gavinshearer.com

November 11, 2007

Pardon The Dust

I spent a ton of time working on the blog this weekend, making a bunch 'o major and minor changes and tweaks. To wit:

• The site itself been moved to a new Web host, and is happily parked on servers operated by the friendly folks at Joyent.
• We're running MovableType 4.01 (upgraded from 3.33).
• I fixed a bunch of crazy, UTF-8 weirdness that had somehow creeped in to posts. You might have seen these wacky symbols that looked like a Euro (€) or a trademark (™) embedded in my entries from time to time. I think I've eradicated all of them.
• A bunch of new photos and captions have been added to the header.
• The RSS feeds were consolidated down to a single RSS 2.0 feed, and FeedBurner's presentation of the feed was tweaked a bit.

I've done a lot of testing to catch issues, but I'm sure I missed something. If you see something strange, please let me know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 11, 2007 4:01 PM.
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October 29, 2007

ClearWire Update: Good News

Update on the ClearWire saga:

This morning I got a call from Larry at their Vegas office. I couldn't take the call, but he left me a very nice voicemail with the following information:

1. The information I was given by the salesperson was incorrect, but
2. Since I got it in writing they'll certainly honor it, and
3. They will have a letter out to me to that effect very shortly.

They also encouraged me to call their technical support and see if they could get the problem licked - they felt that "upgrades" had been made in the area, and that I might have success if I repositioned the modem. While I'm not going to sink more time in to making the service work (I've already contracted with the competition), I do appreciate the Hail Mary.

So it sounds like a happy ending. And while I'm never thrilled to pay a cancellation, they did the right thing and held up their end of the bargain.

Good on ya, Clearwire.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 29, 2007 2:15 PM.
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October 22, 2007

Canceling Clearwire

When Elaine and I moved in to the our place last April, we switched our Internet service provider from Comcast to Clearwire.

This was driven by a number of considerations, not least of which was that a) getting cable Internet at our place was going to be an involved process, b) I'm no fan of Qwest (Seattle's incumbent telco), and c) Clearwire was new, friendly, and easy to order. So we gave it a spin.

We were initially delighted with the service - generally very speedy and reliable - but over the past couple of months we've watched Clearwire's service quality go downhill and stay there. Connection speeds vary wildly, often becoming glacially slow; other times, the service will be fine, but then drop for anywhere from 20 seconds to 5 minutes.

I've phoned Clearwire support a few times about this, and, ultimately, their answer is "wait five minutes and try again." Since the service is delivered wirelessly, they don't have lines to check or physical plant they can manage. Instead, the tech guys are stuck prescribing the usual "reboot your equipment", "try moving the location of your modem," or "wave a dead chicken over the device" routines.

(At one point, the guy on the other end of the phone tried to blame my Apple equipment. Uh, no. Note to Clearwire support: it's not 1996 any more.)

The problem didn't get better, and, as the slow service was now preventing us from curling up on the couch and watching Heroes via streaming video, that was that. We made arrangements for alternate Internet service, got it installed, tested it, found it fine, so and I called Clearwire this weekend to cancel.

Or, at least, tried to cancel.

They say that you can learn a lot about a society by watching how it treats its prisoners, and I believe that you can also learn a lot about a company by how it treats is ex- or soon-to-be-ex customers. In my case, I blew a good 50 minutes on the phone, waiting on hold to cancel my account. By the time I finally got to someone who could do the actual cancellation, he informed me that he was "concerned" about me canceling because it meant that I would be charged a $160 cancellation fee.

Uh, er, no. No, that's not right.

See, when I signed up for Clearwire, one of the things I expressly asked the sales clerk about was a) contract length, and b) cancellation policy. I hate contracts with a passion, and, if I'm getting in to one, I want to know what I'm on the hook for. She explained that they sell Clearwire in two flavors - the 1- or 2-year contract - and that signing the 2-year contract gets you goodies like a free modem, $25 VISA gift card, and things like that. Cancellation can be done at any time, but you're on the hook for the balance of your contract to the tune of $10 a month. Thus, if, like me, you have a one-year contract, use six months of it, and cancel, you owe $60 for the balance.

But now they're telling me $160.

I'm not thrilled about cancellation fees in general, but I knew the score when I got the service. I'm OK with paying them the $60; it's what we agreed. But Mr. Clearwire Termination Department doesn't see it that way, so, once I explain the terms that were explained to me by the salesperson, he launches in to this, "Well, sir, I have no idea why you would have been told that, as that's not our policy..."

Translation: "We think you're lying."

So then I explain to Mr. Clearwire Termination Department that I have these terms, you know, in writing, because the nice lady at the sale kiosk wrote them down on my order form.

Funny how fast the tone of a conversation can turn around.

Termination Department wants me to fax him a copy of the paperwork; I look at my calendar (Saturday), look around me (I'm at home) and explain that I'm nowhere near a fax machine because it's the weekend, and I'm at home.

Fine. I can mail it in.

So I then proceed to blow another 15 minutes writing a letter to Clearwire, making a photocopy of my paperwork, putting a stamp on it, and then shipping it off to Las Vegas.

I'm annoyed. Totally, totally annoyed. Glad that I have the agreement in writing, of course, but still annoyed that this is how they play the game. Searching the Internet for other customers reveals similar stories. Wonderful.

Stay tuned.

(Interesting fact: Clearwire's automated hold system actually says, "To cancel due to connection issues or speed problems, press 3." Wow. I wonder how many people are grappling with these issues?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 22, 2007 7:41 AM.
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June 30, 2007

Malleable Google Maps

I don't know how new this feature is, but this morning I found that Google Maps' driving directions are malleable - that is, when you get the default for directions from Point A to Point B, you can change the route by just grabbing it and snapping it to the preferred way you'd like to go. Everything auto-configures on the fly.

To see it in action, click here (opens in a new window). You'll see the default driving directions between Key Arena and Greenlake, which normally take you along I-5.

Now, hover your mouse over the route there on I-5; you'll see a box that says, "Drag to change route." Pull that line over to Highway 99. The route will recompute automatically, and you'll see a new balloon to indicate your preference.

It's wicked, because it lets you quickly adjust your maps based on things like, say, picking up a friend on the way someplace, or avoiding a stretch of road due to traffic or construction.

(It's also ideal if you like to walk places and want to see what your mileage might be.) Give it a try!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 30, 2007 4:12 PM.
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June 24, 2007

Same Planet, Different Worlds

One thing that's surprised me about the whole moving-in-together thing has been how much time I spend checking my calendar.

Elaine and I are both pretty social, and as such we're forever trying to schedule ourselves or the other for dinners, lunches, walks around Greenlake, barbecues, Storm games, and the like. Until about a month ago, we generally did this with e-mail, which was like this extended game of Battleship:

G: "I'd love to have Bill and his wife over for dinner. How's the 18th?"
E: "No, I can't do the 18th. I have a thing with [insert group of friends here]."
G: "Hm. Weeknights are tough for them, so it's gotta be a weekend. How about the next week?"
E: "Uh ... well, Sunday might work, but we have that party with [insert group of friends here] on Saturday night."
G: "Drat, I forgot about that. And Sunday won't work, because I'm going out with [Microsoft people/MBA people/others] for drinks."
E: "Well, we could try ..."

So the conversation continues like this over several more exchanges, and, eventually, we locate a date that seems to work ("You sank my battleship!"). Then I just have to see if Bill's OK with a) the weekend we've chosen, and b) being scheduled out two years.

And then, a month ago, we tried switching from e-mail to using a series of shared Google Calendars.

It's like going to heaven.

If you've not tried it, Google Calendar is a terrific Web-based calendar. It's very simple, very usable, and very powerful -- a great Web application that feels a lot like a desktop app. However, the secret sauce of Google Calendar (much like the secret sauce of most of Google's Web applications, like Docs & Spreadsheets) is that Calendar makes it possible to share your calendars with others.

The scenario breaks down like this. I log in to Google Calendar and populate a calendar with a handful of my personal appointments. I want to share this with Elaine, so she knows where I am (and whether to expect me for dinner). So in the Calendar, I click on the options drop-down, select 'Share this Calendar' and then enter Elaine's e-mail address. She gets an invitation in e-mail to look at my calendar, which, when clicked, adds my appointments to her Calendar interface. Simple.

We've set up a few different calendar files, based on the context of what we'll be doing. Our "big three" are:

• At Home. (What's goin' on at the house?)
• Social Engagements. (Who're we hanging' with?)
• Travel. (Where are we?)

We also have the Storm Home Game calendar, and I've put up a calendar for my hobby stuff (e.g., singing).

Since we're now both working on the same calendar file, we have a need to let the other one know if a given event is for one or the both of us. Thus, we flag appointments with "[G]", "[E]", or "[G+E]" to indicate whether the appointment involves me, her, or the two of us. (Entries have titles like, "[G] Drinks with Jon".)

We're about a month into using this system, and I can't go back to e-mail. Having everything consolidated into a single view (that I can get from any Web browser!) is fantastically convenient, and saves time. Bill can walk in to my office, talk can turn to that dinner we've been trying to plan, and I can give him some good dates right away, rather than playing the, "Uh, let me e-mail Elaine and see what her calendar is like" game.

Now right about now, I'm sure a few of you are asking, "But what about iCal? I thought you were all hot on your GTD, iCal-as-dashboard system! How does iCal know what's going on with your Google Calendar?"

This is a great point. One of the big challenges I've had with Google Calendar has been interoperability with iCal - out out of the box, iCal can subscribe to calendar items in Google Calendar (change it in Google Calendar, and iCal gets the change), but this is a purely one-way relationship - I can't use iCal to change what's on my Google Calendar.

And then came along Spanning Sync, and everything got better.

Spanning Sync closes the loop between Google Calendar and iCal. It's a Mac OS X Preference Pane that keeps selected Google Calendars in sync with the calendars on iCal, and vice versa. As a practical matter, this means I can continue working in iCal as I usually do - dragging around appointments, changing things - and Spanning Sync lets Google Calendar know, so Elaine gets the latest, freshest, most-up-to-date information. When I'm at home, I can work on my Mac; when I'm at work, I can use Google Calendar through the Web. It's seamless, slick, and, like all great Mac software, Just Works. It also allows me to keep using KGTD, MailTags, and all the other great stuff I rely on to manage my projects. Spanning Sync isn't free (I pay $25/year for it), but it does come with a 15-day trial to let you know if you'll like it or not.

(I liked it.)

So there it is. I know a lot of my fellow Geek Couples wrestle with this problem, too, so folks, lemme tell ya - give it a try. I predict you'll be able to leave "Battleship" where it belongs - at Game Night.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 24, 2007 10:57 AM.
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May 19, 2007

Google Analytics

I've just switched my page-tracking system on the blog from Urchin over to the new-and-improved Urchin (aka Google Analytics). If anyone notices anything strange, please let me know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 19, 2007 11:00 PM.
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May 13, 2007

Airport Extreme, Super Duper, And A Good Night's Sleep

Last month, I upgraded the 'ol home WiFi network to the (allegedly) so-fast-it-hurts 802.11n standard, courtesy Apple's new Airport Extreme base station. I went with the Extreme for a lot of reasons - the speed was attractive, of course, as was my ability to collapse a bunch of older, loose pieces of Linksys network equipment (some of which was left over from my Vonage adventure) into one compact, gleaming, glowing chunk of Apple tech.

But the big reason I went with the Extreme was for its ability to share a hard drive across a network.

See, I'm a bit fanatical about backing up. Ever since my old PowerBook threw a drive in Orlando last July I've become that guy who backs up early and often. My usual routine involves a good, weekly dump to an external disk using SuperDuper!. Saturday morning rolls around, I plug in the drive, and then I'm off running errands for a few hours.

But I do a lot of work on my computer, and weekly really isn't good enough. The thought of losing my machine on a Friday night - and wiping out a week's worth of work - has been nagging me, and I've wrestled with good ways of solving the problem. SuperDuper will allow for regularly-scheduled backups (e.g., "please back up my machine every night at 9:30 PM"), which is great, except that at any given moment in time during the day, my MacBook is as likely to be on my lap as it is on my desk. And if I'm not at the desk, I'm not next to my backup drive ... and so the backup doesn't get done.

(This problem is going to get even worse when Time Machine comes out, as it creates a continuous backup of your machine, saving copies as you modify individual files or resources.)

So. Backing up more frequently is a really, really good idea, but to make it practical I needed a centralized data store, accessible over the wireless network.

Enter Airport Extreme.

Seriously, the Extreme is fantastic. I just plugged my external, 500-GB USB drive into the base station, turned on sharing in the Airport Utility, and - bingo! - the drive is available on my network. Mac OS X mounts the drive when I sign in to my home network; the network volume works just like you'd expect it to. (Which means that when I'm on free coffee shop WiFi, there's no network volume, but when I come home the thing mounts automagically.)

Performance isn't bad, but it's not as speedy as advertised. 802.11n, like 802.11b or g has two speeds: the "theoretical" transfer limit and the "real world" performance. Theoretically, 802.11n can deliver speeds up to 600Mbit/second. In the real world, transferring a 1.02gb QuickTime file took me a little less than 10 minutes in one test, and a little more than 15 in another - or 13Mbit/sec and 8 Mbit/sec, respectively. (I'm doing some tweaks to see about boosting this.)

But truthfully, the performance is acceptable, and the peace of mind from having a reliably-backed-up MacBook is well worth the expense. When Leopard comes out, I fully expect to point it at my network volume, and let OS X simply park my changed files on the backup store. And, of course, there's a lot of flexibility, too - if I need more storage space or a greater degree of robustness, I can swap out the standalone 500-gig disk for a multi-drive RAID array.

Peace of mind is wonderful.

(PS To My Fellow Computer Users Who Don't Back Up Regularly - as one who has lost more than one drive to the Angry Gods of Data Loss, please believe me when I say that you will curse the universe when your hard drive sloughs off this mortal coil. Back up, back up, back up. Unless you can afford to lose all your photos, music, e-mail and so on ... in which case, what are you using your computer for, anyhow?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 13, 2007 2:48 PM.
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May 11, 2007

My Google Maps

Google rolled out a new feature on their mapping service not too long ago, called "My Maps." I noticed the new "My Maps" tab in the interface, but, truthfully, hadn't really explored it until yesterday, when I saw that someone had gone through and built a My Map of the Magic Kingdom.

So today, I'm in Jeff's office and engaged in a little impromptu Disney geekery, showing off the Magic Kingdom My Map and pointing out differences between the Magic Kindgom and Disneyland. At which point, the subject of My Maps - and their inherent coolness - came up, and I had to confess that I'd not, you know, uh, played with 'em.

(Uh, Iwasbusywithworkandjustmovedandbesidesit'sbeenalongweek...)

So then Jeff smoothly moves into his "I'm giving a demo" voice and explains that My Maps lets you define collections of points on a map and then save them - perfect, say, for planning a vacation. If you're off to London, you could easily start a My Map for the trip, plotting the location of the London Eye, Big Ben, The Tower of London and so on. Then, when you're figuring out what to do with your day, it's easy to see what should be done at the same time, and the distances you need to cover.

Another killer use is having My Maps to store and plot a collection of restaurants you're itching to try. Jeff is already doing this, so at one point he did the double-click thing and I found myself staring at a map of Seattle, decorated with pushpins representing restaurants that I've heard a lot about ... but, like Jeff, have never tried.

And thus, the lightbulb went on.

Naturally, I've spent a chunk of my afternoon re-creating Jeff's concept for my own personal use (swanky, gotta-try-it restaurants in Seattle), but am realizing that planning my vacations is going to be a lot, lot more fun.

Maps can be shared, too. So I ask, dear readers - what are you going to put in your My Map? Send it along!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 11, 2007 5:28 PM.
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May 9, 2007

Custom Google Map Of The Magic Kingdom

The Disney Blog is running an article this morning with a link to a custom Google Map that shows the distinct geospatial location of most of the attractions, restrooms, and so on inside the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. Switch to the satellite photo (like this Space Mountain link) and zoom around! Link.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 9, 2007 9:40 AM.
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April 22, 2007

coast2Coaster 1.2

I got to spend some time this weekend updating coast2Coaster. The good news is that the mashup now has the most-recent coaster data from our friends at RCDB, and if you're planning a trip for 2007, well, you're good to go.

The number of parks and coasters has dropped a bit - we're down to 743 coasters this year (from 744 last year) across 266 parks (from 269).

(I'm a little embarrassed that it'd been a year since my last update. Apologies.)

I did a bunch of under-the-hood work on my software as well, which should enable me to roll out a few new features over the coming months. Stay tuned!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 22, 2007 2:37 PM.
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February 19, 2007

Introducing The Book

The internal "Office Product Planning Random" e-mail alias delivered gold (again) this morning (tip 'o the hat to colleague Jill for sending it over) with the video, "Introducing the book."

It's non-English (but does have subtitles), and anyone who has done in-person tech support at some point in their life will laugh, laugh, laugh (and cry, cry, cry) over this puppy. Be sure to watch the whole thing, too - the last 20 seconds or so (when it's "flipped over") are just priceless.

Check it out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 19, 2007 8:48 PM.
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December 27, 2006

Some Thoughts On The New Parallels Beta

The dealers-of-lightning over at Parallels put out a new beta (build 3094) of their must-have Desktop For Mac product last week.

Holy smokes, it's cool.

First, a bit of history. Parallels Desktop for Mac ("Parallels" for the rest of this article) is a program that lets you run Windows (and, more importantly, 3rd-party Windows programs) on your shiny new Intel Macintosh. As such, it's been of keen interest to Mac folk like Yours Truly who love their OS X, but have need to run a Windows program or two from time to time.

Back in January, I wrote a piece ("Prediction: XP Is The "New Classic" Under 10.5") where I talked about how Apple's move to Intel processors was, in no small part, calculated to allow much easier 'switching' to the Mac platform by longtime Windows folks. Virtualization - the ability to run Windows on your Mac - was the centerpiece technology in making this happen:

By going to Intel (as opposed to the Sparc, or the Cell, or any one of a billion other chip designs Apple could have selected), Apple now has binary compatibility with Windows, and, by extension, the entire family of Windows applications that exist in the world. This is the centerpiece of Apple's strategy for the next 5 years.

At the time, I assumed Apple was going to bake seamless virtualization into Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5):

And on the experience side, well, I suspect that Apple is working to make that pretty seamless. And the only way they can do that is to build compatibility for Windows software right in to the operating system directly. As it happens, Apple has a lot of experience doing this - namely, with Classic and with X Windows. In both cases, Apple made it possible for programs written for other operating systems and environments to work natively, and seamlessly, on Mac OS X.

Subsequent public statements by Apple management - coupled with the release of Boot Camp, a non-virtualization approach for running Windows on the Mac - have proven me wrong. Apple is not going to put Windows apps side-by-side on the Mac.

Instead, Parallels is going to do it.

Parallels has delivered some astounding innovation in a fairly short period of time. The product started life as a straightforward virtualizer - run Windows in a window on your Mac, and call it a day. The performance of Windows under Parallels is pretty damn snappy, and, for those of us who (un)fondly remember the sluggishness of Virtual PC, it was both eye-catching and habit-forming.

What's impressed me to death about the new Parallels betas, however, is that their product team clearly has a vision of seamless integration between Windows applications and their Mac counterparts. Their first effort toward this end - introduced just a few weeks ago, with Beta 1 - is called Coherence Mode, and it effectively erases the "Windows in a window" experience of virtualization. Coherence isn't perfect (yet), but it's damn good; watch this video to see how it works. (Cats and dogs living together ... mass hysteria!)

After the shock and awe of Coherence wore off, I sat down with Jeff and we talked about a few of the shortcomings. I mean, Coherence is damn cool, but if it's going to be really seamless, Parallels needed a few more things. Specifically:

• Dock launching. Going in to the Windows environment, popping up the Start menu, and launching a Windows app is just too jarring for most people. What we really want is a way of launching Windows apps from the Dock, just like Mac apps.
• Mac-like window management. Under Coherence, minimizing a window in Windows throws it into the Windows Taskbar, not the Dock. Again, this is jarring and strange; what's needed is the ability to minimize a Windows window into the Dock (presumably via Genie or Scale effect) and summon it back out again.
• Common file system. Today, Windows files (e.g., that .doc file you're editing) must live in Parallels' virtual hard drive, which means you're forever copying files from your "real" Mac to your "virtual" PC. This is a pain. Parallels should simply mount your MyDocuments folder in Windows as a network share, and then point that at your ~/ folder on the Mac. Voila! You can now work on a Mac file from a PC app, no copying/file management required.

And then Parallels Beta 2 came out, and what did it have? Dock launching. Better window management. And a stronger, more seamless Coherence. (If you want to see a LifeHacker HowTo for Mac/Windows integration, go here.)

I tell ya, these guys get it.

(Heck, Apple might as well be funding these folks. With all the new business they'll bring to the Mac, they're practically the Aldus of this decade.)

Of course, true seamlessness between Mac and Windows applications points to a rather interesting existential question about the future of the Mac application market. To wit:

If you can run any full-blooded Windows application on your Mac ... why buy a Mac app at all?

Now, in fairness, I think this is a question with an obvious answer. I mean, if you wanted to just run Windows applications all the time, why buy the Mac in the first place? And indeed, I think about all the great Mac apps that I use and love like NetNewsWire or OmniOutliner or Yojimbo, and there's no way that I'd switch to a Windows counterpart -- assuming one even existed. A lot of Windows software is clunkware - ugly, rudely functional, designed for people with too much free time. Great Mac applications like Delicious Library or Transmit have nothing to fear from the likes of WS_FTP.

Of course, what makes these applications great is that they take smart advantage of the Apple platform - the system services (like AddressBook) and UI conventions that make the Mac the Mac. And those applications that Go Native - not in an Intel-processor sense, but in a Chewy Mac Goodness sense - have nothing to fear from Parallels.

But there is an entire class of applications that I think are officially on the endangered species list.

I'm talking about PC ports.

As a "for instance", let's take the statistical package SPSS. It's an industry-leading product, with a thriving market for third-party developers and others who want to integrate statistical analysis into their business. We worked with SPSS in business school; I've been trained on the product through some classes SPSS offers. It's cool stuff.

SPSS even has a Mac client. And you know something? It sucks. It's inferior to the current Windows version (generally, a generation or two behind - currently it's at v13, while SPSS for Windows is v15), and many/most of the third-party partner applications won't work on it.

So, if I'm a Mac user who can suddenly run the full-throttle maximum-red-hot SPSS for Windows alongside my Safari and Mail.app, am I gonna settle for something that's two generations old?

Not on your life.

There are also good Mac products that happen to have Windows counterparts on different ship cycles. Mac Office is one of these. There's been a recent kerfluffle over the new, XML-based file formats used by Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007, and the fact that there are no converters available for the Mac (yet), while Office 2003 for Windows has 'em now. Rick Schaut over at the MacBU writes:

Lastly, can we port the Win Word converter? Well, actually, in a way, porting the Win Word converter is exactly what we have been doing, but we’re still faced with having to wait until Win Word ships before we have the final source code to merge into what we’ve already ported. Once that merge is done, then we still have to go through several months’ worth of testing and bug fixing before they’re ready for public use.

And that is precisely why there’s a delta between Win Office 2007 shipping and the full availability of converters for Mac Office.

Of course, in a world of seamless virtualization, Mac customers have another choice: simply buy the Windows version of Office 2007, today, and run it as a first-class peer on your Mac. If you need the file format converters more than you need the Mac experience that Mac Office offers you, you're no longer in the ghetto - you've got choices.

StuffOnFire (great name, BTW) even takes this a step farther and asks, "Does Office:mac Still Have a Place In The Universe?":

But I argue that any Mac user who gives two shits about opening Office documents is working at a company that uses Office for Windows. Seriously: why else would you care?

While I may disagree with some of the points of the post (I rather like Mac Office, and don't think of it as a "hulking Carbon beast running emulated in Rosetta on my MacBook Pro"), I have to admit that the guy's got a point. If you want the latest-and-greatest Office - including products that don't have "official" Mac counterparts, like Groove or OneNote or Visio - well, you're good to go. Get thee to the Fry's and load yourself up.

For developers, I daresay the handwriting is on the wall: if your Mac app isn't sufficiently Mac-like, it will simply collapse into its Windows version, or, in the case of terrible Mac apps, simply cease to exist when competition comes to town.

The Parallels guys are very aggressive about their updates, and I'm really eager to see what they've got up their sleeves for 2007. They're killing bugs, incrementally adding features, and eventually will get the product where it needs to be. My wish list contains the three items I listed above, plus a couple small ones: smart hyperlinks (clicking a link in a Windows app should spawn Safari, not IE) and support for sync services (so I can sync with Outlook, or whatever). But those are coming, I'm sure.

$5 says Parallels gets 5 minutes on stage with Steve at January's MacWorld.

UPDATE, December 29, 2006: Parallels Beta 3 (3106) is now out. (Jeez, do you guys ever sleep?)

UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 27, 2006 10:42 PM.
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December 11, 2006

Just Say Yo

I've previously posted about David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology, and how it's saving both my time and my sanity. GTD helps me get stuff out of my head (where it tends to rattle around, noisily, and then pop up from time to time when I'm least in need of it) and into a System - a comprehensive project list that makes sure I'm not missing details or dropping ideas.

GTD is, fundamentally, an identification and tracking system. It helps me pick out projects or tasks that need doing (or, at least, warrant future attention), and then lets me schedule those tasks at times when they're most efficiently done.

What GTD (or at least, my software implementation of it) does not do is help me track a lot of the qualitative 'stuff' that surrounds any given project or task.

Let me give you an example. Whenever I'm working on my column, I invariably have to go through the following steps:

1. Locate an appropriate question. This usually means that I'm reviewing the list of e-mails and other column ideas that have been submitted to me over the past few months.
2. Draft an outline of the answer to the question. I then identify areas where I'd like to do a bit more research, or things I'd like to check on.
3. Conduct the necessary research, keeping track of the various pages or citations I think I might need.
4. Write the actual column.

GTD is great for ensuring that I'm reminded when a column is coming due, and also great at scheduling tasks around the column itself (e.g., "phone my editor"), but it's not great for keeping track of the questions, the Web research, and other aspects of the project itself. Effectively, what I need is a 'repository', a place to store, categorize, and locate the bits and pieces of the project when they're needed.

There are software products that do this, of course - it's just that none of them are very good. Historically, I've used AquaMinds' NoteTaker; while it's kinda clunky (I often find its interface to be just ... strange), it does a credible job of letting me keep 'pages' for my projects, and 'folders' to bundle like pages or projects together.

Problem is, I find myself getting frustrated with NoteTaker on a regular basis (about every 6 or 8 weeks or so). This is usually triggered when it (often) does something to annoy me, at which point I convince myself that There Just Must Be Something Better Out There, Dammit; then I'm off and downloading demo after demo of software programs that, frankly, aren't that great, either.

I feel like I've tried 'em all: Circus Ponies' NoteBook (which shares a codebase with NoteTaker, but is a bit different), StickyBrain (Cintra likes this, which was major points in its favor), DevonTHINK, a handful of others. They all fall short, for a variety of reasons too banal to get in to here.

And then, recently, I tried Yojimbo. And, finally, NoteTaker has been kicked to the curb.

I don't suppose I should be terribly surprised by this. Yojimbo is made by Bare Bones Software, they of the Mac-only, fabulouso-text-editor-extraordinaire BBEdit (to use BBEdit is to love BBEdit, as the old saying goes). Bare Bones makes great stuff, and with Yojimbo they brought their usual philosophy of Not Sucking and focused it on how to capture, retain, and find information easily.

(Sounds about perfect, doesn't it?)

Yojimbo is a 'repository' in the same way that all the other products are, except that it makes it really, really easy to pipe your data into its system. Here's what I like about it:

• Yojimbo has a sidebar that sits along the right side of your screen. Dragging a file or URL to the sidebar causes it to pop out, at which point you'll see a list of folders for your projects. Just drop the file or URL into the folder, and a copy is put in the appropriate place. This makes it super-easy to do Web research -- you just drag-and-drop the URLs of Web pages that you're interested in into the appropriate Yojimbo folder for later review.
• Another nice innovation: Yojimbo lets you drag plain-vanilla URLs into the system, but it also lets you drag Web archives - cached versions of the page. This lets me keep offline copies of everything on my Mac, and lets me access information I might want when I'm not connected to the Internet (aka, "The Airplane Scenario").
• The search engine in Yojimbo is amazing - lightning-fast, compatible with Spotlight, very granular. The experience is much like that with iTunes - just start typing, and all the relevant stuff comes right to the top. This is a nice change from NoteTaker, who would often offer answer my queries as if it had trained under The Sphinx from Mystery Men ("He who questions training ... only trains in asking questions").
• Yojimbo supports custom tagging, labels, and flags on any item in its database. It also supports custom 'project' folders (think: "Smart Playlist" in iTunes) based on these criteria. Wanna see all the flagged items in the system with a "wedding" tag (I mean ... hypothetically, you understand)? No problem. They're all in one place.
• Yojimbo deals natively with PDF files, and makes it simple to park a PDF of any file or Web page you're looking at in its store with PDF services. Just 'print' your file and select "Save PDF to Yojimbo"; the system does the rest.
• There's a handy-dandy quick-input panel (hit F8) that lets you easily take notes from a phone call, meeting, you name it without leaving your current, running, frontmost app.
• Heck, the silly thing even supports storing serial numbers and passwords - and offers encryption to protect them from prying eyes. (Yes, I've converted over from PasswordMaster, and I'm in heaven.)

Yojimbo's still got a few places it can go - for instance, it would be great if I could highlight and annotate a PDF in its database, for research/review purposes - but that's a quibble. I've had a much easier time tracking the various little constituent parts of my projects ever since I started using it - and given how many projects I'm generally managing, that's really saying something.

There's a free, 30-day demo. If you're running on a Mac (and you are running on a Mac, right?), I strongly, strongly recommend you give it a look.

Way to go, Bare Bones. My hat is off to you folks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 11, 2006 9:44 PM.
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November 22, 2006

MovableType 3.33

I've upgraded the blog to run MovableType 3.33; the upgrade seemed to go smoothly, but if you notice any weirdness, please let me know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 22, 2006 5:00 PM.
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September 21, 2006

Getting Things Done

Keith and I recently got into a conversation about productivity - he noticed that my e-mail inbox was relatively clean (3 or 4 messages) and was curious as to what, if any, techniques I use to stay on top of things.

I'm a recent convert to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology (aka "GTD"). Allen's methods have caught on like wildfire among the geek crowd (see also: 43 Folders, Lifehacker), and for good reason - they're simple, easy to implement, and they work. Buy the book.

Allen's techniques boil down to a few simple concepts.

First, when a new 'thing' comes in to your life (e.g., an e-mail message), you make a decision, right then and there, what to do about it. The motto is, "do it, defer it, delegate it, or delete it." Doing is appropriate if the item is simple (2 minutes or less) or really important. Deferring is better when the project can't be done right this second - it might require a special kind of attention or thought, say. Delegating is when you need to throw the ball to someone else for their action; Deleting is just what it sounds like. (And personally, I've found the DELETE key to be my best friend. It's incredibly liberating to just zap stuff that you know, in your heart, you weren't going to deal with anyway.)

Generally, this works great for quick-hit stuff (you've Done it), team/collab stuff (you've Delegated it) and unimportant stuff (Deleted). Problem is, you're now leaking all these non-trivial tasks into your Deferred list -- and that's not helpful, right? I mean, the deferral list for important items ("Write business plan", "Suck up to boss") will compete with the list of other Stuff You Have To Do Sometime that's rattling around your head ("Get milk at grocery store", "Buy a birthday card for Richard", "Run marathon"). You need a system to track your deferred tasks, or else they'll just congeal into this unmanageable, amorphous blob.

Enter the comprehensive project list.

Allen proposes that you use a system to capture all these various Deferred items. When he works with his clients, he actually will spend a couple of days going through their office and files, capturing every last thing the person is doing, needs to do, intends to do, or thought it would be "cool" to do some day. (As you might imagine, for most people - especially go-go-go Type A's - this is a big, hairy list.)

Most of the items on the list are going to be unevenly sized - that it, some items will be small, and deferred because of timing ("Go to Hallmark next week and get that birthday card") while others are larger, and deferred because, well, they're daunting ("Plan Paris trip"). So, armed with your comprehensive project list, you walk through it and figure out what the smallest next step is for each item. In the case of the birthday card, there's not much to break down (I mean, just buy the card, right?), but with the Paris trip, a first step might be to call a travel agent, or go on the Web to find out what fares look like right now. Whatever that next thing is, identify it.

OK. So now you've got your project list, and you've got your set of next steps. Problem is, these steps can't be done in a vacuum - some require equipment (a computer, a phone), while others require you be in a specific location (at home, at work) or in a specific mode (out running errands). Allen calls these "contexts", which refers to the situation you need to be in to work on the step in question. There's no canonical list of contexts out there; rather, people create their own, based on what makes sense to them. I use a short fairly short list:

• @Home - Things I have to be home to accomplish, like cleaning my bathroom.
• @Anywhere - Things I can do on an airplane or on the bus, like reading.
• @Mac - Things that require my personal computer, like e-mail or blogging.
• @Work - Things that require me to be at my desk at the office.
• @Errands - Things that get done when I'm out and about, like picking up dry cleaning or shopping for groceries.
• @Phone - When I need to call someone.

Your list of contexts may (will) vary, but these have been quite useful for me. (And if you want a deeper dive into contexts, be sure to check out 43 Folders' article on the subject.)

So you've got your project list, your next steps, your contexts. Whew! Sounds like a lot of work, huh?

Well, actually - it's not. What's has been a lot of work, for me at least, was feeling drowned in tasks and projects, or worrying about whether or not I was forgetting to do something, or - even worse - knowing that I had some projects lurking in my mind or on my hard drive that I was simply not doing because they felt too big or too amorphous. Getting clarity on what my projects really are and what I need to be working on next is ... wonderful. My mind clears up, anxiety drops, and I can focus.

Not only that, but the ongoing overhead of project/task management is low. It's actually really, really easy to maintain things once you've got your project list, and, if your tools support the GTD methodology, it's unbelievably trivial to stay on top of the various things you're trying to shepherd.

For example, I have a project called "gavinshearer.com" for blog-related items. The top-level project has two subprojects - "Entries" and "Site". "Entries" captures ideas for posts I'd like to write, or posts that are currently in progress. "Site" is a list of improvements I'd like to make to the physical site itself - software upgrades to Movable Type, that kind of thing. When I have an idea for an entry or a site improvement, I just drop it in to the appropriate project folder. Nothing gets lost. And, every Sunday or so, I go through my project folder and figure out what I want to work on this week - just assign a context ("@Mac") and a due-date, and I'm in business.

From a mechanical standpoint, I manage my life in software (natch). As it happens, the Mac is a hotbed of GTD software development, and there are a number of options available to Mac users to make this stuff dead-bang easy. My kit consists of:

• iCal. (Free, comes with Mac OS X)
• OmniOutliner Pro. ($70, OmniGroup)
• Kinkless GTD. (Free download)
• Mail.app. (Free, comes with Mac OS X)
• MailTags. (Donation-ware at the moment, InDev)
• Mail Act-On. (Donation-ware at the moment, InDev)

iCal is my calendar, and it runs my world. Think of iCal as the dashboard that lets me know, at a glance, what the heck I need to be doing on any given day. My contexts are different calendars in iCal, which means they're all color-coded and easy-to-read.

OmniOutliner Pro is a list-making and list-management tool. It's a great product on its own, but it shines when you pair it with Kinkless GTD, a set of free AppleScripts and templates that customize OmniOutliner so it's a) optimized for the GTD methodology (project list, contexts) and b) can talk to iCal. OmniOutliner is my project and task repository - my brain. It's where I go when I need to add a task to my radar, and make sure it Gets Done. Then, I click the "Sync" button, and OmniOutliner populates iCal with the appropriate tasks on the appropriate days. (And, in a moment of utter coolness, if I've modified something in iCal, that gets synced back to OmniOutliner.) Kinkless GTD + OmniOutliner Pro is the glue, the core, of my system.

Mail.app is straightforward e-mail software, but when paired with MailTags and Mail Act-On it becomes a GTD machine. I've written about this before, so I won't repeat a lot of that material here except to say that it's incredibly easy to defer a task in e-mail using MailTags; just tag the mail with a context, give it a due date, and then file it: you're done. Mail Act-On speeds this process up, helping me fly through mail messages by keeping my hands on the keyboard. Together, they're pretty amazing.

So. That's my productivity system. I can tell you honestly that I've experimented with a lot of different systems for managing projects and getting things done, but Getting Things Done(™) is the only one that's been truly effective. I don't worry any more about whether or not I'm missing projects or forgetting things - instead, I can just glance at iCal and go from there. Heaven.

If you're on a Mac and want to try this, most of the tools - OmniOutliner Pro and so on - have free trial periods. Get Allen's book (or visit his Web site), download some software, and see what you think.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 21, 2006 11:12 AM.
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September 10, 2006

Rest Stops: Now With WiFi

Elaine and I were in Bellingham yesterday, having a nice, relaxed lunch with her mom and brother. On our way back down to Seattle, we zoomed past the rest area at Exit 238 and I noticed a small, blue-and-white steel sign (much like your standard "FREE COFFEE" sign) atop the "Rest Area >>" that said,

WIFI

Huh? Really?

Yep, it's true. Turns out that Washington State has been quietly adding Wireless Internet service to several of its public highway rest stops. You can get a comprehensive listing of the rest areas (and their amenities) from the Washington State DOT site. I noticed the signs at Exit 238, as well as Smokey Point (just north of Everett).

The service isn't free (20 minutes for $2), but it is there, and, as one who can see the need to get updated directions or travel information on the road, it's pretty frickin' cool.

Way to go, DOT!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2006 11:27 AM.
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September 3, 2006

MovableType 3.31

I've just upgraded the blog to run on Movable Type 3.31; if you notice anything strange or weird, please let me know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 3, 2006 12:00 PM.
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August 29, 2006

Pimp My Mail.app

One of the new, touted-at-WWDC features of Leopard comes in the form of an upgraded Mail.app. Apple has taken some pains to integrate iCal and Mail, which allows us mere mortals to do handy things, like turn an e-mail message into a calendar to-do reminder - dang useful when you need to remember to, say, reply to someone's mail at a particular point in the future.

In my opinion, these new features really point to the centrality- primacy, really - of e-mail as one's way of managing the world. I, for one, am dead in the water without my e-mail - it's a conversation tracker, life scheduler, serial-number-keeper and bad-joke conduit all rolled into one.

When I moved to Mac OS X back in 2001, I did so whole-hog, and decided to use as many of Apple's bundled products as possible. Part of this was driven by availability (back in the early-transition days of OS X 10.1, there wasn't a whole lotta choice in the 'ol application space, if you know what I mean), and part was driven by a desire to try out some of the highly-regarded NeXT apps that were finally available on the Mac- Mail.app among them. And so, with a slight tear in my eye, I kicked Eudora on Mac OS 9 to the curb and went with Apple's built-in solution. On the whole, it's been a pretty seamless transition.

But.

Mail.app has been slammed by some, and justifiably so, as being a good "80% solution" to people's mail needs. In English, that means it does the basics - but not much else. So if you're checking and sending generic IMAP e-mail, it's great. But once you need robust rules support, or are managing gi-normous e-mail archives, or want integrated calendaring and contact management, well, you were either forced to grit your teeth or switch to competitive products like Entourage. Problem is, Mail.app is nicely integrated with the rest of Mac OS X, which means that switching from Mail also means that you're switching from AddressBook, giving up iChat integration, and likely losing Spotlight support. It's a big cost to bear.

I've been gritting my teeth.

Lately, however, two new products have come on to the market that have a) made my Mail.app experience about 2,000,000% better, and b) given me real hope that a thriving, vibrant market for add-ons and plugins to Mail is just on the horizon.

I'm talking about Mail Act-On and MailTags.

These programs extend Mail.app through some (undocumented) APIs, and, broadly, allow you to pimp your Mail.app today, in a way not too unlike what Apple will offer, built in, with Leopard.

The first of these, Mail Act-On, allows you to associate a keystroke with a mail-processing rule. This lets you create and associate a virtually unlimited number of mail "rules" that can be invoked with a keystroke. For instance, I am forever finding myself spending time mousing around in Mail, filing e-mail from friends in their respective folders. With Mail Act-On, I can create a rule that says, "When you see a mail message from Richard, file it in Richard's personal folder on the hard drive." Then, once I'm done replying to a message Richard has sent me, I just hit the "Act On" key and the message is zapped to its home.

Over the past couple weeks, I've managed to build a pretty comprehensive list of Act-On rules for people I e-mail on a regular basis. So today, when mail comes in, I can zoom through my Inbox in record speed. It's just wonderful. (It's truly astonishing how much time you can spend goofing around in an interface, as opposed to Getting Work Done.)

MailTags, on the other hand, lets me link a mail item to iCal, much as Leopard will. Let's say that message from Richard needs some followup or action from me in a few weeks' time. All I have to do is tag the mail and give it a date; MailTags will file it in iCal as a to-do. Then, when the relevant date rolls around in iCal, I see both the to-do and a link back to the original mail message. This has helped ensure that I'm not missing to-dos, or forgetting some relevant piece of information on the date when I need it.

Which rocks.

There is a growing number of plug-ins for Mail, but Apple really ought to unlock its developer community through better documentation for plug-in authors. I can guarantee that Mail.app, as the incumbent/default mail application on OS X, will be taken much, much farther by the wisdom of the user community than Apple can take it on its own.

In the meantime, feel free to get the jump on "Spring 2007" by pimping out your Mail.app with some slick add-ons.

(Big thanks to the folks over at Mail.app blog HawkWings for all the tips!)

UPDATE, December 31, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 29, 2006 9:51 PM.
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August 26, 2006

When It Rains...

...it pours. At least with technology problems.

Just five days after getting my PowerBook back and happy, it turns out that the battery in the silly thing qualifies for Apple's recall program (short version: Sony's batteries are, shall we say, explosively good, and Dell is recalling 4-some million batteries, while Apple is recalling 1.8M)

If you have a PowerBook G4 or iBook G4, get yourself checked.

Looks like my laptop is a de-facto desktop computer until my new battery arrives. Pity.

UPDATE, January 3, 2008: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 26, 2006 2:17 PM.
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July 30, 2006

Tully's: Grande Americanos ... And Free WiFi

Friday's PI had a blurb about Tully's Coffee - turns out they're going to start offering free Wi-Fi in their 79 stores, effective immediately. Why are they doing it? Oh, because it's a good competitive weapon:

"Free Wi-Fi will bring more people into the stores," said Tom O'Keefe, Tully's founder. "Will there be people who sit in the corner and get a cup of water? Yes. But most will come in and drink our coffee, and I want more customers. Once I get them in, I get them in."

Now, I don't want to rain on Mr. O'Keefe's parade, but it turns out that most of the coffee shops near my place on Cap Hill - Victrola and Fuel being two of my favorites - already offer free WiFi. So while I agree with Tully's reasoning and business decision, I feel like they're a bit late to the game.

That said, it does seem that this might be a good marketing move for free WiFi overall. Tully's caters to the mass-market gourmet-coffee-n-pastry crowd. These folks are Starbucks' core customers, and are likely not buying from the indie coffee place down the block. For those people, free WiFi might be something of a novelty, or at least a talking point that gets them buzzing about how neat it is.

So. Who knows? This might be the start of something good. It's one thing for your local bookshop, restaurant or coffee joint to give up the free WiFi love, and quite another for a larger business to make it part of their competitive arsenal. If it takes business from Starbucks - or at least makes them a little uncomfortable - we might see something similar from our green-logoed friends. And that would be great.

(In the meantime - check out Seattle Wireless for up-to-date hotspots!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 30, 2006 3:36 PM.
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July 22, 2006

Lightning Strikes Twice

I have apparently pissed off the Laptop Gods, because both (both!) of the machines I have with on the road are experiencing some big, big problems right now.

It started with my Tablet. Yesterday morning, the little plastic tab that sits at the top of the screen and locks the top of the clamshell to the bottom - keeping the lid closed when the laptop is asleep - broke off. What this means, in practical terms, is that the lid of the laptop can no longer stay closed on its own, which forces me to shut the Tablet down completely in order to move it (if I put it to sleep, it will jostle in transit, the lid will open 1/8" of an inch, and Windows interprets that as the machine "waking up", and then spins up the machine in my shoulder bag). This pretty much destroys my productivity, because it means I have to set up and tear down my workspace every time I move.

(What makes this worse is that this is merely the latest in a long line of progressively-annoying indignities - such as glacial performance, regular lock-ups, and sub-30-minute battery life - with the thing. The Tablet is old, and, thankfully, my replacement laptop, in all its wide-screen Core-Duo hotness, is already on order.)

The second problem happened later in the evening, when my my Mac decided to do a repeat of its precursor's February 2005 performance and just, you know, forget it has a hard drive. One moment I'm cranking out some e-mail to Ferry Corsten; the next, the machine's seized, I'm rebooting, and then it's all flashing-question-mark, all the time. I'm optimistic that I'll be able to resuscitate when I'm back to Seattle, but in the meantime ... it's a big, shiny, aluminum brick.

Sigh.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2006 6:41 AM.
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July 14, 2006

Cingular Wireless Internet

Back in May, when I blogged about my experience with the Cingular 8125, one of the things I mentioned as a desired feature of the phone was "Internet access for my laptop." Specifically, I said:

It's no great secret that I spend a lot of time away from my apartment (out the door early, home late, and traveling), and if my non-work e-mail, calendar, contacts, to-do lists and other data are sitting on my PowerBook at home, well, they're not doing me much good. Historically, my "solution" to this personal-data-access-issue has been to try using Web-based services; more recently, I've acquired a cellular data card that I pop into into my PowerBook, and I schelp the whole shootin' works around with me. This works, but is far from ideal - it's an extra 5 or 6 pounds on my person. So if a small-n-light doodad like a phone could run my calendar and handle my e-mail ... well, that'd be excellent.

I've since given up on the dream of having a small-n-light device that can run my personal life. My personal (crummy) experience with the 8125, coupled with watching Jeff attempt (and fail) to make a smartphone work for him, has convinced me that the best solution for now is to just keep carting my Mac around.

I know a lot of people who have much the same problem. And, frankly, carting your machine around isn't a bad solution ... as long as you can get consistent Internet access.

This is a bigger problem than you might think. WiFi is fairly available, of course, both from the free sources (coffee shops, your nice neighbor, or "Mr. Linksys/Belkin 54G") and the paid ones (such as T-Mobile or the generic pay-for airport WiFi). But getting reliable, high-speed wireless Internet access outside of the coffee shop/airport location can be a challenge. And let's be honest: without Internet, your computer is, well, a 5- or 6-pound brick in your bag.

Recently, my solution has been to use Cingular's high-speed cellular Internet service. Both Cingular and Verizon have invested in high-speed data networks (using GPRS and EDGE, respectively), and, as a laptop user, you can purchase a special PC card that will get you access to them. I've had a number of people (coworkers, mostly) ask me about the service, and I thought I'd take a moment to lay out what's good (and bad) about it.

(Oh, hey -- props: This is yet another example of the Richard Huff Technology Hand-Me-Down Program™: Richard bought the Cingular gear (and service) before his last trip to Italy, and it was all gathering dust in the closet after he got back. So when I wanted to take it for a spin, well ... he loaned it to me.)

Overall, the Cingular solution isn't too bad. The hardware is a Sierra Wireless AirCard 860 - with a cute little orange antenna - that slides into the PC card slot on my PowerBook. You need some custom driver software (Mobile High Speed For Mac OS X) from the NovaMind folks in Germany, but other than that - simple. Pop in the card, tell the thing to dial, and - boom. Online. Dang-fast Internet pretty much wherever you happen to be.

The service and hardware a bit spendy. The card is about $200 (and activation's another $36); the NovaMind software is about $100, and monthly service is $60.

What's it like? Well, performance isn't terrible. That doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and it's not. Like cable or DSL, the connection is asymmetric - I get consistent download speeds of 70K - 80K per second, but uploads at 10K - 13K. The problem is latency - the network is incredibly, unbelievably, phenomenally latent. What this means, in practical terms, is that downloading a single large file over the network works well, while checking your e-mail using IMAP can take for ... ev ... er.

Another challenge with the system is that the Sierra Wireless card does some pretty wicked compression to get its fast download speeds. This compression is handled by the PowerBook's CPU, which means that the computer feels sluggish while browsing the Internet.

Finally, because the system relies on a PC card, it means your laptop needs to have an available PC card slot in order to get online. This isn't a problem if you're using an old-school PowerBook G4, as I am, but if you want a newer MacBook (or, God forbid, a MacBook Pro), then you're out of luck - the Pros use the newer, non-backward-compatible ExpressCard, while the MacBooks have no card slot at all.

But if you have an older machine - and a need to be online everywhere - this isn't a terrible deal. I've succeeded at using my Motorola v551 phone as a Bluetooth modem on the Cingular network, but the speeds were unacceptably slow - only 6K or 7K per second. So the Sierra card gives a 10x speed boost over a generic cell phone.

But it's no WiFi - and for $60 a month, I feel like it should be a lot, lot better. So I'm off to explore some other alternatives for access. With luck, I'll dig up some little gem that can replace the functionality (if not the blazing download performance) of the Sierra ... without breaking the bank.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2006 4:38 PM.
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June 12, 2006

RSS Housekeeping

I've made an under-the-hood change to the way that my site handles RSS. Effective now, everyone's feeds should be redirecting to my FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/gavinshearer). It should be seamless, but if something breaks (like, you don't get an update from me in the next 48 hours), please tell me. (Thanks.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 12, 2006 6:41 PM.
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May 30, 2006

Three Cheers For Cingular

OK, a big, big shout out to the folks at the Cingular Wireless store in Pacific Place - they took back my Cingular 8125 with nary a fuss or complaint. And, while I know it's supposed to be that way ("30-day return policy" and all that), I also know of far, far too many situations where normal employees become agents of the Dark Lord himself, assessing evil restocking fees and whatnot.

So. Good retail experience - hip, hip, hurrah!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 30, 2006 7:00 PM.
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May 29, 2006

My Cingular 8125 Adventure

This weekend, I swung by my local Cingular store and picked up the Cingular 8125 smartphone. The 8125 is a well-reviewed phone with a full-size, slide-out keyboard, Bluetooth, WiFi, and the usual phone accessories (e.g., camera). It runs Windows Mobile 5.

The thing is going back to Cingular tomorrow.

I dropped cash on the 8125 for a few reasons. First, it seems like every other person in my life is buying a smartphone. Jeff, for example, has been (and is) a committed Treo user, and even recently upgraded to the new 700w. Brian recently bought himself the Verizon version of the 8125 (and loves it). So I was curious: is there something to this smartphone business?

Second, I was hopeful that a smartphone would make managing my personal life a tad easier. It's no great secret that I spend a lot of time away from my apartment (out the door early, home late, and traveling), and if my non-work e-mail, calendar, contacts, to-do lists and other data are sitting on my PowerBook at home, well, they're not doing me much good. Historically, my "solution" to this personal-data-access-issue has been to try using Web-based services; more recently, I've acquired a cellular data card that I pop into into my PowerBook, and I schelp the whole shootin' works around with me. This works, but is far from ideal - it's an extra 5 or 6 pounds on my person. So if a small-n-light doodad like a phone could run my calendar and handle my e-mail ... well, that'd be excellent.

At a super-high level, here's what I wanted the 8125 to do for me:

• Keep and manage my personal contacts, calendar, and to-do list. This I've just talked about; Windows Mobile does it all.
• Allow me to send and receive personal e-mail and text messages. I text a lot, and I've become pretty adroit at the rapid-fire triple-tap needed to text off a standard cell phone. However, there is absolutely no way I'm going to try managing my e-mail in this fashion. If I'm doing mail, I'm doing it with a full-blown keyboard, thank you. One of the big attractions of the 8125 is the slide-out QWERTY; the screen rotates 90 degrees, and suddenly you're in landscape mode. Slick.
• Allow me to send and receive work e-mail. Microsoft IT does a great job of exposing our Outlook corporate e-mail, calendars, etc. to employees with smartphones. As I travel more, there's an undeniable attraction to being able to check and see if anything's "on fire" after the plane lands, rather than waiting to see what's what after I check in at the hotel.
• Allow me to browse the Web. There's real value in getting quick-hit information when you're out and about. This includes weather and movie showtimes, of course, but also bus schedules and traffic reports. Brian and I were sitting in a McMenamins one night and I was goofing around with his phone when the overwhelming utility of an anywhere-you-need-it Web browser smacked me upside the head. I can't really do this on a standard cell - too small a screen, too crummy a keyboard - but if you've got a smartphone with a good keyboard, well, it's a game-changer.
• Internet access for my laptop. As I said, above, I've been using a Cingular PC Card with my PowerBook to get high-speed Internet access. It works great, but it's still an add-in. Ideally, it would be great if I could just connect to the Internet through my cell phone over Bluetooth, "dialing out" over the cellular data network, using my phone to bridge between GPS and TCP/IP.

I'm pleased to report that, of these items, most are certainly possible - as in, on-paper possible - with the 8125. But the reality of using the silly thing just leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly, this comes down to clunky design, and an utter lack of concern for the overall consumer experience.

Let's start with the basics: the 8125 is a bad phone. Period, full stop, end of story. The phone functions seem to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Consider the basic task of dialing a number. You can try to dial by using the touchscreen (which is error-prone and clumsy), or you can use the stylus on the touchscreen (which now requires you to fetch the stylus and poke at the screen, consuming two hands and your full attention). You can also slide out the keyboard to enter the number, except that - wait for it - the number keys are only accessible with a modifier key, so now you're either double-tapping the modifier to put it in number mode (don't make a mistake; backspace doesn't work in that mode), or holding down the option key while pressing buttons.

To put it mildly, this sucks.

Now I know that smartphones are generally assumed to be operated by people who have them populated with their contacts, which changes the usage - now you're just picking stuff out of a list, instead of entering a 10-digit number each time. However, I find that I use my current Motorola v551 in a sort of mixed-mode - sometimes I'm picking Richard's number out of a list, and sometimes I'm typing it in directly. It just depends. So to have a phone that's only designed for one way of interaction seems very user-unfriendly to me.

Actually, the phone-dialing example is good for understanding the whole Zen of this puppy. Windows Mobile is a chunky, clunky user experience. It's hard to navigate and hard to understand, mixing metaphors at every turn. Let's say that you're working on a task on the phone, and now it's complete. Sometimes, you're presented with a wizard-like screen that has a nice, prominent "finish" button. (This is good thing.) Other times, however, there's zero indication about what you're supposed to do next ... and then you notice a small, lowercase, 'ok' in the upper-right corner. So you tap it, and then the task clears.

This is a total pain. Phones should be engineered for people who are busy and don't have a lot of time to stare at an interface like it's the Mona Lisa, teasing out every nuance in order to understand what the ar-teest intended. I'll say this for my Motorola: when the thing needs you to do something, it's very clear about what that thing is, and what you're supposed to do about it.

I'm pleased to report that the Web browser (Internet Explorer Mobile) works as advertised, and I'm even more pleased that some sites (like weather.com and Google) were smart enough to detect that I was on a mobile phone and route me to a lightweight, WAP-friendly version of their Web pages.

The Internet-access-over-Bluetooth, too, was a success. After much research (thanks to Justin Blanton and Ross Barkman) and jiggering, my Mac was able to connect to the phone, dial out, and get good, sustained transfer speeds of 14K a second. While this is clearly not WiFi speeds (it's more like ISDN, circa 1996), it's good enough to get me my e-mail when the WiFi's not available (or, if you're in an airport, outrageously expensive).

But the interface and usability are poor - mind-bendingly poor - and so the phone goes back. It's just not ready for prime time, in my opinion, and it's certainly not worth the $450 (and $40 a month for a data plan). I know everyone's talking about the "mobile future", and I, for one am eager to see it arrive. This weekend just taught me that the wait's a bit longer than I'd thought it might be.

Phooey.

UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2006 8:54 PM.
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Switching To FeedBurner

Jeff and David recently switched to serving their blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and I've decided to do the same. (I imagine we'll be moving Confab later this week.) It will be nice to have some feed-reader statistics, and I'm intrigued by a lot of the value-added services FeedBurner provides.

If you're reading this site via RSS, please update your pointer to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gavinshearer.

I've added a FeedBurner logo to the main page of the site, and also added an insta-subscribe button for you NewsGator, Yahoo, and Google users.

Questions, please let me know!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2006 10:19 AM.
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May 28, 2006

TypeKey Now Required To Comment

It saddens me to announce this, but I'm now requiring a TypeKey account to post comments to the blog, effective immediately. I've been flooded with spam comments all week, and it's reached a point of high annoyance for me - more than 70 attempts since yesterday. This is, sadly, a ratchet up from the issues I ran into back in February.

I know some of you don't like TypeKey, and I apologize. However, requiring commenters to go through a legitimate registration service is the only way to prevent this kind of abuse.

Questions, please let me know.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 28, 2006 3:04 PM.
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May 26, 2006

Office 2007 Beta 2 Is Now Available

Oh! One more thing. The new version of Microsoft Office (Office 2007) is now available as a public beta. It's totally hot - I've been running it for months, and have fallen in love with it.

If you'd like to get access to the beta, just click on over to Microsoft.com and register.

Enjoy!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2006 5:46 AM.
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April 20, 2006

MyBus + SMS = Crazy Delicious!

I have recently discovered that you can get up-to-the-minute, real-time bus information from Metro and Sound Transit sent to your cell phone through SMS.

This totally rocks.

Yes, it rocks. It rocks because it solves an all-too-common problem for bus riders, namely: finding out when the hell the next bus is due to arrive.

The service is relatively easy (and time-consuming) to set up (read: geeks only for the moment), but at a high level, it works like this:

1. First, you have to know the routes you’re interested in, such as the 43 or the 48. If you're already a bus rider, this shouldn't be too hard (I mean, you know how you're getting to work, yes?).
2. Second, you look up the timepoint you want to monitor. The SMS system is built around a query that says, “Hey, I’m interested in finding out the route information for the 43 and 48 when they hit 23rd and Aloha." The system has assigned 23rd and Aloha a code (3924, in this case), and you need to find out what it is. Visit the MyBus Web site, give it your route number, and then find your location in the list. (The timepoint is the four-digit number at the top of the page.)
3. Third, you send an e-mail to the system from your phone. The message needs to be of the format “[Route Number] @ [Timepoint]", so if you want to know when the 43 will be at 23rd and Aloha, you’d send to "43@3924". (If you want data on several routes, separate them with commas, such as "43,48@3924".) The address you’re mailing to is: "sms@mybus.org"
4. There is no step four.

I’ve been using this since Monday, and I must confess that it is wonderfully useful. One tip: since formatting and addressing the message can be pretty time-consuming with the triple-tap cell keyboards most folks are using, just keep your finished message in your phone's outbox and re-send it whenever you want up-to-date information.

If you're a regular Metro rider, be sure to check it out!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 20, 2006 10:13 AM.
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April 16, 2006

coast2Coaster 1.1

I finally got some time to work on coast2Coaster this weekend, and am pleased to report that it's been upgraded to version 1.1. The site is live now.

What's New?
This was more of a "hygiene and scope" release instead of a "big, kick-ass new features" release, but that's because most of the feedback I've received from the community has been of the "Hey! My local park isn't in your database!" variety. Version 1.1 sports the following:

• More parks. I'm thrilled to announce that some of the 'missing' parks from V1 have been located and are now in the system. Of the 21 parks that weren't in V1 (and, yes, that included Mt. Olympus in Wisconsin), we're missing just 4 in this release (more on that, below). We've grown from 234 parks to 269, and we're now tracking 744 coasters (up from 643).
• More accuracy. V1 had some inaccuracies with respect to park locations - some parks weren't where they were supposed to be. It turns out that the good folks over at RCDB actually have very, very accurate geocodes for most of the parks in their system, so I rewrote my spider to fetch that information. I think everything is where it should be, now.
• Canada. I was deluged with requests from Canadian coaster maniacs to please, please please go beyond the US and add in parks across the border. In addition to the 44 US states with coasters, we've now got coasters in 7 Canadian provinces.

Missing Parks
We're still missing four parks - all of which are in Canada. The culprits are:

1. Burlington Amusement Park (Kensington, Prince Edward Island)
2. Sandspit Cavendish Beach (Hunter River, Prince Edward Island)
3. Tinkertown Family Fun Park (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
4. Upper Clements Theme Park (Upper Clements, Nova Scotia)

I am hard at work on the next iteration of coast2Coaster, and would love feedback: ideas, suggestions, and ways to make the site better.

In the meantime: happy coastering!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 16, 2006 12:32 PM.
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April 9, 2006

Site Move

Just a heads-up: I'm moving gavinshearer.com to a higher-performance server here at Gecko Central, and you may experience some weirdness (an old page, for example, or network issues) over the next week or so as the name servers update.

I apologize in advance if it causes any strangeness.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 9, 2006 8:27 PM.
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March 28, 2006

Life On The Cloud

Ever since I started working at Microsoft, I've been suffering from "split data syndrome," and it's frickin' annoying. Like our good friend Murphy's eponymous Law, SDS boils down to a simple axiom: if you've got more than one computer in your life, the information you want isn't on the machine you're using.

I experience this all the time in a number of different contexts - that password I need is in Password Master on my Mac at home, while that other password is in my OneNote notebook on my work Tablet. It's the little things you notice the most - browser bookmarks, for instance. Suddenly, you go to the computer for a given resource and realize, mid-mouse, that the thing you want is safely locked away on a drive that's 20 miles from you.

It sucks.

There are a lot of companies proposing solutions to this problem (Apple has their dot-Mac service, for example, while Microsoft recently bought FolderShare). Problem is, in my experience every service of this type has some rough edge that renders it less-than-optimal. Take dot-Mac: it offers a great solution for some scenarios (it does good stuff with bookmarks), while providing lousy support for others (calendars, anyone?).

Increasingly, I've come to believe that the long-term solution to this problem will likely be done on a vendor-by-vendor, application-by-application basis: you'll buy your software from company X, who, in addition to the downloadable bits, will offer "cloud" services that allow your data to live on the Internet. This will let you access your important information from anywhere - the rich client when you're on your home machine, and a Web client when you're not. This is, in many ways, exactly what people experience with e-mail, today - you can use Webmail when you're out and about, and Mail.app or Outlook when you're at your primary machine.

The reason I believe the app-by-app approach to be the right one is because of complexity. Applications are generally complex, with lots of little nuances here and there. Unless you know those nuances in and out - that is, unless you're the software author - it's going to be really, really hard to provide a great experience to your customers. We already have crude tools, and they stink. What we need, going forward, are tools that just ... work.

Tools like NewsGator.

I bring up NewsGator because I've recently been able to use it to start synching my RSS newsfeeds between my home machine, work machines, and the Web. And it rocks.

As with all SDS issues, the historical problem is simple enough. I've got about a hundred feeds in my RSS aggregator, and, on any given day, half or so of them will be updated with news I want to read. Since I'm at Microsoft for most of my waking hours, it makes sense to have them on my work machine. But which one? My desktop machine has the big screen and full-size keyboard; my Tablet is mobile. So while I might prefer to read news on my desktop, if I'm out of the office (which happens a lot) then I'm cut off from my news. Conversely, if I'm in the office, the last thing I want to be doing is read news on a tiny Tablet screen.

Of course, I want to read news on my home computer, too. If I'm working on my PowerBook, then I want to be able to get my news without perching my work machine on the corner of my desk.

(Platforms are an issue, here, too - I use NetNewsWire on my Mac, and FeedDemon on Windows.)

My "solution" to date has been to physically split my feeds. Home-related feeds stay on the PowerBook; work-related feeds live on my desktop machine at work. This is suboptimal for a lot of reasons (is Daring Fireball a home or work read? What about Wil Shipley?), but it's saved me from the hideous work of keeping full feeds on all three computers, and needing to manually refresh or delete news on one that I'd read on another.

Well, I'm pleased to report that, as of this week, the problem's been solved.

Last year, NewsGator bought Feed Demon. And then, a few months back, NewsGator purchased NetNewsWire. And, as of this week, both products will now auto-sync with the NewsGator cloud - no fuss, no mess. (I mean, yes, it did take a bit of work to get everything set up - we're still talking about computers, here - but even that was shockingly easy relative to the usual.)

I can now leave my feeds in NewsGator's system and my various news clients will just Do The Right Thing. I can have FeedDemon on both my Tablet and my desktop machine, as well as my PowerBook and on the Web. When I read an article on one, it notifies the others. No duplication, no hassle.

It's wonderful.

When you work like this for a while, you realize how excellent the next few years are going to be in the computing space. Data is being divorced from parent applications, and liberated from the PC hard drive. When you put the stuff on the cloud, you can get your information pretty much anywhere you happen to be. The hard work of keeping your versions current, or making sure that one piece of data is on your laptop, or whatever, is pretty much abstracted away and handled for you by the network. Which, when you think about it, is how it should be.

We're going to cure SDS, one app at a time.

If you're using an aggregator (and you are using an aggregator, aren't you?) across multiple machines, this is totally worth checking out.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 28, 2006 3:01 PM.
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March 10, 2006

Google Maps Mania!

Hey! coast2Coaster scored a mention on Google Maps Mania today. Right on!

I've had a few requests to add all the coasters in Canada to c2C, and I'm going to see if I can find the time this weekend. Stay tuned.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 10, 2006 4:40 PM.
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March 6, 2006

Introducing coast2Coaster!

I'd like to start this post with an apology: I know my blogging has been a little light over the past couple weeks, and I've had a few people mention it to me. I'm sorry about that. Part of it has been due to the intensity of stuff going on at work, and the rest of it's because I've had this kick-ass hobby project consuming my nights and weekends. The good news is that, after much coding, re-coding, and testing, I'm thrilled to be able to drop the sheet on it.

It's called coast2Coaster.

What is it? Well, from a geek perspective, it's a mashup between the Roller Coaster Database and Google Maps. From a coaster enthusiast perspective, it's a map of each and every roller coaster in the United States.

(Oh, yeah. It practically made me bounce up and down in my chair when I started coding the thing.)

Now, I've admittedly been jonesing to build a mashup since I attended Web 2.0 back in October. And, like most mashups, this one stemmed from a moment of personal Internet frustration. I got the idea, you see, when I was planning my 2008 motorcycle trip in January. Back then, I was trying to find out where all the good coasters were around the country, and was having a hell of a time - there just wasn't a good, single resource where I could go and see, at a glance, where the parks were. This seemed silly - the data was out there, and the technology was pretty popular. Where was the map?

So, after some futile searching, I thought I'd just build the sucker. And here it is, free for all to enjoy.

A few caveats.

First, this is my first mashup, and I'm sure that some parts of it really suck. I'm not a Javascript guru, and had to learn a lot of this stuff as I was building the thing out. So if the thing blows up your browser or causes your machine to, you know, smoke, or something - I apologize. Please let me know what browser/OS you're running, what happened, and I'll put it in the debug list.

Second, I have a lot of ideas for this application, and this is just V1. I cut a lot of proposed stuff to get the first release out the door, and also because I'm pretty sure the collective ideas of the Internet community will be much better than anything I can come up with on my own. So if there's something you'd like to see, let me know. Assuming my programming kung fu (and free time) are up to it, I'm all ears.

Third, I wasn't able to geographically locate all the coaster parks out there. Of the 255 "active" parks in RCDB, I was only able to get latitude and longitude for 234 of 'em. I'll elaborate on the missing parks in the "how it works" section, below.

Fourth, I know that the data hygiene isn't perfect. I did a lot of geocoding - some manually, some automatically - and I'm reasonably sure that some of my stuff is off. So please don't put your brood in the Family Truckster without checking to make sure that the park is, indeed, where I think it is.

HOW IT WORKS
I know not everyone who reads my blog is a geek, but for all you geeks out there, here's how the system is put together.

At a high level, a Google Maps mashup just takes geocoded data (latitude and longitude) and plots it against a Javascript object. As long as you've got the geocoded data, you're golden.

STEP ONE: Get the data.
The RCDB is an amazing Web site, comprehensive to the extreme. However, one thing it does NOT have is any kind of Web service that can be called to obtain clean data from its systems. So my first order of business was to write a spider, something that would crawl through the RCDB a page at a time and bring back all the raw data to my local machine for processing.

The RCDB pages are reasonably clean HTML, which made it pretty straightforward to break apart tables of data. What I wanted was the name of each park, its address, its URL, and the number of active roller coasters it held. RCDB is a mite too comprehensive, here - it lists coasters that are no longer operating (flagged as such), and parks that are no longer in existence. I needed to screen all this stuff out so I could build a list of just the good stuff.

This took a lot, lot longer than I expected. There was a fair amount of tweaking and coding to make it all come together. As an example: some of the parks have changed their names over time, and RCDB captures this. Thus, you'll see "Bonfante Gardens (2001 to ?)" or something. I wanted to trim this back to just, "Bonfante Gardens." Not a problem, but it's indicative of the kinds of time-sucking detail work that you can get caught up in.

STEP TWO: Geocode.
Once I had the data, I then needed to transform the standard address into latitude and longitude. Fortunately, there's a free service on the Web that'll do this for you - geocoder.us. All you do is feed them the addresss you're interested in, and they spit back the latitude and longitude that corresponds. It's slick.

It's also not perfect. I was able to geocode roughly 2/3rds of the list, but that left 33% remaining. I used a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 to look up those remaining addresses. Again, not a perfect solution, but it got me to where I wanted to be.

STEP THREE: Code Your Web Page.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of stuff I learned about JavaScript, Google Maps, browser compatibility, and the rest. Suffice to say that my client-side code went through a few total rewrites (most recently to take advantage of asynchronous JavaScript in order to make it faster). I'd like to call out a big, big thanks to the clearly-written Google Maps documentation AND to Mike Little, who has some free tutorials on his site in the UK.

MISSING DATA
After filtering, RCDB lists 255 parks in the United States with active roller coasters. Sadly, I was only able to locate geocoded information for 234 of them. If anyone has information on any of these, please let me know. The missing parks are:

• Zoomers Family Amusement Park
• Wild West World
• Six Flags New Orleans
• Six Flags America
• Exchange Club Park
• Story Land
• Land Of Make Believe
• Luck-E-Dawg Kiddyland
• Cherokee Fun Park
• Santa's Land
• Wonderpark
• Chippewa Lake Park
• Pocono Play Park
• DelGrosso's Amusement Park
• Pedroland Park
• Mt. Olympus Water & Theme Park
• Riverview Park & Waterworld
• Magic Forest Park
• Jeepers
• Midway Park
• Playland Park

V2 IDEAS
There were a lot of cool ideas that got cut from this release. Some of those under consideration include:

• "Zoom to here" - this would add a button to each pop-up balloon for the parks that takes you down to the street level and brings in satellite photography of the park. (Try this manually. It's cool.)
• An ability to filter the parks shown by the number of coasters they offer.
• An ability to search for a park or coaster by name.
• An ability to highlight the biggest, fastest, etc. coasters in the US.
• Driving directions and/or trip planning features.
• Thumbnail photography of parks and coasters.

I'm very open to suggestions, here. Let me know what you'd like, and I'll see what I can do!

Finally, I'd like to say a big thank-you to the guys at RCDB, who have done an amazing job of keeping the flame alive for coaster enthusiasts everywhere. This project would not have been possible without them. For my part, I'm just hopeful that coast2Coaster is something that people find valuable, and helps encourage people to get out and ride some cool stuff near where they live - or where they're traveling to.

Enjoy!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 6, 2006 1:02 AM.
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February 20, 2006

Blog Administratia

I made a bunch 'o changes to the blog last night. None of it will affect folks who read my stuff through the main page (and RSS), but if you're looking for older posts, things have moved around a bit, and you've got some new options.

First, I've renamed the "Dev" category to "Geek", and moved a number of articles (technical stuff, product reviews) that were previously in "Cool" or "Misc" over.

Second, I've collapsed the "Internship" and "Visio" categories into the mainline "MSFT" category.

Third, I've created new categories: one is "Confab" (for my podcast), and the other is "Politics." Most of my previously-political coverage (such as my monorail stuff) has been moved over.

Finally, I've added a "key essays" page. As time has gone on, I've had enough people ask me about/refer to/link to certain articles to know that some are more popular than others. I've grouped them by broad topic, and will update them periodically as the feedback pours in.

Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2006 6:24 PM.
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February 11, 2006

Comment Spam Is Back

When I enabled anonymous comments back in December, it was an experiment - a way of (hopefully) stimulating more comments on entries, but without also stimulating comment spammers.

Sadly, the spammers have arrived in force. I'm getting dozens and dozens of "casino!" and "mortgage!" entries on the blog. Bastards.

Rather than let these people vandalize my site, I'm going to set the bar a bit higher and see if it slows them down. As of now, I'm requiring e-mail addresses to post on the site, have turned off HTML, and will auto-post entries only from authenticated or trusted commenters.

I apologize for the increased security, but there's some nasty f