Tsaiberspace

My first Macworld Expo. I didn’t go to the Keynote speech; I just got a free exhibits-only pass, and went on Wednesday after all the Mac fanatics got their fix.

This is also my first trade-show that was not one geared towards enterprise infrastructure. It was immediately apparent on the exhibit floor:

• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, everyone pays (albeit employers usually pay), so both the exhibitors and the attendees seem to be more “serious” about the exhibit floor, and everyone is more engaged. It is relatively easy to get into the Macworld exhibit halls for free, so you have lots of “non-serious” browsers. In return, the exhibitors aren’t necessarily as aggressive about tracking down people who are just idly standing around; they figure you’re just a gawker.
• At an enterprise-vendor trade show, the product is generally available for display, but people aren’t actually selling the product right then and there, since the purchase cycle usually goes through some million-dollar purchasing process, and requires racking some pizza-box machine into a cabinet. At Macworld, there were *so* many vendors of laptop cases, sleeves, iPod skins, headphone accessories, it almost looked like a flea market or some street bazaar. Presumably they are there to sell to retailers (Best Buy, Target, etc.) who would be presumably paying some employees to go check out what is new this year. Although, of the consumer products available for sale, most had an “expo” rate that was up to 50% off their list price.

The one cool thing was some actual space where the new products were being demonstrated - iPhones, iPods, and of course, the new MacBook Air:

I was kind of underwhelmed:

• Heavier than expected. It’s still pretty light as far as laptops and portables go, and it is certainly thin and stylish, but I think calling it “Air” is a bit premature.
• I’m not a fan of the chiclet-style MacBook-like keyboard. I prefer the MacBook Pro keyboard.

But it is kind of neat to be able to provide a first-person description of it without having to wait two months to see one in an Apple store :).

Am I glad I went? Sure. Will I go again? Sure, there is enough to see to keep any computer geek happy (even a non-Machead like myself). Would I line up at 5am in the morning? No way.

My MacBook Pro has been gradually taking over primary-computer-and-storage responsibilities (photos, music, web browsing, etc.). The laptop gets periodically backed up to my main always-on Linux server.

One side effect of the Mac-ification of my life is that my music collection became iTunes-ified. To get my Windows machine into the program, I had to throw out Winamp and install iTunes for Windows.

I started importing all the music into the Windows iTunes, but then realized I’d have to do a re-import every time I added more music. What a drag. Then I noticed that the Windows iTunes was displaying the MacBook under “Shared Music”. That was when the light bulb went on - I should be able to set up an iTunes server on the Linux machine. Then the Windows machine could just remotely play everything and automatically stay up to date with no import pain, since the Linux machine gets a direct backup of everything.

Enter Firefly Media Server (formerly known as mt-daapd). All my research indicated I’d have to download and compile stuff from Apple, ugh. But those articles were all at least 3 years old. Forging ahead:

% aptitude install mt-daapd

I started the ornerous task of dealing with Rendezvous.tar.gz from Apple when out of the corner of eye, I noticed that everything was already working, playlists and all!

Quite possibly my least-painful Linux experience ever.

Unfortunately, mythmusic on the MythTV machine lacks a DAAP client, so I’m still stuck synchronizing files over (and using mythmusic’s horrible GUI). Ideally I’d set it up to look like an AirPort Express with AirTunes so that I can push my laptop iTunes to the living room speakers, but apparently there is some still-uncracked encryption involved that prevents this from being a reality.

I bought the TRENDnet TEW-432BRP 802.11g router and wireless access point today. I am probably the last person in the world to finally upgrade from 802.11b to 802.11g.

The motivating reason is my 6-year-old wireless router doesn’t support PPTP VPN passthrough (PPTP is the little-used VPN protocol used at my work). At this point in time, an 802.11g wireless access point is hardly blog-worthy. But these are the blog-worthy points:

• The power supply is the same powerstrip-friendly size as a cell phone charger; the plug only takes up one slot. FINALLY! That alone makes it a winner right there. The palm-sized router itself is also small. The Linksys WRT54G power supply still takes up three slots.
• Only $3.00 at CompUSA this Columbus Day weekend, assuming all the mail-in rebates come through ($20 and $17 from CompUSA and TRENDnet). The purchase price of $40 is still cheaper than the normal $50 one pays for the Linksys WRT54G.

Other notable geek-friendly features:

• It supports port-mapping. This means the router can be configured to expose SSH on some random port to the outside world, but forward those incoming connections to port 22 on my SSH server. Most home routers (like the Linksys WRT54G) only support basic port forwarding, where the public and private port must be the same.
• Mixed-mode 802.11b/802.11g operation appears to work fine (I still have some 802.11b stuff running at home), and they don’t get in each other’s way. The Linksys WRT54G kept hanging when both types of devices were in operation at the same time.
• It is theoretically hacker-friendly, being theoretically capable of running OpenWRT firmware. The new-generation Linksys/Cisco WRT54G models (all you can find at BestBuy, Office Depot, etc. these days) cannot run OpenWRT.

Update(s):

• Dec 16 2007: $20 rebate check arrived.
• Jan 2 2008: $17 Visa pre-paid debit card arrived.

Woo-hoo!

My browsing environment has been Google-fied. My first four Firefox tabs are now:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• iGoogle
• Google Reader

Google Reader finally wins after a long love-hate relationship with Bloglines. Google Calendar completely blows away Yahoo! calendar, and from there it was a simple step to switch away from Y! Mail to Gmail for Calendar and Maps integration.

I tried to resist, but I’ve now succumbed.

First article here.

It was only a matter of time before online web services would be shown to be compromised. TurboTax Online has allowed a user to see lots of juicy information about other online filers, and it was completely inadvertent, not even a malicious attack. See story here.

Three three major tax software providers (well, the three that I know about) all offer desktop software (download or CD purchase) and online services of their products. For a package including one federal return and e-file, and one state return, all three encourage people to go online (or discourage people from staying at home, depending on how you look at things).

Note: This is not meant to be a price comparison between the three vendors; only a price comparison between each vendors’ individual products. The market being what it is, the bundling of services inevitably vary from vendor to vendor.

Buying a CD incurs material costs over downloading software, but why does downloading software cost more than using an online service? It costs money to maintain an online service, and it costs money to store your information from year to year.

To be sure, it is probably worth some money to know exactly how people are using the products (which forms are most popular, which interview questions seem to take the most time, etc.), for the purposes of improving the product and gaining an edge over the competition.

However, the tin-foil-hatted paranoid in me also knows that it is definitely worth a lot of money to know the tax situations of the people using the products. One needs only to consider the value of a list of e-mail addresses (or even physical addresses and social security numbers!) of people in some ZIP code who are married, self-employed, holding multiple pieces of property, with some specific number of children of a certain age, and earning above some certain amount of money (all inferred from information in the tax return).

Even if 2nd Story Software, Intuit, and H&R Block never sell or give out this information, what happens when the companies hit bad times and go belly up on the auction block? I’m sure this data would be worth a lot on its own, outside of the actual tax software and service products. And then there is always the risk of some kind of security breach like another stolen employee laptop, or hacked server, or whatever the breach du jour happens to be.

There is an older writeup of TaxACT here.

Update: the unstated but obvious fact is that using an “online” service for filing means that there is yet one more party storing your tax records, which is one more party able to lose/release your data.

Since becoming Mac-enabled, I had become Workrave-less. I finally found AntiRSI, a similar program for the Mac. It doesn’t appear to keep a history of keyboarding and mousing activity (no more pretty graphs of office productivity), but it does provide smart reminders to take breaks every now and then, so it gets the job done.

And because it’s written natively for Mac, I have to admit that the eye-candy is much nicer than that of the relatively plain-Jane Workrave for Windows and Linux.

After three years of using Quicken 2004 Premier for Windows, I decided to upgrade to a more recent version. I had been underwhelmed with the “Premier” version (it promises extra bells whistles for tracking investments, but I didn’t really see any value-add over my Quicken 2003 Deluxe), so I went back to the Deluxe version.

I did a few things differently this time:

• I skipped retail and bought it on eBay last week ($49.99 retail, $20.50 for me on eBay).
• I had it shipped to my office address instead of my apartment complex. For the past few years, I’ve been spoiled by managed complexes with offices that receive all your packages. We’ll be moving into a house next month with no such luxuries, so I wanted to give the office shipping department a test run before I ordered anything more serious.

A retail CD with no box arrived in the office mail today, in a plain padded envelope. With some small amount of trepidation (What if it’s a fake? What if the CD has viruses on it?), I backed up my Quicken files, opened the CD, scanned it for viruses, and installed it onto my computer.

It was a very anti-climactic experience. Both the Quicken software itself and my data file were upgraded in-place without a hitch.

What differences did I notice from Quicken 2004 Premier?

• The online one-step update now runs in the background when launched, instead of completely taking over your Quicken session and preventing you from doing something else. This is nice. You can click “One-Step Update”, then go back to reconciling your bank and credit-card statements while other transactions are downloaded in the background.
• I can download transactions directly from within Quicken from more of my institutions.
• The color scheme is different, and you get to choose from a few different color schemes (green, blue, etc.).
• Following a disturbing trend, the UI features bigger fonts and bigger buttons, resulting in an effective loss of screen real estate. I understand that there is a legitimate need to increase font and icon sizes to compensate for the ever-increasing resolution of modern LCD screens, but I wish for once that software writers would cater to geeks like me who actually want to get work done on their computers.
• A few things here and there seemed a little slicker, like navigating between different areas of Quicken. Nothing astonishing, and nothing I can quite explicitly identify, but something noticeable. Or maybe I just wanted to justify the $20.50 as something not ill-spent.

What remained the same from my old copy of Quicken 2004 Premier?

• Initial installation is easy. It also leaves a smattering of cross-promoted products all over your Windows desktop. Enough already, I already paid you for the software, do you now have to sell me some extras? I wonder how much money Intuit actually makes from installing icons for MasterCard and CitiBank on the desktop after installation.
• Pretty much everything else.

In summary:

• My office appears to be fine for receiving packages.
• eBay appears to be fine for buying software.
• I will be sticking with Deluxe from here on out. Premier doesn’t offer me anything useful. It does offer more investment-related “advice,” but it’s not that useful.
• The upgrade from 2004 to 2007 might be worth the $20 purchase price, for increased compatibility with financial institutions’ online operations. For example, with Quicken 2007, I can download my Bank of America and Wells Fargo transactions directly from within Quicken. With Quicken 2004, I had to go to the respective websites and download my transactions myself. It’s admittedly just a small plus, but a plus nevertheless.

All in all, not bad for $20.50 for a three-year upgrade. It’s definitely not worth $49.99 for a yearly upgrade. It’s probably not even worth $20.50 for a yearly upgrade.

Edit: Actually, it turns out I have to upgrade, because Quicken only provides online services for products up to three years old. See their sunset policy for details.

I ordered high-speed internet from Comcast. In theory, all they need is for you to provide them with the model number and MAC address of your cable modem (usually on a sticker on your cable modem). In practice, they make you run a setup wizard on some kind of “install CD”. It’s fine that they want to use a computer to communicate technical information instead of making you read a bunch of digits over the phone, but what is unacceptable is that this “setup wizard” takes a further unwelcome step of “branding” your Internet Explorer with a spinning Comcast logo and putting Comcast in the title bar.

I found this tool to remove IE/OE Branding.

I just started a new job two weeks ago. Standard issue for engineers at the company is a choice of laptop: Dell (Windows) or MacBook Pro (Mac OS X). Already being very familiar with Dell and Windows, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to kick the Apple tires.

The hardware is very nice: bright widescreen LCD display, stylish silver finish, pleasant-to-the-touch keyboard, and the very retro one-button trackpad. However, I have been more annoyed than enthralled by everything else that is Mac:

• Everyone raves about the great UI, but while it might be good for completely novice computer users, it’s not so great for anyone who wants to actually get any real work done. Particularly annoying is the motif of a single menu bar at the top of the screen. If I move my application window down to the bottom of the screen, I still have to move the mouse all the way back up to the top of the screen to activate the menu. In Windows, the menus appear within the application window, so the menu bar is never that far away. The single menu bar at the top of the screen saves some screen real estate, but I’m more interested in getting work done than I am in watching my desktop background change colors.
• There is no convenient keyboard-able shortcut system to activate the menus: one must know either the undocumented Ctrl-F2 keystroke to reach the menus, or the pre-built shortcut keys for various functions (open, save, cut, copy, paste, quit, etc.). In Windows, the menu is easily accessible via “Alt”, and the “hot” keys are denoted with underlining.
• The trackpad is neat: one can pan around windows with one hand by holding one finger to the trackpad and using another finger to issue a scrolling motion. However, shipping the laptop with just one button? A single-button trackpad and single-button mouse might look more stylish, but Apple needs to just invent the stylish moral equivalent of a two-button mouse.

Anyway, there are already lots of websites out there that complain about similar issues (and just as many that tout the superiority of such “issues”), so I’ll just say that those are the top-three annoyances.

The whole suite of iLife applications (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) is probably fine and very nice, but at least for normal engineering work, I gave it a shot, and didn’t like it. So I’ve spent the past week getting my MacBook Pro to work and look just like my Linux desktop (this is where I will admit that I like the “OS X” part of “Mac OS X”). It has been a much more fruitful exercise bending the MBP to my will, than teaching this old dog the new Mac tricks.