On chatting

Another night and another blog entry, i'm on a massive roll. 

Anyway, looking through some feeds I saw a mention of a relatively dead IM app on the mac called Proteus. It got me thinking about the protocols and applications. For the miserable period I was on the PC, there was an awesome multi-protocol client that had no equal, it was Trillian and to to this day its still the best on the PC. 

For the Mac there have been several wanna-be's but I dont think any have quite made it. I think Adium is the closest but here as with many decent 3rd party apps that you just have to have Apple is closing the gap quickly with its iChat. Until recently it was pretty weak in multiple account/protocol support and only let you log into one account at a time. Now you can log into many and it supports AIM, .Mac (really AIM protocol) and Jabber. The noticeable omission is Yahoo which is surprising giving that they do have relationships with Yahoo (iPhone push email as an example). I suspect, that unlike Google, Yahoo is not willing to allow any of its services to be used without a way to get some ads in. Google clearly doesnt care about that to the same degree. 

ICQ used to be a larger force, but with it being bought by AOL, I look at it as one company/protocol with AIM even if thats not technically true. The reality is that 90% of my contacts are AIM based or Yahoo. A very few of them are Gtalk and I dont see that growing.

So back to the client tools, Adium supports all the protocols well and has a very cool and reliable interface. It doesnt do voice or video conferencing. iChat does everything I care about except Yahoo and has some very slick video and voice conferencing. It also has remote control of macs, application sharing and other features. To me the feature set of iChat makes it something I can't give up on. So I keep all my contacts in iChat except Yahoo and I run Adium just for my yahoo contacts. 

Yes, so I run 2 chat clients all the time. Apple, please add Yahoo Messenger support to iChat.

The other thing that i've been suffering with is that along with many email addresses i've collected IM accounts over the years and have a dozen or so now. The different protocols require different accounts and sometimes you end up with accounts for work vs home. In the earlier days some protocols/clients wouldnt let you log on with an account if you were logged in somewhere else. That no longer seems to be the case and I think you can generally get down to one account per protocol. The oddity there is .mac vs AIM. The AIM ones are free, the .mac account I only get while I pay for .Mac which has questionable value due to its sync issues, and behind the curve space/webmail client etc.

I'd love to see the market gravitate to a single protocol, but I don't think it will happen. Barring that i'd like to see Apple either make everything they did available for folks like Adium to build it in (there were rumors of libraries for that but I dont know if it happened) or to go all the way with iChat.

Until then, i'm using (and liking) both.

My current setup for the digital life

What? Another long post so short after the last? Well, to tell the truth they were one VERY large one I cut into 2...

So here's some info on my current setup between the iPhone and computers.

Personal email - Google Apps, a free service hosting my own domain name and providing free IMAP with SSL support. So I get full desktop, iPhone and Web client support fully in sync all the time. Cant beat the price, reliability, storage space etc. Since I normally use IMAP, I have no idea how Google can sustain this free, no-ads environment that they've given me with my own domain name.

Work email - A mentioned in previous posts I'm in a tight company standards controlled Exchange environment that i've worked around using a combination of OWA and Synchronica. Short of shutting off OWA, its hard for companies to kill this approach. As mentioned before, Synchronica isn't a great solution yet but it has potential. At some point I may win the war for iPhone VPN access so I can do normal IMAP over VPN to Exchange for work email but i'm not holding my breath. For desktop mail while at work I have full IMAP access on my Mac within the company network (that took some doing). Until I got that going I was using Outlook under Parallels since the current version of Entourage on the Mac stinks bad (I may revisit all this when Entourage 2008 finally comes out). 

Calendar - Since the geniuses at Snerdware have chosen to drag their feet in making Groupcal Leopard compatible and that it wasn't most reliable product in Tiger anyway I started looking for other solutions. At first I tried using the Apple iCal app to maintain home and work calendars in appropriate locations and do bidirectional synchronization of both. I found this to be totally unreliable (even on Leopard) and lost my calendar data (thank goodness for backups) several times. I think resorted to unidirectional synchronization and had inconsistencies that Apples iSync just couldn't get over even with complete resets of the sync system. My current stage is using Google Calendar and then just subscribing to the calendars (one for work, one for home) on the various macs so I can look at my calendar using the Apple iCal tool (view only, no edits :( ). Calendar invites to home or work are a little work to add, I have to save the .ics file and then "import calendar" to the appropriate calendar in Google. But my sync issues are gone. Then the path to the iPhone is the same as the local iCal solution, just pick which calendars to sync to the iPhone (fortunately you can sync subscribed calendars). In case I need to create an event while on the road I have a "iPhone" calendar thats just a temporary holder until I move it back to one of the others.

Contacts - For some (nice) reason the iSync bidirectional sync between 2 macs and my iPhone works flawlessly. There's no clean way of keeping the same contacts on Google in sync with the macs/phone and the Google contacts app/section is still pretty weak. 

Notes - currently my solution is to email myself stuff. Someday Apple will fix that in the iPhone.

To Do's - My current approach is emails sitting in various folders. My "inbox" in email is always near empty on all accounts with things properly filed/sorted. The iCal/Google/iPhone to-do stuff isnt well baked and my usage is light so that suits me for now. 

RSS feeds - I can't get Googles reader to save my login info, and its interface is weak next to NewsGator Mobile and NewsGator also has a nice desktop client (the free/lite version works fine for me but I may pay for it just to support their work)

TV/Movies - I use an EyeTV Hybrid as my digital VCR and have it export its recordings to iTunes in iPhone format and have setup iTunes to sync unwatched episodes of my (and my daughter's..) favorite shows automatically. There's no maintenance/work and its all automatic. For Movies, I use a low cost NetFlix subscription and then rip movies using Handbrake into iPhone format. I watch the movies once and then delete them. In theory this isn't fully by the license terms but I feel this is within the intent of the law. I don't really watch any TV or movies at home (yes, I spend my free time doing crazy things like this post) so only when I travel do I get to do that sort of thing and then my all-in-one iPhone device keeps me well entertained (I do wish they had more than 8GB on it).

Filing System - I looked at personal databases, including Bento and couldn't find a good reason to use something other than the normal file system with good folder/file names etc. I did get the idea from some products that instead of printing receipts from online transactions, to save them as PDF to my file system. On the more physical side I try to keep as little paper as possible and shred everything. I'm currently searching for a cost-effective scanner for important docs I want to keep but not physically. So far for the Mac, decent ones are $500...

Password management - With the number of sites at work and home and the need for good security (different, complex passwords at the various places) I opted for a password manager. I never liked the ones I ran into on the PC like Roboform which seemed to install all sorts of extra stuff but i've been very happy with 1Password on the Mac and the developer is very responsive. It syncs bidrectionally to both macs via iSync (this works well) and does a secure HTML page on the iPhone (I havent used this since i'm still nervous about its security) and provides access (for a fee) to your passwords online (which I wont use since I dont want my passwords on a web site owned by anybody). Having access at both my main Macs is sufficient.

And of course the Mac/iPhone only things like iPod/iTunes for Music and iPhoto for Pictures work wonderfully. And yes, i've paid for all the music in my iTunes library, same for my software. Thats a moral integrity challenge I put myself through years ago (with quite a bit of expense) that I think I passed (although the grading is a very grey area and a topic for another long post). Since Apple has a poor concept of centralized iTunes/iPhoto libraries within the home I use rsync over ssh to get copies of the music/pictures to my wife and kid's machines. 

Backups - With Leopard I use time machine on all computers. In addition I have off-site backup schemes around the same rsync/ssh stuff mentioned above. Of course its all no-login/password, SSL cert required, not a well known port etc.

Machine Security - As mentioned previously the Filevault stuff (especially with Spotlight and Time machine) is flawed so I use various encrypted disk images with some of the passwords saved in my login keychain and some in my head. This makes my data secure from theft (secure virtual memory is enabled) and it also makes my backups secure onsite or not. I have several images to keep them small so that the Time Machine incremental backups don't blow out my backup space quickly. And then the usuals (screen saver locks the machine, password required, no automatic logins) and not so usuals (all my machines are tethered to large pieces of furniture including my external backup drives, some of which are sequestered in odd places in my house and connected over a WPA network).

Video Games - I got into computers, and my career with my love for computer games. I've owned most computer game systems (and currently have a PS3, Wii, and a XBox 360). My favorite gaming device for games other than driving games is the desktop. For many years that was the Wintel platform. Now with OSX and Bootcamp its my MacPro running WindowsXP (Vista is a failure) (I just finished Crysis before the holidays). I like the First Person Shooter (FPS) types, but have been spending time with World of Warcraft over the last few years. Its hard to beat the cost for the amount of play time that you get from the MMORPGs. I dont like the FPS genre much against the online community since I dont have the time to become proficient against human opponents.

Some background

Since i'm often commenting on Macs and iPhones I figured it may be time for some background.

Beware that this plus the next are long reading. If anyone is watching, get yourself a drink and a snack before starting to read this one...

My first exposure to a computer was the original Apple back in the late 70's in England. From there I owned various models of Apple II computers in the 80s and did a lot of hacking on them with BIOS changes and some programming. At work I used the Apple Lisa computer which was a $10,000 machine at the time and the large company I worked for had a grand total of 2 and didn't know what to do with them. They weren't useful for much at the time. When the original Mac 128 came out, I bought it and still own it. It has the signatures on the inside of the case from all the original development team which is very cool to me. I made several hardware and software modifications to it over time. Through my early career I owned macs (as well as a few other things like the Amiga), the last of which was a decked out Power Machintosh 6100.

In the mid-90's I worked at a company that provided Wintel based machines for home use for free (early days of the work at home concept & they also included frame relay connections). By that time my Power Mac was aging fast and Apple had a poor roadmap for the future. I jumped ship, sold the Power Mac for $4,000 and spent the next decade on WinTel.

About 10 years later my wife wanted a web browser type notebook to use around the house. By that time i'd had my fill of WinTel world and Apple had some shiny new machines out and that included the new OSX. I bought her a PowerBook G4 12" which is a wonderful machine. She still uses it daily (it now has Leopard on it). Its been heavily abused and still runs strong with never a hardware failure. 

I spent most of my career in the SunOS/Solaris/Linux world and eventually ended up at a startup where I needed more than a Unix desktop as I was doing more managerial things but still hands on. So I needed Office apps, but I needed/wanted a Unix environment. I stole my wifes Powerbook and used it until work eventually bought me a 15" Powerbook G4 and then later a 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 which is what i'm currently using at the office.

Home has expanded beyond the PowerBook G4 12" (wife's portable) to include an iMac G5 17" (kids room), an iMac Core 2 Duo 20" (wife's office) and then my current pride-and-joy the dual processor, 8 core, Apple MacPro that I currently have 3.5TB of storage atttached to and 6GB of memory. Its the center of my "digital life."

Just about every machine i've ever owned has been taken apart in some way with non-supported memory upgrades, to disk upgrades (the 12" Powerbook was fun to take apart for a disk upgrade) to ROM upgrades. So far all i've done with the MacPro is add memory and disk but give it time...

Along the way I bought parts of old iPods off eBay and put one together (I wasn't sold enough on the need for music in my life to pay the current price of them) and eventually ended up buying several models, the last of which was the 5th generation iPod Video, 60GB.  I replaced various cards and drives in the iPods for myself and then later friends and family. 

I used various normal cell phones like the Razr and PDAs like the Sony Clie but always hated carrying multiple devices around. I hacked the Mac/Razr environment so I could bluetooth sync my contacts but could never get the calendar to go and managed to fry my Razr trying. I even resorted to trying the dreaded Blackberry 7000 series (aka Crack-berry) but I wasn't a huge fan of the interface and the thing that drove me away is that Blackberry has allowed companies to lock out features of the phone when you register the device with the company. Most companies i've worked for require me to buy the phone, so I think if I pay for the phone I should decide what can and cannot go on it (and yes, I get the security concerns driving the corporate behavior).

And then this year, the iPhone came out (waited in line for 2 hours for mine). So now I have my calendar, contacts and ipod and phone in one place. Then the mission became to have my whole life, work + home on the iPhone and thus the recent rash of blog entries (and frustration). And yes, like the other devices in my life, I hacked the iPhone with 3rd party apps, SSH access etc until Apple made that more painful and now with a SDK coming out and 1.1.3 coming out soon I'm trying to be patient.

So, with all that background you'll now know a bit of where i'm coming from on with my posts and focus on the Apple products. The last bit of the puzzle is that I work as an executive in the high tech industry with software and hardware (more software than hardware). Quality, performance, scalability, security and all those things are daily challenges that I think about at work and home. Having a horrible commute gives me lots of time to ponder content for these strange posts.

So if you're still with me, thanks for reading all this. If not, for some reason I felt I needed to brain dump (latent backup needs??) so there you go. Its way past my bed time, and perhaps yours too. 

'til next time.

Follow up

Well, it seems those Synchronica folks pulled the trigger too early.
Their partner website is unreliable and unresponsive. It also gives no
information on the support model for the pay service. That has me
concerned since the beta/demo version didn't work well enough to pay
for...

Exchange on the iPhone

Seems Synchronica finally got organized and now has licensed their
technology for a professional hosted service. See: http://www.syncyourmail.com

I hope the pay version doesnt have all the timeout issues for deleting/
moving messages...

Vista

Ranked #1 tech disappointment of 2007 by PC World: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

Apple, don't blow it this time. The 10 years in between the Apple II
and my OSX mac were pure PC torture.

Dumb articles

In this one "10 Reasons IT Should Not Support the Apple iPhone" (http://www.cio.com/article/165254

) you get a pile of garbage. I do agree with #1, they should allow you
to encrypt some data on the iPhone. Thankfully, products like
1Password have that figured out WITHOUT hacking the iPhone (see http://switchersblog.com/2007/10/05/iphone-password-manager.html)

Anyway, dont waste your time reading the article, its junk.

Back to the file system

Well I tried Yojimbo for a couple days. I kept asking myself, what
does it do better than folders in finder? I could really only find one
thing, the individual file level encryption. Thats not enough to have
a whole proprietary filing system and pay extra with the remote access
concerns etc. So out it goes. It did get me thinking about printing my
receipts online to PDF and just saving them in the file system.

I haven't given up on 1Password -- with that I can have nice and nasty
passwords I dont have to remember or type.

Exchange email on the iPhone?

Can you get the iPhone to work like a Blackberry? No, but you can get
pretty darn close at least for the key stuff:

1) Sync your calendars. Prior to Leopard GroupCal was a nice option
for keeping your exchange cal sync'd to iCal and then to the iPhone.
Leopard came out and the GroupCal authors seem uninterested in their
customer base. They expect an update around Q1. I hope someone finds a
solution that doesn't need GroupCal before then. In the meantime, if
you use IMAP to get Exchange mail, double click on mail invites and
add them to your iCal calendar directly. Thats close enough for me.

2) Email. Even if your company like mine has opened up IMAP, it
probably requires VPN first. Most VPN's ive seen are CISCO based
don't support the VPN the iPhone has built in (or if they do it
requires your IT shop to change CISCO VPN settings. If your
organization is of any real size, forget that.

So you have no VPN and you may or may not have IMAP enabled. Almost
all organizations have Outlook Web Access (OWA) enabled. The iPhone
understands IMAP and POP, what we need is an OWA<->IMAP translation
service.

Enter Synchronica (http://www.synchronica.com/). Their Mobile Gateway
product does just this and for the most part works fairly well. Go to
their web site and sign up for a 60-day free trial. I asked for
pricing after the trial and got no response. Their "resellers" in the
US make no mention of this service/capability. So I have no idea how
to pay for this for real (and given the timeouts in #2 below, i'd be
hesitant until they fixed that)

What you get:

1) Full IMAP like access to your email for reading. You can see all
your folders and all your email and get alerts as new mail comes in.
2) You can generally file, send and reply to emails although sometimes
you get timeout messages where the operation failed. The timeout
happens more on the filing/moving of emails than it does on the
sending. Be careful on the sending since more than once it sent, I got
no error message, but the recipient never received.

For me keeping up on the reading to watch for developing emergencies
(or just to keep on top of things while traveling) its valuable.

Now since I tend to talk about security, lets address that here. Their
IMAP support supports SSL, so data between your iPhone and the
Synchronica gateway is encrypted. OWA is likewise encrypted between
your company's Exchange server and the Synchronica gateway. The email
passes through their gateway and its possible for them to snoop, save,
store etc the data there (naturally they claim they don't and it would
be bad for business if they did). Thats a security risk that most IT
groups would not allow if they knew about it. So you'll have to figure
out for yourself if you tell people how you're reading Exchange email
on your iPhone.

(p.s. When you send mail via this setup it ads a little tag line that
you cant remove while in the demo stage that indicates your mail
flowed by a path like this...)

But, despite my thoughts around security, I dont have a password on my
iPhone. That means if I drop it someone else can read my mail until I
get to a browser to change my password. The iPhone password options
are very limited and have no settings like "enable password if I
havent used it in 1 hour" type controls which would be more useful.
Also as far as I know the iPhone does not encrypt any data it stores
which means a password is just a delay for real hackers.

3) Contacts. AddressX, like GroupCal broke with Leopard and they're
not updating it any time soon. I dont send new emails to many people
from the phone, mostly replies so this really isnt an issue for me.
Those I do send new emails to are in my address book in the mac and
sync to the iPhone just fine.

As to the rest of what the blackberry does, I could care less. I love
my iPhone, I just need it to be useful for both work and home rather
than carry two devices. Yes, I could have just gotten a blackberry,
but both blackberry and my company have conspired to lock me out of
many features on the device (which would be paid for out of my own
pocket) so that was not an option. If its a phone I pay for then I
decide what goes on it.

'nuf said.

Saving stuff

I recently ran into Yojimbo (http://www.barebones.com/products/

yojimbo/) for keeping notes, pictures etc. The whole topic of a
personal storage system for this sort of stuff is interesting. Why not
use the file system? One reason is indexing, another is around
security since you cant encrypt individual items and there's a lot of
overhead in making/using encrypted disk images. I'd be filevault all
the way if the whole concept wasnt totally flawed. So Yojimbo is cool,
and I can print receipts direct to it, save my notes into it and
choose which ones are encrypted or not. It also supports saving
usernames/passwords but offers no browser integration. I've been using
1Password for saving my login information and its a great application
for that with great browser integration. It has the concept of secure
notes but no real import/export capabilities so that piece is sort of
useless. I'd love to see an app with the combination of what both of
these offer. Time will tell.

Accessing stuff at home from work

Ok, so you've been good and disabled all open ports at home but port
22 (ssh) and you've set it up to only allow access with a certificate
(no username/password) and you've renumbered the port to something
else like 1234. How do you copy files back and forth between home and
work without resorting to the command line and SCP?

Here's how:

From the terminal do this:
sudo ssh -p 1234 myhomecomputer.bounceme.net -l myname -L
8000:127.0.0.1:548

Now in finder Command-K (Connect to server) and enter this:
afp://localhost:8000

Substitute your own remapped ports, your local user name and your home
computer URL or IP address.

No you can drag and drop like its local and SSH will deal with the
security for you.

iPhone in the Northeast?

Sitting here shivering in New England it seems obvious that despite
some awesome text correcting algorithms that the iPhone designers live
and work in a much warmer place. Touch typing characters without any
tactile feedback when you're freezing your butt off is not easy. No, I
dont have any ideas how to fix it, perhaps make them run hotter like
the MacBookPro's so they warm your hand to create less jitter :)

Security

With the help of Proximity (http://reduxcomputing.com/proximity.php) and this the little applescript below I now have my screen saver locking within 10 seconds of me walking away from my mac. No need to trigger the screen saver or press a button, its taken care of. Very cool.

Script:

-- Silly little screen locker

-- to be used with Proximity: http://reduxcomputing.com/proximity.php

display dialog "iPhone not nearby, locking screen. You have 5 seconds to cancel" buttons {"Continue", "Cancel"} default button "Continue" giving up after 5

do shell script ("open /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app")

SSH Access

Since i've been complaining about Leopard, here's a plug. You can now
skip SSH keychain managers and have OSX remember your SSH passwords.
See this URL:

http://www.wand.net.nz/~smr26/wordpress/2007/10/28/mac-os-x-leopard-built-in-ssh-agent/

If you were using SSHKeychain before for keychain management you may
need this helpful tip:

http://garrickvanburen.com/archive/sshkeychainsocket-error-on-rake-remotesetup

Then you can setup a cron job to sync some remote (work?) machine to
some other (home) machine like this:

30 00 * * 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 echo "Starting rsync..." && rsync -avz -e "ssh
-p 1234 -i /Users/aUser/.ssh/aUser_home" --delete --
exclude="*Trashes" /Users/aUser/Documents/ aUser@aUser_home_machine.bounceme.net
:/Users/aUser/Documents/Work_machine && echo "rsync complete"

Make sure you setup SSH on your home machine behind some decent
security. For me, its behind a NAT, only one port is open and its not
well known and it only allows my user name in and it requires a ssh
key (username/password not allowed).

I used to do all the above before Leopard, but now I got to drop
SSHKeychain and do it more natively. Thanks Apple!

Hey Apple

Deleting my crontab files on the upgrade to Leopard was not nice. I
consider that data loss. Who does your QA?

Time Machine

So Time Machine basically doesn't support File Vault. I was very
disappointed to see this. It will only back up your home directory if
you're logged out and then all the magic "go back in time" stuff is
disabled. In the days of ever increasing need for security Apple
really dropped the ball on this one.

Finally

Finally there. Didn't help that I have filevault and several macs to do.

This "solution" just stinks: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305454

. Its basically a wipe. I had the problem but ended up moving a bunch
of stuff out of my filevault home volume and then allowing it to
reclaim the space. Once I did that I could turn off file vault (and
then back on again). Finally I got my Time Machine enabled with my
encrypted home directory.

I also had an old 12" MacBook with no DVD that I wanted to install
tiger on. Fortunately I had an external USB DVD RW drive. Double
clicking the installer didnt work (didnt install the DVD after the
reboot), but holding down option during the boot got me to select the
disk and install it.

There are a lot of look and feel changes that will take time to get
used to, but now at least im using it and not watching installs or
LONG filevault operations.

Progress

Well, I made some progress:

1) Stacks - doh - click (left) on them and they pop, hold and you get
a different menu. I was holding. Dumb operator error...

2) Cisco VPN, get the latest here and you'll be fine: http://www.macupdate.com/download.php/10317/vpnclient-darwin-4.9.01.0080-universal-k9.dmg

3) File vault issues, Apple has an article that worked for me. The odd
thing is that disk utility found nothing wrong and nothing to fix, but
running through this process made it work to turn off disk utility. Go
figure. Here's the link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25695

4) Speed of mac pro - clicking on the spotlight icon in the menu tells
me I have 5 hours to go. Sigh. I hope when its done it can actually
find things. The old one never did it well and it sure wasnt zippy.
Perhaps apple needs to meet Lucene (http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/)?

5) 2 of my 5 macs are now running Leopard so i'm getting there

Leopard first takes

Well, it looks cool but I have to admit i've had my issues with
Leopard already before it even hits the shelves in the store:

1) I cant turn on Time Machine on the shiny new 1TB drive I bought.
Seems nobody knew/mentioned that you have to turn off filevault and
then turn it back on again under Leopard before you can enable Time
Machine with a File Vault enabled machine. Do you know how long it
takes to turn it off then back on again??? Im going to find out but
thats miserable. Not to mention my one machine failed in the "turn off
file vault" operation and just came back up with it still enabled.

2) Those spring loaded folders you've heard all about (stacks) dont
always do the spring thing. So far I havent been able to figure why
they do sometimes and at other times dont.

3) On one machine double clicking "install leopard" after inserting
the DVD worked fine. On another it didnt and I had to reboot and hold
down "c" to get it to CD (DVD) boot so I could install.

4) Post install on my 8 core MacPro, the machine is heavily crunching
the hard drives (a mirrored pair of 500GB 7,200 rpm disks) to the
point that the machine is sluggish. Its like the old spotlight initial
pain from Tiger all over again.

Leopard here!

Yes, the long awaited OSX Leopard arrived at 11am today (I laugh at
those waiting until 6pm for the stores to sell it). Upgrade install
is in progress on my main server. Yes, I have blind faith in Apple...