Matthew Krieger - I think about IT, therefore I am

What NOT To Do in the Midst of a Crisis

mgk — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:22:47 +0000

In the midst of a crisis, what you DON’T do is sometimes as important as what you do. This applies to business, technology, people - anything. So, the patient is on the table, chest open and bleeding. Here’s my list of mid-crisis don’ts:

Don’t assign blame. It just doesn’t matter at the moment and only adds fuel to the fire.
Don’t reflect on what you’d have done differently given another chance. This is just a distraction to the problem at hand.
Don’t start the post-mortem early. This is especially important if you’re the general and not directly in the fight.
If you’re the boss, be hands-on but in a hands-off kind of way. Providing just the right amount of support to the troops, while not micro-managing, is a difficult but important balance.

What are some things you think shouldn’t be done during a crisis?

iPod Touch + Click Wheel = Best Usability

mgk — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:05:55 +0000

I misplaced my iPod Touch the other week and went back to using my 30 GB iPod Video. Given my type of usage (primarily podcasts while driving) and some of the iPod Touch annoyances I wrote about previously, the iPod Video and other click wheel-based models definitely fit me better. For example, slewing back and forth in content with precision is much easier with the wheel. This is due to the fact that the distance your thumb must travel around the click wheel is much longer than the slide distance on the touch. As a result, actions like adjusting volume and moving back and forth in a podcast are much less sensitive and hence more accurate. A click wheel on the iPod Touch is entirely doable on the Touch’s multi-touch screen. It could be enabled on the screen when desired. It might look something like this (rendering my own):

Podcasts aside, I still believe that a virtual click wheel on the iPod Touch and iPhone would benefit all content types.

Kriegster’s Tips for Buying an HDTV

mgk — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:01:09 +0000

Note: This post is more informal and stream-of-consciousness than normal.

I often get asked by friends, family and coworkers for advice on buying an HDTV. I’m no home theater expert by any stretch, but after going through the research and purchase process myself I’ve come to the conclusion that consumers are unnecessarily focused on the technology details rather than the things that matter most (good price, favorable reviews, technology not obsolete).

Some thoughts in no particular order:

I have no overall brand preference - for people like you and me (home theater amateurs), most brands will be good enough
I have full confidence in the Costo-type off-brands like Vizio since the screen and core components are made by the same folks. The prices are lower because their standard definition tuners are typically lower quality. If you plan on watching a lot of standard definition content you might want to steer away from these.
It’s normally difficult to find online reviews of Costco and Sam’s Club TVs. This is because the model numbers the manufacturers use for the warehouse club units are typically different than the mass market models. Rely on the fact that the TV looks good enough in the store and that Costco lets you return almost anything at any time.
Don’t get hung up on comparing TVs to each other in the store; it’s a total apples to oranges comparison. Some are older, some are newer, some have been sitting on the floor for 8 months running 24×7 and their bulbs are dim, the lighting stinks and is different in different parts of the store. If a particular TV looks good enough then it’ll be fine at home. Even if conditions were 100% equal, you’ll go nuts comparing two sets, but if you took either of them home, within 5 minutes it’ll be the only one you know and will look great.
Rely heavily on online user reviews, especially on Amazon. Stay away from TVs that don’t have any (or many) reviews.
You might be able to negotiate a better price on plasma because there are way more LCDs selling as plasma is phased out
Don’t buy an extended warranty from the reseller

It is almost always a sucker bet
The resellers make almost no margin on the TV and ALL their margin on the warranty; they’ll gouge you on the warranty price.
If you insist on having an extended warranty, see if you can get it direct from the manufacturer post-purchase. For example, I got my Sony TV at Tweeter and they wanted $300 for an extra 3 years. I called Sony and they told me I could buy the exact same warranty direct from the Sony web site up to 1 year post-purchase for LESS THAN HALF the price. The caveat is you need to buy the set from an authorized reseller.

If you buy with an American Express card you’ll add a year (max) to the base manufacturer’s warranty at no additional cost. American Express will also give you accidental damage protection (e.g. Nintendo Wii controller wedged in the screen) for 90 days
Personally I don’t like Best Buy or Circuit City; I find their prices very high. Sears has VERY competitive prices. Online prices are normally the best but you’ll pay shipping. So you just have to do the math. Tweeter is normally much more expensive and I’d normally never buy there but they matched Sears and they give great service (e.g. the sales person isn’t a pimply high school kid who doesn’t know anything). Find the best local price and see if Tweeter will match. As a rule, they won’t match any online reseller or “fell out the back of the truck” places.
Don’t forget to upgrade your cable service to HD. And if you use your existing Tivo with the new HDTV then you’ll have to keep switching between the regular cable and HDMI inputs. My dad has this problem. I told him to either get an HD Tivo or a HD DVR from the cable company or else it’ll be a giant ongoing pain.
If your cable box offers HDMI output and component video output (in addition to the standard coax, RCA and S-Video connectors), use the HDMI. I’ve seen many people hook up the new TV with their existing coax or RCA or S-Video cables and they get a lousy picture because connections can’t carry an HD signal.
Do not ever, under any circumstance let the store sell you HDMI cables. Don’t even buy them from Walmart or other mega-chains which are normally cheap. You get charged 5X what they are worth. Buy them from Amazon (you can get a 6′ cable for $7 online vs. $30 or more in the store).
There is NO DIFFERENCE between the super-duper-gold-special HDMI cables than the regular old ones. Pretty much universal agreement on this. Just get the cheapest ones you can find that don’t have cat teeth holes in them.

AOL’s Buy of Social Network Bebo is Great News…

mgk — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:38:28 +0000

…for the few lucky folks who’ll make a ton of money in the transaction. For AOL and the rest of us, it’s no big deal.

Why do I say this? Several reasons:

Social networks are extremely trendy. Members Only jackets were all the rage once too. Bebo may be rich in advertising opportunities today and a wasteland tomorrow.
Initiatives like Google’s OpenSocial will make it easier for developers to create cross-social network functionality and meta-social networks, which will in turn make it easier for users to (ex)port their contacts and social graphs from social network to social network. Stickiness to individual social networks will decrease as social aspects are built more into Internet plumbing.
Bebo isn’t Facebook or MySpace.

I feel like I should have some witty closing sentence here but I can’t think of one. :)

Protect Yourself Using Desktop Search

mgk — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:55:22 +0000

Must people accumulate lots of stuff; digital stuff is no exception. We’ve got mounds of files and other documents on our computers at home, work and in our various email accounts. Over time we’re bound to let some of our private information seep out and end up in places we don’t want it to be. Using desktop search products (e.g. Google Desktop or Windows Search) you can instantly search your files for occurrences of your social security number, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and any other information you’d prefer not to have floating around.

When searching for items like social security numbers, be sure to look for multiple formats, e.g. “xxx-xxx-xxxx” and “xxxxxxxxxx”).

While you’re at it, you might want to perform the same searches in your email accounts. Many email services provide excellent search capabilities.

Don’t forget to clear your search history when you’re done so you don’t leave any additional crumbs.

Opportunity Lost for Greatest Video Blog Post Ever

mgk — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:24:13 +0000

Most people who watched the video of last week’s satellite shoot ‘em-up were wanting of a more exciting and spectacular impact and explosion, Star Wars style. The video is cool but I’d prefer to see something like this.

What we should have done was taped uber-blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble - video-camera and all - to the missile and let him ride it all the way to impact. It would be like watching Major Kong from Dr. Strangelove ride the falling nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull, only funnier.

There’s always next time…

My Blackberry Feature Wishlist

mgk — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:51:11 +0000

The Blackberry has been so successful as a mobile email device in part because it offers good enough completeness of experience and integration with corporate email systems (Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes being the canonical examples). By “completeness of experience” I’m referring to the fact that most of what you can do natively in the email lifecycle in Outlook/Exchange and Notes you can do on the device. There are a number of gaps - gaps which force me to use the native email client to accomplish basic tasks - and I’d like to see them addressed.

In no particular order (and from a Lotus Notes-centric point of view):

Rich text support including the bare basics like bold, italics and support for colored text
Usage of the Notes Drafts folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to message drafts
Usage of the Notes Trash folder from the Blackberry, so that the Notes client and the Blackberry have equal access to deleted items. This would support undelete from the Blackberry as well.
Ability to copy and paste attachments between messages, or for a functionally equivalent result the ability to forward a message containing an attachment and then delete all text except for the attachment
Ability to edit portions of existing messages when replying to or forwarding them. The message body is immutable.
Tab, indentation and bullet support

Any Blackberry/Notes experts out there that can comment?

The iPod Touch Could Do a Better Job with Podcasts

mgk — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:51:52 +0000

I’m a big fan of podcasts; I think the medium is excellent. I’ve used the 5G Video iPod and the iPod Touch and I think Apple took a step backwards with the Touch’s support for podcasts. The experience just isn’t optimal.

The following are annoyances and/or problems (in no particular order) which I hope Apple will address with a firmware update:

Landscape mode is more difficult for podcast listening than is portrait mode. In landscape for example, the play and pause buttons become miniscule and you can’t slew back and forth in a podcast.
I do most of my listening in the car. When I put the Touch down, the screen invariably switches from portrait to landscape mode as the device turns sideways along it’s journey from my hand to the seat. (This is a case where a “feature” becomes an annoyance.) When you pick up the device you need to wait the second or two it takes to flip back to portrait mode. Note that this problem isn’t unique to podcasts.
My fingers move faster than most devices can keep pace, and the iPod Touch is no exception. I wish the CPU was faster or the UI was more responsive or that keystrokes and gestures were buffered in hardware.
Titles that are longer than approximately 20 (give or take, since the font is proportional) characters are cut off and there’s no horizontal scroll mode or marquee behavior to show you the remaining characters. Turning the Touch to landscape mode provides a marginal improvement since the screen is wider, but even then many titles display truncated.
Screen real estate is poorly used. While a podcast is playing the majority of the screen is filled with the show image (if the audio file included an image) and the title displays in a micro-mini font.
Almost nothing in the UI is customizable. Fonts, font sizes, screen colors are all fixed.
Show notes (may include the text of the podcast, summary info, links, etc.) aren’t supported and aren’t displayed. Previous iPod models (and likely the new Nano and iPod Classic) display the show notes when you click the center button. I know the information is encoded in the audio files but the device just isn’t exploiting it.
The volume should be adjustable with a tactile button on the unit. You often want to adjust volume in very fine increments and this is difficult as a touch control.
Fast forward and reverse within a podcast are nearly impossible with one hand. The position control is so fine grained that you have to be holding the unit in one hand (or have the device sitting very stationary on a surface - not exactly the conditions while driving) and adjust the position with the other, while looking directly at the screen. Even with both hands you frequently overshoot your destination - makes it very difficult if you want to listen to the last several seconds or jump forward or back to different places in the audio. The click wheel-based iPods do a good job of this by giving you good control over the position. The Microsoft Zune gets this right as well - hitting forward or back jumps a given number of seconds or minutes, and if you hold down forward or back the device does a VCR-type fast forward/reverse behavior.
Podcasts are marked as played even if you only listen to the first few seconds. This is unfortunate because you can’t turn to landscape mode to get longer titles until you start playing. So to just view a fuller title you’ve marked the show as played. The Zune doesn’t mark a podcast as played until you listen to the majority of the show (I’m not sure I like this method better.)
You can’t download new podcast episodes or subscribe to new podcasts over WiFi. The iTunes WiFi interface doesn’t support podcasts at all. The root of this issue is that the Touch doesn’t contain a full blown iTunes client with separate podcast subscription capabilities and as a result, there’s no direct device-to-Internet podcast retrieval. The Zune doesn’t have a direct-to-Internet podcast capability either; you have to sync content from a PC running the Zune Marketplace software which in turn does the Internet downloads. See my previously written related rant.

Update 2-3-08: Added additional bullet.

While in landscape mode you don’t get volume or position controls.

These annoyances are somewhat compensated for by the fact that the Touch is a pleasure to use, but it would be nice if Apple could address these issues.

Usng Google’s “Did you mean?” Feature as a Better Spell Cheker

mgk — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:07:23 +0000

Over the years I’ve used Dictionary.com to spell-check the odd word here and there. Recently however I’ve started using Google’s “Did you mean?” feature as my official spell-checker.

Most people have used Google’s “Did you mean?” feature even without knowing it. It works very simply - if you do a Google search on a misspelled word, you’ll most likely be asked, “Did you mean: correctly_spelled_word“. This feature wasn’t built as a spell-checker per-se (in other words, the audience for this feature isn’t generally people looking up the proper spelling of words but rather the person who incorrectly types a search term. Recognizing that the search term is spelled incorrectly (which would return poor results) Google suggests the proper spelling so you can get the results you expect.

However, there’s no reason that “Did you mean?” can’t be used directly as a spell checker, and that’s exactly how I use it now. I like it better than the dictionary sites because a) I get just the results I want (the correctly spelled word), b) the results are nearly instant since I have a Google search box just a single click or keystroke away and c) most dictionary sites are built to define words that you spell correctly, not correct incorrectly spelled words (therefore, you end up typing in the incorrectly spelled word several times in trial and error mode until you get the answer you’re looking for).

Give it a try. Go to Google and type in an incorrectly spelled word or search phase and you should get a “Did you mean?” suggestion.

Interesting Points from the Book “Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service” by Joseph Petro

mgk — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:08:51 +0000

I’ve always been fascinated by the United States Secret Service, especially the procedures, regiment and strict discipline associated with presidential protection. (The Secret Service actually started out as an arm of the U.S. Treasury department with the responsibility of fighting the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, however aspect is far less sexy and interesting to me.) I just finished the book, “Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service“, written by Joseph Petro, a former agent who spent 4 years of his service protecting Ronald Reagan. The book was interesting and an easy read.

The following are some facts (according to the author) that I found especially interesting (in order of mention in the book):

The President doesn’t eat anything unless the origin of the contents and who handled it are known. At state banquets for example, it appears that the President is eating the same food as everyone else, but his meal is cooked by White House stewards who actually source the same ingredients themselves. There are exceptions, like when the President is at a baseball game and wants a hot dog. In this case an agent will randomly select a vendor and make a purchase.
While at an Orioles game, Reagan ordered three hot dogs, handed the vendor $5 and said keep the change. However the hot dogs were $2 a piece and Reagan’s staff had to chip in the difference.
Upon hearing gunshots, most people instinctively duck and cover. Secret Service agents are trained to unholster their weapons, stand up and return fire.
By design, the President is never more than 10 minutes away from a trauma center. In the case of foreign soil where there may not be a trusted hospital within range, the Navy may actually locate a ship with full trauma and medical facilities in proximity.
The legislation creating the Secret Service was actually on Lincoln’s desk waiting to be signed on the same day he was assassinated. However it wasn’t until 1901 that the charter of the Secret Service grew to include presidential protection.
The Secret Service has protected the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gutenberg Bible and the Mona Lisa, in addition to human protectees.
Secret Service protection of the President and Vice President are mandatory; it cannot be turned down. Spousal protection is optional.
Most presidential trips are preceded by three Service Service visits for surveying and planning purposes. The first trip is typically 3 to 5 months prior and is called the “survey”. The second trip is 1 month prior and is called the “preadvance”. One week prior to the President’s trip the site is visited by advance team. Other agents arrive 1-2 days prior to the President’s visit for bug sweeping and securing and final prep.
The President travels with a password (although it’s carried by an aide). It needs to be processed like any other.
Early in his Secret Service career, Petro was advised never to put the President higher than the 9th floor in a hotel, which is the maximum height that ladder trucks can reach. In addition, the Secret Service takes over three entire floors. The President would go in the middle with agents above and below.
The Oval Office doors are always locked and they don’t open like regular doors; there’s a trick to it. The same applies to the doors on the limo.
Protectees are assigned code names by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), with family member’s code names starting with the same letter. For example, George Bush 41 was “Timberwolf” and Barbara Bush was “Tranquility”.
Family and friends who send letters to the President use a special, private mailing address.
When the President travels, the Secret Service flies around their own cars They typically bring two complete sets in case there’s a problem. This includes two presidential limos.
Reagan worked in his residence in the early morning and always came to the Oval Office at 9 AM - no sooner and no later. If Reagan was ready earlier he’d pace for a few minutes while looking at his watch.
When the President or First Lady went shopping, the Secret Service would never carry their bags as it would interfere with their “operational readiness”.
Whenever the President traveled, he had with him a slew of Secret Service agents, a doctor, a WHCA officer and the military aide (the person who carries the nuclear football) at all times.
95% of the threats against the President and Vice President come from people in mental institutions or are otherwise disturbed.
Nearly everyone who comes under the attention of the Secret Service as a potential threat is interviewed.
Reagan’s Secret Service detail took intensive horseback riding training because he was such an avid rider.
To get off his horse, Reagan always did the Italian dismount. In this maneuver, the rider swings one leg forward and over the horse and then slides down off the side.
The Secretary of State is protected by State Department Security, who conduct separate advance trips than the Secret Service, even if they’ll be traveling together to the same place.
During trips, a Secret Service agent would be stationed at the nearest hospital trauma center.
The Secret Service has to be in the presence of the President at all times, so Petro attended several of Reagan’s colonoscopies during his colon cancer recuperation.
An AOP is an Attack on the President. The Secret Service trained for multiple kinds of AOP scenarios, including during normal walks or motorcades, skiing, scuba diving, and horseback riding.
AOPs scenarios don’t get run at the White House because agents running around with guns drawn would upset the staff. As a result, a model of the White House facade was built at the Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, MD.
Dan Quayle would make impromptu visits to Dairy Queen because he and Dairy Queen have the same initials.
The inaugural ceremony is a military event run by the Military District of Washington.
Air Traffic Control (ATC) clears the airspace wherever Air Force One flies.
President Reagan logged more miles (631,640) on Air Force One than Nixon, Ford and Carter combined (566,386).
The largest Secret Service protective effort ever was during the Pope’s 1987 visit to the US.

Computer to User: “Go help yourself”

mgk — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:17:51 +0000

In a time where customer service reps are often less than helpful, we now have computers emulating that poor service. I called a colleague at his office today and got his voice mail. Since he wasn’t there I hit “0″ to get the operator. The convention for the “0″ key in most phone ACD (automatic call distribution) is to ring the switchboard. Not only did the system balk at my “0″ entry but it told me to get help elsewhere and then come back to try again. As you might anticipate, this wasn’t helpful at all.

Listen to a recording of this particularly rude computer. You can hear me hitting “0″ several times and the computer’s response.

Email Needs an “Opt Out of this Thread” Option

mgk — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:36:29 +0000

Have you ever been one of multiple recipients on an email and gotten caught in a storm of “Reply to All” activity? I have - it’s annoying and I want a way out.

What we need is an “Opt out of this thread” option. I think implementation would only be feasible within proprietary email systems that don’t rely on Internet standards to route messages between users. (The capability to support this doesn’t exist in the Internet email protocols [e.g. smtp, pop3, and imap].) For example, I could see this implemented within the boundaries of corporate email systems (e.g. Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes) or public systems such as Hotmail or Gmail but not between separate email environments or systems.

In a sea of gimmicks to reduce email overload I think this option could have a positive effect.

Tip: Viewing Inline Email Images on Your Blackberry

mgk — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:51:14 +0000

I’m using a Blackberry against a Lotus Notes back-end. When I receive an email message with an image pasted inline (vs. as an attachment), I can’t view the image; it’s represented as “<< image >>”. I’m not sure why the Blackberry or the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) don’t present the image as a viewable attachment, but there is a workaround. If you forward the email to your web-based email account, e.g. Yahoo or Gmail and then browse there from the Blackberry, the image(s) will either be viewable directly within the message as HTML or will show up as a viewable attachment. As a quicker alternative, some of the big email services have an applet that you can run right on your Blackberry (I downloaded Google’s Gmail application for Blackberry directly from my device at http://gmail.com/app). With this approach, I simply forward the email to my Gmail account and view it (images and all) using the Gmail app.

Tip: Reduce the Pain of Replying to or Forwarding Large Attachments by Using Browser-Based Mail or Blackberry

mgk — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:57:00 +0000

I use the Lotus Notes client (I assume this information applies to Microsoft Outlook against Exchange as well, but I haven’t verified) on my laptop for most of my corporate email access. By default, most people work in “online” mode, meaning that the email client is communicating directly with the server, just like when in the office. In this situation, replying to or forwarding emails with large (multi-megabyte) attachments can be painfully slow since attachments have to travel the network both ways - the email client has to bring the attachments down from the server to your machine and then send them back out again with the outgoing message. (If in fact you choose to keep a copy of the sent message, the Lotus Notes client* will actually send the attachments to the server twice, once for the recipient and once to save a copy in your mail file, for a total of 3 trips across the network!**) And since most residential Internet connections are asynchronous, the outbound delay is multiples of the inbound.

A trick for avoiding this delay is to use either your Blackberry or browser-based email access to reply to or forward the large attachments. In both cases, the attachments are kept server-side; the data never traverses the network to your Blackberry or browser.

* Tested with Lotus Notes 7.0.3 client against Lotus Domino 7.0.3 server.

** Verified using Ethereal packet sniffer.

Griffin’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has Benefits Beyond FM Transmitting

mgk — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:59:39 +0000

Griffin Technology’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has benefits beyond just wirelessly transmitting your content to your car radio or home stereo system. The device has a mini-USB port so you can charge and sync your iPod without Apple’s annoying proprietary cable. I move my iPod around a lot and I frequently don’t have an Apple cable where and when I need one.

The benefit of mini-USB is that it’s been adopted as a standard for both data and charging in many portable electronics devices, so you tend to always have a cable around. And if a cable breaks (it does happen) you just replace it with another one, cheaply.

You can find a new iTrip on eBay under $10 (not including shipping, but all-in you’ll pay under $18). I’ve seen iPod sync cables (especially in brick and mortar stores) for rarely under $15 and sometimes over $25.

Mo’ Floppies Mo’ Problems

mgk — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:40:53 +0000

I found a stack of 5 ¼” floppy disks while rifling through some old boxes today. The disks were labeled “Full Backup” and were from early 1991. The capacity of a double-density 5 ¼” floppy disk is about 1.2 MB. Amazing. Today I back up about 10.3 gigabytes, which is small by comparison to people who shoot a lot of digital photos or video. Doing some simple math (1 GB = 1024 MB, and let’s assume the floppy disk was full at 1.2 MB - I’m not going to try and find a 5 ¼” disk drive to check it), my data volume has grown 8,789 times the 1991 amount.

In another useless mathematical exercise, assume that a 5 ¼” floppy disk is 1.5 mm thick and (who would have guessed??) 5 ¼” wide. To hold my current backup set I’d need a stack of floppy disks 43 feet high or 3845 feet (about 3/4 miles) if placed end to end.

Finally, let’s assume that in 1991 it cost $20 for a box of 10 5 ¼” floppy disks (my memory may be way off, but unlike what my girlfriend tells me, I don’t live in the past), so $2 per disk. To store my 10.3 GB on floppies would cost $17,578 ($1,707 per GB). Today you can get a 500 GB hard drive for $100 (20 cents per GB). So buy this ridiculously rough measure, storage has gotten 8,535 times cheaper since then.

Providers Should NEVER Ask for Your Password

mgk — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:14:04 +0000

I’m in the process of switching my mobile plan from Verizon Wireless to Sprint. While verifying my identity during several calls to customer service, I was very surprised that the reps asked me for my account password as part of the questions. No one should ever ask for this information, and you should never provide it if asked! With most* online services, all you need is a username and password to get complete access to an account. This gives the rep complete access without an audit trail, should the rep wish to conduct abuse (unlikely, but a highly unsecure process nonetheless.)

* More and more online services, especially financial institutions, are requiring information in addition to your username and password before granting account access. However these cases are still few and far between.

It’s bad enough that we all have our social security numbers and credit card numbers floating around as easy fodder for identity theft, so we should avoid giving away the keys to the kingdom while we’re at it.

This was timely as there have been some blog posts lately regarding websites whose internal system constraints or politics (my own assumptions) force less secure passwords (ironically, the post I linked to is about a financial service). After having it drilled into my head over the years (and coming to the same conclusion myself) that a 6-character password doesn’t provide appropriate security, it’s too bad that some websites actually won’t let you choose longer ones.

Back to Sprint - I hope they reconsider their policy around establishing customer identity on the phone. At a minimum, asking for your password undermines efforts to establish trust in an increasingly online and digital world.

Open Source Irony

mgk — Fri, 25 May 2007 03:00:43 +0000

Given Microsoft’s recent claims that the free and open-source software movement is violating 235 of it’s patents, the following statement* made by an Ubuntu spokesman is ironic (emphasis mine):

Microsoft has stated that Silverlight is a cross-platform plug-in. ‘Cross-platform’ does not mean ‘two-platform,’ and if the Microsoft team needs help getting this to work on Ubuntu, we would be delighted to help them accelerate that. If it’s open source—who knows? There might finally be some Microsoft code in a Linux distribution.

(* The context of the above statement is around Microsoft’s Silverlight product which runs on Windows and Mac.)

To be fair, I don’t know if any of the 235 alleged patent violations are source code related because Microsoft isn’t making the specifics of their claims public at this point.

IE Friendly

mgk — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 23:33:13 +0000

I resolved the issues that caused my blog to display improperly in Internet Explorer 7. If you only have (or prefer) IE 7, there should be no display problems at this point.

Some Lesser Known Google Search Tips

mgk — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:12:58 +0000

Google’s Matt Cutts recently appeared on Episodes 137 and 138 of DL.TV with a handful of not so well-known but very handy Google search tips. Some highlights from the list include (paraphrased):

Include quotes around your query to get results that contain exactly the text you enter, in the order you enter it. This is helpful when you want to narrow down your search and you know the exact expression you are searching for. For example, type “loose lips sink ships” to find all exact matches (returned 193,000) of that phrase. If you search for loose lips sink ships without the quotes, you will likely get many more results (returned 583,000), since you will be including pages that contain all those words but not necessary that exact phrase.
Phrase your query in the way in which the result might appear. For example, if you want to find out the height of Mount Everest, try the query “mount everest is * feet high”. The query is written in a way in which the result is likely to appear on a web page. The height (the variable piece of information you are trying to find) is specified as an asterisk. In the results, the height will replace the asterisk. Note that I included quotes since I expected the results to appear exactly as I wrote in the query.
Search for ranges of numerical values in a query. For example, you are interested in Mount Everest base camps between 10000 and 20000 feet. Include the range separated by a “..” as in the query mount everest base camp 10000..20000. Note that I left off the quotes since I didn’t really know how the words would appear. Alternatively, you could search for DVD players in the $100 to $300 range with the query dvd player $100..$300.
Exclude certain keywords by using the minus sign. For example, you are interested in ribs, but not the pork variety, you could query on ribs -pork. This will return results containing the word ribs but not pork.

These are just a few of the many Google search tips that are available.

Increasing Your Blog Readership Using FeedBurner and Email Signatures

mgk — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:11:19 +0000

I agree with Robert Cringely, FeedBurner is going places.

I called FeedBurner today to ask about some solutions to support corporate blogging and spoke with Jake Parrillo from the Business Development Team. We drifted to talking about blogs in general and about ways to generate traffic to a blog. He told me about a free FeedBurner service called Headline Animator, which according to FeedBurner allows you to:

Create and customize an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML.

The result will look similar to this:

Jake told me that he uses the Headline Animator to spread the word about his blog by including the banner in his email signature. Outstanding! He says it’s really helped to increase readership.

Email signatures are just one idea; you can of course place the banner anywhere.

Setting it up is really easy. (See the Headline Animator Overview and FAQ for more details):

Set up a FeedBurner account
Burn your RSS feed
Click on the Publicize tab
Click Headline Animator
Configure the theme (controls the size and colors of the banner; there’s an “Email Signature” theme) and the Title
Click Activate
Copy the resulting snippet of HTML and paste it anywhere you like.

I just configured a Headline Animator banner for my blog’s RSS feed and included it in my Yahoo email account’s signature.

Thanks Jake!!

p.s. Too bad there haven’t been too many tech IPOs lately, I’d love to get in on this one.

Windows Home Server Will Achieve Limited Adoption

mgk — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:37:05 +0000

I don’t believe that Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Home Server (WHS) product will achieve wide adoption among the product’s target audience. Announced by Bill Gates at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January,

Windows Home Server will help families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers, in order to easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. By automatically backing up home PCs, centralizing a family’s digital “stuff” and allowing access to it away from home, Windows Home Server will help simplify and enhance family life.

I expect the product to see great uptake among technology enthusiasts but I don’t think it will be pervasive with the typical Internet family. Reasons include:

People don’t think of themselves as running support operations. (Credit for this bullet comes from colleague and friend The Derf.) When it comes to people’s computers, they just want them to work and they expect their data to be safe. Unlike things like printers and scanners (and even WiFi) which provide direct and obvious utility, WHS is a pure infrastructure device and therefore won’t be recognized as essential.
For PC and consumer electronics products to be widely adopted I believe they must either fill an obvious gap (I don’t think the gap is obvious here since most people don’t think about things like backup) or they must significantly improve the user experience. For example, WiFi allows you to sit out on the deck and browse the Internet. Photo printers give you the instant gratification of passing around just-taken digital photos. So what about appliances that backup PCs? Wait, doesn’t that just happen automatically*?

Paul Thurrott covers the product and states Microsoft’s objectives towards ease of use in his preview of WHS at the SuperSite for Windows. It’s an interesting opposing view.

* Microsoft seems to recognize how important (and generally missing) consumer PC backups are. (Backup is a primary function of WHS). As such, I’d like to see Microsoft implement an Internet-based backup offering as part of Windows Live OneCare which could be integrated with Windows Vista and XP. I think Vista should present users with an in-your-face prompt to back up their data to OneCare following new PC setup. Including this functionality in Vista could spread the protection of PC backup to the 90 million+ units of Vista that IDC estimates will ship in 2007. Note: If you are interested in Internet-based backup for your Windows machine today, check out Mozy and Carbonite, which are very good and inexpensive. The Webware blog has a post on some other services as well.

IE Unfriendly

mgk — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:14:42 +0000

My blog doesn’t render properly in Internet Explorer 7. I’m using the Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner. His Vertigo demo page renders perfectly in IE 7 so I may have introduced a problem when I was customizing the page templates. According to Google Analytics, 64.52% of you aren’t seeing the problem. :) (It’s actually 71% since 18% of the IE users are running IE 6.)

My Reading List

mgk — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:04:53 +0000

I’ve added a Reading List section to my blog, representing a partial list of the books I’ve read. Specific mentions include:

Confessions of a Street Addict - Jim Cramer is great whether you have an interest in the market or not. This book describes how he got to where he is. I get a kick out of Mad Money.
The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time - A fascinating look at the history of Google. An easy read.
Jack: Straight from the Gut- Jack Welch is a business legend. A very interesting account of Jack and GE.
Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity- Long title, but outstanding book. It’s a bunch of essays written by Joel Spolsky about the business and technology of software. Possibly the best insight into the world of software and programming that I’ve read.
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions- A great true story about 6 MIT students who made a killing in Vegas Blackjack using a system they developed.
How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle - How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers- A fun read about the interview process for software developers historically used at Microsoft.

I added the Reading List link to the blog header line:

I’ll be adding to the list over time, so be sure to check back.

testing

Defining the Undefinable

mgk — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 05:50:12 +0000

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are two concepts that have gotten an incredible amount of press in the past year, both in IT industry media and corporate IT. Part fact, part hype, part buzz, part reality, part theme, part meme, part concept and part tangible, these two terms share one important attribute:

They are very difficult to define.

If you ask 10 different people to define SOA or Web 2.0, you will get 10 different answers. For the most part, all of the answers will be right, and all will be wrong.

For corporate IT shops (and Marketing and Advertising and other departments who might touch the Web 2.0 concept), I posit that you shouldn’t spend time ‘figuring out’ the definitions of these terms. That approach won’t scale – different groups within the organization will end up with very different (and often orthogonal) interpretations.

Rather, I suggest that organizations educate themselves as much as possible on these concepts and then:

Define what they mean to your organization.

These definitions should be developed internally (IT is the best candidate to spearhead) and then evangelized horizontally, across the organization. In the case of SOA, this is important because it is an overarching concept, with integration and sharing at the very heart of the idea (at least in my definition) :). It’s very difficult to build an effective SOA without the organization having a unified view. In the case of Web 2.0, its possible touchpoints extend across IT, marketing, product development and other business areas, making a common definition important as well.

Once these terms are defined, the business can build their Web 2.0 strategies and IT can design their SOAs. By marching in lockstep with your cross-departmental peers, your organization can best take advantage of these powerful yet vague terms.

I Went to Macworld and All I Didn’t Get Was A Lousy WiFi iPod

mgk — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:24:31 +0000

Well, I didn’t actually attend Macworld but I figured the title worked.

Another year has gone by and we’ve got no WiFi-enabled iPod. (A $600 iPhone with WiFi doesn’t count.) This feature just seems to fundamental to me, so basic. Having to be tethered to a PC to download from iTunes or sync your podcasts just seems so against the grain of the everything-mobile world we live in. And the iPod doesn’t make it easy (for the average consumer) to get content from multiple PCs either; you’ve of course got to have iTunes installed, your playlists defined and optionally your podcast subscriptions configured. So not only must you be wired, but you are effectively bound to a single PC.

You can’t blame Apple entirely, no one else really has WiFi either. Sure, the Microsoft Zune has WiFi, but it’s for Zune to Zune sharing only, and it’s a limited-power/range implementation of 802.11 b/g.

All I want is WiFi in my regular 5G video iPod. If I were designing the feature I’d have the iPod be a full fledged WiFi client with support for running a slimmed-down version of iTunes and the ability to download content directly from the iTunes Music Store or from my PC which holds my entire song/podcast collection. Note that I’m not looking for iPod to iPod WiFi. This will just become another conduit for piracy and people are already irritated with Apple’s DRM and the state of DRM in general. And look how well the Zune music sharing DRM was received.

Why hasn’t Apple done this yet? I have several theories:

They don’t have to; there’s no (significant) competition. And from the beating that the Zune has been getting by the media and through anecdotal accounts, it isn’t a competitive threat(yet).
WiFi-enabling iPods won’t sell more of them. Despite my desire for the feature, people I’ve spoken with aren’t holding off for WiFi before buying one.
The iPod monoculture already has people willing to pay lots of money for the existing devices. Why reduce margins by adding manufacturing costs?

WiFi iPods will appear eventually, but on Apple’s timeline.

Wikipedia’s Success Doesn’t Validate Wikis

mgk — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:21:54 +0000

It seems like everyone is using Wikipedia. Almost no one will disagree that Wikipedia has achieved astounding success over the past year. With high Google PageRank, Wikipedia results are likely to be at the top of many search results. This, and the fact that Wikipedia has become near-de facto standard for people doing ad-hoc research ensures that this cycle of success will continue.

Wikipedia’s incredible success however doesn’t validate the Wiki as a collaborative platform. Rather, it’s the combination of right-place, right-time, critical mass, network effect, viral marketing Web 2.0ishness that made Wikipedia shine. Wikipedia is similar to many other Internet success stories in that their formula for greatness is anything but easy to decompose. However in the case of Wikipedia, a critical item NOT in that formula is the use of a Wiki as the underlying collaborative engine.

This is evidenced by several factors:

There are no other Wiki mega-success stories on the Internet
Problems associated with democratizing content creation, as has been the case in several high-profile Wikipedia-related cases have raised a degree of skepticism towards the Wiki as an authoritative body of knowledge
The Wiki paradigm, a collaborative process which allows users to directly contribute to other people’s work, isn’t radical enough to cause a paradigm shift. The underlying technology, which lets users modify each other’s content in-place has existed for a long time under different window dressings.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t good Wiki use cases (i.e. corporate internal/team collaboration) or that future hits like Wikipedia won’t happen, but the Wiki as a medium isn’t the secret sauce that will make the collaborative environment a success.

Ten Ways To Increase Your IT Value

mgk — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 04:48:48 +0000

I wrote this Computerworld article back in 2003, but most of the points still apply today.

I’m planning on updating this list at some point and resubmitting it.

I’ve Been BlitzKrieged!

mgk — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 04:06:59 +0000

This is apparently what happens to your Google AdSense ads when you’ve got no content and your name is Krieger. Translated to German, krieg (as in blitzkrieg) means war. krieger translates to warrior, fighter or soldier.

Auf Wiedersehen!

A Blog is Born

mgk — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 03:28:20 +0000

And so Kriegster.com is born, weighing in at 49 words and 1 post.

Right now this blog is just a statistic in a sea of blogs but I hope to make a mark, and maybe even say an interesting thing or two.

Looking forward to 2007 - Happy New Year!