Google Calendar

I wrote a while back about using Google Calendar as my main calendar
source and then BusySync to sync it to my home and work Macs. Well
that worked pretty well until I got a strange email one day from an
admin at our office. "I got this calendar reminder from Google and I
think its related to you, can you please stop sending me emails from
outside the company network?"

Strange. I looked into it. It seems Entourage sync'd to iCal. Google
subscribed to that calendar (I didn't want more than a 2 way sync for
this flakey Entourage stuff) and then Google has taken it upon
themselves to send notices to all meeting attendees about upcoming
meetings. It was an option I had no control over at all. I tried
turning off all the settings and thought I had it licked, and then I
got another email from a colleague saying the same thing.

Ok I thought, this is ugly, I deleted the Entourage calendar from
Google, now only my personal calendars were on there.

Another week or two goes by, and then an email (from my boss's admin)
asking me to cease and desist.

Google, your calendar app is sending emails about calendar events in
deleted calendars to my co-workers. This is unacceptable.

My only fallback was to disable Google Calendars for my domain.
Fortunately i'm the only one in my domain using them. It seems that I
will never be able to re-enable the calendar service on this domain as
Google somehow is caching deleted calendars and events and sending
unwanted messages to people.

I only hope that now with the Calendars disabled it no longer sends
the messages, if it does I have to nuke the domain and hope that
works...

Meanwhile i'm back to iSync for my calendars which is marginal at best
and since Entourage doesn't work its now hard to get a consistent view
of all my calendars in one place. Im hoping that the new iPhone and
Snow leopard release fix this disaster.

Office 2008

The normal office 2008 apps, Word, Excel etc are reasonable for me. I
felt no loss with VBA going away and they've been reasonably stable
and compatible in the otherwise Windows dominated office. What
continues to shock me is how bad Entourage 2008 is. It is the worst
piece of software i've used in a long time. Here are a few MAJOR flaws:

1) Database corruption - seems to happen about once a week requiring
you to rebuild its entire (proprietary) database (hold option key at
launch, get coffee)

2) Calendar/contact sync - this is a great way to lose your data, more
specifically when things go wrong it wipes data off your Exchange
server. Yes thats right, it doesnt just have sync issues, at times it
clears your entire calendar on Exchange. Microsoft, take a note from
apple on the "warn my if more than x% of my data changes" type notices
from iSync (not that iSync doesnt have horrible problems too).
Currently Entourage 2008 is the only way to push your Exchange
Calendar to an iPhone compatible iCal destination. Unfortunately its
so bad that you may as well throw it out and wait for the native
Exchange support in iPhone 2 and Snow Leopard.

3) Microsoft Sync services - this is the best way to heat your lap and
drain your battery. Runs forever, drains your battery, and doesnt do
anything useful. "Force quit" is your solution.

4) If you read an reply to a lot of emails like I do with Entourage
you will eventually see what appears to be a duplicate reply from
someone in your mail box. If you read my blog you'd know that I file
mail after I read it and my inbox is always near empty. So I read a
message, reply, then file. Some time later a new message turns up and
seems to be the one I just filed. Odd. I go on Exchange via OWA and I
see the new message is actually a new reply but for some crazy reason
Entourage is showing me the old one. Cache coherency problems? Don't
know but again, this makes entourage unusable.

5) Calendar time shifts - Although not as quite as disastrous as a
total calendar loss mentioned above Entourage has the habit of
shifting my calendar events by many hours on the Exchange server
itself - yes, it took my existing events and then updated their times
to its liking. I then had meetings scheduled at 2am etc. Again this
makes Entourage unusable.

I read a review of Entourage 2008 recently in MacWorld, they gave it
4/5 stars, same as Apple Mail as a Mail client. I don't think the
reviewers know what they're talking about and I think the entire
Entourage 2008 team should be banned from the software industry forever.

Bento

Ok, so I don't get it. Bento, the "personal database" from the makers
of File Maker has huge support form the reviewers and rates highly.
Its also pushed at Apple stores and on their web site. I tried it and
I just don't understand its value. I have to ask, so what? Perhaps i'm
not the right demographic but frankly I don't see the need for its
existence. Sure it seemed like a nice app but a nice app with no value
to people doesn't warrant high marks.

Where have I been?

Sorry folks, life caught up on me. Currently im 30,000+ feet in the
air fighting a nasty stomach bug on my way home from CA again on my
MacBook Air. For the record, the battery life is fine for me for these
trips. Even in the office yesterday, I never charged it or plugged it
in and used it for notes, spreadsheets etc all day long (but not
constantly).

Just finished a book recommended by a friend, The Daemon by Leinad
Zeraus (an assumed name chosen for its hit raking in Google from what
i've heard). It was a great book and a good fit for my interests and
background (although a little more violent than I expected). If you're
a hacker type, computer gamer or just into the whole digital age, I
recommend it.

Anyway I have a backlog of a few things I want to comment on so
they'll be coming shortly.

p.s. for the record, crossing the country and back in 3 days with a
stomach bug that requires you to find a restroom every 2 hours is not
a pleasant experience. Someday i'll eat again.

Gmail

I love Gmail. Google has made a completely free mail system that supports IMAP and has a great web UI and has the best spam filter on the planet. But even Google makes mistakes. This link is a good summary.

GCal has more issues and has a lot of growing up to do.

And the docs, well they're cool and its amazing what they've managed within a web browser, but they don't come close MicroSoft Office.

Calendar woes & evil birthdays

So despite Apple's mostly broken .Mac sync for calendars I had a fairly decent system going until recently. I kept my calendar in Google Apps  and subscribed to it in iCal then sync'd my calendar to my iPhone the normal way. That way I had my calendar on the road and I could see it from my work or home macs by subscribing. It was a pain that I had to use the google web pages to add/edit events but having my calendar on the road is priceless and I needed to be able to reliably see my calendar at home and work. The .Mac sync you think would have done it, but at least for calendar events i've found it to be terrible.

Anyway so I was ok with the solution, then, for more than a week my calendar sync setup stopped working. I had no new events on the iPhone and I no longer knew what was going on. What happened? From the Mac's point of view it was a simple setup, a few calendars subscribed from Google Apps and then pushed to the iPhone. I couldnt even edit them on the iPhone. So why couldn't it sync? Then I noticed the list of calendars in iTunes for the phone was messed up. I tried all sorts of stuff from resetting my sync history to following various cookbooks to unregister computers, delete sync files etc. None of these worked. I kept searching and eventually ran into something that told me to turn off the "Show birthdays Calendar" in iCal. I clicked that little checkbox and all my calendar sync woes went away. This is a pretty obvious bug and one that others have run into. Sometimes I wonder about Apple.

Anyway, the place I ran into the final solution, BusyMac, has a product called BusySync  which has a new beta version out that allows bidirectional sync with Google Calendars (even Google Apps ones). This fixed the last complaint I had with my system before it broke, that I had to use the Google web pages to manage my calendars. It worked out of the box and now I have the perfect setup.

My personal calendars sync from Google Apps to both my work and home iCal calendars. I can edit in any of the locations (work, home or on the web) and the events turn up everywhere.

My work calendar on Exchange gets pushed to iCal at work by Entourage (I use entourage ONLY for this feature as it has some nasty duplicate email and crashing bugs that may be fixed with the recent update). That iCal calendar gets pushed from the work machine up to Google Apps by BusySync and then back down again to my home computer by BusySync. As with my personal calendars I can edit in iCal at home or work, or on Google Apps or in Exchange (OWA, Outlook or Entourage). The Entourage sync to iCal seems shaky and isn't 100%. It would be nice if the BusyMac people supported OWA sync directly or if Google supported all this sort of stuff themselves (they do have an Outlook->Google Apps sync tool but not for the Mac).

Anyway so now I can use the tools I want and see my calendars everywhere. Welcome to the 20th century.

Apple/Google, buy this technology and either upgrade or add it to your inventory. And then make it free for everyone.

It will be interesting to see how the iPhone 2.0 updates with Exchange support etc change all this in June and if my crazy IT departments rules will even allow this approach to work.

The Paper Free Office

Well, I'm not paper free but I'm well on my way. Its bothered me for a long time that my drawers fill up with paperwork, they're not very secure (we have a lot of animals so there are always people with access to the house) and I have no easy way of finding the papers and even with a reasonable paper filing system its a pain to manage. So I looked around for a while and eventually found the answer -- the Fujitsu ScanSnap 510M  Mac version, there's one for the PC too).

The 510M is fast, scans double sided, and does it in color. It can save to PDF (my preferred approach), do OCR (turn scans into text and does surprisingly well at it), print, email etc. So now when papers come in I drop them in the scanner (by the way its small and you can fill it with papers to scan) it scans them and I shred them. My family makes fun of my shredding. And now, with the scanner/shredder combination, I find my high power cross-cut shredder (yes I drool over the confetti ones, nut that I am) can't keep up -- thats right, I scan faster than I can shred.

So all paperwork with any potential value gets scanned (anything from business cards to tax returns) and then into the shredder it goes. If I need it back I print and it comes back in the full color glory it originally had. My drawers no longer fill and I have a nice tidy filing approach on my mac (in an encrypted disk image). 

So I no longer have to deal with the paper once I initially process it, its much more secure, and I can even get at my paperwork when i'm on the road (via ssh etc).

Now I think about the backlog. I must resist. Too much scanning/shredding. I must resist...

Disk Encryption hacks

Having commented in the past about using disk or disk image encryption to protect my data this research shows that you're never really safe. While thats true, if you use disk images and unmount them, log off (as opposed to locking your screen) or set your keychain to auto-lock after some period, then you'll be more protected against these kinds of attacks.

Video conferencing for the rest of us

Rumors are starting to circulate that Apple will add video conferencing (ala iChat) to its AppleTV. That would be the killer app for the box. For me, as i've said before the, the AppleTV holds little appeal. But if all of a sudden it supports video conferencing i'll be buying one, not for myself, but for my PC-brainwashed family. 

AppleTV becomes Apple's next virus to infect the home after iTunes. iTunes introduced easy synchronization on multiple platforms and a way to deliver music, movies, TV, and soon iPhone apps. Next AppleTV will be replacing your phone calls and bringing more mac-like stuff to your living room. For those who refuse to move off their PCs and move to the unknown world of Apple, this small step (after the lure of the iPhone) is yet another pull into the wonderful world of all things Apple.

Sparse Bundle Disk Images

So i've blogged in the past about my concerns on Time Machine and FileVault and how I use encrypted disk images to store sensitive data rather than use FileVault. Basically Time Machine requires you to be logged out and FileVault encrypts too much anyway.

OSX Leopard introduced Sparse Disk Bundles which I hadn't looked into until recently. Like a sparse disk image they look like a certain size volume but only use whatever capacity you've actually used within them (give or take a bit). The issue with sparse disk images is that when you change anything inside of them the entire image changes due to the encryption and you have to back it up as one big chunk. With sparse disk bundles only a small chunk (min of 8MB) that changed needs to be backed up. 

So rather than a nightly 15 minute backup of some large .sparseimage, you can get down to a nightly 30 second incremental backup of the same data in a .sparsebundle. With the same level of protection. This works both for rsync and for Time Machine.

This means if you have sparse disk images of any size you should consider converting them to bundles. Here's the command line way to convert them:

hdiutil convert -format UDSB -o docs.sparsebundle docs.sparseimage

And then when you feel comfortable (or trust Time Machine) delete the docs.sparseimage file.

Your backups will be faster and you wont eat up all your TimeMachine disk space.

And since you're mounting/unmounting these as you need them you're essentially satisfying the "logout" requirement for TimeMachine to backup the sparse disk bundles.

There's evidently some debate as to whether its safe to rsync/backup a mounted sparse bundle. From above it seems Apple thinks not.

Obligatory comment on MS/Yahoo

Ok, so here's my 2c to the whole thing. Google is mad that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo and Microsoft is angry about that. The thing that I wonder about is why Google cares? Microsoft can't get their stuff together in this area and Yahoo is not even close as far as I can tell (but what do I know?). Yahoo's mail client has gotten a lot more slick and they've been getting into interesting things like push mail with the iPhone but I see all that going away if they join the borg.. oops I mean Microsoft. 

As to the rumors about Apple bidding on Yahoo. I say stick to innovative real products and don't spread yourself too thin.

So really google, why do you care? Just do what you do best and outthink them. The bar really isn't that high anyway (Vista, Mac Office 2008 being two messes i've recently noted in this blog).

Wifi @ 30K

On a recent trip accross the country I finally encountered a plane that had Wifi access for the trip. It was on a JetBlue flight and only worked once you were up to altitude. After waiting for so many years for internet connectivity in the air I was horrified to find they only supported Yahoo IM/Mail and Blackberry IM/Mail. In my Google/IMAP/Web world that means the service is USELESS. Fortuntely the DirectTV and XM offerings work well for me. The Bose quiet comfort 3 headphones my wife gave me for Christmas really help keep the noise and distraction down.

I worked the solid 6 hours on the flight, flipping in a new battery in the MacBook Pro half way while listening to my favorite XM station (16). There wasn't an airline power plug to be found on this new Wifi/XM/DirectTV plane. I could forgo all the rest if I had some juice. What are they thinking?

While JetBlue rarely runs on time in my experience and any unusual weather etc could delay you for days, the flights are comfortable once they get started.

Someday perhaps they'll figure it all out. Meanwhile i'm happy to be home.

Office 2008

Well, Office 2008 for the Mac finally came out and now we have native
office applications. It looks like they should have spent more time
testing it though:

1) The sync with iCal piece for the calendars causes a constant crash
if you import a bunch of calendar data into the "Entourage" iCal
calendar that it creates. The workaround is to import events one by
one which is tedious.

2) The Database Daemon claims it finds corruption and kills entourage
and that goes into an endless loop. The solution is to launch holding
the option key and tell it to rebuild the whole database. That seemed
to do it.

So now that Office 08 is out, how did that change things?

At work I was using Apple mail & imap and then saving calendar invites
to import into a calendar that sync'd with the iPhone.

Now I use Entourage 08 which doesn't feel as nice as Apple Mail but it
works and the calendar integration works too. I have that sync to my
local iCal calendar and then my iPhone syncs work to get work and
personal calendar information on the iPhone.

So at home its Apple Mail (using Google Apps as the hosting service),
at work its Entourage. My home calendars are on Google Calendar, my
work one is on Exchange.

And through it all I avoid the iSync mess that Apple needs to address.

Backups (again)

I was interested in the Time Capsule announcement the other day as I want to be able to backup my other home macs over the network without complex rsync/cron scripts but with the Time Machine interface/abilities. Until this product, it seemed the only way to do these network backups was with OSX Server edition. But then I found iTimeMachine and for free you can enable network based backups for your other machines. 

And while we're on the announcements again i've been thinking about the whole lyrics bit they spoke about. They said they sync and are available but I kept wondering, how do I get the lyrics? I searched around and found pearLyrics. Drop it in as a widget, as you play music in iTunes it adds the lyrics to your music. Note that the author got into some strange legal battle and dropped the product directly but mirrors have it and it works well. 

2 free solutions, gotta love that.

Quicken

Seems they're finally going to rev in the fall. I hope someone comes out with some compelling competition to shut them down before they do. That much of a delay to get to a native application is disgraceful.

And yes, the previews of the app look nice. But will apple still be on the processors when they finally catch up?

MacBook Air (again)

Another interesting thing, the MacBook Air has no Kensington lock slot on it. In theory that means its much more susceptible to theft given its size and appeal. The company I work for has a policy that all unattended notebooks must be secured. As I was pondering/googling that, I ran into a couple of amusing videos showing the hacking of the lock with a roll of toilet paper. I love it. Evidently after this round of videos/posts Kensington made the locks marginally more secure although there still seems to be plenty of evidence that the locks only deter casual theft.

So what is the real value of that slot and does anyone use it?

At work I have 2 laptops, both secured to my desk with these kind of locks (yes, i'm going in armed with a toilet paper roll tomorrow). At home my backup drive is secured to my desk with a lock like that. My big MacPro isnt. So they'll get the expensive machine with my encrypted data but not the backup drive (which also has encrypted data) unless they're determined. And they have to get through the ADT alarm system and 4 dogs. I think thats good enough.

Did I mention I periodically backup my really important stuff to DVD and place them in my fireproof safe (which is in the basement and weighs 800lbs)? 

Ok so i'm a nut, but my data is important to me. Is yours important to you?

Reactions to the keynote

Apple posted the keynote address as a quicktime feed. Here are some running reactions as I watch it:

* Office 2008 is the last big app to go native on Intel. For me this isn't true. Quicken is one of the top programs I use at home and its the last holdout on my hard drive with the current version still being Quicken 2007 (I never upgraded from 2005 since they have added very little in the subsequent upgrades and are not a native app). Quickbooks got there a while back but the Intuit folks are even slower than Microsoft if you can believe that.

* Time Machine. I just wish they'd let my big desktop MacPro that has a 1TB external drive attached to act like a Time Capsule. They've limited the Time Machine code to only allow network backup when you have OSX Server or this Time Capsule.

* Multi SMS is cool, but the ability to repeat the SMSs to the same group because of the chat like view is awesome.

* Web Clips -- the natural for me was NewsGator, it was the first I did. None others made the cut so far. 

* Their approach to finding where you are without a real GPS is very cool with Cell and Wifi hotspot technology. I still think it would have been easier (and more accurate) to just slap a GPS in there.

* He glossed over the Lyrics part. It looked kind of ugly as he flew by it. They didn't say how you can get the lyrics attached to your songs. There are cool widgets to do that on the mac, but nothing to automatically add lyrics to all your iTunes songs.

* I was disappointed they didn't add cut/paste to the iPhone or the ability to share contacts with other iPhone users.

* I'm decidedly not interested in the whole TV Show, Movie, AppleTV and Rental stuff. I have my EyeTV Hybrid to get DRM free TV shows for free onto my iPhone or TV. I also have Netflix  and Handbrake to get Movies onto my iPhone (to delete after I watch...). And EyeTV is easy. They also released V3 of their software today which has some nice enhancements (I just downloaded it but can't install until I finish recording yet another Hannah Montana show for my daughter). For those paying attention, I have a PS3 and a XBox 360. With Connect360 or MediaLink for $20 I can see all my pictures, play music and videos. Sure not the DRM protected stuff, but as I said I avoid those.

* They'll take a lot of heat on the rental time (30 days) or finish within time (24 hours). For example, I started a House episode last week while on the elipitcal trainer at the gym. I got half way through and paused. I didnt get back to the gym (12" of snow...) yet and will finish it some day. I have no time limit and my iPhone knows where I left off. It was all free. Free is real tough competition, Apple should learn from Google on that one.

* MacBook Air. I said it before, but the lack of a swappable battery is a real turn off. When on a long flight I use my MacBook Pro as a portable battery for my iPhone. I've got extra batteries for the MacBook Pro so I dont worry about the phone. Now they've crippled my battery source for my portable devices. I don't know about you, but NONE of the flights i'm ever on have that connector you need for the airline connector. The video really shows off how thin the machine is. But you you need to sacrifice to get from 6.5lbs of MacBookPro (and its 15" screen, removable battery, expansion port) to get to the MacBook Air.

* So Remote Disk for the MacBook Air, why don't we get that on the other machines running OSX? I suspect its coming in some update (perhaps in 2 weeks when these ship). Sharing CD drives over the network is something you could do for a long time. I do wonder how you do a fresh re-install of OSX on it without that USB DVD drive...

Thats it for now. It will be interesting to see how the MacBook Air does in the market. I wonder if a MacBook Pro Air is coming?

Sigh - MBA

Ok, i'm a huge Apple fan but the MacBook Air as I find out more is disappointing.

The SSD instead of a HD upgrade is $1,300. In other words don't bother. Especially considering you lose space and the HD is proven to be durable since its what they use in the iPod. Question is why they didnt include the 160GB version they currently ship in the iPod Classic?

And then the dirty secret, they approached the battery on this like they did on the iPhone -- its not accessible. Thats the stupidest thing i've seen in a long time. What were they thinking? 

So I get on a flight from MA to CA and part way through I run out of juice. What do I do? Today, I close my lid, flip in a spare battery, open back up and carry on. Its a 10 second procedure. Now   its "Game over, man."

So, sigh.

MacBook Air

Apple introduced the MacBook Air today. 

Its got an odd wedge shape and is  0.16" to 0.76" thick. Its got a 13.3" widescreen display which is LED backlit. An iSight is built-in. It has a macBook-like keyboard, but with an ambient light sensor like my existing MacBook Pro. They've integrated the multi-touch stuff from the iphone into the trackpad which will be nice. On the storage side it uses a 1.8" HD, 80MB but you can replace it with a 64GB flash drive. Oddly they don't give you a lot of reasons for doing that upgrade, although performance was briefly touched upon. 

On compute its a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz process. I wonder about the upgrade choice there. With limited disk space in an ultra portable and less ports, why do you need as much power? How many times are you going to be using VMWare or Parallels on this puppy?

It uses the magsafe connector like my MacBook pro, and has a USB 2.0 port a Micro-DVI and a Audio Out port. For networking it has 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR and evidently no wired ethernet port. 2GB of memory is standard. 

The claim 5 hours of battery life which seems really short to me.

Ok, so how much will it cost you? $1,799. I thought about that price, then I went to Dell's web site and tried to find something similar. I found the Dell XPS M1330, somewhat similarly configured for $1,349. So the pricing seems about right. Apple will cost more but then they bring more to the table.

You can read more elsewhere when the official stuff gets posted. Meanwhile, the big question is will I buy one?

I need to think about that battery life and know if the battery can be easily swapped (no more embedded batteries like iPhone PLEASE). Also the TSA is no longer liking extra batteries to tag along with you so thats a consideration.

But, yes, i'll be getting one.

Oh and by the way, the iPhone got some nice updates: Maps with location, Webclips, Customize home screen, SMS multiple people, Lyrics, Webclips, etc. Thanks Apple for the continued free upgrades to the iPhone (I question the fact they're charging the poor iPod touch people $20, but the value for that $20 cant be argued).

Video cards

So Apple finally offers a GeForce 8800 GT video card for the Mac on the Apple Store. I immediately ordered it as its about 3x faster than the ATI card I have today and in general I like GeForce better for video cards from my PC days. Given that I do the dual boot gaming thing, the card is important (I also have a 30" Apple Cinema screen).

Anyway, the next day (today) I get a phone call from Apple. It seems that they have no idea what the card they're selling is compatible with. They said it will only work with the 8 core MacPros, I then tell him I have an 8 core MacPro I bought in March. He's then confused (this one thing about the new 8 core machines when i've had one for 9 months is silly). He essentially said they have no specs, don't know what its compatible with and I should read up in a week or two when the post the specs to see if what I ordered is compatible with my machine. 

Good advice, but it seems that if they didn't know what it was or how it would work with their products they probably shouldn't be selling it. More to come I guess.