I am very particular about usability and user interfaces. I’ve never been an Apple fan, because I dislike closed, vertically integrated systems that lock me into a single vendor at a premium — you have to buy their hardware to use their software, and it’s proprietary from end to end. But of course, there’s their much-vaunted interface design and sometimes I think maybe it would be worth it to switch to Apple products in order to get that famous design “je ne sais quoi” from Apple.

The problem is, I have hated the interface design of every Apple product I’ve ever used. Among the most collossal mistakes — on the original Macs, you eject your floppy drive by dragging it to the Trash.

Switching from Audible to eMusic because of iTunes Player Interface Sins

Until recently, I was locked into using iTunes at least some of the time because it’s the only authorized way to burn books from Audible to CD (the unauthorized way is to play the book start to finish using a sound capture card and essentially re-record it as an MP3). Unfortunately, every time I have to use the iTunes player, I feel like screaming. It’s the main reason I just cancelled my Audible subscription. And frankly, the need to use the iTunes player in order to buy tunes off iTunes is the main reason I refuse to patronize iTunes. I just did a free trial of eMusic, and I’m sold. It frees me from the evil that is Apple (yes, I know, MS and Google are the evil empires oppressing poor little Apple. Thank God. I think Apple is the most rapacious of the three, they just haven’t been as successful at world domination yet, but I think we would all come to regret it if Apple had the power of a MS or Google. No friends, they would not use it repsonsibly, but that’s a long topic).

So where does the iTunes interface fail?

1. Managing Audio Books is Next to Impossible.

I have two choices. Let iTunes manage my files, or manage them myself. Since I have a lot of audiobooks, I can’t let iTunes or any other player pull data from the internet manage your tracks. For example, for Harry Potter, which runs to almost 100 discs, it files them under 5 authors. For a single book, it will be the tracks under multiple titles. And it will split tracks from the same disc.

In my opinion, the author should always be condsidered the “artist” for an audiobook, not the reader or some other random person. If I let iTunes handle this, I’ll get Harry Potter books filed, stupidly, under the artists:

1. J. K. Rowling (space)
2. J.K. Rowling (no space)
3. Jim Dale (the reader)
4. Nicholas Hooper (who wrote one of the soundtracks for the movie… uhh this is an audiobook, not a movie)
5. Patrick Doyle (ditto)

Then for album titles, I’ll get

1. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
2. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 01
3. Harry Potter & the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
4. Harry Potter The Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
5. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone [motion picture soundtrack]

Now, I’m not just anal. This means that in order to put together a playlist for a single book that actually plays the tracks from the book in order (which is kind of important for most books), you would have to hunt through, in the worst case for the scenario I gave above, 25 folders. Okay, I have not encountered the worst case, but I have had a single books split willy-nilly among as many as five folders. So there’s no way you can let iTunes manage your files and still be able to listen to a book in sequence without considerable effort.

Fine, I’ll manage them myself. But the tools for managing files are incredibily rudimentary.

No file management and Import Settings are just format and quality settings

That's "advanced"???

If I burn tracks from a CD using iTunes, I have hardly any control over what goes where. I can select a main folder for my iTunes media and I can tell iTunes to manage the media or not. That’s it! In Winamp or Windows Media Player, I can say where I want imported files to go. They still mess up if I let them pull information from the internet, but at least I can burn to a “quarantined” area where I can look at the files from burn and make sure it didn’t spread them all over my media collection. With iTunes, I can’t do that.

Doesn’t Monitor my Media Folders

Seriously, I have to buy a $25 app just so that when I add files to my media folder, iTunes will see it by default? Otherwise, I have to “import” every time I add files. As I said, I don’t want to manage everything through iTunes. Of course, this wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the misguided playlist metaphor that dominates the interface.

Playlist Metaphor

And then, in iTunes, everything is done in a playlist metaphor. Yes, I can “Create playlist from selection”, but that means I have to find the files within iTunes, select them all (and for a book this could be 250 tracks if it’s 10 CDs with 25 tracks per CD), create a playlist and then play it. With Winamp, for example, I can just play a folder and I can also ask it to recurse down the directory tree and play everything in subfolders. In order. It takes me 7 seconds.

And then, and here’s what set me off this morning, if I want to burn a CD, I have to first create a playlist. Now, I only wanted to burn one track to a CD and normally I would never use iTunes to burn with, but this is an Audible book and Audible only works with iTunes (even the Audible Player won’t burn the book to disc). Now, let’s say I have a track downloaded to my desktop and I want to burn a CD in Windows Media Player. I simply open WMP, drag the file into the playlist area, and hit “Burn”. There’s no playlist saved, created or other annoyance.

I’m sure this is all well and good if my overriding objective is to use an iPod, but it isn’t.

Better Alternative – eMusic plus Winamp

So I have come up with better alternatives to managing media and getting my ID3 tags in my MP3s. That’s for a future post. But how can you get rid of dependence in the iTunes player? Well, there are only two services that really require me to use it: Audible and iTunes itself. So the key is to dump those services. These days, alternatives abound. For buying music and downloading audiobooks, you can go to Amazon or Wal-Mart or whereever.

If you want a subscription like Audible, though, I’ve switched to eMusic. Okay, full disclosure: I signed up for the eMusic free trial offer that came with my wife’s new laptop (but actually, if you just go to the site you get a similar offer without buying any laptop). The selection is somewhat limited in the free trial, but I still managed to find plenty of music and a book that I wanted. Even with a full subscription, you don’t have a catalog as extensive as Audible or iTunes, but it’s not bad and it’s cheaper than Audible ($10/month versus $15/month). For music, it’s subscription-based, so if you download more than ten tracks per month at iTunes, eMusic will be cheaper.

Most of all, though, the main thing that got me to switch is that eMusic files come as MP3s, so I can use any player I want to play, burn and otherwise enjoy my audio with any player I want, including easily putting it on a CD or my non-Apple MP3 player so I can enjoy my audiobooks in the car.

Good bye Audible. Good bye Apple. In the case of Audible, I’m sorry, because I like Audible and if they would let me manage my books easier, I would stick with them. In the case of iTunes… good riddance!

Now that I have that pointless rant out of my system (I’m understand that nobody really cares but me and that bashing Apple is an unfogiveable sin), as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to show you how I now just use filenames and create MP3 tags from filenames to manage everything, then I can control the sort order in any player… coming soon.

For a few days, my offline Gmail was refusing to synch up with the server. Every time I would try, I would instantly get an ! in the synch status and it would say “Synchronization has stopped unexpectedly”. Well, yeah. I had figured that part out.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but you can open the troubleshooting page by going to Settings -> Offline and scrolling down to the link for the Troubleshooting Page.

On my page, I noticed several errors for Failed to get blob down at the bottom of the page under “Recent Errors”.

A BLOB, of course, is a Binary Large Object. I realized at that point that I had unsynchronized messages with images attached (that is to say with BLOBs attached).

I tried moving these to Drafts, but that still didn’t work, so I copied and pasted the contents into a text editor for safe keeping, deleted the messages, cleared the browser cache, closed the browser, reopened, and reloaded GMail.

Success!

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that can cause this, but I didn’t find any good information on this on Google Groups or with a quick search, so hopefully this will help someone or at least give some directions to look in.

I hate keeping things simple or easy, so in order to always retain a certain level of complication and frustration in my life, I insist on using two computers, a desktop and a laptop. A smart person would just buy a really powerful laptop and be done with it. Too easy. The one plus of this system, though, is that by keeping them in synch, I basically have two versions of every file that matters, plus my most recent archive on an external hard drive.

Since this is a long review of my trials and travails with Live Mesh, let me give a little summary at the top for the impatient types and the pros and cons of Live Mesh.

Live Mesh pros

• Synchronization through your internet connection, so it does not depend on the reliability of your home network.
• Real-time synchronization that works in the background so you don’t have to remember to sync.
• Off-site storage (5GB) so you can actually sync while one computer is off.

Live Mesh negatives

• Data integrity and potential data loss. Live Mesh doesn’t use a transactional model, or anything close, and deletes data willy nilly while it sorts out your supposed conflicts (see the "Cardinal Sin" section at the end).
• Performance. Synchronization through an internet connection is very slow. It will take days to synchronize an amount of data that you will synch in minutes through the local connection.
• System performance. My system ground to a halt while Live Mesh ran, eventually getting to the point where it took over four minutes to launch Word. It normally takes under two seconds.
• System stability. After a couple of days, both computers running Mesh started to experience major issues. Application crashes, system instability and lockups, system crashes. These computers were formerly quite stable and restabilized as soon as I removed Live Mesh.
• Phantom conflicts. I created perfect mirrors in the file systems for the folders I was planning to synch. Same files, same timestamps. Mesh flagged almost every one of them as a conflict. I’m not sure how Mesh determines whether or not there’s a conflict, but there is a serious problem with the algorithm. The two other synch/compare tools I ran found no conflicts.

Bottom Line

A friend is running Live Mesh with great success so I know it can work for some people, but for me it was a disaster. I have previously depended on two excellent, stable and reliable tools, Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and I’m back to using those and that’s what I still recommend. Live Mesh has, in my opinion, fundamental architecture flaws that simply can’t be solved by any number of bug fixes. I’d like to see a product like Live Mesh, but properly implemented.

My Live Mesh Saga in Detail

So, this long saga of my Live Mesh trial (in at least two sense of that word) may try the average reader. If you want the real meat of it, skip to the Cardinal Sin section at the end.

The Problem

The hard part is keeping the computers in synch. For normal daily syncs, I have been using Allway Sync, which is a great product. For more complicated syncs and anything involving synching a local machine with data on a server, I use Beyond Compare, which is a file/directory comparison tool, but has some great synchronization tools (I need to review these, because they’re worth knowing about). The Achilles heel of Allway Sync and Beyond Compare, and almost every similar tool, is that they depend on my local network. Unfortunately networking my Windows XP Home computer and my Vista Home Premium computer is an exercise in frustration, with the Vista computer unable to see the XP computer ever, and the XP computer losing the connection to the Vista computer frequently. Also, these syncs only happen when I remember to do them, rather than happening in the background. That means I don’t waste system resources on background processes, but I could get caught with my data down, so to speak.

Enter Live Mesh

In theory, Live Mesh would solve both of the problems. It does it’s synching through the regular internet connection and it synchs files whenever a file is created or modified. For the first 5GB of data, it also stores the data on your Live Mesh Desktop, which is on a remote Microsoft server. 5GB is kind of laughable by today’s standards (I commonly file a 4GB photo card on a weekend hike), but it’s more than zero. Then finally, Live Mesh includes a remote desktop tool that gives you access, upon approval, from one computer to the other, and unlike the solutions that run over the local network, it worked from the Vista machine to the XP machine as well as the other way. Sounds like a great solution. And it’s a Microsoft product. I know for many people that means run for the hills, but I figured if anyone should be able to get something to work stably with the two latest Miscrosoft operating systems, it should be Microsoft. Figure again.

Getting Started — Initial Quibbles

I found getting Live Mesh up and running rather unintitive. Before installing it, I had done an up to the minute sync and so I knew both file sets were identical. It took some playing around to figure out how to tell Mesh which folders to match with which folders. On two machines with identical file structures, that might not be a problem, but since XP has My This and My That (e.g. My Documents) and Vista has just This and That (e.g. Documents) the file paths do not line up. So what Mesh likes to do is create a new folder on the target machine desktop that correlates to the source folder on the machine you’re working on.

The trick is that when you add a folder to Mesh on one machine, tell it to synch with the other machine (or was it not synch?). Then go to the target machine, right click the light blue folder on the desktop and tell Mesh which local folder to match that to. If the folder is dark blue, it’s too late, you can’t change it and you have to delete the Mesh folders and start over again. And again. I repeated this several times before I got it right. If that sounds confusing and unnecessarily complex for what should obviously be the simplest use case and primary task for Mesh, you’re starting to get why this is not a positive review. Eventually, though, I got all that figured out after much trial and error and Mesh started its work.

And then I started looking for missing features I had come to expect from Allway Sync

• File masks — omit certain types of files from my synch because I don’t want to copy, for example, shortcuts from one machine to another because XP and Vista have different file paths. Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Folder masks — omit some subfolders from synch. I keep my archived backups, for example, only on the desktop (and external hard drive). Again, Live Mesh is all or nothing.
• Force a synch — this isn’t part of the Mesh paradigm. It’s real-time synching. The thing is, 90% of the time when I use the laptop, I don’t have an internet connection. So when I’m getting ready to head up to the mountain house for a few days, I like to force a quick synch before I head out the door. In theory, Mesh is up to date at all times, but that’s only true if you have a connection between the machines at all times. That might be good for an office worker who is synching with colleagues or a file server, but it’s not my situation.

Signs of Trouble

Now, if these two machines are in synch, it takes Allway or Beyond Compare about 5 minutes to run the analysis and generate a report. Unless I’ve just uploaded 10GB of photos or unzipped some massive open source application with thousands of files, the actual synch takes a couple of minutes. Usually I allow ten minutes total, but half of that if I know they’re basically already mirroring each other.

So Mesh started working. I expected that the internet synch over 1.5Mbps DSL would be slower than over the local network, but I was completely unprepared for this. Even though the folders in question were identical, Mesh was working for days and there is no progress indicator, so I had no idea whatsoever whether or not I was even getting close. Granted, I was synching about 50GB of data, but every file was bit for bit identical with identical timestamps. How hard could this be?

Then It Gets Bad: Crashes, Slowdowns and Conflict Hell

Apparently, really hard. As Live Mesh ground away, my Vista computer became progressively slower and less stable. Applications crashed. Live Mesh crashed and had to be restarted several times. It got to the point where I couldn’t work. I counted four minutes and two seconds to launch Word. And it wasn’t Word’s fault. Every app started behaving like that. And Word started to get a little crazy and at one point I could not save documents. Even closing and reopening Word (four minutes remember), I could not save a document. Finally, I shut Mesh off temporarily and Word sprang back to life, launching in under two seconds, but I actually had to reboot to get file-saving abilities back. So I decided I could only let Mesh run while I wasn’t actually doing anything. Eventually, though, Mesh crashed and would not restart on the Vista machine.

Meanwhile, it was cranking along the laptop and I decided to let it run and see what woud happen. What happened is I started getting notifications that I was out of disk space and that computer was crashing too. Now, I only had 22GB of free space on that machine, but since I was not adding one single byte of data, I figured that would be okay. Not quite. In two days, Mesh had brought down two computers, both of which had run reliably for years.

So clearly, I had to get Mesh off my system and uninstall it. So I did. That was easy enough. Now I had to figure out how to get things back the way they were. The first thing I noticed is I had a Live Mesh folder on my desktop. I looked inside and it had a subfolder labelled “conflicts”. Hmm… that’s interesting. Why would there be any conflicts? I wonder what’s in there. Answer: thousands of files. A total of something like 18GB of zip-compressed data. Now, that’s enough for me to damn Live Mesh to the Seventh Circle of Software Hell. Why is it finding conflicts when the data is bit-for-bit identical, has the same hash, and has the same timestamp? I mean, for God’s sake, what other tests are there? What possible conflict is there?

Essentially, Live Mesh saw every single file it analyzed as a conflict, and that was what was filling up my disk — when it sees a conflict, it puts a zipped copy of the file in a Live Mesh folder to await resolution (or so I thought). So I deleted that folder to get the XP machine running again.

The Cardinal Sin: Not Respecting Data Integrity

Then I fired up Allway Sync to analyze the disks in case Mesh had changed any data. Oh, my naiveté! Thousands and thousands of deleted and new files. So then I fired up trusty Beyond Compare for a little more analysis. It turns out that every time Live Mesh had found a conflict it had deleted one copy and moved, not copied, that file to the Conflicts folder. In the meantime, it had created thousands of placeholder files with the name filename.ext.xlp.

I don’t think I lost any data, because Mesh keeps one copy and deletes the other, but I had to go through and delete thousands of *.xlp files and then essentially move 27GB of data (the uncompressed size of the 18GB of compressed conflicts) from the computer that still had a copy to the one that didn’t (not always the same).

So here’s the cardinal sin: any data synch like this should be as transactional as possible. In SQL, you can group operations into transactions, which means that a set of operations fails if any individual operation fails. Here’s an example. When you go to the ATM machine and ask for money, the transaction looks like this:

• Request money from account
• Debit account for amount
• Spit bills out the slot
• Roll up the transaction

If the machine fails to give you the bills, the transaction fails, the debit gets rolled back and you don’t have to prove you didn’t get your money. The financial system and any system that depends on having the data right depends on a transactional model.

The key principle is data integrity. You can get a lot wrong in an application, but you shouldn’t screw up the data integrity part. So in my opinion, the fatal and fundamental flaw of the Live Mesh architecture is that it does a poor job of maintaining data integrity. Now, data synch can’t be fully transactional, because if the connection dies, you can end up unable to roll the transaction back. But, the placeholder files that mark the fact that Mesh has flagged a conflict should be in the Live Mesh/conflicts folder and the original data should be left intact for as long as possible. In other words, it should identify the conflict, which presumably requires user intervention of some sort, and do nothing to the data until it has instructions from the user. The Desktop/Live Mesh/conflicts folder should hold the placeholders and leave the original files alone until the last possible moment. To go around deleting my data and creating placeholder files in my data folders merely to mark the existence of a conflict is borderlin criminal!

So for me, the broad outlines and concept for Live Mesh is interesting, but the implementation is so fundamentally flawed that I don’t think any amount of bug fixes could redeem it and convince me to use it and I can’t recommend it.

Allow me to vent… I know that there are whole sites devoted to this, but I don’t have rights there and I need to get this off my chest

Not Bad Really

I’m testing Office 2007 Home Edition. Some things I like. In general, I like the interface and find that but for a few incredibly annoying things, I could really appreciate this. In fact, it’s the best version of Office so far in my opinion, but that does not, of course, mean that I’m happy;-) People complain about the size of the Ribbon, which is sort of your command center in Word, but I find that if you take some time to set things up, you almost never need to expose it. For example, I create a Quick Styles set for each document template (always use styles, never direct formatting, right?) and the right-click context menu then has pretty much everything I need and most days I can leave the Ribbon minimized for 95% of the time. So for me, it’s a cleaner, more compact interface than older versions of Word and most actions take at least one fewer keystroke or click than in Word 2000. It’s much much smarter at putting the right things in the right-click context menu.

A Fitting Companion to Vista

Still, to me it is at the same time the Office equivalent of Vista. That is to say, the improvements in interface are offset by just absolutely abysmal stability and quality control at every level. It looks great. There are some nice, ehttp://raisedbyturtles.org/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=233&type=image&TB_iframe=trueven beautiful interface enhancements. But deep down, some things are just plain broken. Like I say, a fitting companion for Vista.

Whenever I use a Microsoft product, I wonder if they just don’t do any unit testing at all or what (unit testing is where every time you design a part of a program, you also design a program to test all possible options).

So What’s Pissing Me Off Today?

So the things driving me nuts right now are:

1. Improper language handling in footnotes. Most things in my computer are in English and I have an American keyboard, but I write a lot in French (a lot as in I’m writing my fifth 400+ page book). I also use a lot of footnote (a lot as in the book I’m working on currently has 2227 footnotes). So I set my computer locale as English (US) and the document language as French. But every time I create a footnote, it switches to English. I say switches, because it actually briefly shows in French, but after a second or two switches to English. So I decided to go nuclear: I went into the Word Options —> General —> Language and changed the Primary Editing Language to French. No luck. I went in and changed the Footnote Text style to explicitly use French. No luck. So far, nothing I’ve tried has allowed me to create a footnote in French. Even in a French document, with my primary editing language set to French and the Footnote style set to French, when I create a footnote, it’s in English and I have to manually change it to French. Nice work guys. I haven’t seen anywhere else that mentions this problem.
2. Proofing Tools Hell. When I tell Word not to check spelling and grammar in this document, turn off autocorrect, and tell it not to check spelling as I type, why does it insist on running the proofing tools anyway half the time? Why does it occasionally and without rhyme or reason that I can see insist on highlighting the occasional spelling error anyway? This is an edition of an old document — 80% of the words are not in the dictionary. The only way I have gotten this to really quit happening, is to disable proofing tools altogether for all documents. Obviously I don’t want that. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere.
3. Proofing Tools Hell 2. But wait, that’s not all! Why, after all these years, is Word still incapable of letting me keep the proofing tools on in a document with a "too many spelling errors"? My document has footnotes that include archaic terms and proper names. Because there are a lot of those, I can’t have it check spelling errors at all because it has some maximum number of spelling errors that it can check and every important document I’ve ever written exceeds that number. Come on! If I want to use proofing tools, I would have to run spell check and laboriously tell Word to ignore the thousands of words it doesn’t know. Just highlight the mispellings and let me scan for the ones I want to correct. This is a known problem in all versions of Word since at least Word 2000 and that Microsoft sees no need to fix.
4. 

   Empty Document Pane in Word 2007

   The Phantom Window. A new one with Word 2007 and, I believe, only happens on my Vista machine (or is it the XP machine?). Word has the bad habit of opening an “empty” window when I open a document, but when I close the empty window, it closes the document. For example, when I launch Word it shows me a blank document by default. So then I go to the Recent Documents menu and click on the most recent document. It opens the document in one window, and leaves an empty window. This can also happen if I double-click on a Word file — it opens one window with the file and another empty window. I do not mean, by the way, a window with a blank document. I mean a completely non-functional window with no document of any sort whatsoever. Fortunately, this is intermittent so I can open and close Word until it opens correctly. Alternatively, I can open a document in the empty window and then close it. If, however, I simply try to close the empty window without opening a second document in it, Word closes entirely, include the document I’m trying to open. I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere on the net, but no solutions posted.
5. Phantom Footnotes when Track Changes is on. I had a footnote, which I deleted. Sort of. The number disappeared and the footnote disappeared, but it still counts. So, assuming this was note 3, the notes are now numbered 1,2,4. So I tried to use find and replace and find the mark and delete it. Word 2007 won’t find it. But if I go to References —> Next Footnote, it stops at the phantom note. So I cut and pasted the text into a new document to see what would happen. The phantom note disappears. So I cut and pasted the text in the original document. Unfortunately, the footnote counter doesn’t disappear, so now the notes in the original document are numbered 1,2,5. Great. It turns out, this is quite a simple fix — it’s caused because I’m tracking changes and Word does not update footnote numbers (and many other field code-based numbers) until changes are either accepted or rejected. This makes sense in the “Final with markup” view but is damn confusing in the “Final” view that is supposed to be, uh, the Final view.
6. Large Document Handling. This is a shame. One of the main reason our workgroup quit using Wordperfect was because it was so cumbersome with large documents. With WP, you pretty much had to divide a large document into subdocuments and then assemble it from a Master document when you wanted to generate an index, cross-references and so on. Since we have a massive index and hundreds of cross-references (possibly thousands), this was just too much of a hassle (plus WP was unstable and kept corrupting our files and creating "holes" in the middle causing data loss). Word 2000 shined here. Indexing was logical, flexible and accessible via search and replace in a way that neither WordPerfect nor Open Office could match. We left Wordperfect primarily because of the stability issues, but after a serious look at Open Office, we chose Word 2000 because of how well it handled indexing and cross-references and how well it worked with large documents. Lately, with two large documents open, I feel like I’m back in the 1980s. With a relatively fast dual-core processor and 3GB of memory, things draw to a standstill. I click on a point in the text and literally go make a cup of tea while I wait for Word 2007 to decide it’s ready to accept input. It’s pretty strange — everything goes along fast and nice, but then things begin to bog down until I simply have to close all instances of Word and start back up. Meanwhile, the CPU is not running hard and there seems to be system memory left. Other applications open quickly and run quickly while this is happening. If I let it sit for 15 minutes or so, it seems to sort itself out too. I’ve tried turning off background saves and some other things that supposedly slow Word down, but no luck. It’s still terribly slow compared to Word 2000.
7. Interoperability with Other Versions of Office. I’m not a MS hater. I don’t dislike them any more than I dislike Google or Apple. That is to say, I think they are all aggressive companies who have used every advantage and all their available resources to shut out competition whereever possible. Traditionally, MS had the most resources and was the most successful at this strategy. Now Google seems to have taken over. Apple, with its totally closed, proprietary systems, has tried just as hard as the others, but with less success. Okay. But if there is one thing I hate about MS, it’s that you can’t run multiple versions of their programs at the same time. If you want to keep Word 2000 and Word 2007 on the same machine, prepare for Hell. It will effectively want to run an install program every time you use Word 2007 if you had the poor judgment to run Word 2000 since the last time you ran 2007. Want to run Internet Explorer 7 and 8 on the same machine? Forget it. The only way to really do this with MS products is to run virtual machines using VMWare or some such with each machine having it’s own browser and version of Office. Would it really be so hard to let me run multiple versions? I might have a good reason to do so, like the fact that you broke large document handling in your new version!

Okay, I have that off my chest. I’m sure MS is listening.
Microsoft has been working on its reputation a lot lately, but honestly, the number one thing they could do for their reputation is add six months to the testing cycle and do multiple public beta tests and not release until they’ve fixed the bugs. Aarrgggghhh.

I sometimes find myself on public hotspots at a hotel or airport or what have you. And sometimes, the reason I’m online is because I have to pay a bill or do some other sort of business. I know that on an open network, I’m putting myself at risk and it always makes me really queasy and I’ve been wondering what the best way to handle it is.
Is Hotspot Shield the solution to surfing on public wifi? » »

I just discovered Google Charts. I’d never heard of it before, but I’m the sort of person who reads an article and scans for numbers and flips for charts, so this seemed pretty cool. Essentially, it’s an API that lets you create a chart with a simple URL.
See sample charts from Google Charts » »

No, that title isn’t a typo. It’s a sarcastic comment on the “genius” of the login screen for the iTunes Genius feature which, as it turns out, is the same as the iTunes store login. It took me four tries to figure out how to log in. Not so Genius. Read on » »

I’ve been experimenting more with Gmail after my disappointing Zimbra experience (I haven’t totally written Zimbra off though, I’m just letting it mature in the cask for a while – the ultimate winner will be the first to allow offline use of Contacts and provide reliable contact synchronization). Anyway, aside from Gmail not having a decent way to delete a message without get kicked back to the message list (instead of just going to the next message like every other email client on the planet, there is also the annoying fact that in Gmail there’s no button to just view messages with no label. In their wisdom, the Google people no doubt think that I’ll be using their wonderful search engine to just search and find the messages I want and locate the relevant message. But as the great Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns (I can search for those) and unknown unknowns like the credit card bill that I totally forgot about and which I could search for if I knew I had forgotten about it, but then I wouldn’t have forgotten about it and wouldn’t need to search for it now would I?

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but os so cumbersome. You have to do a negative search for every label you use. That is, you look for messages not labelled Labe1 and not labelled Label2 and so on. There’s no way around this.

If you do this more than once, typing in all your labels in the arcane syntax Gmail uses gets old. So what I’ve done is simply create a shortcut, which you can do quite easily and it works up until you add a new label, but then it’s just a simple matter of editing the bookmark.

So first, you have a full syntax and a compact syntax and, as far as I can tell, the compact syntax does not work with multi-word labels. So if you have Gmail labels with spaces in them, you have to use the full syntax and substitute hyphens for spaces.

So let’s say you have the following labels:

1. Label1
2. Label2
3. Label Three
4. Label Four

First, we want to exclude all messages that have those labels. To exclude a labeled message from your search, you use the -label: operator.

For the single-word labels, we’ll use the short syntax. This allows you to group terms within curly braces without repeating the “-label:” qualifier. So it looks like this in your Gmail search box

-label:{Label1 Label2}

Simple as that. Now for the multi-word labels, in theory as I read the instructions, I merely need to add quotes around the terms, and they should work within the curly braces. Not so for me. If you create a filter and look at the test search, that’s not how it does it either. So based on that, what I found worked for Label Three and Label Four was:

-label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

So the entire search, with both single-word labels and multi-word labels, looks like this

-label:{Label1 Label2} -label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

Now, that will create a URL that looks like this

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/-label%3A%7BLabel1+Label2%7D+-label%3ALabel-Three+-label%3ALabel-Four

Now you can save this as a bookmark or shortcut and instantly access your unlabeled Gmail messages. Sometimes Gmail will add a zx parameter to your URL that looks like zx=afeoasdxou3swf that is just a random string so that if your ISP is caching data, it will see this as a unique URL and won’t give you cached data for Gmail. Since this effectively creates a single-use URL, if that appears in your URL when you do your search, you should edit it out before saving the bookmark.

Note that if a message has two labels and you are only excluding one of those, the message will still show up in your search. So if you have something labeled Label1 and Label5, and you use the search above, it will still show up in your results.

Also, sometimes a conversation that is labeled shows up unless you relabel the entire conversation, because one message is unlabeled or is still in the Inbox or whatever. If you select the whole conversation in the list view and label it, that takes care of that issue.

I’ve been on a long quest for an email client that I like. Granted, my wish list ranged from simple (must not crash constantly) to less simple (synch address books with online account). Despite high resource usage and some interface shortcomings, I think the new version of Yahoo! Zimbra is it. Finally, something to get me out of Thunderbird instability hell! For me, at least, this is a Thunderbird killer. Well, I thought this was a Thunderbird killer until a zillion problems with Zimbra surfaced.
What's so great about Zimbra? Read on » »

Every once in a while I file a support issue with some service I use. The customer service rep confidently replies with an answer. The last one, at a place I won’t name, suggested that I clear my browser cache. Of course, I had done that, multiple times on multiple browsers. That’s fine though. That response probably works most of the time. But here’s the thing: he then marked my ticket as “Closed”, problem solved. This is the second time in a couple of months that I’ve had to deal with a business who operates this way.
How I *want* to be treated -» »