Life is grand

The multi-desktop Spaces feature in Leopard is turning out to be really useful and well implemented. The main thing I like is the keyboard support for it. CTRL + an arrow key takes you to one of your four spaces. That makes it really easy to quickly flip between spaces and applications. Dragging applications between Spaces is also pretty simple though a keyboard command to send the current application to a Space would be useful e.g. CMD + CTRL + arrow key.

My main gripe with Spaces though is switching between windows of the same application. If I have two Firefox windows open in two different Spaces it seems to attempt to rotate between them when I switch to, say, Adium and then back to Firefox. I’d prefer if windows of the same application but on different Spaces where broken up into separate items in the switcher sequence.

Still, Spaces is the slickest implementation of this idea I have seen and a very nice feature to have in Mac OS X.

This is why the new semi-transparent menu bar in Mac OS X Leopard is a bad idea. Hard to read, confusing and doesn’t help in any way I can see. Other wallpapers are not much better. Even the default Leopard wallpaper causes problems.

Otherwise my first few hours with Leopard has been pleasant. More to come.

Mac OS X (Tiger) died on my MacBook Pro this morning. Woke up on a lovely Sunday morning, booted up the old MacBook Pro and was asked for a username and password. I was a bit sleepy but still thought it odd it was asking for a username. With just one user on the system it normally defaults to that one account. I got the Shake Of Denial on entering the password. Thinking I had typed it wrong I tried again, and then again and again and again. Odd. So I tried the root user just in case but no luck.

I got a bit worried at this point.

Using the iPhone I pulled up some web-pages on Mac OS X password recovery and learned about the single user boot option. Command + S during boot and you get a terminal window. Some commands I tried brought up a very worrying message; Couldn’t find root user, sleeping then trying again.

Plenty of commands weren’t working either. su, sudo, passwd, netinfo etc. No errors, they would just go straight back to prompt. Every now and then I got a “Bus error” message and a “Disk0s2 UNDEFINED” warning. That was my main hard-drive.

I spent the next three hours going between the iPHone and my MacBook Pro trying to figure out how to restore the root user or my main user. No luck. Worse, I didn’t have enough space available to do a reinstall.

Eventually I learned how to manually mount an external hard-drive in single-user mode using mount_hfs and copy all my files off of HD.

Just before I was about to use DiskUtility from the Mac OS X install disc to erase the disk I tried one last thing; delete the Mac OS X setup file which told the OS that it had completed an install. I deleted the file, rebooted and was gloriously shown the user setup procedure. 5 minutes later and the root user plus my main user along with all files, settings, system files etc. was restored and working perfectly.

That was 10 minutes ago and everything seems to be working as if nothing had happened. I am worried though as during the day I heard the dreaded Ticking Of Death from the hard-drive. So I will send it in to get a replacement/check.

So there you go. I am going to upgrade to Leopard right this minute and get Time Machine working. I don’t have any irreplaceable data on my hard-drive (everything is stored off-computer in repositories that I bring down working copies of) but a good backup will save me the several hours I spent today fuxoring around trying to restore things manually.

p.s. Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper are supposed to be good backup systems too.

p.p.s My faith in Apple hardware is a bit rattled today. I have never had a hard-drive failure in 15 years of using computers. And this MacBook Pro is not much older than a year.

no enterprise should want their confidential data stored in the cloud outside of their control. With a managed RSS ecosystem, content and metrics are stored securely. Your data. Your hardware. Your policies. Your compliance. If the researchers, engineers, marketing and other key contributors in your organization are using Google Reader (which is a terrific reader for individuals) you need to think about the risk of Google’s ability to connect your domain to the feeds and the details on the articles being read by your employees.

No disrespect meant to the people at Attensa but this is FUD meant to sway buyers towards Attensa products.

There are risks to “Your data. Your hardware. Your policies. Your compliance.” in the form of the enterprise’s competence in hardware, policies and compliance.

Enterprises don’t store their money personally. You don’t store your money under your mattress. You let the experts do it for you.

I agree “the cloud” has a way to go before it can be fully relied on but the shift is underway and we shouldn’t be using FUD to sell product.

Just remember that there is risk in absolutely everything. Often the choice is made by being persuaded by the most persuasive seller, not by the most right seller.

I got an invite to Hulu this evening had a fun few seconds logging in and checking out the home-page. On clicking a video, and I tried quite a few, I was told it wasn’t available in my area (Ireland.) The interface is well done, simplistic and usable. No download feature though which is a pain.

So A for effort but F for delivery. It doesn’t work “Anytime. Anywhere.”

Here’s what Facebook can do. Permalink to this paragraph

Let’s say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends “Dave bought a Wii and he likes it.” That’s a lot more likely to result in a sale than an intrusive ad

Dave is right. It is more likely to result in a sale. But how much more likely and from what starting point? Not much more likely and from a very small starting point (as Dave admits, the starting point of AdSense is pretty much zero for many of us, we blank them out.)

Will Facebook already know I have a Wii? While I am glad my friend got one I don’t need to see a targeted Wii advert.

And will Facebook know not to tell me my female friends bought the latest copy of Vogue, and liked it. Or that my mom bought Dove and liked it. Or that my budy Dave got pimpim rims for his ride and liked it but that I don’t pimp my ride so I won’t like it?

Automating and giving over control of word-of-mouth to companies is doomed to fail. They will abuse it, they will assume too much, they will counter their competition in annoying ways to be the exclusive targeted shoe/denim/computer/book/magazine ad I see (actually, there is an avenue for Facebook to explore; auctions on exclusive ads to users in segments.)

I already know when my friend buys a Wii and likes it. He phones me and tells me, he tells me in the corridor, he emails me, blogs about it, IMs me and probably mentions it on Twitter too. I don’t want a Facebook advert about it on top of all that.

And my friends know infinitely better than Facebook whether something they have bought, and liked, will or won’t appeal to me.

(Reading this further piece by Dave highlights why ads on search result pages are the best in the market; they are information to your query. Ads on my friend’s page is advertising to no query. If I read Dave right the answer seems to be a targeted ad system that is watching what you are looking for and suggests “information.” Sounds a bit like a Google/Facebook version of Clippy though.)

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

For many Mac OS X Leopard users this is a serious bug. I am glad I haven’t upgraded to Leopard as I do a lot of copying photo files between my camera volume, my main HD volume and an external HD volume. If I lost some of those I’d be pretty angry.

Interestingly Time Machine might help you out in this case. But that isn’t guaranteed.

Facebook will be controlling the inventory for these Social Ads, not Microsoft (which continues to serve the more generic, standard ads on Facebook)

So let me get this straight. Last week Microsoft paid $250million for the rights to international Advertising 1.0 on Facebook. A week later and Facebook launches Advertising 2.0 and Microsoft will have to buy into it all over again.

(On an aside I think Facebook’s announcement was very weak. This has been attempted before, admittedly in less successful networks.)

Seeing as emailing large files doesn’t work there are a lot of web based systems out there that try to simplify the process. Drop.io is easily the easiest, fastest and most useful of these services I tried. No registration, multiple file select, quick upload, customisable conditions (”expire files after 1 month”), secure and so on. Just give it a go, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

As an aside I predict the io TLD will become the new hot Web 2.0 property. Drop.io is a cool name.

I have been trying to digest Google’s Open Social over the past few days and then get hit by Google’s Open Handset Alliance today. Any more open and my brains are going to start pooling around my feet.

Then Derek Powazek writes a telling line:

Open Social, which is going to solve all the problems you didn’t know you had with social networking sites

I was tending towards positive thoughts about Open Social until I read that. I was thinking that while Open Social wasn’t ideal (Google own/control/define it) it might be a useful stop gap until true “social network portability” happened.

But then Powazek said the above and it struck me; I don’t want to run applications inside a social network. Applications on my desktop don’t run inside my address book. They run alongside it and dip into it when they need.

Before Open Social I bemoaned the walled application garden of Facebook. It was AOL for applications. Then along comes Open Social and the hype-train just bundles me along over that wall and into a new space that looks back on the wall, but from inside it. Suddenly I think Open Social is cool, applications in many social networks, wow!

Wait a minute…

So yeah. No applications inside social networks. That is an easy but wrong headed idea. It works now but doesn’t work in the long run.

I don’t even want my social network to be part of a social network. My network is mine, it belongs where I am, not inside some other application. And then the applications, and this is truly novel, just live on the web. Not inside Facebook or Ning or Bebo or MySpace. You host them where you want and how you want and they access everyones social networks which are stored where people want and how people want. You want to store it on Facebook? Sure, just make sure Facebook hasn’t sucked your network in and locked it up.

Open Social seems to fight the web a bit. It makes it easy to create applicatons with social network capabilities all inside a subset of the world wide web. It doesn’t work on the open web, your app. only works inside an Open Social container. Define, controlled and owned by Google. Nobody owns the web folks, not even our good, good friends Google (whose products I use everyday.)

As for Google’s Open Handset Alliance, I’m not sure. It is an operating system and some middle-ware with some PR behind it. Mobile app. development is pretty darned difficult I have found, you can’t do jack without giving your unborn children over to some mobile company and a telco or other. So an open mobile OS would be nice for mobile app. developers. Finally, a bit of freedom, right? But it could be too open, too unrestricted to the point where, as Andy Rubin says, the company supplying you the phone can totally lock it down. And then an app. designed for this Open Handset Alliance won’t work. It won’t install or it will but then it won’t be allowed access to the GPS or the camera or it might have all that but then the OS blocks VOIP calls and forces the app. to use the telco’s network and it all ends up as big a mess as we currently have.

Eric Scmidt says “why would you bother?” in response to a locked down OHA device. Because people do? Because not everyone chooses right? Because some companies are scared and clamp down instead of opening up? Because a company can get a free OS and middle-ware and then lock it down to squeeze every cent they can out of it? Not everybody believes in open yet.

I just think it could become highly confusing for the people who use the phones. OHA is currently a “developer announcement” but what/where is the user announcement? Where is my Plays For Sure that doesn’t come to a crushing end?

Funnily enough, the iPhone is pretty consistent. You know how to develop for it. Users know how to use it, what always works and what always doesn’t work.

Really, I am not sure about OHA. Truly open is chaos but potentially great.