Geek with an Attitude

What am I talking about?  Well, add a “.com” to pandora, and what do you get?  A music service for the 21st century!  That is, if it were actually tailored to consumers of 21st century music instead of “content providers,” which is fast becoming a synonym for “money-grubbers.”  What is it about providing “content” that makes one want to tick off one’s customers these days?  I don’t know, but I do know this:  Pandora is the answer to a question nobody asked.

In theory, it seems like a brilliant idea.  Go to pandora.com, type the name of a band you like, and they will create a playlist (or, in Pandora lingo, “station”) for you based upon sound-alike bands.  Then, you can further refine the playlist by adding bands you like and giving the thumbs-down to any suggested songs you don’t want to hear.  It’s like having a radio station that plays songs especially for you!  Add in the ability to make more than one playlist, and you’ve got yourself a potential killer app.   Kind of like how Shawn Bradley was, at 7-6, a potentially dominant basketball player.  We all know how that story ended, don’t we?

As great as the idea behind pandora.com is, the poor execution nearly cancels it out.  Here are the oh-so-intentional missteps these people made:

1) You can start a station, but you have to register for the site if you want to play more than a couple songs.  Registration for sites like this is pretty much par for the course these days, but that doesn’t prevent me from hating it.  They then use your registration information to target ads at your face as long as pandora.com is open.  This keeps it free!  Yay!  (A quick thank-you to Firefox and Adblock Plus for defeating this problem for me, thus helping pandora.com despite themselves.  The ads they show are the flashy and potentially spyware-ridden kind, and I wouldn’t be able to hack pandora.com if I had to fight through them)

2)  You can vote each song “thumbs-up” or “thumbs down.”  Giving it a thumbs-down vote will kick it off the station and alter the station in ways that you might not want.  They also let you “skip” a song, but only up to 6 times an hour.  So, if you’ve listened to a song for 3 minutes and have gotten tired of it, you have to wait it out until the end if you’ve used all your skips for the hour.  This is incredibly lame.  Why do they have this stupid rule?  Because their “content licenses” make them.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — copyright simply doesn’t work in the digital age.  I can’t understand why a “content provider” would require a personalized radio station to play whole songs.  What benefit is that to them?  The whole point of pandora.com is the illusion that you have created a radio station just for you.  When you can’t skip songs, the illusion goes right out the window.  That, and you can’t even turn it to a different station, because when you come back, no longer how long you leave, the end of that song is still waiting for you when you get back.  How did the next generation of radio end up worse than the last generation?

3)  Oh, and perversely, you can’t rewind or fast forward, either.  It’s like they’ve anticipated everything I could possibly want, and then denied it to me.

4) They generally take one song per album of the artist you want, and play those to death.  If you don’t refine the station, you could hear the same 20 songs over and over, just like on the Top 40 radio you were using the internet to avoid.  The good part is you can make 100 stations, and add variety that way.  But still, it’s just one song per album, and often just a couple of songs per artist.    For example: my favorite artist Starflyer 59 has 6 songs on there, and none from my favorite albums.  Sure, I could pop in those CDs, but that doesn’t help pandora.com, does it?

I think that’s enough ripping for now.  The sad part is that it’s a genius idea, good enough to be useful even with all the above caveats.  Somebody will come up with a real version of pandora.com some day, but until they do, we’re stuck with this ad-supported content that’s been licensed within an inch of its life.

(insert obligatory closing line about closing the mythical box here)

Wanna hear a dirty secret?  I’m not really passionate about technology.  And by “not really,” I mean, not at all.

I don’t judge technology on anything other than utility and ease of use.  I don’t care how cool stuff looks, I just want it to work.  I don’t care about the newest things on the market, or the next great thing coming down the pike.  I bought a desktop and a laptop last year, and went quad-core CPU on neither of them.   Who the hell needs a quad-core PC these days?  Sure, Outlook might load .5 seconds faster, but it that worth twice the price just to say I have a quad-core machine?  Heck, no.  Quad-core is for chumps, yo.

I don’t own a gaming console, and never have.  I just recently got around to playing Doom 3.  My webcam is at least 8 years old.  With the exception of MS Windows and Office, all the software on my computer is free.  I don’t like mp3 players — including iPods.  CDs are so much better, seriously.  I briefly flirted with the iPhone, but settled on the much cheaper and much more functional and easy Blackberry Curve.  I hate the fact that Twitter exists, and I hate even more that I’m on it.  I don’t like this world we’re in, and don’t feel the need to try anything new.  If I see something I think I might like, I’ll try it out.  If not, I have no desire to participate in the feeding frenzy.

I mean, let’s take Linux, for example.  I really like the idea of Linux, in that it’s free and not a product of those evil geniuses at Apple or those evil dullards at Microsoft.  But the only “flavor” of Linux I’ve ever really been able to tolerate is Ubuntu, because it’s the only one that seemed designed for the needs of the average power user.  I still dual-boot with Windows XP, and you know what?  I use XP way more, because it does everything I need it to do.  That’s right, an OS designed and built in 1992 is my favorite of all time.  If Ubuntu could run things without me having to go to the internet every day to find instructions, I might use it more.  Functionality and ease is all I want.

If you’re thinking that makes me a pretty weird IT guy, I have to concur.  I thought of all this as I was troubleshooting a really obtuse computer problem for a customer today.  It’s ridiculous, this problem.  One of her CD drives intermittently won’t eject a CD until you restart the computer.  Normally, one could live with this problem (and to her credit, she has been for over a year), but now I have to actually fix it.  It’s times like this that I realize that I’m actually a writer, not a computer technician.  This is a real bummer, because I thought for sure I was a computer guy.

*Note to prospective employers:  I was employing irony in the preceding paragraph — of course I’m a computer technician.  I, as a writer, was just being ironic.  Sorry for all the confusion.

** Note to other prospective employers:  I wasn’t actually using irony in the above paragraph, I was just saying so to increase my chances of getting a job.  However, as a writer, I could use irony if I so chose.  Isn’t that in itself ironic, don’t you think?  A little too ironic?

Yeah, I really do think.

Miro likes to update; not as much as iTunes or Windows, but still…when I saw that the 2.0 version was available, I was filled with trepidation.  The previous versions seemed to only fix cosmetic problems, and didn’t concentrate on the real annoyances that keep Miro from being my software lover:  Movies that come back after I delete them, random crashes, and the inablity to advance Youtube videos or automatically download them in high quality if available.  There were a number of other problems, but those were probably my biggest criticisms of Miro 0.0-1.1999.

So, did they fix the real stuff in 2.0?  Short answer:  A little.  Any discussion of Miro 2.0 must start and end with the fact that it crashes a LOT.  It crashes more than any other program I’ve ever seen, and that includes any and all versions of McAffee anything.  It doesn’t seem to like progressing from one video to the next, which is unfortunate since the whole point of Miro is to be your one-stop shop for everything involving internet TV.

Having said that, you can now advance Youtube videos without Miro freaking out.  However, I still have phantom videos that come back from the dead, ones that I have even deleted manually from my hard drive.  It still goes out and downloads them!  So that’s one out of three, which would be pretty good for a third baseman.  Also, the videos you search for on Google Video won’t technically play, which is a problem.  So there are a bunch of bugs that carried over from previous versions of Miro, is what I’m saying.

A new feature that I kind of like is the ability to add “sites” to Miro, which basically makes Miro act as a browser for different channels in Hulu.  I love Hulu, but you can get the same things by going to, well, Hulu.  Without Miro getting rid of the bugs, there’s no reason to make it a one-stop shop, you know?  Now, if it managed to download the Hulu videos for later viewing, that would be something.

I don’t want to make it sound like Miro is bad, though.  Everything I liked about it in my last review still applies, and their collection of video podcasts in the Miro guide has led me to all sorts of fun stuff (even if much of it has been cancelled due to lack of funds and a global recession).  If you want a convenient place to download and view internet podcasts and/or Youtube videos, Miro is your guy.  Especially if they fix that whole crashing thing.

When Apple recently announced they were going DRM-free on their iTunes purchases, the world cheered.  After all, they were charging 99 cents per song, and those songs were not songs per se but were restricted Apple “song files.”  Yeah, they were pretty to listen to, but you could only burn them to CD a certain number of times and you couldn’t play them on an unauthorized computer.  With no DRM, the world theorized, you could download a song from iTunes and actually own the song.  You could take it with you, put it on a bunch of compilation CDs, transfer it to twelve computers, and so on.  This was hailed as a great day in America.  And it was, for NEW iTunes customers.

Existing customers, however, were caught in a vicious game.  In order to get the new DRM-free music, they would have to upgrade their iTunes again, then upgrade their music files at 30 cents per file.  This was not explained very well, so lots of people upgraded to DRM-free iTunes and then upgraded their music, only to find that their music wouldn’t play until they paid Apple some moolah.  They couldn’t go back to the old way, either; what’s done is done.  So, if they had 500 iTunes songs, they had to pay $150 to hear them again!  Leave it to Apple to screw up something as great as DRM-free music, right?

And just FYI, I’m going to repeat this again…upgrading to DRM-free music in iTunes means upgrading every single pre-existing iTunes purchase at 30 cents a pop, and you can’t go back if you regret or misunderstand your decision.  Also, most good songs are now $1.29 instead of $0.99 now, so budget appropriately.

Apple has been getting by on cool looks and the goodwill of early adopters for a while now.  As people ooh and aah over things like the iPhone and MacBook Pro, Apple has been treating its Windows customers with an almost Microsoft-level contempt.  Need I remind you they put out a version of iTunes that downloaded and installed the Safari browser without customer’s authorization?  And tell me again why you can’t sync one-way from your iPod or iPhone to your computer…it would sure make things much easier after hard drive crashes.

If you’ve had to deal with AT&T’s customer support recently, and by recently I mean in the years since the advent of DSL, you know a few things:

1)  They’ve outsourced all of their tier one tech support to script-readers in other countries who (non-convincingly) all have names like “Ted” and “Darren.”

2)  DSL is a frustratingly anti-intuitive thing to install and maintain, and tier one tech support can only deal with the most common of issues.  This can lead to looooong support calls, especially if the customer isn’t technically inclined or able to fight through occasionally thick accents.

3)  AT&T is this way because it saves them gobs of money, and therefore they don’t care to pursue technologies or policies that minimize support calls.

If you’ve gotten AT&T DSL, and you want to use your own (non-AT&T) address in a program like Outlook, you’re going to need tech support.  You wouldn’t think this would be a big deal (and for most internet service providers, it isn’t), but AT&T-Yahoo decided long ago that only their mail servers should be used to send mail from AT&T DSL accounts.  That means that for most people who have a work or business e-mail address they want to set up at home, the following will happen:

1) They’ll bring their laptop home from work, connect to their home network, and download their e-mails.

2)  They’ll find one they need to reply to or forward, and they will try to reply or forward to it, like a human being normally would.

3)  It will be stuck in the outbox, and never sent.  They will get an obtuse error in Outlook saying that there was a problem with the server.

4)  They will try a few more times, getting more and more frustrated.  If they’re smart, they will put the error message into google and get back results that lead to an AT&T Yahoo support page.  If they aren’t, they’ll call AT&T tech support and get a guy named “Darren” who will walk them through changing their SMTP server to smtp.att.yahoo.com

5)  That used to be enough;  However, AT&T then started sending unsolicited e-mails to their customers, warning them that their e-mail was being sent insecurely, and sending them to a support page with instructions on changing their outgoing mail server to secure port 465, using their AT&T DSL username for authentication.

6)  That used to be enough;  However, NOW AT&T won’t even let you send emails from your non-AT&T e-mail address unless you explicitly allow it in your Yahoo! Mail settings.  That means logging into Yahoo with your DSL username and password and following elaborate support instructions on how to do this.  If you are in an organization, and that organization has multiple people who want to use Outlook with their own e-mail addresses, you have to explicitly allow all those addresses to send mail with smtp.att.yahoo.com.

I’m betting this is the type of thing that AT&T doesn’t tell you when you buy their internet service.  The worst part?  If you take your work laptop home with you, now everything you send from Outlook at work is going through the stupid AT&T servers to get wherever it’s going.  This is ridiculous.

So, why all the draconian measures?  Security for you?  Please.  Making you authenticate your e-mail and secure your communications might make you feel better, but trust me — nobody’s trying to intercept and read your e-mail packets before they reach their destination (and if they are, your office/workplace probably has already thought of that, and has taken steps to defeat it.  In short, it’s their problem, and you have nothing to do with it).  How about security for them?  Well, if your computer is a spyware-infected spam-generator, that spyware is going to either use the settings in Outlook/Outlook Express, thereby defeating any security measure Yahoo! might use (because if you can send e-mail, so can spyware), or use a server that Yahoo blocked in step 4).  Any way you slice it, any steps beyond 4 are totally unnecessary.  So what’s the deal, AT&T Yahoo! DSL?

I’ll tell you what the deal is — they want you to use their mail, and their webmail, and run your life.  They can do it because tech support is so cheap.  They don’t care how many times you call, as long as the person taking your call is working for peanuts.    I’ve seen a lot of complaints about this AT&T policy in various places, but not a lot of speculation as to why they do it this way.  If anyone has any ideas beyond “They just want to run your life,” I’d be glad to hear them.

A page of complaints and advice about this issue on echeng.com is here

Apparently, this rule also applies to Uverse subscribers.  Oh, goody.

The AT&T support page with detailed instructions is here

Perversely, you can still use Google’s gmail sending server in Outlook, but it will edit all your e-mail to make it look like it came from your gmail account.  That’s some serious BS right there.

**Of course, if you can get past tier one tech support, you can get this problem fixed in 90 seconds.  They can unblock the port commonly used to send e-mail, and then you don’t have to go through all the steps.  Just call AT&T and keep telling them you need the “port 25 block” lifted.  At first, they will tell you it’s permanent, and can’t be lifted, and can I please help you with something else.  Keep telling them you need it lifted, and if necessary ask to speak to Tier Two tech support.  Once the real Americans in tier two answer the phone, explain that you need the block lifted, and they will do it for you.  Isn’t life great?

Even though I intellectually know that a database is, at it’s core, just a table of information, most database software programs try to make the database into some sort of mystical collection of fragile data that can be corrupted just by looking crossly at it.  You might start with a basic database, but then you add users and passwords and permissions and network drives and modes of operation and links to other programs…and you end up with an unwieldy pile of poo that takes 5 minutes to load and 5 seconds to screw up.  Why can’t we just make databases that work?  Can’t we concentrate on that?

The problem, apparently, is speed.  If a database is allowed to be “just a table,” every time you look for some esoteric piece of info from that table, it has to search the whole table for it.  This is understandably slow, and so database people since the dawn of time have been coming up with ways to speed up the process.  I just so happens that all of these ways are horrible, and they mess up the elegance of the table in all sorts of evil ways.

One things I’ve never understood is why a program would keep you from opening a database if you had permissions for it.  Even though we have all these bells and whistle attached to it, the table should still always open.  Except it doesn’t.  Something in the software gets messed up, and it displays a weird error message and closes.  That’s my information — give it back!  It then takes several trips to the proprietary knowledgebase or a few phone calls to tech support to fix it so I can look at my table again.  What has our software become?  What has our speed purchased for us?

The thing is, most businesses don’t need all the extra stuff — they just need a database that’s reliable and customizable to their needs.  They usually end up getting a cocktail of overpriced and overly pumped-up databases to cover their sales, billing, payroll, and customer information.  Not only that, but those overpriced programs will connect to other programs like Outlook and slow that down, too.  You got Quickbooks for payroll and invoicing, Timeslips for keeping track of time and other invoicing, ACT for sales and customer data tracking, Outlook for e-mail and other stuff, and Peachtree if God forbid you have hard-core accounting to do.  All of these solutions does more than you could ever want it to, and yet you need more than one of them to meet all your needs.  This is disgusting, and nothing can be done to change it…

The best set-up I’ve seen is using Outlook (even though it’s a singularly horrible program — more on this another day) with Exchange Server.  If you’ve got the money for it ($699 plus $67-$100 per user license(!)), Exchange allows for people in organizations to share Outlook information — customer databases, e-mail, calendars, tasks — seamlessly and without database errors.  You can also share the info to and from anywhere that’s connected to the internet with Outlook Web Access.  Do I sound like a commercial?  Well, how about this:  It’s great, but it’s amazingly expensive (because Exchange provides a ton of other services that nobody will ever use), and it doesn’t print checks or do your taxes or a bunch of other things you need.   It’s not a complete solution, but for what it does, it’s pretty good.

Which is more than I can say for ACT, Quickbooks, Timeslips, or heck, anything by Sage, Intuit, Adobe, etc.

And then of course I discovered Google Calendar Sync, and all of a sudden the calendar part of Exchange didn’t seem worth it anymore…and Gmail, which made an Exchange server seem like a comical waste of time and money, or Google Docs, which provided templates for me to use without having to prove that I own the software first, and I was in love.  Soon, I realized, all software in the world will be free.  Richard Stallman will win the day, it appears.  Who saw that coming?

Oh, right…Google.

It’s been a while.  Shut up.  I’ve got some thoughts about software.

Without software, most computers are just inert boxes of highly technical electronic components.  In order to do anything, a computer must have instructions.  This is where software comes in.  The software runs the computer, and the computer can only do what the software is capable of telling it to do.  That’s why it’s so amazing that so much of our current software sucks.

I don’t mean to complain…ok, I kinda do.  Why can’t, for example, Microsoft — the biggest software company in the world — get it right most of the time?  Windows Vista?  Really?  I remember the day I first installed it, and it took 11 gigs of hard drive space, and I thought, “Why does this need so much of my space?”  And then I ran it and got my answer:  It’s bloated, and sad, and provides all sorts of new things nobody asked for while breaking a bunch of stuff that did work in Windows XP.  If it’s a newer operating system, why won’t games from 2005 work on it?  And why does everything seem so much slower?

This is certainly not confined to Vista, or even Microsoft.  Using iTunes in Windows is an exercise in wondering why it doesn’t do what I want it to, and why it keeps asking me to update the software, and why those updates always entail completely reinstalling the program.  Maybe it’s better on a Mac, but on Macs, software tends to work.  I don’t know why it can’t work that way on PC’s.  I suspect the underlying OS is the problem.

There’s a lot of hay that could be raised about the current trend of “software as a service,” “web 2.0 crapola,” and so on.  I’ll get to that in the weeks ahead, though.  Suffice to say that software, I’m keeping my eye on you.

Love,

Mike

It struck me as I was browsing my iGoogle page just now exactly how much of a geek I am.  I was interested in all the slashdot stories — every single one!  Not only that, but I think you all might want to hear what me, the very definition of “some nerd,” thinks about them.  How geeky is that?

1) The New York Times is reporting that the Blackberry network is partially down for the second time in less than a year.  Potentially up to half of Blackberry users aren’t able to receive e-mail or surf the internets.  Hey!  I’m a Blackberry user!  What about me?  Sadly, my Blackberry appears to be functioning as normal.  It’s ironic that little old unimportant me can get his e-mail while million-dollar douches across America have their business deals put on hold.  Take that, white people.

2)  Remember Vista, the operating system that nobody liked because it didn’t go well with their old and/or cheap equipment?  Well, it’s finally being updated to Service Pack I.  This is news in and of itself, but the fun part is that Microsoft isn’t making SPI available to Technet subscribers until March (Technet being a paid service from Microsoft for approved software developers), even though pirated copies of the thing are all over the net.  Some technet subscribers, desperate to test their programs on the new Vista Service Pack, might turn to piracy.  As always, Microsoft stinks.

3) Are you familiar with the name Dongfan Chung?  Well, he’s a Boeing engineer who stole our valuable Space Shuttle secrets and gave them to his people, the Chinese.  Some of my best friends are Boeing engineers, and I wonder how they feel about this, and if they knew this dude, and if they feel sometimes like they’re working at SD-6.

4) Anti-virus software company Trend Micro is facing a huge nerd boycott over their patent suit against the open source software ClamAV.  Clam just happens to be the “it” antivirus among the Linux crowd, and Trend Micro suing them is just stupid and pointless. What do they hope to accomplish suing free software?  Well, we’re up in arms now.  Just try to take our free software from us, we dare you.

In other news, that sound you just heard was Trend Micro completing their crash from the world’s #1 Antivirus company (circa 2002) to a monster worse than even Norton (but still better than McAffee).  I can’t believe I ever recommended them to anyone.

I wish to register a complaint.

Remember IE 7?  The internet explorer that was going to revolutionize the way we surf the web?  The one they practically make you install via Windows Update?   The one that thought it was a good idea to replace the tried-and-true “menu” system with cryptic buttons?  The one that uses the terrible Windows Live Search by default, unless you explicitly tell it to use Google?  The one that forces you at gunpoint to configure the phishing filter the first time you run it?  Oh, and about that…

At least 10 times in the past two weeks I have come across a message like this after installing IE 7:

Can’t display the web page.

(some cryptic error code that just means the website is down)

Please try again later or somesuch.

So, did IE 7 break the internet?  Nope.  If you go to Google, or Yahoo, or Epthnation.com, you’ll find that you can surf the web just fine.  So what gives?  Well, if you look at the address bar, you’ll see it says:

http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx

Which is definitely not your home page, right?  So why did it go there first?  Because IE 7 makes you configure it on its first run, and won’t stop opening up to that “runonce” website until you do.  This is normally not a problem — you just click a couple of boxes and move on.  However, lately the server for that page has been “too busy,” which is causing it to throw up errors and make everyone call their local IT guy and say the internet’s busted.  That’s not cool.

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies on the planet, but they for some reason don’t seem to want to fix this.  The real problem is their design, which hijacks the browser’s start page like your average piece of spyware.  Since I believe Microsoft will never stop hijacking stuff, I had to find a workaround.  Thanks to Mr. Google, I did.

Method One

Just keep clicking “reload” until the page works.  This has gotten less and less effective over the past week, so that brings us to:

Method Two (be careful, and follow the instructions exactly)

Go to the start button

Go to “run”

type “gpedit.msc” in the box and click “ok” — this will bring up the Group Policy Editor

Under “Computer Configuration,” click on the little plus sign by “Administrative Templates.”  This will open the folder.

Open “Windows Components”

Click once on “Internet Explorer.”  You’ll see a bunch of things pop into the right pane.  In that right pane, scroll down to “Prevent performance of first run customize settings.”  Double-click on it.

Click the button next to “enabled.”  Then go to the drop box by “Select your choice” and pick “Go directly to home page.”

Click “Ok.”

Open Internet Explorer, and notice that you’ve won.

Adobe Reader has, in the course of a few years, become an indispensable part of any American’s computing experience.  This is because so many companies, both big and small, are now producing .pdf documents in lieu of things like printing manuals.  This saves paper, but also requires the end user to install a piece of software that has become, like everything Adobe produces these days, a bloated auto-updating piece of crap.

Left to its own devices, Adobe Reader will now run both itself and its updating program at startup.  This takes valuable memory from you, and if an update actually comes through, the program takes over your computer and bugs you until you install it.  This is for a free file reader, remember.  iTunes also displays this behavior, but at least you can say that’s a functional program with a number of fun uses.  All anyone uses Adobe Reader for is displaying the proprietary .pdf file format.  Ok so that begs the question: Are there any other free software programs that will read .pdf’s?

Well, there are, and chief among them is Foxit Reader.  Foxit Reader isn’t technically open source, since they don’t let people alter the program or its code.  But it is free.  And it’s better than Adobe Reader in several important ways:

1)  No update program of death.

2)  It’s a tiny (2mb) download that: doesn’t make you unclick a check box to avoid installing programs you don’t want; installs super-fast compared to the 22mb Adobe product; and, doesn’t run in the background for no reason.

3)  It keeps you from having to experience the heartbreak of Adobe software.

I’ve only been using it for acouple weeks, but so far it does everything Adobe Reader does.  By that I mean, it reads and prints .pdf files.  If your computer hurts, try it.

(Go here for a better and slightly sales-y explanation of why Foxit Reader is better, from Mr. Foxit himself.)