Tralfaz

Category: Tech

  • Almost back to normal – a week after re-imaging my laptop

    Last week, I had to get my laptop re-imaged. I had fouled up either my hive, or the install of Windows, so it had become incredibly unstable. Probably my fault. (ok, almost certainly my fault).

    It has taken a week to get back to functional. All the key software is installed. The settings are back to where I like them (for power options etc), and I got all the essential drivers sorted (you really need to have the touchpad driver installed and configured if you are going to type on this thing, otherwise the incidental contact on the touchpad will cause the cursor to move, and drive you batshit insane)

    We use Symantec endpoint protection, and I hate it. It is resource heavy, and there is no way (allowed at least) as an end user to adjust how it works. We also require our laptops to use whole disk encryption, which again is a resource hog. It only took 3 days for the 300G HD to initially encrypt (that took all weekend!!!)

    The only thing I forgot to do was to backup my IE favorites. And since there are internal sites that ONLY work on IE, I have to re-create them.

    Sigh.

  • Switching back to my iPad

    About 8 months ago, on a whim I bought a Nexus 7. Really to be used for testing websites I work on for how they look on that size screen, a few months ago I decided to give Android a fair shake. Caveat: I have been an Apple person since 2002 or so, and have been with iOS since the original iPhone, so I am clearly a biased opinion.

    The fair shake involved me using the Nexus 7 for all my media consumption, and tablet like duties (email, magazine reading, newspaper apps, etc). I did not “root” my device, or install a modified ROM. It is plain Android (jelly bean 4.2 right now I think). I have only used the Android play store, and I have never sideloaded apps (unlike most of my Android phanatique friends, who load tons of pirate apps).

    I have documented some of the annoyances in the past, but I will summarize:

    • The auto intensity adjustment is flakey. I read in bed, and the intensity switches levels a couple times a minute. I have never seen that with my iPad.
    • The interface is at times unresponsive. Mostly noticeable during games (for example Astra Solitaire is painful to play, because the UI at times take 2 or 3 stabs with your finger to get it to respond. But I experience this with many applications. From reading the forums, this is not an uncommon Android experience.
    • Gmail application. When I got this, it was great, very well mimicking the web browser version. But they have Google+’d it, and it sucks. I have gone back to using the “other” mail application.
    • Chrome is missing one killer feature. Safari on the ipad (and on my mac as well), has a “reader” mode. It strips all the miscellaneous cruft, and displays the main content in a larger, easy to read font. Yes, Chrome lets you double tap to size it to the window, but that often is still text that is too small to comfortably read.
    • The facebook application for android blows donkeys. It is just horrible. The iOS app used to suck, but about 4 months ago, a major rewrite made it killer and easy to use. Android still suffers here.
    • The Google Play music app is painful to use. Really hard to create/modify playlists on the device.
    • The accuracy of where it reads taps is odd. This is hard to explain, but for example, if you are looking at the device tilted back, and you pull up the email account selector on the gmail app, in the iOS world, it would know that you are looking at the screen tilted, and assume that you will tap a little low. Android misses this, and you select the one below your intent.
    • Battery life is atrocious. I don;t play much music, or video, but have to charge it every day to day and a half for 2 – 3 hours of reading, light browsing. My iPad (granted a much larger device), I get easily 3 – 5 days of that same amount of usage. And it is 2,5 years old, so the battery isn’t fresh. I suspect this is somewhat caused by a lot of background processes that are constantly active. Unlike my iOS devices, it does update programs and the system silently and in real time. So I often have updates in the notification area. IOS prompts me to upgrade apps, so I tend to do it all at once.

    I have heard people on the interwebz saying that the Nexus 7 is the best tablet out there, period. I suspect that they have never spent time with an iPad. It is just enough more polished, and less intrusive to knock the Nexus 7 off the pedestal that some place it. I haven’t toyed with one of the updated Nexus 7’s, perhaps they fix these gripes, but I suspect it is more tied to the Android OS, than the hardware, so I would be skeptical.

    So, I am back on the iPad, and I will keep dabbling with the Nexus 7, but it isn’t going to displace iOS for me. (as I said, I was biased)

  • Refresher: Set theory and logic

    Yesterday, while I was waiting for my computer to be reimaged due to some serious funk happening with my outlook mail, I had a couple hours to burn. After I killed a longer than normal walk at lunch, I sat down in the lobby with a good book.

    Background: my products are reliant on a lot of technology, but one aspect is critical in how they work and are used. This being a PID Servo Control system. While you don’t need to know in depth what that is to use one of our instruments, having a deep knowledge does indeed help you get the most out of it.

    Control theory is something you would imagine to be the realm of electrical engineers, but curiously, it seems to be the realm of mechanical engineering. And at the root of it is math. To understand what is really happening, and how it works, you need to know a branch of mathematics called “Discrete Mathematics”. This is the foundation of computers and computer science, dealing with the world broken into discrete pieces and processed algorithmically. (As an aside, my education is in Physics, and there we deal in continuum mathematics, similar, but distinctly different).

    So I picked up a textbook. I might have mentioned in the past that Dover publishing does a wonderful job of keeping classic science and math texts in print, and affordable.

    The early parts of this text are a deep dive into set theory, function representation, and logic (mathematical logic is not the same as what most people think of logic). Being a child of the 70’s, and the evolution of mathematics elementary education, I had always some concepts of sets, and operations on sets. But beyond this informal early introduction, I never really dove into the subject. Some of my physics topics touched upon it, but again, it was using set theory to get to a solution.

    The first chapter was an eye opener. I realize what I had learned earlier was very shallow, and cursory, but now I have a much deeper understanding of these foundations of modern mathematics.

    A good way to spend a couple hours.  Next up is counting (combinatorics).

  • What a wasted day

    The joy that is Windows. Every so often you need to blow it all away and start from scratch. Today was that day.

    Outlook had been a piece of garbage for quite some time. Lots of bandaids, duct tape and baling wire was keeping me up and running. But today it finally gave up the ghost.

    So, back up all my files, and off to IT to reimage, and get me back to a stable state. Alas, a lot of software needs to be installed to get me functional.

    So, I really got 2 hours of work done today, and tonight I need to leave it running to complete the encryption of the disk (paused now).

    Happy, happy, joy, joy, joy

  • Dear Google, please stop fscking with Gmail

    Two days ago, I gave you props for being smart about the “Reply All” function in Gmail. Today, you wiped out that karma credit you earned with your new changes to gmail.

    Once again Google screws their userbase
    Once again Google screws their userbase

    I have long been a happy, satisfied customer of gmail. Hell, I purchase a small business account for my main domain, because your service is pretty kick ass. I have been on gmail since it was invitation only back in 2003 (I think). Mostly, I access through the web, as I have found the interface to be clean, intuitive, and efficient.

    I understand that your product teams like to have things to work on. Heck, I am in product management, so I know the ship or die mentality.

    You may have done some customer validation, and market research. Heck, you probably have enough back end analytics to get a very granular idea of how people use and interact with Gmail. So, after crunching that data, you put together a feature map, and started coding.

    But, I have become quite satisfied with my email workflow, and even something as innocuous as the tabs to organize email is disruptive to my work. This will drive me to move to using a MUA to process my mail (Apple Mail or Outlook) and to bypass the once excellent, spartan, and usable gmail interface.

    No, I will not give up my gmail address for this, but I would be a lot happier if you gave people the option to stay with what they had. You are getting as bad as Facebook in changing the look and feel of Gmail.

  • How to make Windows 7 x64 suck

    As a longtime Mac person, I have to admit that Windows 7 is a pretty good operating system. Stable, snappy, and not too much of a resource hog, even on questionable hardware. I used it at my last company on a decent Dell Latitude system, and it was quite good.

    But you can make it suck.

    I work at a Fortune 500 company. I have an OK HP elitebook (15″ mid sized laptop) that once I got the driver sorted out worked pretty well (the stock image that we drop on it doesn’t have the chipset or the audio drivers setup properly.)

    But this this is dog slow. I mean, teleport me back to the 1990’s and 2 megabyte Windows 95 slow. Why is that?

    Well, it isn’t the hardware, it has a snappy Core i5 dual core system. I doubt that a quad core i7 would make much difference. Stock it came with only 4G of ram (which seems like a waste for a 64 bit OS), that I bumped to 16G.

    But it is encumbered with an amazing amount of crap. We have:

    • Symantec Endpoint Protection
    • PGP whole disk encryption
    • Configuration management software
    • About 7 services related to asset tracking, and cataloging. FFS, how many of them are really needed to say that this is my laptop?
    • Our presence and messaging solution is Cisco WebEx connect and Meetingplace (which is a flippin resource pig)
    • Direct links to our Sharepoint system that cause huge slowdown periodically

    All told, when I need to reboot my system, which happens far to frequently, it is literally a 20 minute process until the machine becomes responsive. I am hardly the only one to complain. In fact it has become such a problem that our standard configuration for laptops is now with an SSD.  Unfortunately I have 2 more years on this lease before I can make that jump. It is going to be a long long two years.

    I know that it isn’t Microsoft’s fault for this, but it is painful.

  • Dropbox FTW

    I heavily rely on the various cloud services to keep working documents, and helpful things available wherever I happen to be, on which of my devices.

    I have a 100G Dropbox account, a 25G Google Drive account, and, being an Apple person, I have an iCloud account as well. All of these do a pretty decent job of keeping files synchronized around my devices.

    Dropbox remains king of the cloud storage/sync world.
    Dropbox remains king of the cloud storage/sync world.

    But, the one that I couldn’t live without is Dropbox. They weren’t quite first to the market, but they started with a strong offering and have enhanced it as time has gone on. Now, if you are using a program that supports cloud file synchronization, it is going to support Dropbox. Dropbox has aggressively opened their platform to developers, and there are now tons of great applications that share and exchange data via Dropbox. This evolution was highlighted last night when I got an email from O’Reilly Media telling me that I could sync my ebook purchases with my dropbox account. Cool. Also, something that I enabled without thinking is that the Dropbox application on my computer will know when I put a camera memory card in, and it will copy all the files to a “Camera Uploads” folder. So, it is like the Apple Photostream feature. Pretty cool option.

    Google Drive is in second place. While you can use their service to share data between programs, it is not as straightforward as Dropbox. It is a bit more granular so for about $2.50 a month I get 25G of storage. The fact that it is now the Google Apps repository is nice as well. I do some work for a non-profit, and we often collaborate via Google Docs files, so my Google Drive gets a fair amount of access from that.

    Apple is a distant third. I never expected it to replace Dropbox, and I am sure Apple wasn’t planning on that as well. But for apps on my mac and my iOS devices that support it, it is really a pain free to keep your data sync’d. I haven’t explored the options for collaboration, or sharing, and frankly, I will probably use Dropbox or Google Drive for that anyway, since most of the people I work with are PC people.

    While I still have a couple of USB thumb drives, Dropbox has pretty much made them irrelevant. I only use them when I need to run a PPT presentation on a computer that isn’t mine. Other than that, they really don’t serve a purpose in my workflow.

  • Where has all the Flash gone?

    Please, it's for the children
    Please, it’s for the children

    Thinking back to 2007, and the launch of the original iPhone, I remember the outcry over the fact that the iPhone didn’t render Adobe Flash content. Lots of predictions of doom and gloom for the device (although no cellphones at the time really supported it).

    As a Mac person, I have long loathed Flash. The implementation on the Mac was buggy and a huge resource hog.  I would have to run a plugin on my browsers to turn off flash or the CPU would be pegged, and the fans ramp up to “747 takeoff mode”.

    But Apple stuck to their guns. Of course, there were lots of people who had Android, which did support flash and did a lot of hating on Apple’s position. But then they saw that flash would drain the power in your battery in a ridiculously short time.

    Fortunately, the Web designers took note, and flash seems to be on the wane. I don’t come across many sites that use more than a minuscule amount of flash content. The lazy sites that pretty much did all their work in flash have gone the way of the do do. And the world is better.

    This was brought to my attention when after a required reboot on my work PC, I was prompted to update flash. That has become less important than ever for me. It’s a good thing.

  • The idiots have won: Time to remove the “Reply All” option in email

    Microsoft, Apple, Thunderbird (indeed, all MUA’s):

    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option
    Time to kill/hide the Reply all option

    It is time to remove the “reply all” option. I know that there are valid use cases for it, but alas, the general population has failed to grasp the implications of this seemingly innocuous button on their email. Yes, there are times that people really really do want to spam their colleagues like it was a listserv, but this is an edge use case.

    Unfortunately, the idiots who populate the corporate and social world today seem to think that the normal use of email is to reply all. I have even heard them justify this by saying “If all those people were copied originally to the invite to meet for drinks on Friday, then I need to let them all know I am in.”*

    Even educated, scientists who I work with have this affair with the reply all button.

    Back when I was at Cisco in the early ‘oughts, we had these huge mail storms. People used mailing lists, and sent trivial status updates to literally thousands of people (good reason to limit distribution list access), to which many would reply “Please remove me”, of course this lead to a lot of other people replying the same, and suddenly you have an email thread with 500 replies in less than an hour, with absolutely no commercial value.

    Time for the nuclear option:

    1. Remove the button completely – yes, this makes life more difficult for people who have legitimate uses.
    2. Make it available as a menu option – prefer buried a couple layers deep. I know this breaks my mantra of keep it simple and accessible. I am willing to make a tradeoff here.
    3. If neither of these are attractive, then add a dialog box, particularly when there are more than 3 recipients of the original email, that warns people of how rude it is to spam their colleagues needlessly
    4. Put some intelligence into the email application. If the topic is mundane, and there are lots of people in the “to:” list, move them to a BCC: to prevent the dreaded reply all.

    Of course, the reasonable thing would be to expect people to have some common courtesy, and refrain from replying all.

    The one bright light is that Gmail’s online interface, while I find lots of flaws with it, does this well. A user has to take an extra step to reply all to an email, and it does keep it down. Of course, if you download your mail into Outlook, that safety is defeated.

    —

    *Yes, this email happened this week, and really annoyed the hell out of me.

  • Life with the 13″ MacBook Air – Two weeks down

    I have always used the time to upgrade computers to buy the biggest, fastest, bestest computer I could get. I typically keep them for 3-4 years (and use them hard) so skimping on the price is not a really a priority.

    My macbook pro is getting a little long in the tooth (but by no means giving up the ghost), and I was flirting with the MacBook Pro Retina display. But I took stock of my needs, and realized that I don’t need the biggest and fastest. For Father’s Day, Apple seemed to think that my boys should get me a MacBook Air.  They were just refreshed, with new, low power use CPU’s, and some pretty impressive specifications.

    I was piqued. I took a trip to the local Apple store (there are several here in Phoenix, one about 5 minutes away) and did some hands on.

    I was smitten. The idea of a very light, very compact package with outstanding battery life was very appealing indeed.

    So I took the plunge, bought the 13″ version, and ordered it with the 8G of memory (soldered on the board, it is not upgradable post purchase), and the 256G SSD.

    I have blogged about getting it up and running, and figuring out how to live within the space constraints (it is a bit of a shock to go from a TB to 1/4 TB of storage (hint: my music, movies and Aperture photo library didn’t come across. But my MBP will suffice for that!).

    I was tempted to buy a second charger when I picked this up, but I refrained. I am getting a real 10 – 12 hours of use between charges. That equates to two – three days of my usual use.

    The display is smaller than the 15″, and although it dismayed the Apple watchers that Apple didn’t drop a retina display in this, I am not disappointed. Yep, the retina displays are crisp, and awesome, but they have 4x the pixels, and that does impact battery life.

    The build quality is typical Apple. Solid. great screen hinges, and no blemishes.

    So far, I love it, and will probably be an ultra portable user for life now.