSD, which I did. Once that’s created the cloning process can kick off. For me CCC ended up pushing nearly 205GB of data onto the new drive. That process took 2 hours and 50 minutes to complete.

From there I went into the System Preferences and clicked on Startup Disk. After I changed it to the new SSD drive I clicked Restart and I was now running off the SSD.

Though everything appeared exactly the same on the new SSD, for some reason it didn’t carry over my Dropbox credentials. I had to log back into that tool manually.

Faster? Oh yeah. Faster.

Before doing the install I recorded the time it took to perform certain tasks and load some applications. I also ran the Nova Bench application and let it calculate a score before and after the conversion. Nova Bench upgraded my score from 1042 to 1094 after the SSD was in and reported that my disk throughput went from 52MB/s to 166MB/s. For perspective my MacBook Pro tests out at 323MB/s, roughly double the performance. Given the MacBook Pro is running a 6GB/s SATA interface, that makes sense.

I also tested some normal tasks:

Task	Hard Drive	SSD	Improvement
Power on to Login Page	1m 11.3s	24.6s	65%
Login to Desktop Ready	13.3s	3.8s	69%
Shut Down (no apps running)	1m 9.7s	27.0s	61%

Some decent performance improvement was achieved. Starting up felt much snappier than before. But how about regular use applications? Here’s what I found:

Application	Hard Drive	SSD	Improvement
Mail.app	5.2s	2.4s	54%
Safari.app	6.8s	1.6s	76%
Contact.app	2.1s	1.1s	48%
Pages.app	8.3s	2.7s	67%

I measured the improvement based on that first pass opening the apps. In every day usage this performance was pretty stunning. It felt as though I had upgraded to a brand new Mac. Every aspect of the Mac just seemed snappier.

Back when I was heavily into Windows I found myself upgrading machines every couple of years. It wasn’t really a hardware issue as much as the degradation of a Windows machine after extended use. You pretty much HAD to format the drive, reinstall Windows and start over again. Once you get to that point it was worthwhile just upgrading the hardware at the same time.

My Mac Pro has been different. It’s now 5 years old and has been through Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and now Mountain Lion. These were not full reinstalls but upgrades to the existing OS. It really is amazing to me that with this SSD upgrade I’ll likely get at least another 2-3 years out of the machine, if not more. Sure, Macs may cost a little more up front, but the ROI is easily justified if you'll be keeping it long term.

Got some advice for SSD upgrades? Please drop a note in the comments.

Hard Disk Clicking and a Time Machine Failure

2013-05-14T10:40:00.000-04:00

It had been a long couple of months. We’d been working furiously on the launch of EasyGrouper and were just a few days away from having it go live. As I sat in my home office working on my new MacBook Pro I heard a deeply disturbing sound coming from my older Mac Pro tower a few feet away:

ZZZZ-click

ZZZZ-click

ZZZZ-click

That’s never a good sign. My Mac Pro is my main home machine and runs a lot of stuff for me. It’s got a 320GB main drive (“BootDisk”) running my apps and working documents, a 1TB drive called “BigDisk” that contains my family photos, videos, music, etc. and another 1TB drive called “Backup” for... you guessed it... backups.

I tapped the keyboard to wake up the screens and could see that the icons for my drives were all on my desktop when suddenly the BigDisk icon vanished and OS X gave me an error message that said I had not ejected the drive properly.

Not good.

My Mac could no longer see my BigDisk internal drive—the drive that contained over 380GB of rather important information. Virtually every digital picture I’ve taken since 1999. I didn’t panic though. I’m a big Time Machine advocate and it’s saved me before. I tried restarting the machine but the ZZZZ-click sound returned and it wasn’t even able to see my drive. I got back to work on EasyGrouper, determined to get this resolved the following Monday when I came up for air after the launch.

Fast Forward to Monday Night(mare)

I sat down Monday night to work on restoring my files. I clicked on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, selected Enter Time Machine and the space traveling interface popped up with a Finder window.

My Time Machine Display

But there was a problem. A big problem.

I clicked on my machine in the list of items on the left pane and it only showed one drive: BootDisk. Oh yeah, Time Machine had been running for the last few days so it had been backing up my machine without BigDisk in there. I started to use the Time Machine interface to go back in time.

I backed up to the day I heard the clicking sound. No BigDisk. I backed up further. Nothing. The only drive that was being backed up was my BootDisk drive. It’s as though Time Machine didn’t even see the drive.

Now I started to panic. I counted on Time Machine to back this up for me and I never saw an error message or any indication in the menu bar that Time Machine was having a problem. I knew that at some point Time Machine had been backing up that drive because I had previously used it to recover a file I inadvertently modified and saved.

I looked into Console and searched for “backupd”; there were plenty of entries for it backing up my BootDisk, but that was it. No Time Machine error messages like I’d seen in the past. I had an external drive in my fireproof safe that contained a backup of my pictures and home movies, but I hadn’t updated it since the end of 2010. I had become lazy and complacent and it was about to bite me. The last three and a half years of my digital life had just vanished.

Recovery Time

I asked around the office and many people recommended I see if a hard drive salvage specialist could restore the data for me. I found Salvage Data in nearby Herndon, VA—they were super nice and would perform a free diagnostic to see if the drive could actually be recovered. I dropped it off and waited to see if they could help.

The next day I got a call. The drive’s primary head cluster had failed and the drive had logical errors that would need to be corrected. It would take 10-15 days if I didn’t need rush service. The price: $1,740. The price seemed high but Salvage Data had an excellent reputation and the people were extremely attentive and understanding. They described the work that would need to be done in a clean room environment and the parts they would need to acquire and it seemed reasonable given the amount of time it would take. Finally, they assured me that if I did proceed with the recovery I wouldn’t have to pay anything if it turns out they couldn’t get the actual data off.

I talked it over with my wife and we decided that the information we were missing was just too important. I went back to my Mac Pro, dejected that Time Machine had failed me and that I didn't have a more robust backup system in place. I decided on a whim to check it one last time.

I used the right-hand time-line and clicked on the oldest date I could see. Time Machine animated the Finder windows and scrolled rapidly through the days and I noticed something odd. One of the days had an extra drive in it. Through patient scrolling I found something that I had missed earlier: on April 3, a little over a month before my drive had failed, there was a backup of BigDisk. There was no entry for it before or after that day.

I opened the drive entry in Time Machine and lo and behold my photos, movies and music were all there! All of the pictures I took after April 3 were missing but otherwise I had virtually all of my data! I immediately started the process of restoring the data to my external drive.

Time Machine - Not Confidence Inspiring

I’ve always been a big fan of Time Machine. I love that Apple has made backing up as simple as they have. This little experience has given me pause though. Time Machine had failed and I never received an error message. No notice, no warning. Just a lot of missing files.

While I am a huge fan of simple and powerful, I really need to stay informed. If I have a Mac with multiple drives does Time Machine back them up? The only option I have in Time Machine is to tell it what I want to exclude, which implies that everything else is going to be backed up.

In the mean time, I’ve decided that this little experience requires a complete change in the way I store and ultimately back up my digital life. Over my next few posts I’ll be covering how I have added new and more robust storage to my Macs, how I’m handling offsite storage and some of the tools I’ve found to make my information far more secure.

If you’ve got some background on how Time Machine works in a multiple drive system, please share it in the comments below.

Trust me when I tell you this: within the next 24 hours you should verify that you are properly backing up your important files. Pick any hard drive (or SSD for that matter) that you have. If it died now, how would you recover? The cost of prevention is a tiny fraction of the time, money and frustration you'll experience if you don't.

Employee Lists on your iPhone or Android with EasyGrouper

2013-05-10T11:41:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time since I blogged, mainly because I’ve been so busy building up another product for public release. Now that the product is launched I’m hoping to spend a little more time covering technology topics. I figured what better way to restart the blogging than by writing about our new product.

The Problem with Contact Lists

Today nearly everyone carries a smart phone. Whether it’s a company issued phone or (more likely) a personal device, it’s hard to go anywhere and not find them. When you need to get in touch with someone you work with, the best way is usually to call or text their mobile phone if they aren't nearby. Sometimes it's a quick email from your smartphone if the message isn't urgent.

This is where the problems begin. Getting the people you work with onto your phone is largely up to each individual. Unless the company they work for has an Active Directory or LDAP server humming away—and it's been updated with everyones person mobile device—each person has to maintain their own contact list. Most small non-technology businesses don't have the resources to run a server like that.

For companies that only have a handful of employees, this isn’t really an issue. However once you hit the 15-20 people mark it becomes very difficult to balance. The most common way of dealing with this is by putting together a spreadsheet and either emailing it around or putting it on a shared drive (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) that people can access. Pulling up this information is not generally very easy when you are sitting on a mobile device with a poor internet connection.

Enter EasyGrouper

Seeing this as an opportunity we developed EasyGrouper. What we wanted to build was a really simple way to put a list of just the people you work with—and their primary work contact information—on the web and on everyone's phones. It needed to be spreadsheet simple because that’s generally what we were replacing.

Main List

The idea was to make it completely separate from your regular contact list. The contact list model in most phones feels completely broken; every app wants to access my contact list; online apps like Facebook and Twitter want to mine my contacts to see who I communicate with; some desktop apps and online services want to synchronize my contact list and I get multiple copies of the same contact in my address book. For a common user—especially of the non-technical type—it’s a giant mess that people have just accepted as ugly.

Rather than exacerbate the problem, we decided to take a really simple approach. Put the list of people on our secure web site. Focus on the most basic contact information that people really need: name, title, email, phone numbers. Provide a web page that is responsive and looks good on mobile devices as well as custom apps that provide beautiful and responsive user experiences for the end user. Keep the data cached on people’s phones so the response time is extremely fast, and only perform updates to the data in the background.

Locations and Groups

Information Page

We went a little further than just putting together an employee list that would allow simple calling, texting and emailing. When people are out in the field or away and traveling they often find themselves needing to look up important information that is specific to the company or a project some people may be working on. Our Information pages are basically a complete web page that gets pushed down to each person’s phone automatically. Links in those pages are automatically linked into the features of your mobile device. Tapping a phone number will dial it, a link to a web site will load your web browser, an email address will load your mail client, etc.

This means that if a company wants to put up an information page for their office they can list out who the emergency contacts are, who to call for catering, directions to a client location, health insurance information, etc. Pretty much any information a person may need when they are out of the office.

Statuses

The one last feature we added was the ability to set a status. Very often when you are trying to find someone you work with and they aren’t where you expect them, you ask around: "Have you seen…?". The status feature lets you put a quick line next to your name in the list for a set time frame. It’s a great way to let people you work with know that you’re on vacation, at the dentist or traveling.

As we built and prototyped EasyGrouper we talked to a lot of small businesses about it. The reception we received was overwhelmingly positive and after having used it for a few months several of our early adopters have found EasyGrouper to be an indispensable tool.

We priced EasyGrouper to be very affordable. The client apps that we built for iPhone and Android are free and anyone can set up a 45 day trial account for up to 200 people. For US $25 per month a company with up to 50 employees can roll this out to everyone.

You can check out the video for EasyGrouper below or get more information by visiting our web site at www.easygrouper.com.

Warning - iOS5 Update Restore Error - Wait to upgrade

2011-10-12T18:16:00.002-04:00

I patiently waited for the actual release of iOS5 - since I can't get myself an iPhone 4S for a little while without paying a premium. When I saw that iOS5 was available, I decided to update my 32GB iPhone 4 to the latest and greatest.

First off, Apple wanted me to upgrade OS X to 10.7.2 and iTunes to 10.5. That took the better part of an hour in itself, between downloading a pretty hefty collection of bits, installing them and then running a subsequent back up, I was a full hour in before I could even begin to upgrade my iPhone.

Once that was out of the way I tried updating the iPhone 4. Here's where the fun began.

First, an error

After sitting there for a very long time—I didn't pay close attention—iTunes reported this little error. Not good. When I clicked OK (it's not really OK but that's the one to push), I pulled my iPhone off the USB connector and the phone itself seemed fine. Still running iOS 4.3, and all of my content was sitting there fine.

I Googled up the issue and there was a huge thread on the Apple discussion forums on this. Since several people reported that they were able to upgrade by just continuing to try, I decided to give that a go. Three attempts in, I got something different. It looked like my iPhone was being updated!

Then suddenly I got the error again. Oh well. The problem was my iPhone was now in a restore state and not being recognized by iTunes - it had the little "plug me in to iTunes" graphic on the screen of the iPhone.

This was not good. I tried to do a restore and it would spin and spin, however I now got a different error message:

Looks like the Apple servers were completely overwhelmed. This was not good. Especially now that my iPhone was essentially in brick mode. I kept retrying and the restore would get to varying degrees of success, then eventually fail out. Sometimes with the above error, other times with one of these:

After this error, I would then get the old "Hey, this iPhone is in recovery mode..." error:

I tried everything. Rebooted my Mac several times, tried unplugging all the USB devices, etc. and still no luck. I was panicking - while I was sure I could get my apps back somehow, I had a lot of video and photos on my iPhone that hadn't been pulled off. I thought about the videos I had taken of my mom over the last year, right before she passed away. If those were gone, I was not going to be happy. I knew iTunes was making backups for me, and that my Mac was in turn backed up, but the way this was going, my confidence was not very high.

Eventually the iPhone appeared to restore and started up again. Then it flipped into "restoring" mode for my apps and then music and videos:

This process took the better part of an hour. All in, the upgrade took me about 3 hours from start to finish, and I still have an iPad 1 to update.

I think I'm going to wait a week or so to upgrade the iPad. If you are considering upgrading your iPhone now to iOS5, be very patient; you may be without your phone for a number of hours and the way the Apple servers are performing right now under load, perhaps a very long time.

UPDATE: My iPhone was successfully updated to iOS5 - total upgrade time was a little over 3 hours and took about a dozen retries at various stages. All of my information (contacts, calendar, photos, etc.) were intact.

I decided late this evening (Oct 12, 2011) to try updating my iPad, just to see if it would actually go through. This time the upgrade went much more smoothly - not a single error. It did require about 1.5 hours to complete however.

Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T07:09:00.000-04:00

We mourn the loss of famous people—our entertainers, our leaders, our athletes—even though we never got a chance to meet them in person. They entered our lives through popular media and became part of it. We would watch them act or sing and it would engage us. They would speak about the important challenges we face and we would be inspired to address them. We would watch in awe as they performed incredible feats of skill, wondering how anyone could pull that off.

When one of those famous people die young, it's notable. That small window in our lives that they occupied goes dark and we miss them for a time.

Steve Jobs was different.

He wasn't an entertainer, yet he could capture the attention of the public and engage us. He didn't give many speeches, but the few he did were inspirational. Though he was not the classic business CEO he created multiple businesses that enjoyed extraordinary financial success. While these are all great accomplishments, it's not the main reason many people will remember Steve Jobs.

Steve had an uncanny ability to create things that became part of our lives. He didn't just build tools that made it easier to do something, he built tools that added joy to the task. He and his team put such a high value on the quality of a product that simply holding it in your hands left you with an appreciation for the attention to detail poured into it. There was a depth to the products Steve created; while something could be very simple on the surface, a little digging would lead to some cool discovery of a feature or capability that would make you smile. Like many of his product presentations, there always seemed to be "one more thing" subtly hidden on the device, waiting for you to discover it.

Personally I'm going to miss Steve's influence on the future of technology.

My thoughts are with Laurene, Steve's children and family, and the folks he worked with every day to make magic happen.

Things I learned from my mom

2011-08-12T13:34:00.003-04:00

Hug Frequently
A hug costs nothing yet gives a huge return. Spend them on family and friends as though you have an unlimited supply, because you do.

Enjoy Family Time
My mom was happiest when we were all sitting at the dinner table, swapping stories and making one another laugh. I am happiest when I am sitting at the dinner table with my own kids, making each other laugh.

Laugh Easily
Open yourself to laughter. Try to find the humor in things, even if it sometimes comes at your own expense. When frustration is about to lead to anger, try laughing about it instead.

Protect Ferociously
If you attempt to harm my child I will personally introduce you to the afterlife. No, I am completely serious.

Marry My Child, Become My Child
When I married my wife, my mom didn't treat it as though she lost a son but that she finally gained a daughter. She gave her love unconditionally and always treated my wife as her own child.

Say “I love you”
Don't assume your family and close friends know that you love them. This isn't some awkward teenage crush, these are the people that are most important to you. Tell them. I never had a conversation with my mom that didn't end with her telling me that she loved me, unless I managed to get it in first.

Share Your Pride
My mom frequently shared how proud she was of me. She always focused on my accomplishments, and merely noted my failures to me privately. She instilled in me a drive to succeed, not a fear of failure. Find the positive things your children do and build on them.

Don't Give Up
Sometimes life throws you a curve ball. It may be a spouse going through a tough time, a personal financial crisis or even cancer. Fight it because your family needs you.

Teach By Example
You can't expect your children to behave any differently than you do. If you want your children to pay attention to you, pay attention to them. Be as kind to them as you want them to be to others.

Keep Chocolate Handy
Every problem looks easier to solve with the application of a little chocolate.

Adalene was born on February 14, 1930, the fourth child of Salvatore and Rosaria. My grandparents immigrated from Sicily just a few years earlier and settled in a little burg in Western Pennsylvania. My grandfather hand built the house that my mother was born in and remains in the family to this day.

My mom was a child of the Great Depression and quit school after the 8th grade to take a factory job and help provide for her family. She spent the first 30 years of her life devoted to her parents while staying in Pennsylvania. When Salvatore died, my mom, her sister Angelina and her mother moved to California to start a new life. It was there that she met my father Dave Alison.

On her first date with my dad they were involved in a horrific car accident when a drunk driver ran a red light. My mom's foot was nearly severed but they were able to reattach it, though the injury would plague my mom for the rest of her life. At this point it became pretty clear that my mom was a survivor.

In 1962 she married Dave and became Adalene Alison. A year later she had me, followed by my brother a year and a half later. With a young family under her wings, she and my dad set about building a life for themselves. My dad had a couple of business ventures that failed, putting some pretty heavy stress on the family. To complicate matters, my dad was an alcoholic, alternating through beer, whiskey and vodka over the years.

Through all of these challenges Adalene remained committed to Dave. My grandmother Rosaria lived with us and watched my brother and I while my mom and dad worked during the day. It was only when I was an adult that my mom and dad revealed how hard times were when I was a child. I never knew this; I always had clothes, there was always food on the table and my parents would somehow find a way to give us huge quantities of toys for our birthdays and Christmas. My brother and I wanted for nothing.

In the late 1970s my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She insulated my brother and me from it, always assuring us that she would be fine. She always seemed more concerned with us than herself. She had surgery several times to remove the cancer before it would come back. She kept fighting and eventually had a mastectomy. Though scarred from the surgery, she was cancer free and would remain so for the rest of her life.

Over the years my mom encountered other health problems that led to her quality of life declining. Fortunately my dad quit drinking and became the devoted spouse my mom had always been to him. As dementia started to affect my mom, my dad was there to help her get by. The year 2011 was a series of declines for my mom and it was pretty clear that her time on this earth was coming to a close.

Though my mom fought many battles and overcame adversity every time it knocked at her door, she never lost her ability to laugh and smile. Even while in hospice care and bound to a wheelchair, she would reach out and hold the hands of others around her, trying to comfort them.

On August 11, 2011, while my mom quietly breathed her last breath, my dad held her hand and whispered into her ear "I love you".

First Impressions of Lion

2011-07-25T12:38:00.000-04:00

I've been playing with Lion fairly steadily now since its release and have some initial impressions I'd like to share.

Gestures
The changes to the gestures in OS X are dramatically different. I can deal with the change to scrolling direction on a page (up is down, down is up) - that's really not that big of a deal. After less than a week I've completely adjusted to it. You can switch it in settings if you like, however you are better off just adjusting to it if you are exclusively a Mac user since it matches up with how actual touch screens like the iPad work. Apple wouldn't be making a change like this just for consistency, I believe it's to prepare Mac users for the future when a hybrid device that is a merger of iPad and Mac is released.

What is a big deal is that the default behavior for going back in a browser (three-finger swipe left) is changed, now it's two fingers and only works on Safari (not Chrome). I'm hoping I can get this to work in Chrome because for now I'm back to using Safari. I understand why Apple did it but it's made using my Mac feel very awkward for now.

Full Screen Mode
I like it - though having another button for doing this seems excessive. I don't know of anyone that uses the Zoom button (green + in the caption area). We've seen by the gestures that Apple is willing to completely change behaviors, why not this one? I do like that it also hides the menu bar at the top, which is great for letting you focus on content. Move the cursor to the top of the screen and the menu bar "un-hides".

What is a little odd is that moving the cursor to the bottom of the screen while in Full Screen Mode does not bring up the Dock Bar, so you can't easily launch another application while in that mode. This makes sense though since the application you are currently running is taking over the entire screen. Instead you can hit the old Exposé key (or the Mission Control gesture) and launch another application from there.

I haven't upgraded my dual-display Mac Pro to Lion yet (it's actually still on Leopard), but I'm interested to see how Full Screen Mode works in that environment.

Scroll Bars
Like many of the user interface elements in Lion, the scroll bars are now very muted in appearance. The big change is that by default they are set to auto-hide when not actually scrolling. While that behavior is brilliant on an iPhone because of the severely limited screen real-estate, that's not really the case on a full size display on a Mac. Why not? The scroll bar not only provides you with a general scrolling mechanism but it also gives you immediate feedback on how long your document is. Without it there you need to touch the scroll gesture just to see it. Fortunately you can change that in System Preferences to always show them, which is what I have done.

Mission Control
Love it and hate it at the same time. I use Spaces heavily and I don't like that I've lost my nice little grid and that it's now a single line across the top portion of the screen. It's lost keyboard navigation (arrows) between the "desktops" while in zoomed out mode, though I can assign Control-# keys for each of the Desktops. I like that the gestures for Mission Control allow me to simply swipe side to side (3 fingers) to move between them. This should expose it to more people that Spaces, which was really more for the techies out there.

The changes are not too bad on a modern Track Pad equipped MacBook Pro where the Track Pad is very close to the typing position. If you are an external mouse user then it's a much more difficult proposition.

Launchpad
This is just useless to me as a power user. I assume it's there to help new switchers that are coming because they love their iPad or iPhone so much. I can see that it would be much easier to guide a new user through finding and launching an application rather than having them scroll through the Finder's Application folder, however I'll just stick to launching my applications from LaunchBar.

Mail
Really like the new Mail overhaul. I use Mail extensively and this is just great. I like the appearance, the way threads of messages are kept together (ala Gmail), the drag metaphor (click and hold a second, then a message is draggable). Looks fantastic in full screen mode.

Calendar and Address Book
This is a rather large mistake by Apple. They are going for a "real world" object look and compromising functionality by doing so. The Address Book in particular is far less usable. Hoping they don't try this little "making it look like it's a real world object" with Mail (look like a piece of paper pulled out of an envelope), iTunes (look like an old record store with a demo turntable), iMovie (an old film splicing machine), etc. This is not enhancing usability at all.

General Stability
I've been getting exceptions thrown in Safari pretty regularly. Since I upgraded from Snow Leopard I had quite a few utilities installed and I think one or more of them could be causing issues. Make sure you check the applications you normally run all the time to see if there are Lion specific updates available.

Other Little Things
If my MacBook Pro drops into sleep mode the trackpad no longer wakes it up; I have to hit a key on the keyboard. One of the utilities I've come to depend on—Growl—is not currently supported and I find myself lost without it. Performance is very good overall, and Snow Leopard was no slouch. Safari is considerably faster and the new Back / Forward animations look very slick.

Summary
With Snow Leopard Apple brought OS X fully into the 64 bit world, preparing the operating system for the next generation of software to come. With Lion Apple is now doing the same thing with users, preparing us all slowly for a world that is driven by portable devices, not personal computers.

It's a lot easier for Apple to get the average person to buy an iPad and use that for Email, web browsing and some basic applications. People don't consider that "switching" - it's an entirely new paradigm to them. Given that, I think we will continue to see the innovation at the user level happen on the iOS front and that will drive direction for the foreseeable future.

You may read what I have written and think I'm not happy with Lion. That would be incorrect. I really like Lion and the problems I'm pointing out are because of frustrations I have with something I spend so much of my day using.

Upgrading Multiple Macs to Lion

2011-07-20T12:33:00.001-04:00

Like many Mac users I am in the process of upgrading my Macs to Lion today. With 8 Macs in our house downloading 3.7GBs of installer seems like a huge waste of bandwidth. You only need to purchase the upgrade once for all of the machines you own or control so here's a technique that may help you only download Lion just once:

1) Purchase Lion on one of your Snow Leopard Macs
The download is about 3.76GB so depending on your connection speed it may take a while. You'll need to be current with Software Update if you aren't already.

2) Once the download is complete you will be presented with this screen:

3) Do not click Continue! Press Command-Q (or quit from the menu) instead

4) Open Finder and navigate to your Applications folder
You should see the installer with the Lion icon titled "Install Mac OS X Lion". Copy that 3.76GB file to portable media device (like a Flash drive or external hard drive).

5) Copy the Installer application to the Applications folder of the Macs you want to upgrade

6) Ensure each of your Macs is running Snow Leopard and current with Software Update
I'm not sure this is completely necessary but better safe than sorry. There have been recent updates to the App Store that enabled people to purchase Lion upgrades; if you don't have those updates I'm not sure if the upgrade will work. If you are still running Leopard on a Mac it will first need to be upgraded to Snow Leopard and updates applied.

7) Backup your Mac before your upgrade
Though the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade is pretty smooth and few people appear to be reporting problems, having a decent backup (even if it's just Time Machine being completely current) is always prudent.

8) Run the Installer on each of your Macs
The upgrade took about 35 minutes to run on my new MacBook Pro, though your mileage may vary.

I'm putting this out before I've completed the upgrade process on all of my Macs because as soon as you execute the Upgrade the installer is removed from your Mac and will need to be re-downloaded (or copied as I mention above).

If you have any other experience with upgrading multiple Macs to Lion please leave a note in the comments!

Vibram FiveFingers - Getting started running barefoot style

2011-06-29T09:41:00.000-04:00

After reading Born to Run, Christopher McDougall's best seller on long distance athletes, I became convinced that I needed to make the switch to a barefoot style of running. Based on everything I've read the human body has evolved over millions of years to be optimized for running, yet it's only in the last 40 or so years that we've had heavily padded running shoes and the number of injuries caused by using them has skyrocketed. I won't delve into the details here, encouraging you to either pick up McDougall's book or Google yourself up some background on it.

The bottom line is that if you want to go with a more natural barefoot running style you have a few choices. Since the bottom of my feet are about as tough as the South bound end of a North bound baby, actually running in bare feet didn't seem reasonable. I've done it on the beach in soft sand but that's pretty much where I draw the line. The first thing I did was lace up my heavily padded Nike running shoes and try running on the balls of my feet.

It turns out running "on your toes" is actually pretty tough to do in standard issue running shoes. The padding insulates you so much that your foot doesn't naturally want to land on the ball of your foot and I found myself really having to focus, lest I revert back to running on my heels and rolling forward. Turns out that undoing 30+ years of heel-strike running wouldn't just happen automatically. I ran a very flat 3.1 miles that way at an 8:37 pace (normally I run at about an 8:10 pace while exercising).

My calf muscles were quite tight afterwards, something I never experienced after running. Usually it was my knees that were a bit sore and they were fine. As a hardcore cyclist—last year was 4,500+ miles at an 18.5mph average—my calf muscles are well conditioned. Or so I thought. The barefoot style was pulling on them in a different way and I found that after my first run they were quite sore in that over-stressed muscle kind of way. I probably should have stretched them more after my run but since I didn't the next couple days involved me walking a bit gingerly. Fortunately it had no impact on my cycling.

Enter the Vibram FiveFingers
I decided that if I was going to switch to the barefoot style I may as well use a "shoe" optimized for that and went with the Vibram FiveFingers Bikila. I use shoe in quotes because the Vibrams hardly look like a shoe, especially when mounted on your feet. Because they are form fitting the appearance at first glance is that your feet are painted the color of the shoe. They provide a nominal level of impact insulation, more to protect your skin from small sharp objects (glass) and provide excellent gripping on smooth surfaces.

I wear a size 10 1/2 US shoe and though the size charts I've seen would recommend anywhere from a 45 to a 46 (EU style sizing) I chose a 44 because that's the size cycling shoe I use. Putting on a Vibram takes a little getting used to - you can't just jam your foot in. Instead you need to inch your toes into their respective sockets.

Initially wearing the Vibrams was an odd feeling. I wasn't used to having material between each of my toes. It's not an unpleasant experience, just a bit odd initially. The material for the shoes are highly breathable so it doesn't feel like you're really wearing anything. Walking around in them is also interesting because it's just a tiny step above being in bare feet; you "feel" the undulations in the ground you are walking on and your foot conforms to different terrain.

Appearance
The reaction you get while wearing Vibrams will vary. People you don't know will ask you about them: "What ARE those?", "How do they feel?" and "Does it hurt to run"? If you have children like I do in their late teens and early twenties, they will be completely horrified. "Dad, PLEASE don't go out in public with those on your feet"! Ah kids. I remember the battles over appropriate clothing with my daughters when they were young teenagers and this is my mid-life revenge.

That First Run
As I set out on my first run in the Vibrams I noticed something immediately: my foot automatically adjusted to running in the barefoot style. I didn't have to focus on my running like I did when I was wearing my Nikes. As I extended my leg forward my foot just dipped down to land gently on the pads of my foot, my foot spread out as my heel came down a microsecond later. It was a solid but gentle impact. If you are used to running in padded running shoes with your heel striking first and rolling forward, try running barefoot on a hard surface; your feet automatically adjust to the terrain and the ball of your foot will absorb the impact. This is exactly what happened when I ran in the Vibrams.

Another thing I noticed immediately was that my feet felt very light. It's hard to appreciate how much running shoes add to your in-motion weight until you discard them and run with something like the Vibrams. I immediately felt much faster and had to back off on my pace because I didn't want to become gassed a mile into what was supposed to be a 3 mile break-in run.

I ran almost exclusively on asphalt in a very flat area and everything was going great. At one point I had to jump over to a grassy shoulder to let traffic by and the transition was very easy; even though there was an angle to the surface I had no problem with keeping stable. The wide bottom of my running shoes normally had a difficult time on those types of surfaces and sometimes my foot would roll awkwardly if it caught an edge. With the Vibrams my foot just conformed to the surface area, wrapping around whatever I stepped on.

At one point I tried running on a gravel pathway next to the road to see how it felt. The marble sized rocks felt a little odd under my Vibrams—and large rocks were uncomfortable for my sensitive feet—but overall it was actually quite easy. I didn't feel any discomfort until the last 1/4 mile of my run.

Let the Pain Begin
With just a couple blocks left in my run I started to feel some discomfort on the inside edges of my feet just forward of my arch. It started out as a mild pinching sensation and rapidly started to hurt more and more, especially in my right foot. My wife will tell you that I'm one of the more stubborn people on the planet so rather than just stop and walk the last 1/4 mile I kept running as planned. As I rounded the last corner and began to taper off, I was favoring my right foot pretty heavily and limping slightly. I sat down on my deck and extracted my feet from the Vibrams, which is nearly as challenging as putting them on. You don't slip your foot out as much as you peel them off.

I had developed two small and painful blisters on each of my feet in nearly identical locations, though they had broken open on my right foot. The problem was where the base of the strap was mounted to the outside of the Vibram. When I put on the Vibrams I synched down that strap very tightly, much like I do to my cycling shoes. I believe that I had it so tight that it was pulling the strap base into my baby-like skin and that's what caused the abrasion.

The second thing I noticed was that my calf muscles were again on fire. I hadn't fully recovered from my earlier attempt at the barefoot style and was now paying the price. I sat down and massaged my calf muscles heavily and that helped but it turned out that pain would be with me for a couple of days.

I managed to complete the 2.9 miles in 24:48 with an 8:32 / mile average. This was still down from my normal speed but the last painful 1/4 mile was run at a pretty slow pace.

Three Days Later - Another Run
After three days and several bike rides to help my legs recover I felt I was ready to give the Vibrams a try again on that same 2.9 mile course. This time I had two pretty heavy blister bandages sealing up my foot in the injured area, the strap was pulled on pretty lightly and I set off at what I felt was a pretty easy pace. The bandages helped my feet tremendously and I felt no discomfort from them. My legs also felt very strong and I tried to maintain a pace that could have gone for 10 miles pretty easily.

I kept waiting for the pain to come to my feet but it never did - the blister bandages were working. I returned home within 23:55 for an 8:14 pace, which is very close to my normal time, yet I was not pushing all that hard. My calf muscles were again sore but this time I spent 10 minutes stretching them out after the run. A few hours later they felt fine.

Summary
Running in Vibrams is a very interesting experience. If I look beyond the blistering my feet experienced (something that should go away over time) and the muscle adjustment (already made to a degree), I feel like my running experience has been completely revitalized. My knees are not sore at all and my heels feel great. Instead of feeling like I'm jamming my legs into the pavement I feel like I'm working my muscles as they were designed to operate. Frankly I can't wait to get out on the road in them tomorrow; the 5K and 10K races I run during the summer start soon and I'm interested to see if this will help me improve on the personal records I set last year.

Special thanks to Greg and Reid—Twitter friends and fellow runners—for giving me feedback on the Vibrams. Also, please note that I'm including links to Born to Run and the Bikila's through my Amazon referral account - if you pick them up from there I get referral credit.

Three iChat Features You Should Know About

2011-05-18T10:48:00.001-04:00

As I wrote up my last blog post on Skype alternatives I started seriously looking at iChat again. Since I had been using Skype for my video chats and Adium for my IM communications, iChat never seemed to have that little blue orb beneath it in the dock bar to indicate it was running.

When I first switched to Mac over three years ago I played with iChat and relatively quickly dismissed it as a cute toy. The cartoon bubble discussion was cute but not compact enough for my relatively heavy IM usage. The video chatting was cool but after playing with the effects button and carrying on a video chat while riding a moving roller coaster I quickly concluded that this was a fluffy consumer novelty and moved on to other applications for my business needs.

Researching alternatives to Skype changed all that.

The more I played around with iChat, the more I learned about some interesting features, especially if the people I was communicating with also had iChat available to them. More and more of my friends and business associates now have Macs than ever before and iChat is already installed so it's really not that hard to leverage. For the most part if you see the Video Conference image:

to the right of their name in your buddy list, you can leverage all of the features below:

Screen Sharing
As a person that provides technical assistance to my family and friends, being able to trouble shoot a problem without having to go to their computer is a huge help, especially when they are hundreds or thousands of miles away. Having the ability to share a screen and actually manipulate it as though it's local is also great for demonstrating something I've built locally to one of my colleagues.

With iChat you can initiate either a "Share my screen" or a "Ask to share their screen" connection. While connected a voice chat channel is opened and you can speak over it while you work. To start up a screen sharing session, Control-click (or Right-click) a buddy name in your iChat list and select the sharing direction you want.

While the screen is active you can jump between the two by clicking on the screen in the lower-right corner.

A couple of notes: You can end the session by closing the small box in the lower right. This will also terminate the voice session. Pressing Command-Q or Command-W will not end the session—those commands will be sent to the remote screen and likely close the current application or window that's open.

Multi-Person Video Chat
With iChat you can link up to four people together in a video conference. Though obviously limited to a very small group, having four people able to easily see one another and carry on a discussion is amazing for an application that's simply included with OS X. Though Skype now offers video conferencing with up to eight people, it requires a paid subscription in order to use it.

Once you establish a video connection with a person you can add others to your chat by clicking the Plus symbol at the bottom of the video chat window and adding another buddy. If you are communicating with people using AIM accounts you can even join a chat room and keep a running text log as your meeting progresses.

iChat Theater
Another great little feature of iChat is the iChat Theater. Once you have a video chat running with someone, click the Plus symbol at the bottom of the window and select the option to share a file through iChat Theater (or simply drag the file to the video chat window). The image of the person you are video chatting with drops down into the corner and the image or file you are presenting takes over the main part of the screen. This is great for reviewing images or paging through a Keynote presentation. There are reports that the next version of OS X (Lion) will support sharing web pages.

iChat Theater also works when doing multi-person chat; as a presenter your multi-chat window is taken over by whatever it is you are sharing, as you can see below:

Important Tips
When you have a single or multi-user video chat running you will see a Mute button in the lower portion of the screen. Clicking that will mute your audio, but not the audio on the other end. As a result, if you click Mute your chat partner will continue to be both seen and heard and your video will continue without sound. If the other person mutes the sound, don't say anything stupid like "wow, when is this going to be over?".

Holding down the Option key transforms the Mute button into a Pause button. This both mutes the audio from your end as well as freezes the video from your end. Like Mute only, this only applies to your feed; the other end is still visible and audible.

For years now my friend an Mac super-user Ast Moore has been telling me I should be using iChat instead of Adium. Now I'm starting to see why.

Got a video / screen / file sharing tip with iChat? Please drop a note in the comments!

Skype Alternatives for Mac Users

2011-05-12T11:56:00.000-04:00

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion in cash. As a long term Skype user I've had Skype loaded on my Macs for years now. It serves for video chats with my family and business associates and also as my desk-bound IP telephony device. This model has worked well for me. By combing a couple of cool AppleScripts with Launchbar I can call people without my fingers leaving the keyboard. So if everything works so well, why would I need an alternative?

Skype's Mac Client
I was more than a little concerned when Skype released their last Mac client and it was, well, not very good. Skype's never really been a company that embraces the Mac user interface well, though version 2.8 is serviceable from a user experience standpoint. With the announced acquisition my confidence in Skype putting any money into "embracing and extending" the Mac client in a way that makes dedicated Mac users happy is... well... compromised.

Microsoft
My confidence in Microsoft's ability to service the needs of Mac users is not very high. Though Steve Balmer has stated that Microsoft will continue to "invest in Skype on non-Microsoft client platforms", that could simply mean they will patch bugs and maybe ensure that some new features added to Skype will also be slapped into the Mac user interface. This hardly makes me confident that they will do anything innovative on Mac. It's far more likely they will simply leave the Skype for Mac client wallowing in freakish misery forever.

Given these and other issues, what are the options for people that want to move away from Skype on Mac? I'll take a look at some of the more popular alternatives here.

As a comprehensive communications solution Skype is pretty robust and not easy to replace with a single solution. It supports both Mac and Windows (there is even an open source Linux client), and offers mobile video support as well. You can use Skype to make free calls to other Skype users for video and/or voice as well as fire chat messages back and forth. Skype on the iPhone also supports video calls over 3G. Video chats are very reliable and other than some basic configuration settings (like which mic to use), they generally work very well.

For purposes of this blog post, I'm going to focus on the Video Chat portion of Skype. I will compare the three main options for Mac users: FaceTime, Google GTalk and iChat.

FaceTime

Though FaceTime is the new kid on the block, it's become very popular among Apple aficionados because it's integrated into iPhone 4s, iPod Touches and iPad 2s, as well as any Snow Leopard based Mac. Apple has also released the specification for FaceTime as an open standard, encouraging other platforms to use this. Apple made FaceTime a significant part of their marketing strategy, devoting full national commercials to it.

Advantages: Very high video quality, even over connections that would cause other video chats (including Skype) to degrade and produce artifacts. Integrated directly with the calling feature on iPhones so you can switch to a video chat on demand. No large client loaded on Mac while waiting for calls - incoming calls are handled directly by OS X.

Disadvantages: Requires the latest and greatest Mac OS (currently Snow Leopard). Older Macs not upgraded to Snow Leopard are out of luck. An iPhone 4, 4th generation iPod Touch or iPad 2 is required on the iOS side, though that's mainly because they are the first devices to have a front and rear facing camera. As of today, you cannot run a FaceTime call over 3G; it requires WiFi unless you jailbreak your iPhone or trick it into thinking it’s connected to WiFi. There are no clients currently available for Windows or Linux. No screen sharing.

Summary: While I love using FaceTime, today it's far too limited. 3G support will help tremendously. Apple should invest the time in building a Windows FaceTime client because it's highly unlikely anyone else will. Those two factors are critical to widespread adoption of FaceTime. This is a great consumer point to point solution for personal use assuming the people you want to chat with are sporting the latest and greatest Apple equipment.

Google GTalk

If you have a Gmail or iGoogle account you also have a Google Chat account. Add in the GTalk plug-in and you can have a video chat with another Gmail account user directly from your browser. The video quality is great and connecting up is very simple. The price can't be beat because this is another one of Google's many free offerings.

Though Google doesn't directly support video chats on iOS there is a free application called Vtok that does support video chats from an iPhone/iPod/iPad.

Advantages: Excellent video quality on the desktop. Works on Mac OS X (10.4 +), Windows (XP +) and Linux. Client plugin is very lightweight. Can run Vtok over 3G on the iPhone.

Disadvantages: Video quality when running on iPhone (using Vtok) is poor, even over WiFi. Cannot perform screen sharing.

Summary: If you want ubiquitous access much like Skype, Google Gtalk is probably your closest bet, though it's really not for mobile devices right now. Sure, Vtok works but the quality is very poor on iOS devices, at least when compared to the Skype or FaceTime options. Google needs to develop a super high-quality iOS client for iPhone equipped users to feel like this is a viable option.

iChat

Macs have had video chat capabilities for years through iChat. With iChat and an AIM, Google Talk or MobileMe account (or connected to a Jabber server) you can video chat with another Mac user. iChat is a base part of OS X. Not only does it do basic video chats, it includes some other great features. iChat really is a central hub for a wide range of communications capabilities, mostly technical in nature. Transferring files, remote screen sharing (the full interactive kind), walking through presentations and video conferences with up to 4 people are all possible.

Advantages: Very good video quality over a decent connection. Supports up to 4 simultaneous video chats at once - great for a small conference. Has many of the filters and capabilities of Photo Booth, so you can make your video chat occur on a moving roller coaster if you want. The iChat Theater is great for walking a couple of people through a document or presentation. The screen sharing feature allows you to do complete technical support for another Mac user.

Disadvantages: No mobile support. If you are connecting with someone else and they don't have iChat, it's hit or miss as to what functionality you will have. Video conference with more than two people appears to require everyone on the same service (not some on AIM, some on Google Talk). File transfers rarely seem to work correctly.

Summary: iChat isn’t going anywhere because it is the base method from Apple for IM chats on OS X. Apple now has two different and incompatible video sharing technologies (FaceTime and iChat), so it will be interesting to see where this goes. My take is that while FaceTime is a really easy to use consumer oriented product, iChat is more oriented towards work and collaboration tasks. As I researched this topic I discovered a huge number of great features in iChat that I didn't know about and will be writing up shortly.

Bottom Line:
If you feel compelled to move away from Skype and need to do video calls, any one of these three tools are a decent replacement. If your video calls tend to be business related, iChat provides all of the sharing technologies you could need for Mac to Mac communications. If you deal with a heavily mixed platform environment, Google's GTalk and video plugin will give you the best cross platform support.

FaceTime is the most promising of these technologies because it seamlessly integrates voice calling and video, allowing you to transition on demand (assuming both sides have the same capabilities).

Personally I wish video calling was as standardized as voice calling; when I call a person I don't think about which handset or carrier they use, I just dial the number. Over the next few years virtually every mobile phone sold will have video calling capabilities, yet if I can't perform a video call from my iPhone on AT&T's 3G service to a friend running an Android based phone on Verizon, where's the value? Virtually every laptop and netbook sold in the last 2-3 years has a video camera set up for video chat, yet they are not compatible with one another.

As a consumer, I just want it all to work together. If Skype, iChat, FaceTime and GTalk could all video chat with one another the world would be a better place.

The Mac applications I run all day, every day

2011-05-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

When I bought my new MacBook Pro I used the applications I had running on my previous MacBook Pro to help me determine what I would need in terms of horsepower. It was an interesting exercise, mainly because it gave me a good sense for all of the things I need my Mac to handle throughout the day.

I'm a software developer and do some of the development for SharedStatus, so my needs are a little biased towards that. I've broken down what's running on my Mac into two sections, Basics and Development. To give some perspective on how many apps I have loaded up as I write this, here's a snapshot of my current Spaces window zoomed out:

I've always been fascinated by these types of lists because it helps give people exposure to some apps they may not know about. Here are the ones I nearly always have running:

Basics

Safari

I love the speed of Safari and this remains my default browser. Nice and fast, Safari does have a tendency to crash on me if it's been running for a long time and I have a huge number of tabs open, though it always seems to happen when Flash based web sites are loaded up. Fortunately more and more sites are switching to HTML5 solutions instead of Flash. My iPhone and iPad are happy about that too.

Google Chrome
	I really enjoying using Chrome. Why do I have two (well, three—see below) active browsers? Because I'm often logging in to different profiles (personal / business entity) on different online services. The fact that the URL bar and the search area are one and the same is also a cool feature. Chrome is—like Safari—very fast in rendering web pages.

Adium
	Though I have some die hard Apple fans that tell me I should use iChat, I'm hopelessly addicted to Adium. The customizability of the interface is outstanding and the integrated support of multiple IM accounts means keeping everything consolidated in one place is easy. Having a friend that has Trollicons loaded up makes for some hilarious chats too.

Skype (version 2.8)
	I continue to use Skype for my virtual phone and also for video conferencing, though Facetime may soon replace that function. I haven't upgraded beyond version 2.8 due to the horror stories associated with the most recent release. Combine Skype with some Applescripts and Launchbar goodness and it's a great replacement for a land line.

Echofon
	I'm very heavy into Twitter; it has effectively become my primary news channel, replacing my RSS feeds for the most part. Echofon is great because it syncs up from Desktop to iPad to iPhone, so as I switch between machines I don't have to scan through tweets I've already read on another device. Note: you can follow me on twitter @dalison.

iCal
	I always have iCal loaded up; quickly seeing what's on deck, accepting e-mailed appointment invites, etc. all work nicely, and it syncs up well with my iPhone and iPad. I also have it mated up with my Google Calendar account.

Mail
	I occasionally access e-mail through a web interface (especially for Gmail based accounts) but my default e-mail access point is Mail.app. I use IMAP to keep my folders synced up and the integration with the rest of the OS is good. With the Growl add-on installed (see below) I get a nice notification of new e-mail as well.

Pages
	I'm doing more and more writing and blogging these days and my preferred tool for capturing initial drafts is Pages. I love the user interface, the application performance and in the unlikely event I need a document that is print (or more likely PDF) ready, Pages can create a really beautiful document quickly. I always seem to have it open.

Growl
	Most of the notification oriented apps I run have Growl support. Rather than each app coming up with their own notification model, Growl provides a clean and highly customizable model that any OSX application can leverage. I love seeing a Growl notification that a file in my shared Dropbox account has been updated.

Launchbar
	I've become a hard core keyboard user on my Macs as a direct result of LaunchBar. Not only can I quickly launch or open my existing applications from the keyboard (much like Spaces) but I can connect applications and documents together. I've written rather extensively about Launchbar in the past.

iStat Menu
	I like to know what's going on with my Mac, whether it's the temperature inside the machine, the actual health of my batteries or to see if there is any odd network traffic flying across the pipes at the moment. iStat Menu is a staple on my Mac's menu bar.

Dropbox
	I'm not sure how I got by without Dropbox before. It’s not that I couldn't quickly transfer files between my various machines, it's just that it required me intervening to do it. Dropbox makes it seamless. Just getting my 1Password files to synchronize automatically makes Dropbox invaluable to me.

1Password
	The older I get, the less grey matter I seem to have to dedicate to remembering passwords, login names and some of the incantations sites require me to perform to obtain access. 1Password handles all that and fills out credit card and mailing address forms for me. The fact that it's synchronized between my various machines (and my iPhone and iPad) make it a necessity for me.

Skitch
	I often find myself passing screen shots of new features for SharedStatus back and forth with my partner Josiah. Skitch makes that easy, not just because it can take a screen shot so easily (OSX does that natively) but because it includes basic drawing tools to quickly call out parts of images captured. I can resize, crop, drop in arrows and call-out text in seconds.

Caffeine

You know when you fire up a long YouTube video or Skype video chat and your energy saver preferences kick in because you haven’t been touching the keyboard or mouse? Clicking the Caffeine coffee cup in the menu bar tells your Mac not to fire up the screen saver or drop into sleep mode for a pre-defined number of minutes. You can come close to this behavior with Exposé hotspot preferences (System Preferences / Exposé & Spaces), but Caffeine makes it much easier. And it's free.

SMARTReporter
	I keep SMARTReporter running all the time because I like to keep an eye on the health of my hard drives. I don’t actively use it but I like that it passively sits in my menu bar and will notify me if one of my hard drives starts to act up. Also a great free utility.

Xmarks
	As you can see on this list, I keep three different browsers running all the time. I also have two primary Macs that I use; Xmarks keeps my bookmarks and browser tool bars synchronized between each of my browsers and on each machine. Combine that with 1Password and I can get to anything from pretty much anywhere.

Time Machine
	I've always been a big fan of Time Machine because it makes backups something that I do every single hour and I don't have to worry about it. Unless there's a Time Machine error of course. Time Machine has saved me hassles on more than one occasion; mate it up with a Time Capsule and you have roaming around the house backups.

Development

2-3 Terminal windows
	At any given time I have 2-3 Bash shell windows open. One is usually for local commands related to my Rails development, another is for a running instance of my development version of SharedStatus (or other project) and a third is usually open with an SSH session to a remote server.

Firefox
	I put Firefox into the development category because that's primarily how I use it. I've generally found that page rendering is a bit faster with Safari and Chrome than in Firefox, but neither of those browsers has the depth of extensions for playing with web pages.

TextMate
	As a Ruby on Rails developer you learn that a healthy combination of terminal windows and a programmers editor are your friend and TextMate is a fantastic editor for Ruby development. Lots of extensions for languages and version control systems too. It's also great for hacking on plain old text files, CSS pages, etc.

MySQL Server
	I keep a MySQL Server instance running on my machine at all times (automatically started at login). A couple of the Rails projects I do use MySQL server so I like to have it available immediately in case I need a local development build of a web application.

Sequel Pro
	When I need to browse through data sets or build up experimental queries, Sequel Pro is my go-to tool and I often just have it loaded and running in one of my Spaces windows. It’s perfect for jumping in and examining (and modifying) data. Another great free utility.

Flow
	When I purchased one of the MacHeist bundles a while back I got Flow, an FTP client. Flow has a very OS X like user interface and feels natural running on Snow Leopard. I'm always pushing files up to web servers and having this open makes it simple. About the only thing I wish it did was integrate with 1Password.

Xcode
	I've been doing more and more iOS development lately (more learning than anything else) and as a result I nearly always have Xcode Version 4.0 loaded up with a project. Xcode can create some fairly heavy demand on a Mac, sometimes at really odd times. Why my CPU utilization pops up so high when parked on the New File dialog is but one example.

Most days these apps are all running at the same time, as you can see from the Spaces screen shot at the top of this post. I have lots of other applications that I use on an infrequent basis but they aren't always running, like the rest of the iWork suite, iPhoto, Preview, OmniGraffle, etc.

What's running on your Mac right now? Any cool applications that I should be using that I haven't already mentioned? Please drop a note in the comments and let me (and the other readers) know.

Finding a protective shell for a MacBook Pro

2011-05-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

When I packaged up my old MacBook Pro for my daughter I did a quick wipe down of the machine and found that though it was three years old it had very little visible wear and tear. The keyboard and palm rest areas were in perfect shape and there were no dents in the aluminum case. Though the white power supply and cords were a bit dirty a quick wipe down with a damp cloth had them looking like new.

About the only thing that made the machine look used was the outside of the case. As I had slipped it into my bag or carried it in my hand, objects like my watch band had rubbed against it and put a series of small scratches all over the outer shell. They were purely cosmetic but annoying nonetheless.

I’m determined to treat this new MacBook Pro with a little more care and as a result started searching around for a protective shell case for it. I rationalized that this would help maintain the resale value of my Mac in the unlikely event I decided to sell it or—more likely—it would look like new when I passed it down to one of my kids in the future.

Plastic Covered Couches
My grandmother was a fan of plastic covered furniture back in the 60s and 70s. As a young lady going through the Great Depression she developed a deep appreciation of the cost of things and wanted them to last as long as possible. As a result, her couches and chairs were hermetically sealed in plastic-wrap. You would sit on them in shorts and immediately begin to sweat and after just a few minutes you felt you were physically attached to the piece of furniture.

Sure, her couches looked like new and were preserved for future generations but I couldn’t help but think that the enjoyment of that particular piece of furniture was completely compromised. While I want to protect my new MacBook Pro, I don’t want it to suffer the same fate.

First Try - iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case
As I tend to do, I jumped on Amazon and found a number of cases available. I looked through the reviews and found a very affordable hard plastic shell that got pretty solid reviews: a Blue iPearl mCover Hard Shell Case. At $19.99 it was less than half the price of other cases so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m a member of Amazon Prime so 2-day shipping was free and as I’ve been finding lately, sometimes it arrives next day.

MacBook Pro open (mCover installed))

MacBook Pro - top view

MacBook Pro - left side view of ports

MacBook Pro - right side view of Super Drive

MacBook Pro - Back / hinge side view

MacBook Pro - bottom of case

This case is a hard plastic shell that clips to the MacBook Pro and provides protection for both the top and bottom halves of the machine. It doesn’t impact the closing of the MacBook, nor does it seem to prohibit pushing the display back to a pretty aggressive level.

Pros: This case feels tough and pretty durable. When attached you can still see the Apple logo and the bottom half contains some small folding feet that can prop your MacBook Pro up a bit. It fits the outside of the MacBook case very well and snaps on in seconds. There is plenty of venting on it, especially on the bottom, so I didn’t notice any heat build up with it attached. All of the ports on the MacBook are readily accessible—the case doesn’t prevent any of the connectors from being used. The front edge of the case is flush enough that it doesn’t rub against your wrists as you type. There are two rubber feet on the front edge of the case that keep your MacBook from sliding around.

Cons: Since this a shiny hard plastic shell (it provides no shock absorption), your MacBook Pro now feels very plastic. The shell collects finger prints and smudges pretty easily and seems to attract dust statically. The shell doesn’t really touch the MacBook Pro surface other than at the clip points so the shell makes the MacBook feel significantly thicker. The folding feet on the bottom don’t feel very sturdy and are not useful when propping the device up on your legs because they have a small footprint and dig into your legs a bit, at least while wearing shorts. The cutout on the bottom (which I assume is for heat dissipation and/or cut down weight) makes the bottom of the MacBook look very odd and exposed.

I tried using this case for a couple of days and didn’t care for it. My MacBook felt very cheap with it on and carrying it under my arm felt odd because of the air gap between the MacBook and the shell; it just felt bulky.

Using this particular case just made me feel like I was doing to my MacBook Pro what my grandmother did to her furniture. If you are looking for very cost effective protection for your MacBook Pro, this may be a good choice for you. Reading through the reviews on Amazon it’s clear that quite a few people like this case and that it may be a good fit for some. I guess I’m just not one of them.

My search for the perfect MacBook Pro shell continues. If you have a recommendation for a good protective (and high quality) shell, please drop a note in the comments.

Upgrading to a new MacBook Pro

2011-04-28T10:13:00.003-04:00

We were sitting around the dinner table when my daughter called to tell us that her MacBook—which had loyally served her through he entire college career—had died. The hard drive was failing, she was three weeks from graduating and needed a solution quickly. My wife and I discussed options for how to deal with it and then she said something incredible:

Wife: ″David, you’ve been talking about getting a new MacBook Pro. Why don’t you get it now and ship your older MacBook Pro down to her? She could have it tomorrow if you do this now.″

Wife: ″David? Where are you?!?″

Too late, I was already driving to the Apple store.

The ″Problem″ With Macs
When I was a Windows developer (1990 to 2008) I found myself upgrading my machine with pretty regular frequency. It wasn’t that the hardware was that far off the state of the art, it’s just that Windows had a tendency to degrade over time, to the point that within a year and a half the machine felt very sluggish. The normal solution was to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows and all of my apps. When faced with this option I often just decided to upgrade the entire machine.

My Macs however have been a different story. Both of my primary machines, obtained in the Spring of 2008, still performed as fast as ever. It’s become more and more difficult to justify an upgrade to a machine that just worked fine and performed well. When my wife dropped the green flag I didn’t hesitate to jump in.

Choosing the Right MacBook Pro
Figuring out which MacBook Pro worked best for me was relatively easy. My MacBook is used as a development machine; some Ruby on Rails work and basic web development and lately more and more Xcode work on iOS apps. I am a heavy Spaces user and at any given time have a considerable number of apps running. All this pointed towards a slightly more powerful processor.

From a portability standpoint this is my travel machine. When I’m on the road (or just want to head outside and work), I need something that’s portable enough I can grab and take with me. While I think a 13” would be ideal purely for travel size (or a MacBook Air for that matter), as long as I can open it on an airline folding table I’m good and I have been able to do that on most airlines with my older 15” MacBook Pro. This is one of the things that eliminated the 17” from contention.

From a screen real-estate standpoint my needs are high. When doing application development you want as much screen as possible. Having an application window open while you are debugging code in another window is a regular occurrence. Fortunately Apple recently released a much higher resolution screen with the 15” MacBook Pros - it’s 1680 × 1050, a 36% increase over the standard 1440 × 900 display I used to have. Though I would love the 1920 × 1200 display on the 17” MacBook Pro, the portability factor trumped that. If this was my only Mac (I still have a desktop bound Mac Pro with dual displays) I likely would have gone with the 17”.

The displays are also offered in a Glossy or Antiglare options. Though technically the Glossy display is supposed to make colors pop better I didn’t see that when comparing them side by side. The Antiglare screen is significantly more visible in brightly lit environments. Sunlight, fluorescent lights, background lights, etc. can wreak havoc on the glossy display and limit your ability to see the screen.

While I could have custom ordered my machine from Apple I needed to get it that night so I had to make some compromises. The Apple store I visited didn’t stock exactly what I wanted so I paid a little more than I intended and got the highest processor so that I could get a machine with the higher resolution screen and Antiglare.

I really want 8GB of memory for this machine but Apple’s cost to upgrade that is a completely unrealistic $200 premium. I’ll go to the aftermarket for that.

The specifications for my new MacBook Pro are:

15” High Resolution Antiglare Screen
2.3GHz Intel Quad Core i7 Processor
4GB RAM
750GB 5400RPM Hard Disk

I plunked down the credit card and walked out the door with my shiny new MacBook Pro.

Migrating Macs
Before I shipped off my old MacBook Pro to my daughter I needed to migrate everything over. When you first start up a new Mac you are presented with a series of options, one of them being to migrate your data and applications from your old Mac to your new Mac.

Since both of my MacBook Pros (old and new) had FireWire 800 ports, I purchased a Belkin FireWire 9-Pin cable to hook them together and perform the transfer. When you choose that option on a MacBook Pro you are presented with a series of steps, the first of which start off with starting up your previous Mac in Target Disk Mode. You restart the machine and immediately hold down the "T" key. This effectively turns your Mac into a FireWire hard disk enclosure for your drive.

I walked through the steps to start the migration and let it perform its magic. With 165GB of data and an extraordinary number of small files (versioned development with Git will do that), it took about 2.5 hours to perform the migration. I’ve done these migrations before using Ethernet (also an option) cabled up to a 1 Gigabit Ethernet Switch and it takes about 20% longer. I’ve also had some problems with the Ethernet migration because it sometimes has trouble with very large files.

This is where a Mac really shines—once you’ve completed a migration (assuming it works like mine has anyway) your new Mac has everything ready to go just like your previous Mac. There were only a couple of minor things that I had to tweak and that’s because I’m a developer: I manually modify my /etc/hosts file to remap domain names and that file did not get migrated over. I also had to manually start (and set to auto-start) my MySQL server instance. Once that was done my new Mac was performing just like my previous Mac, except that it was considerably faster and had a much higher resolution.

Saying Goodbye - to an old friend
With my new Mac up and running properly all that was left was doing some final touches on the older MacBook Pro, packing it up and overnighting it down to my daughter. This Mac is named Yoda (in keeping with the Star Wars theme I have for all my computer names).

As I write this Jocelyn called to tell me Yoda had arrived and that she couldn’t believe how cool her “new” MacBook Pro was. She never got around to upgrading her older MacBook and it was still running Tiger, so Snow Leopard on a bigger screen with a faster processor was a huge step up.

Hearing the joy in her voice about her new Mac made me pretty happy too.

Replacing a MacBook Pro Battery

2011-04-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

It was a perfect late winter day outside - abnormally sunny and warm. I decided that rather than spend it in my office I’d grab my MacBook Pro and take it out on our deck, feel that nice breeze and work through some code. I got comfortable, flipped it open and started to plug away in Xcode. Everything was ideal - so much so that I’m sure photographs of me sitting there would have made for great stock photography for some web site.

After about 15 minutes of moderate use I looked at the status bar and noticed that my battery was already down to 79% available. This was not good. 30 minutes in, I was down to 50%. iStat menu was trying to predict how much longer I had and the number of minutes of power left were dropping like some kind of warped time traveling machine.

I went from Carpe Diem to Carpe Power Cordus. Total buzz kill.

I’ve now had my MacBook Pro for nearly three years. This particular MacBook Pro is the last generation before the unibody models debuted and as such has a replaceable battery. A little over a year ago my battery started acting up something fierce and Apple was kind enough to replace it, though technically it was out of warranty.

They did this because my number of cycles were so low (47) and it was clearly in need of replacement—the Apple store ran a test on it that said “Battery BAD”. They issued me a brand new battery and sure enough, I was able to get a few hours (2-3) out of it on a full charge. I made a commitment to myself to cycle the battery frequently but that only lasted about a month before I fell into my old habit of just leaving the machine running 24x7 and connected to power all the time. I did cycle the battery down at a minimum every month, but not every single week.

Apple insists that the best way to extend the life of the batteries in a MacBook Pro—at least for my generation MacBook Pro—is to regularly run it off batteries. This would “keep the juices flowing” within the cells and ensure they last longer. This seemed a little self-serving because they use the cycle count (recharge cycles) to determine how old a battery was. If I did as my Apple Genius recommended and cycled my battery constantly I’d have 350+ cycles in less than a year pretty easily. The old Apple page for my MacBook Pro suggested that after 300 cycles my battery should still have 80% of it’s charging capacity. The new unibody models are apparently much more efficient and are designed to get to 1000 cycles before dropping to 80% capacity.

So here I was with a battery a little over a year old, it had a grand total of 54 cycles on it and was down to 79% health. I tried the Apple recommended reset procedure but it had no impact. Rather than going back to Apple I decided to try a different route.

NewerTech NuPower Battery
I did some research and heard good things about the NuPower Batteries so I decided to buy one through Other World Computing. It was $30 cheaper than the Apple battery so I figured it may be worth a try.

The NuPower Battery that arrived was virtually identical to my existing Apple battery. Everything, right down to the status indicator was identical. It fit into my MacBook Pro perfectly and I followed the instructions to get the battery calibrated.

Once calibrated, my MacBook Pro’s battery performance was right back to brand new levels. I’ve had this battery installed for 4 weeks now and it’s performed perfectly, giving me a solid 3-4 hours of “battery time” based on how hard I push my MacBook Pro.

One interesting aspect of this NuPower battery is what iStat Menu reports in terms of Design Capacity and Current Capacity. After a couple of full cycles and 4 weeks of use, the battery reports a design capacity of 5400 mAh, but a current capacity of 5607 mAh. However my older Apple battery had a design capacity of 5600 mAh but had been reduced to 4442 mAh. I’m not sure why the internal indicator on the NuPower is only displaying 5400 mAh capacity but clearly it’s exceeding even the design capacity of the Apple battery in actual usage.

Some Tips For Making the Battery Last
I’ve read pretty extensively on Lithium-Ion battery technology and believe that Apple is giving good advice in telling you to rotate off power fairly regularly (at least monthly). What they don’t tell you is that if you do keep your MacBook plugged in most of the time that the heat of your machine running will also cause your batteries to deteriorate more quickly.

Battery University has some great pages on what can impact Lithium-Ion battery life and heat is as big a factor as anything for long-term battery performance. As a result I ran a few tests by using the Sensors gauge in iStat Menus and found that for my MacBook Pro the battery temperature ranged from 91F to 94F while my machine was open and running on plugged-in power. Normally I would leave my MacBook running 24 hours a day; I’d have the screen power down and the HDD spin down but even in those conditions the battery temp hovered in the 86F range.

However if I put my MacBook to sleep by closing the lid, the battery temperature immediately on waking up was registering as low as 75F after a few hours - the same temp as the room it was stored in. That 11F to 19F range is pretty substantial and something I think factored in to my battery’s early demise.

If you—like me—run your MacBook 24 hours a day not only should you run it off batteries every week or two to keep the battery juices circulating, you should close your machine’s lid when you walk away to let it cool down when not in use. You can of course set your Energy Saver preferences to put your machine to sleep after 10-15 minutes of non-use while on power as well. I personally have it set for 10 minutes, however if I know I’ll be away for a bit (lunch, going to bed, etc) I just close the lid. One of the better features of Macs is that they wake from sleep reliably and nearly instantly - best to take advantage of that.

Got a tip for making that battery last longer? Please drop a note in the comments!

Working from home - why it used to be so hard

2011-02-08T14:36:00.001-05:00

I've long been an advocate of people in a technology-oriented job being able to work from home, even if it's just a day or two a week. I've even provided some tips on working from home on this blog. In the early days of my software engineering career, working from home had some significant obstacles that really don't exist today.

I tried to work from home once I had a serious commute. Back then I lived in Los Angeles and had to spend an average of 50 minutes commuting to work and back every day. Over 400 hours a year spent staring at tail-lights and bumper stickers in LA traffic. It was just awesome. My bosses at the time didn't like the idea of me working from home because they didn't think I could be productive from there. Relative to today's technology, I can see why.

A Different Time
Back then (1988—1994) my ability to work remotely was severely limited. I used a modem to dial into my office computer using PCAnywhere and hoped that my wife didn't pick up the phone in the middle of the call. She seemed to have an uncanny ability to do that. I would look at my phone bill at the end of the month and realize that the call to the office was costing me 15 cents a minute because the phone company considered that "long distance". The phone company was always changing the call rates and packages, so I never knew what the calls would cost until after the fact.

I did have a cell phone. It was a large brick-like device that worked incredibly well while standing directly underneath a cell phone tower, but it dropped calls if I even looked at a tunnel. I rarely used it because to keep my monthly plan affordable I had to pay nearly 80 cents a minute for air time.

I did have access to instantaneous communications through my pager. It was just like SMS is today, except that I could only receive messages and the messages themselves could only be numbers. Since I had some IT responsibilities back then I had to keep that pager nearby. I could either set it to belt out a high-pitched sound that gave me a case of cardiac arrhythmia when it sounded or set it to silent and miss the page. Stupid thing didn't even have a volume setting.

Though the Internet technically existed back then (I started using it regularly in 1993 from the office) there really wasn't much on it. We didn't have search engines so we used this as our Google:

(Yes, I kept the book. Just couldn't throw out that history)

As a software engineer I needed reference material. Virtually all of the documentation I needed to reference came in heavy book form so if I was going to be working from home I'd pack up the two or three heavy duty books I needed in a backpack and lug them home. It was a great workout and given the time I spent commuting, about the only workout I got.

In spite of all these hassles I was eventually able to convince my bosses to let me work from home one day a week. Friday was usually a slow day at the office and traffic was usually at its worst, so that was often the day.

Since I had to go through so much in order to "telecommute" and work from home back then, I'm amazed at how much easier it should be today. Even with all of the advances, many companies don't embrace it. I put together a post on the SharedStatus blog: Working from home - justifying it to the boss. Please take a read and let me know what you think.

How about you?
It's great to see how far we've come in terms of "telecommuting" technology, a somewhat anachronistic term now. What technology did you use to work from home back in the day? Drop a note in the comments and we can compare war stories.

An All New SharedStatus - Free Project Management Software

2011-02-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

The core product for my company, SharedStatus, has undergone a pretty large overhaul that I would like to share with you. First off, what does SharedStatus do?

SharedStatus is a free online service that helps you keep get stuff done as a team. You can create a project, add team members to it and assign tasks to yourself and others. You can also share ideas through messages and comments. Most project management tools focus on features only a project manager needs, and often have lots of overkill; SharedStatus is focused on the people that actually get the work done, making it easy for everyone to update their status as they go. You can eliminate the last minute status report updates and time wasting status meetings; it’s why we call it SharedStatus.

What’s New and Improved
Here is a quick summary:

New UI - It’s clean, simple and focuses on the content. We made it highly responsive, so much so that it often feels like a local desktop application.

Labels - We added a project wide labeling system for tasks, messages and files in your project. You can apply one or more labels to anything and quickly see everything with that label using a mouse click (or finger tap).

Group Chat – Stay online with your team to discuss issues in real time. No need to fire up that IM client and get disturbed by friends and family while you are trying to get real work done.

File Storage - Got a distributed team, or even people that need to work from home occasionally? Let SharedStatus ride herd on key files, storing them in your project so everyone on the team has access.

Email Enabled - People live in email. Rather than fight that, we embrace it. If someone comments on a message or task in your project you can be notified by email. Simply reply to the notification by email and your response will be added to the thread for everyone to see.

Free Version - We wanted to remove the barriers to people using SharedStatus. Rather than give you a free trial, we are giving you a completely free option. No credit card required, no expiration. There are some limits but for a small company that needs to manage tasks between a group of up to 20 people, our Free plan may be all you need.

A Whole New Business
Not only is SharedStatus the application new, the entire business has evolved. We used to operate under the AlisonWeb Corp. banner but have now become SharedStatus LLC - making it clear that we are focused on exclusively on SharedStatus. I added a partner last year that has helped make this new product a reality: Josiah Ivey. Adding Josiah to the team has been incredible and we are both excited to see SharedStatus evolve over the coming years.

There is also of course a new web site that reflects the changes we have made and includes lots of screen shots and videos to help you get an idea of how SharedStatus works.

If you work with a team of people and want a simple, free tool for keeping your projects running smoothly please check out the new SharedStatus.

Passwords - 10 Tips for Developing a Personal Strategy

2010-12-15T13:15:00.002-05:00

Passwords. PINs. Security Codes.

It seems like every place we go online someone is asking us to either validate who we are with a password protected account or asking us to create an account so that we can access something. We are inundated with so many requests for account names and passwords it can become easy to be lazy about the passwords we choose and who we give them to.

As the Gawker Media hack showed us, poor password discipline can lead to a compromise of your personal data security. I’ve compiled a list of tips that can help you become a lot more secure in your online travels.

Tip 1: Don’t Use The Same Password Everywhere
If you use the same password in multiple locations you are going to run the risk of that password being exposed. All it takes is one poorly secured system or an unscrupulous web site operator to collect your email address and password. At a minimum have different passwords for your primary computer login, email account and any financial systems you access (banks, credit cards, etc).

Tip 2: Never Use Simple Words or Dates
“password” is one of the most used passwords in history and obviously the worst possible one to select. Names, middle names, common words, etc. are also a bad idea because a dictionary attack has a much higher chance of success on them. Avoid pet names because with today’s social web most people know the names of your cats, dogs and pet iguanas. Birthdays and anniversaries are also easy to find.

A good password should be at least 10 characters long and contain a mix of letters, numbers and punctuation. Many sites now require at least one of these elements.

Tip 3: Change Your Password Regularly
Open your calendar program and put in an appointment for 6 months from now. If you can make it a recurring 6 month appointment that’s even better. Title it “Change passwords”. No matter how secure you are, at some point you’re going to reveal your password. I once did it with a friend while on IM: I was rapidly Command-Tabbing between an Adium window and Safari, pasting in information. One Safari screen asked me to log in; I entered the password and hit enter, only to realize I had just plopped my password into the IM window instead.

People don’t change their passwords mostly because it’s such a hassle. If you haven’t changed your password in years then it will seem like a lot of work. Do it on a regular basis and it gets easier.

Tip 4: Use a Secure Password Storage Tool
The older I get the more I realize that my brain is not a reliable storage medium. I’m only good for a handful of passwords, especially when I change them out regularly. Rather than just writing the passwords down (see Tip 7 below), I use 1Password. Hands down one of my favorite applications, 1Password securely stores my passwords and embeds itself into my web browser. When I’m prompted by a site to login, 1Password can do it for me. It can also enter my credit card information, personal data, etc.

As a computer enthusiast I have multiple computers and devices for accessing the web around me all day: Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Windows 7 PC, iPad and iPhone. 1Password can keep all of them syncronized using a free Dropbox account. Now I only worry about remembering one unique password - my 1Password master password.

Tip 5: Share Your Password
Wait, share your password? Yep, you read that right, though only in certain circumstances. If you pay bills online and use your bank or credit card to handle it, does your spouse or significant other know how to take over if something happens to you? If you’re elderly and your kids are next in line do they know what to do? No one wants to think of a world where they don’t exist but in the event something happens to you the last thing you’ll want your spouse or children to have to go through is figuring out how to unwind the personal security you’ve put in place.

Don’t feel comfortable giving your spouse that information? Write your passwords down on a piece of paper. Put it in a sealed envelope. Show your spouse the hiding place for it and explain that’s where your main passwords are, then put a list of the key accounts for bill paying, banking, etc. on a piece of paper and put that some place else. Just don’t forget to update it when you change your passwords.

Tip 6: Lock Your Computer
If you travel with a laptop you should always require your password when your machine is rebooted or when it comes out of sleep mode. If your passwords have been remembered by your computer through something like 1Password this is critical. I do this on my desktop machines as well, not because I’m worried about my wife or kids accessing things (I trust them), but because if a burglar steals my computer while I’m away I don’t want to make it any easier for them.

Mac Security Setting

Windows 7 - Power Options / Require Password

Tip 7: Post-It Notes Are Evil
I actually love Post-It notes for everything except passwords, yet that seems to be the dominant way they’re used by people. If I was personally trying to access someone’s computer and needed their password I’d look for a Post-it note on 1) their display, 2) their keyboard, 3) under their keyboard, 4) in a nearby desk drawer or 5) under knick-knacks on their desk. Is that where you put yours? Don’t.

Tip 8: Resist Public Terminals
It’s great to find public terminals in airports, hotels and other lounges but if you’ll be using them try to only access public information. Checking your e-mail from a public terminal can be risky; is it possible that someone—maybe even the owner of the terminal—has installed a capture program to harvest your login details? Is the browser set to remember usernames and passwords automatically?

If you do use a public terminal make sure you log out, don’t just close out the browser window. You may still be logged in. Also, clear your history if possible. Some poorly written sites will pass your username and password along in a URL.

Tip 9: Know Where You Are
As you are browsing the web you hit a site that contains something you really want to read but it asks you to log in using your Google credentials. It even tosses up this on the page:

Looks legit, right? Make sure you know where you are before you enter login credentials. Check the URL first. Make sure you are accessing the site through HTTPS. If you’re not really sure, click on the little padlock image on your web browser. That should display the security certificate from the site. These kinds of phishing attacks don’t just happen from emails - be aware of where you are before you enter any sensitive data.

Tip 10: Become a Password Activist
If you’ve read through this, chances are you have someone in your immediate circle (family, friends, etc.) that isn’t as concerned about password security. Casually check with your spouse, kids, parents, etc. if they are keeping their passwords secure. You can use every single one of the tips I’ve put in here and be very secure but if your wife or husband has access to the same bank accounts you do and they aren’t as careful, well... you get the idea. Make sure they are.

The bottom line is no one will care about securing your information more than you. Sure, it’s a pain to go through but it’s far more painful to deal with an identity theft. Ask the 100,000 people that just had their email addresses and passwords harvested from Gawker.

Got a tip for helping people lead more secure online lives? Did I miss anything? Please drop a note in the comments. I've got it set to allow anonymous comments so you don't even need to log in!

Window Controls: Mac OS vs Windows

2010-11-16T09:00:00.005-05:00

As I observe casual users working with a Mac (my wife falls into that category) I often see them doing something that is very Windows like: trying to close an application by clicking the close button in the top of the window title. My wife also says she hates the Maximize window button because it doesn’t maximize the window like it did in Windows.

On a Mac the series of buttons in the top left corner of a window are called the Title Bar Buttons. Much like the window controls found in virtually every version of Windows, these allow the user to perform actions on the window they are attached to. In Mac OS they appear as a series of traffic lights in the top left of the window, in Windows on the top right of the window:

This is probably the one area that most people struggle with, and the underlying design philosophy is both subtle and complex, mostly because the buttons feel like they should work the same way in Mac OS and Windows but have some different behaviors.

They are named nearly the same too:

Mac OS: Close, Minimize, Zoom
Windows: Close, Minimize, Maximize

First off, the easy one. The Minimize button—yellow, center orb on Mac—works just like it does in Windows. It minimizes the window. No problem. Want it back? It’s down in the Dock. Click it to restore it.

The Close button—red, left orb on Mac—is a window close button. It closes the current window, and sometimes the application. Applications that quit when the main window is closed include Calculator, System Preferences, and Network Utility. Nearly every other application keeps running after you close the main window. Here is the fundamental difference:

Windows applications are usually completely contained within their primary window. If you want to open two WordPad documents in Windows 7 you start up two WordPad instances, each with its own window, menus, resources, etc. A Mac application that supports multiple documents (any application that has File > New in the menu) gives you an application instance and a window for each document. Closing the last window of a Mac application that supports multiple instances doesn’t mean you want to close the application as well.

This diagram may help illustrate the point:

In Windows if you close Win Doc 1, you are also closing the application associated with that document. In Mac OS closing Mac Doc 1 simply means you are closing the document window, not the application. So in Mac OS, even if you only have one document open in an application, closing that document window does not quit the application.

Side Note: If you are wondering why sometimes the Close button has a dot inside of it instead of an X (like this)

That’s because the document has changes that haven't been saved yet. Save the document and the dot becomes an X again.

Want the application to just quit? Go to the menu bar while the application has focus and select (Application Name) > Quit, or hit Command-Q. Using the keyboard shortcut for quitting applications has become my preferred method.

Finally there is the Zoom Button—green, right orb on Mac. Windows users expect to click the Zoom button and have the window go full screen, much like it does on Windows. It does not. First, let’s cover what it does do:

A Mac application determines the minimum and maximum size a window should be based on the resolution of the display and the user interface inside the application. That means that every time you click Zoom the results can have quite a few variables that determine what will happen. Sometimes the application will simply grow in height to the maximum size of the display area (without overlapping the Dock). Sometimes, if there were horizontal scroll bars, the width will change to eliminate them. The Zoom button is a toggle switch. Clicking it a second time will revert the window to its previous state.

Occasionally you will get an application that just maximizes right to the edges of the display (Firefox is a good example of that). The bottom line is, there is no consistency between applications on what Zoom will actually do other than likely expose a little (or a lot) more content for you.

I’ve found that nearly three years into becoming a pretty hard core Mac user I rarely ever hit the Zoom button. In fact, other than clicking it a lot to help with writing this blog post I don’t think I’ve used it in over a year. Since the impact it will have is not predictable, I just grab the window handle and resize it to what I need.

Want to learn more?

I wrote this because people often search for problems to a specific issue and I couldn't easily find something that pointed out the key differences. If you really want to understand how Mac OS applications should work, take a look a the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Though it is written to help application developers comply with Mac OS standards, as an application user you can get a very good idea of not just how Mac applications work but also why they work that way.

Special thanks to friend and Mac expert extraordinaire Ast A. Moore for helping me put together this post.

Setting up a new Mac for a college student

2010-09-30T09:00:00.002-04:00

When my daughter shipped off to Virginia Tech in 2007 we bought her a shiny new MacBook, an ethernet cable and a license for Microsoft Office. Back then I was still a Windows guy so I figured she would need MS Office—that's all I had ever used and that was the same for her. Other than a passing interest in the device I let her set it up for herself. Being a newly minted adult and excited about leaving the nest, she wanted to handle it all herself anyway.

Not being a techie, she installed Office and depended on the core Tiger version of OSX to get through school, which worked fine for her. In the 3+ years she's been off at school I think I've gotten maybe one or two "technical support" calls from her. Lots of calls for extra money so we knew the phones worked, just not a lot of technical issues.

When my middle child—a son starting at James Madison University—needed a MacBook for school I was determined to set it up for him before he took off, giving him some additional software that would make his computing life a little easier.

My son is really a non-techie. It's not that he doesn't know how to work a computer, in fact he's a skilled touch typist and uses his computer quite confidently. It's just that a computer for him is a tool, plain and simple. As long as it gets out of his way when he's trying to get work done (by work I mean accessing Facebook) it makes him happy.

As a result, I gave him the bare minimum that I considered important to get by at school:

Snow Leopard Basics

OS X is a very capable operating system when shipped out in a new Mac, though a couple things require you to intervene before they are actually leveraged.

The first thing I did was purchase a small 320GB USB drive for Time Machine use. The last thing I wanted my son to do was lose his work because of poor backup discipline. Most adults don't even think about backups so expecting a teenager that struggles with basic cleaning and laundry principles to do it is ridiculous. I walked through a couple of scenarios with my son, telling him how bad it would be if his data was not backed up and his drive failed or his MacBook was stolen. All he had to do was keep that USB drive plugged in when it was sitting at his desk and he would be fine; Time Machine would take care of the rest.

The next Snow Leopard "feature" I ensured he leveraged was Software Update. My son is much like my wife; when either of them see this screen:

they simply click the "Not Now" button or close out Software Update completely. I tried to impress on him the importance of keeping his software current and that he should avoid delaying software updates for more than a couple of days. I have no idea if he's actually keeping his Mac current but I'm hopeful.

DropBox

While Time Machine did its magic and was ensuring his entire Mac was properly backed up, I wanted to make sure he had another tool at his disposal to ensure his documents and class papers were safe. By far one of my favorite utilities, DropBox integrates seamlessly with Finder, synchronizing the "DropBox" folder with a virtual drive up on the web. The advantage is that not only are your documents safely tucked away on yet another medium, they are also accessible from a remote computer by logging in to your DropBox account.

The advantage of having access to your key files while you are away from your own computer is huge, potentially saving him the time of having to run back to his dorm room if he forgot a file. The fact that versioning is supported by DropBox also means that he has at least some history for the document in case he needs to roll it back and there was a problem with Time Machine.

As I set this up for my son I noticed that his roommate—packing a Dell laptop running Windows 7—didn't even have a backup system set up. I hooked him up with the Windows version of Dropbox. I highly recommend Dropbox to anyone whether they are running OSX, Windows or Linux.

Caffeine

A laptop isn't just for work while sitting in a dorm room, it's often used to entertain as well. I've observed my son watching video clips on YouTube, LiveLeak, etc. and having to constantly tap the touch pad area to keep the Mac from dropping into sleep mode. By clicking on the little coffee cup icon in the menu bar Caffeine will keep the Mac from dropping into sleep or screen saver mode in the middle of a passive activity like watching a video clip.

Another great, free utility and it's now installed on every Mac we have.

Skype

Free tools are great and another one for a Mac (or Windows machine for that matter) is Skype. Though we talk to our son on the phone pretty regularly having the occasional video chat through Skype makes it feel like he's not really that far away. My wife loves seeing our son's face every once in a while too.

Skype was one of the utilities I was glad I set up before we left the house for school. I could confirm he had his account set up correctly, and we were able to add each other to our Skype directory and make a quick test video call.

While Skype has the option of auto-loading when the Mac is restarted, my son wasn't too keen on that feature. "How about we text one another on the phone and set up the Skype call?"

iWork

I've been a big fan of Pages for a while now; it's a great general purpose word processor that fits nicely into the Mac environment, unlike the Microsoft offering. Though the .pages file format is hardly universal Pages itself can save most simple files into a DOC format. For the kinds of papers my son will be producing, which will sometimes include images embedded into the documents, Pages works great.

Keynote is easy to use and produces some really beautiful presentations, though this is not something my son (nor my daughter before him) have had to use extensively.

Numbers is the third leg of the iWork stool and is adequate for very basic work but falls far short of what any power user of Excel is used to. That said, it's serviceable as a basic spreadsheet. Getting all of them in a Family Pack that can be installed on up to 5 Macs in the same household makes it a very cost effective purchase.

As an alternative to iWork you may want to consider some of the great free alternatives out there. NeoOffice is my favorite; it performs reasonably well, can open and write to most of the standard DOC, XLS and PPT formats and comes with a UI that doesn't look completely odd on a Mac.

What's Left

Safari is a fantastic web browser right out of the box so I encouraged my son to use it, even though I personally alternate between Safari and Firefox for development reasons. As far as e-mail, my son's school and personal e-mail accounts are both accessible and very useable from within a web browser. Rather than set up and try to remotely support Mail.app I figured he would be fine using it through the web.

Though my son's MacBook was of course WiFi equipped, some schools don't have WiFi available in the dorms and actively discourage students from setting up a Wifi network themselves—JMU is one of those schools. Always give them an ethernet cable and get a minimum length of 25'; sometimes the ethernet jack is on the other side of the room from where they will want to set up their desk. Bringing along a couple of power strips and extension cords is also a wise move.

The last thing we did before leaving his dorm room was set him up with a very inexpensive ink-jet printer and throw some spare ink-jet cartridges and a couple reams of paper into a drawer. Fortunately the MacBook recognized the printer as soon as it was hooked up. Once a test page popped out my son started to get a little anxious for us to leave. "It's all set Dad, I'm good. I've got stuff to do!"

We began an awkward transition; my son clearly wanted us to leave so he could start the activities JMU had planned for him. My wife and I kept shuffling around the dorm room, trying to make sure we had everything covered, delaying the inevitable goodbyes. When that moment finally arrived we got through it as quickly as we could. He hugged my wife, gave me a huge bear hug, then we quickly headed out the door.

During the long drive home my wife and I tried our best to be upbeat and happy for our son. Our little boy was now an adult, having to handle things on his own without his parents standing around him. He had a well stocked dorm room, his xBox, a mini fridge full of sodas and a shiny new 13" MacBook Pro. He was ready.

My iPhone rang. It was my son. "Uh Dad? I can't get on the internet."

A quick reboot later and everything was working fine and he hasn't had an issue since then. Still, it was nice to know he still needed me.

Is there an application or service you think a Mac wielding college student must have in order to get started? What did I miss? Please drop a note in the comments.

Trying to lose 30lbs with diet, exercise and an iPhone

2010-06-11T08:00:00.008-04:00

By the beginning of 2009 I realized that something needed to be done. We had just returned from a fantastic trip to Jamaica with the entire family, staying at an all-inclusive resort. All-inclusive is code for “eat and drink everything in sight”, and I heartily did just that.

As I reviewed the pictures taken during the trip I was shocked to see how much weight I’d put on over the years. At 45 years old my steady diet of junk food and extremely half-hearted attempts at exercise had converted my body into an awkward pear shape. A professional career of driving a computer everyday meant ready access to snacks and little natural exercise other than pounding away on a keyboard. My fingers were as lean and nimble as ever but that’s where the good news ended.

The stats weren’t pretty: at 5’11” I weighed in at 206lbs, solidly into the overweight category. I wasn’t sleeping well because I snored loudly and suffered from mild nighttime apnea; after lunch I nearly always needed (though didn’t get) a nice long nap. Instead I pumped my body full of coffee and soda to get through it. I was up to size 38 pants and XL shirts, and worst of all my blood pressure was running as high as 153/80. My doctor told me that I would need to get on blood pressure medication soon.

To add insult to injury my wife got us a Wii Fit. After stepping on the evil little device it decided my Wii character needed to look like a friggin beach ball, whereas everyone else in my family had normal Wii characters. On top of that the stupid Wii Fit made a noise that sounded a lot like "Oh My!" when I put my weight on it. I get it, thanks.

It was a new year so I set a very specific goal for myself: I would get down to 175lbs by my 46th birthday in June. That 31lb drop would put me at the weight I was when I met my lovely wife back in 1985, a weight I hadn’t seen on my scale in 23 years. My good friend Jeff had dropped nearly 50lbs in a little over a year so I knew it could be done.

I had the motivation, all I needed were the tools to make it happen.

Diet & exercise are the key to losing weight. Who knew?
Though I’m happy to share the foods I started eating and the exercising I did I won’t go into too much detail right now. Suffice it to say by counting calories, eating quality foods and putting in vigorous exercise I quickly started dropping weight. Initially it came off very fast, then I would hit walls that would take longer to see results.

What I found out about myself was that I was highly motivated by seeing my goal weight and every few days checking on my current weight to see how I was progressing against that goal. I had read some good reviews of Weightbot and figured that since I had my iPhone with me all the time it would be a good tool for helping me track my progress.

Weightbot
The thing I love about Weightbot is that it doesn’t try to be too many things. You enter your height, pop in a goal weight and from then on all you need to do is plug in your weight using a simple dial control. It’s got some great sound and visual effects so it makes it fun to use and even supports a WiFi based Withings Scale for data entry.

Where it comes in handy is when you rotate your iPhone on it’s side and the goal chart appears. Not only does it present you with a chart of your actual progress with your goal displayed, it also gives you a projection of when you will reach your goal weight based on your current weight gain/loss patterns.

I found this view to be a huge motivational tool. I really wanted to make it to my goal weight before my 46th birthday and I could tell early on how I was doing. At $1.99 Weightbot is a great buy and for me was well worth the money.

How I did
Unfortunately I missed my goal weight of 175lbs by my birthday - I hit it four days later. The results of losing that weight and learning to enjoy exercising had a profound impact on me. I went from a size 38 waist to a size 32 and from XL shirts to mediums. My blood pressure dropped dramatically and just a few days ago was measured at 112/71. I continued to drop weight, leveling out at about 170lbs with a measured body fat percentage of 9.9%.

To my surprise (and my wife’s enormous relief) I stopped snoring after dropping the weight. Apparently I carried half that weight in my face and once it was gone my air passages were much clearer and I could sleep silently.

This wasn’t of course because I spent $1.99 on Weightbot; that was just one tool to help me achieve my goal. If you are interested in losing weight and find that you are goal oriented, consider adding Weightbot to your toolbox.

Speaking of goals - I could use your help
A huge part of my exercise regimen has been my newfound love of cycling. Recently I learned about the Tour de Cure, a bike ride to raise money to find a cure for diabetes. My father is a Type I diabetic and since the ride falls on Father’s Day this year I decided I’d jump in and see if I could help them raise some money. I signed up to do the 100 mile “century” ride, my first attempt at that distance.

I’ve been training like a madman lately and am shooting not only to complete it but to do so in less that 6 hours. Would you consider making a donation to the Tour de Cure and sponsoring me on the ride? If so, please click here. All the money goes to the American Diabetes Association and is tax deductible.

Got an iPhone app that is great for helping people keep track of weight loss or exercise performance? Please drop a note in the comments!

Safari 5 Reader - a feature with a direct impact

2010-06-08T10:00:00.006-04:00

On a day where the news from Apple focused on the iPhone 4 and new iOS features, the update to Safari 5 was almost an afterthought, so much so that the press release went out a couple of hours before the product itself was even available. Even the first iteration of the Safari page was improperly formatted.

There are a number of updates that went in to Safari 5, not the least of which is improved HTML 5 support. Though performance is reportedly better I have been unable to detect any improvement; benchmarking would be required to see it. The big user oriented feature that's been added is Reader, a view of certain web pages that eliminates all distractions (ads and visual distractions) that draw away from the material you want to read.

When viewing a web page that Safari determines contains an article, a Reader "button" appears in Safari's address bar:

Clicking that will present the web page in a simple, large scale Times font. Images embedded in the article are often included and if the article has a multi-page footer for navigating Reader will suck in all the pages, presenting you with a single, simply formatted view.

I tried this out on a number of different blogs and news sites and the results were great. Not only was it easier to focus on the content of the article it also allows me to print or e-mail the content to someone using that view.

I for one can't stand those animated ads with people dancing around or the bouncing balls trying to get me to see how low a bank's interest rate is. It's great to have a nicely done feature that allows me to pull out the meat of the content and I anticipate Reader will get a lot of use.

Can Reader change how sites are presented?

While add-ons like AdBlock for Firefox have supported this basic capability for many years, this is the first time a major web browser has presented this as a front and center feature. It will move the blocking of ads from a niche area leveraged by the technical minority to one used by a much larger percentage, especially if Internet Explorer and Firefox follow up with a similar feature.

The interesting part about all of this is how it will impact the economics of the web. Many of the more popular web sites support their content through ad revenues, many on an impression model. When a person visits a site the web server will still count the ad as an impression. Initially this means that web sites that depend on ad revenue will not see a decrease in impressions so they'll be safe. Just not for long.

Over time advertisers will see disturbing trends: while they are getting the same number of impressions as before, the conversion rates will begin to decline. Business models that count on revenues from ads with distracting content will struggle to survive.

In many ways this is no different than the popup wars of the last 10+ years. You may remember when not too long ago a visit to some web sites meant 2-3 popup browser windows appearing. Web browsers have all gotten significantly better at blocking popups and as a result most reputable web sites don't even bother trying to put them up.

If Reader becomes a big hit—which I believe it will—it may actually drive the design of many web sites. If a web site wants to maintain an advertising model they will need to present their content in such a way that a user doesn't quickly reach for the Reader button.

This of course won't happen overnight; it will take years before these changes to behavior have a direct impact. Smart folks have a tendency to see where things are headed and plan accordingly. Just a little FYI for those of you that have web sites that depend on ad revenue; those few high-dollar distracting ads you allow may be killing off your web site.

Isn't it ironic?

One of Apple's big pushes on the iPhone / iPad front is to create a highly useable ad supported model for "free" applications called iAd. So basically Apple has said "We think your web sites have a horrible ad model and presentation. We're giving people a way to avoid it". At the same time they are saying "We really know how to advertise. Here's a new way to do it."

At least they are consistent.

An open letter from a cyclist to 99% of drivers

2010-05-27T15:55:00.006-04:00

The news always seems to be carrying some story about a cyclist and a driver getting into a fight or of a cyclist being struck by a car while they are riding. When these stories are discussed in the comments section of a news site tempers flare and heated arguments about sharing the road break out. The pattern is so consistent that you can predict it pretty accurately:

Cyclists hate drivers that don't give them enough room on the road
Drivers hate cyclists that use roads they didn't pay for
Cyclists hate drivers that don't pay attention
Drivers hate cyclists that see stop signs and traffic lights as optional
Cyclists hate drivers that think bikes can't be lawfully ridden on the road
Drivers hate cyclists that slow traffic

The number of arguments leveled at one another is the ultimate fodder for Interweb trolls but the consistent pattern I see is the hatred part. As a vehicle driver and dedicated cyclist I'd like to take a slightly different approach to this:

Dear 99% of Drivers:

In the last year I've put close to four thousand miles on my various bikes, a large number of them on public roads in several states. While I have encountered my share of drivers that either don't see me or don't want me on the road, you were not one of them.

You pulled your vehicle as far over as you safely could to give me the room I need for both of us to share the road together.

You waited an extra 5 seconds to let me pass before making that right turn that would have cut me off.

On that narrow country road you stayed behind me when we approached that blind curve or hill until I could see ahead to tell you the road was clear and that you could pass me safely.

You weren't composing a text message on your cell phone at the same moment you began to pass me on the road. Or ever while you were driving for that matter.

You saw me trying to cross a busy road and safely slowed down, flashing your lights to let me cross without disrupting the flow of traffic or making the people behind you slam on their brakes.

When you pulled up to an intersection to make a right turn you didn't automatically push the nose of your car out into the area my bike was riding in.

These are just a few of the things you did to help us both safely share the road. I don't know if you could tell by seeing me on my bike but I'm a father, a husband, a neighbor, a son, a brother and a friend. I do know that you saw me as a person, not as an obstacle that needed to be overcome. Your awareness of your surroundings wasn't limited to the interior of your car.

In return I promise to do my part. I'll continue to keep as far right as I safely can. Sometimes I have to swing out a little further into the road than I like because I've had people open their car doors into me. I may hold you up on narrow roads but I want you to safely pass me as soon as possible; as soon as I see that you can pass I'll wave you forward and if I can pull it off safely I'll wave to you or give you a thumbs up. I know you're just following the law but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate it.

Sure, there are still lots of drivers out there that don't understand how fragile a person on a bike is and there are lots of cyclists that disregard common courtesy and the rules of the road as well. The reality is they are a minority, and hopefully a shrinking one.

This letter isn't directed at them though. It's directed at you. Thanks for sharing the road with me.

--David

For the last several years my blog has focused on switching from Windows to Mac and the occasional posts on starting a new business. These are both topics I intend to continue with, I just want to mix in my passion for cycling and exercise as well. I'm always looking at technology that I can use with my Macs, iPhone or iPad to make my cycling and exercise experiences better and hope to write about that as well.