Category Archives: Technology

Don’t Spam the Messenger

iChatI’ve had to remove my iChat/AOL Instant Messenger screen name from my already fairly outdated About page because in the past month or two, I’ve become the victim of some pretty frequent IM spamming. There’s nothing interesting or clever about this junk advertising, aside from the fact that it gets delivered over a previously spam-free communications channel; in fact, it’s probably among the more banal and least innovative ways of capitalizing on a new medium that I’ve seen.

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Tethered to My Wireless Carrier

Treo 600All year long, I’ve been waiting for the FCC’s mandate on wireless portability to become law, so that I could switch from Sprint PCS without having to give up my number, and without having to send out one of those unseemly emails imploring friends and family to “Please note my new cell phone number.” This situation finally became reality on 24 Nov, but as I began to casually shop around for a new carrier I found that the coverage quality provided by the competition is generally even poorer than Sprint PCS.

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Desktop Clutter

HP DesktopJust for posterity’s sake, I wanted to publish these two screen shots we took of a brand new Hewlett Packard computer we bought at Behavior. It’s a true eyesore — nearly half of this virgin desktop is littered with advertisements and junkware. The second screen shot is a look at some sort of umbrella program that HP includes with the machine, probably intended to help new users make their way through the confusing mess of meaningless icons.

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A Year with Windows

AlienwareAbout a year ago, we bought four Alienware personal computers at Behavior. Alienware is widely acknowledged as the manufacturer of some of the best Windows-based personal computers on the market, and yet, as of yesterday, all four have had serious problems, and one of them has even broken down on two separate occasions. They all suffered the same problem — poor cooling requiring a fan replacement — and, at various times, each of my colleagues has been stopped cold during the course of several work days owing to this defect. It’s been a complete pain the butt, though less so for me, because I had opted instead to buy a much-less sexy Hewlett Packard earlier in the year. That one, however, has stopped running Microsoft Outlook reliably, and is such a mess of Windows patches, viruses, spyware and generally misbehaving software that I can barely use it anymore. Next week I’ll probably have to completely erase it and reinstall Windows, and everything else, from scratch.

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Retouching iPhoto

PicasaWithout apology, I admit a prejudice against any Windows-based software that blatantly mimics innovations that originated on the Mac OS; a prime example is Candy Labs’ App Rocket, a startlingly faithful and shameless reproduction of Objective Development’s superb LaunchBar that was developed for — you might even say “ported to” — Windows XP recently.

Unfairly or not, I regard those indiscretions with scorn, and not a little indignation, which was my attitude when stumbling across Picasa, a program that bears a remarkable similarity to Apple’s iPhoto software for management of digital photos. I might have dismissed it altogether, but the attractive design of their Web site hinted at some level of cleverness at work, and so I decided to download and install the software on my Windows box for a trial run.

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Housebreaking Tips for a Panther

Mac OS X PantherWith my girlfriend away all weekend in San Francisco, I figured that if I was going to make the somewhat reckless and potentially time-consuming decision to install Mac OS X Panther that I may as well do it while I had two good, solid days to myself. On Friday night I settled down after dinner and and set about preparing my system for the upgrade. First I did some research around the Web for tips on how best to avert any potential problems, which led me to pay for and download “Take Control of Upgrading to Panther” — a PDF-based ebook from TidBITS publishing that is an invaluable primer sold at the bargain price of US$5.

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Crouching Panther, Hidden Crashes

PantherAll 23 gigabytes of my PowerBook’s hard drive have been backed up to my G4 tower, so I am, in some sense, ready to install Panther, the newest version of Apple’s Mac OS X software, as soon as it goes on sale tonight. In about an hour and a half, on my way home, I’ll probably swing by the venerable Tekserve and pick up my own copy… but I cant’t decide whether to actually go through with it and really install this major upgrade to the operating system on the very first weekend of its public release. Typically, I would wait a little while to see what kinds of problems other, more adventurous Macintosh fans might encounter. But there’s something about Panther that has me very anxious, and I’m just itching to get it running on my Mac. In all likelihood, I will install it on an external FireWire drive, but somehow I know I won’t be satisfied until I’ve thrown caution completely to the wind.

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All Together Now!

RendezvousToday at Behavior, we finally got a majority of the office running iTunes, thanks to the Windows version of this excellent music management, shopping and playing software that was released recently by Apple. This means both the Windows machines and the Macintoshes were all working together without a hitch, and much more seamlessly than just about any other cross-platform technology I’ve ever used.

This is all thanks to Apple’s superb implementation of the Zeroconf technology standard — Apple calls it Rendezvous — which makes networking and sharing ridiculously easy. We had already been using this between the Macs, but being able to see my colleagues’s Windows-bound iTunes music with absolutely no effort left me duly impressed.

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