Category: Internet & Technology

I just had to post this because it’s so crazy…check this guy out!

Twenty years from now when we’re all using Macs (well, hopefully not) no one will know what this even means.

I’ve been using Vista’s Windows Mail (the re-born Outlook Express) on the computers where I don’t want to have Outlook 2007 installed, and in generally it’s a pretty decent mail solution. I’m using IMAP so my email is the same on all the computers. One important solution I had to configure was using FolderShare to synchronize the /contacts folder between all my PCs so each PC had the same contacts. I wish Microsoft acknowledged and provided solutions for multi-PC households – they seem to have their head stuck in the sand when it comes to that.

At any rate, I wanted to email a bunch of people today and like any good, rational person using email I wanted to use the Blind Caron Copy (BCC) field to protect the privacy of the people I was emailing, and to lessen the chance of it being blocked by spam filters. So I start clicking through the menus, and nowhere do I find a simple “View BCC”. What the hell? I looked through the options, and even tried the help file. There isn’t a single result for the terms “BCC” or “blind carbon copy” (in quotes). Who writes these help files?

I finally turned to an online search and discovered that in order to view the BCC field I had to click on “All Headers” under the View menu. That’s absolutely inane – why could you have a UI element that doesn’t include the keyword that the user is looking for? To quote Monty Python, someone should be sacked.

As much as I like Vista, what I don’t like is waiting for developers to catch up and make their applications Vista-compatible. I still can’t get ACDSee 9.0 to work on Vista, and Adobe Lightroom is crashing regularly on me when I try to edit my RAW photos (which is bizarre because it worked fine for more than a month on the same hardware, minus a video card). I filled out an Adobe tech support request and Vista isn’t even an option on their list of operating systems. Vista came out at the end of January, making it six months now since release. I have all of my hardware working, but I’m still fighting with all sorts of software issues. There’s no solution other than to grit my teeth and bear it, but I’ve gotta’ say, my jaw is getting sore. When will the pain end? When will computing feel “normal” again like it did with XP? Come on software developers, catch up…

I emailed YouTube last week asking them why my 13 minute HTC Touch unboxing video was rejected for being too long when my account was categorized as a director account. I also asked why one of my videos was processed and live in about 20 minutes while the other took over two hours. Here was their response:

“Thanks for your emails. We’re no longer offering the option to upload videos longer than 10 minutes, regardless of your account type. If you see a video on YouTube that’s longer than 10 minutes, it’s probably owned by one of our content partners. There are also some users who can upload longer videos because they were given this permission before the feature was removed. Also, occasionally, depending on site traffic, changes to video and account information on our site can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your patience.”

So basically, we have a site that was built completely on end-user content now turning away users that want to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. I’ve had a YouTube account for a couple of years, and I thought I had requested “Director” status, but it seems either I hadn’t or it was never granted – and now I can’t get it. It’s bad enough the the quality is complete crap on YouTube, but it has such a large user base posting videos there gives you good exposure. Ideally my videos will be under ten minutes, but if I get on a roll and a video happens to go over 10 minutes, it’s idiotic that I’ll then have to break it up into two pieces. I’ve been testing DailyMotion and the video quality looks quite good compared to YouTube – they encode at 640 x 480 I think. So do I go for quality or put up with the length limitations of YouTube and the lower quality? Decisions, decisions.

I try to keep my office tidy, and with the U-shaped Ikea desk I have, all the cables running from PC to wall are exposed making it all too easy for things to look messy. Baseboard cable clips were a good solution I found to allow me to group power, networking, USB, and other types of cables together. The problem is that the Belkin clips I purchased aren’t strong enough – they seem designed for only a couple of thin, light cables. Over the past year since I installed them they’ve all fallen off, looking like this:

(baseboard dust – gross!)

Essentially being a problem of adhesive strength versus the stress the cables place on the clip, as each one fell off I re-attached it to the wall with Krazy Glue. That worked for a few weeks, but all of them fell off again – this time leaving the adhesive pad on the wall. What I’m looking for is some sort of cable clip that’s much stronger: I’m thinking something that screws into the drywall, something that will hold the cables in place and not fall off. Has anyone heard of such a thing? All my Google searches have been in vain…

While looking up what movie to go see with Ashley tonight, I clicked on a banner ad that caught my attention over at Calgary Movies (you should always click on an ad if you visit a site), and it took me to a Samsung promotion page. Samsung is demonstrating the breadth of their product line, and since I didn’t know they made refrigerators (that’s the type of hardware I don’t know much about), I clicked on it. Nothing happened. I clicked again. Nothing happened. I clicked on the stove. Nothing happened.

Of course, silly me, the itty-bitty grey squares surrounded by the thin black line is the click point. They took the smallest possible user interface element and made it the only thing the user can click on to see more about the product. Idiots. One of the golden rules of user interface design is that if you want the user to interact with your interface, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to click on items – meaning you pick the biggest, most obvious things in the interface, and those are what drive the interaction. Whomever did this interface must have slept through that class in school.

I made the mistake of importing my OPML file (with about 150 feeds) into Internet Explorer 7 because I wanted to read my RSS feeds using Outlook 2007. That didn’t turn out so well, because Outlook 2007 has next to no tools for managing feeds – it looks like a last-minute add-on, lacking even basic features such as marking feed item as being read when you exit the feed. So I decided to switch back to using Feeddemon. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 have a symbiotic relationship to feed items – meaning that whatever you import into IE7’s RSS feed items will also show up in Outlook 2007. As Shakespeare would say, here’s the rub: there’s no way to select all the feed items in IE7. If you want delete them, you have to right-click on each item and delete each one. I thought there had to be a faster way, so after some research I discovered that the IE7 feed items are located here (you’ll need to turn on hidden files to see them):

C:\Users\Jason Dunn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

Now here’s the ugly part: Outlook 2007 creates a one-time, not a permanent link, with the RSS items in IE7. Meaning that even though I deleted all of the RSS items from IE7’s data store, they all still existed in Outlook 2007. 🙁 The slightly better news is that pressing the Delete and Yes key in rapid succession allowed me to get through them all pretty quickly. The ultra-ugly news was that even after deleting all the feeds, I still had 8500+ unread mail items in Outlook – and the only way to delete them was to delete them in groups, feed by feed. What a completely screwed up scenario this is…I hope I don’t have to repeat all these steps with Outlook on my main workstation (I did this all on my laptop).

When you work with computer hardware on a regular basis, building machines and swapping components in and out, you start to see patterns of hardware failure. Generally most hardware is reliable, but you’ll see more failures with components related to movement, power, and heat. Hard drives, system fans, power supplies and optical drives seem to have the highest failure rates, but video cards are failing more often than they used to as they run hotter, faster, and need more cooling. Things you don’t see spontaneously fail very often include CPUs, RAM, motherboards, and cables – sure, they can fail, but they usually require “help” from the owner or local power outlet.

Imagine my surprise when this week I had not one, but two bizarre failures of hardware that I’d never expect to fail. I booted up my Fujitsu P7010 laptop, a little 10.6″ screen job, that has 1 GB of RAM (2 x 512 MB) that I installed over a year ago. It’s run fine since then, but this week when I booted it up Vista wouldn’t load – I’d get a blue screen of death and an error related to memory. Because I had been running this hardware for so long (the laptop is a bit over two years old now) hardware failure was the furthest thing from my mind. I ran the Vista repair process (which is quite impressive) because that’s what the OS instructed me to do, but that didn’t work so I figured I’d run memtest86 and see if something was wrong. Below is a photo of what I saw (hint: red is bad).

I ran the test two more times, each with one of the 512 MB memory modules installed, and isolated it to one of the chips. I phoned Kingston, and was happy they had a lifetime warranty. The warranty process was amazingly fast and painless: no waiting on hold at all, the technician listened to me explain what I did and immediately agreed it was bad memory. A few minutes after that I had spoken to an RMA tech who took my credit card number so they could cross-ship me new RAM immediately, and as long as I return the defective RAM within ten days they won’t charge my credit card. Oh, and they also gave me their FedEx account number so I wouldn’t have to pay for return shipping. You never want RAM to go bad, but when it does happen, you can’t ask for anything more than a company that’s willing to make the replacement as fast and painless as possible.

Ok, so RAM can and does go bad. But when is the last time you heard of a coaxial cable spontaneously failing? Yesterday I was having massive trouble with my Internet connection, and I blamed it on my Netgear WPN824, which has been flaky since the day I bought it (mostly giving me random network failures that persist until I reboot it). I swapped in a D-Link DI-624, power-cycled everything including my cable modem, and assumed everything would work fine. I’ve swapped those routers in and out several time, with a Netgear router thrown in for good measure, because I can’t never seem to find one that’s stable 100% of the time. At any rate, my connection kept failing, so I looked at my SHAW cable modem with a critical eye. I have a 10 mbps downstream connection that’s been amazingly solid for the past two years (it was a bit rocky before that). Sure enough, I checked it and it wasn’t online. I’ve had a cable modem connection since 1995, so I’m very familiar with how they behave and know when something isn’t working right. I called SHAW tech support, he confirmed that it was disconnecting and re-connecting from the network, so I power cycled it one more time, and saw it lock in – and thought my problem was solved. I went back to work, only to lose my connection again. I went to my wiring area and watched the cable modem – it would lock in, all lights lit, then it would lose the network connection and everything would start blinking. And it would repeat that cycle every minute or so. What was going on?

I phoned SHAW tech support again, they said it must be a local problem with the wiring or the modem itself, and they’d have to book a service call – the best date they could do was a week down the road. I told him that if that was the case I’d be ordering DSL the next day – that rattled him, although I was mostly bluffing trying to get more immediate service (although I do still wonder about running cable and DSL together and bonding them together for a redundant and faster connection). I was suspicious of the cable modem rather than the household cable connection, because my SHAW digital phone (basically a private VOIP service) was working perfectly, as was my cable TV. My loving wife Ashley volunteered to drive to her parents house, borrow their cable modem, and bring it back so I could try a known good modem. I did, and it didn’t work. At this point I was starting to get really frustrated, and Ashley said “Did you try changing the cable that goes into the wall?”. I gave her one of those “Don’t be silly, that couldn’t possibly be the problem” looks, but having nothing to lose, I gave it a try – and it worked. What the hell…?

The cable in question is five years old, having been installed when we moved into our house. It’s plain old copper cable – how could it possibly fail? I don’t know how, but it did – and thanks to my wife, looking at a problem with a fresh set of eyes unfettered by assumptions, I’m back online.

Note to self: always check the obvious points of failure, even if you think they couldn’t possibly fail.