Scot’s Newsletter Blog

Back in July, I wrote a piece in the newsletter titled iPhone Lust? Get Over It. Apparently I didn’t, though. I bought an iPhone about a week ago, after learning that I could ditch Lotus Notes and my crummy Crackberry at work and use Apple Mail for work email and the iPhone. That proved to be an absolutely irresistible combination.

My wife, Cyndy, got a nice BlackBerry at her job several months ago, and it quickly became her main phone. Neither of us were using our circa 2005 LG flip phones from Verizon. I’m a jeans-pocket guy for my cell phone, and the LG phone felt like a brick in my pocket. My older model CrackBerry was great for email, but a very poor cell phone. So bad that I found myself carrying both at times, something that’s patently ridiculous. So we dumped our Verizon phones, and I went to the Apple store in a nearby mall.

The most surprising thing for me was the purchase experience. When I bought my Verizon air card (WWAN service) at the nearby Verizon store back in May, I had to sign in, wait 15 minutes for a sales rep, politely listen to the upsell and then indicate that, no, I just wanted what I wanted, and wait while she first brought the wrong card and then the right one from the back room. Then I was ferried over to the cash register queue, where I had to wait another 15 minutes to check out. Then there was something strange in my account that involved 20 minutes of head-scratching and furrowed brows by two Verizon salespeople. Eventually, I was allowed to pay and walk away with my air card.

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Earlier this week I was honored by a promotion to the position of Editor in Chief at IDG’s Computerworld. I’m now overseeing the magazine and website, and helping to guide a stellar staff of 45 editors and writers. It’s an awesome responsibility, but I feel equal to it. In fact, I’m charged up and ready to go.

I’m very proud of the publication Computerworld has always been, and the one it’s become over the past two to three years. If you haven’t checked it out recently, you’re missing out on something special.

Last weekend I posted about issues with performing an Upgrade installation of Leopard on one of my MacBook Pros. That machine is happily running Leopard now with all my data fully intact. But I learned something in the process.

I made a backup of my Tiger installation just prior to performing the upgrade and was able to boot to the backup without difficulty. I also used Disk Utility (the Mac’s onboard disk integrity check and repair tool) to check both of the partitions on the computer’s hard drive. Everything checked out, so I went ahead with the upgrade.

As detailed earlier, I ran into the hanging blue screen after installation on the first restart that many other Leopard upgraders experienced. Many people had reported that the problem cleared up for them when they followed one of two methods for removing a Mac OS X customization utility by Unsanity called Application Performance Enhancement (APE). I didn’t have APE installed on my system, but it had been there and uninstalled with leave-behinds. I used Target disk mode to access the hard drive and remove the offending files. That didn’t solve my problem, so I decided to resort to my backup. So I removed the same offending files there just to be safe, wiped my boot volume, and copied my backup to the boot volume. During the copy process I got the error message that I didn’t have rights to copy three or four unnamed files — a message that made no real sense. And it was at that point that I knew I was in for it.

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Stop the presses! Something appears to be wrong with Apple’s Leopard OS X 10.5 upgrade-installation process — at least on some Macs. I ran into the problem on one Mac. It manifests itself as a never-ending “blue screen” (not a Windows term, mind you) after Leopard completes “successful” installation, on the first restart. Many others have encountered the same issue, and you can see evidence of that in the Apple Discussions area in the thread titled Installation appears stuck on a plain blue screen.

If you read through the thread (as well as many others on other forums), you’ll find that various things are blamed for the problem, including an add-on customization utility called Application Enhancement (APE) by Unsanity.

The Apple Discussion thread offers a solution that involves booting in single-user mode, which requires you to hold down the S key while your Mac boots. Apparently that works for some people, but on my MacBook Pro 15, the only boot option that worked at all was Target Disk Mode (which lets you plug in a firewire cable and address the drive from another Mac as if it were an external drive).

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With Apple’s new OS X 10.5 operating system due to ship at 6PM (wherever you are in the world) tomorrow, the question millions of Mac users are asking themselves is: Should I spend $129 on this thing yet? The short answer is: Yes and no, but probably not in that order.

At Computerworld, we’ve put together the quintessential examination of the new Apple OS commonly referred to as Leopard. Check out: In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights. Be sure to check out the First Look at Leopard Image Gallery for a complete visual tour of the new OS, complete with a screencam of the Stacks feature.

I like Leopard. The new OS X has over 300 new features according to Apple (I didn’t stop to count them). There are literally oodles of small tweaks and changes. Things like, when you select Shut Down from the Apple menu, the new default countdown time is 60 seconds, not two minutes. (Yeah, I went for something pretty mundane that you probably haven’t read in a hundred other Leopard reviews.)

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Beginning immediately, I will be switching Scot’s Newsletter to primarily a blog with a text-only notification newsletter.

In the text-only, October 2 issue of the newsletter, I described two possible format changes for Scot’s Newsletter:

Option 1. A blog presentation with a text-only, blurb-and-link notification newsletter.

Option 2. An HTML-only newsletter, without a text alternative.

The main reason to change formats is to save production time for yours truly. It takes almost as much time to produce and send the newsletter as it does to write it. (Of course, the majority of the time I put into the newsletter is spent on research.)

Now five days after the newsletter went out, I’ve received over 2,700 votes. With voting beginning to slow down, the votes for the blog outnumber the HTML-only newsletter option 2:1. In other words, I’ve received a little more than twice as many votes for the blog as I have for the HTML newsletter.

There is much to be done on the blog site, in revising the template for the new text newsletter, and on the Scot’s Newsletter website to pull this altogether. It’s not all going to happen overnight.

Several people who voted requested navigation changes to the blog site that I’d already been thinking about. I’m also considering how to work through the archiving system, how to make the site print better (although it does print OK for now). Please be patient while I make modifications, which will come over time — a little bit here and a little bit there.

WordPress geeks and designers: If you’ve got experience, I might need your help!

For those of you who wanted HTML or who preferred the text newsletter, I ask you to give this a good try. And let me know what isn’t working for you. I can’t promise to fix all problems, but I do care and will fix anything I can.

Thanks to all those people who voted, and the many people who expressed their intention to support Scot’s Newsletter no matter what change I went with. That means a lot to me.

It will come as no to surprise to those of you who’ve been at this computer technology thang for a while that — given that Vista sales haven’t been great over the nearly one year since Microsoft released it to manufacturing on November 8, 2006 — Microsoft has to do something. And that something appears to be Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which the company intends to ship sometime in the first quarter of 2008.

On Friday I interviewed Microsoft Vista SP1 production manager David Zipkin. And while Zipkin insisted that SP1 isn’t just a roll-up of patches, updates, and security fixes that you’re already getting on Windows Update, he was hard pressed to tell just what exactly is new in the forthcoming service pack. The truth is there are new things, but very few that you or I really care about.

In the end, maybe it’s all a moot point anyway, since most people will get SP1 when they buy a new PC or download it as part of Windows Update, where it will be about a 55MB download. Microsoft will be distributing it on DVD, both to enterprises with license agreements and to consumers who are willing to sign up for it on a Web form, pay a modest fee for shipping, and wait several weeks. But my guess is that waiting won’t be a huge hardship.

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It’s taking forever to kick the door closed on the long-term Windows software firewall evaluation. In the last installment of the series, Windows Software Firewalls Evaluation Rolls On, I wrote about issues with Comodo 2.4 that Scot’s Newsletter readers have reported — and which the Comodo folks graciously owned up to. With a rearchitected version of the firewall on the way, I decided to hold out to see whether the new product would get the job done with fewer issues.

A couple of days ago, Comodo released what some have dubbed Comodo 3.0 Beta 3 (version 3.0.9.229). With this new rendition of the code, for the first time you get the sense of what the company expects the user experience to be. The product relies heavily on user prompts to warn you of possible threatening actions, but you can tell it to remember your answers and make specific programs “trusted applications,” which effectively silences future prompts. The user experience is pretty good, overall, but it’s way too early to determine whether the product will perform without bugginess on some desktops.

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In early September I wrote a column titled Apple’s Taking a Pass on the Enterprise Prize. It appeared in Scot’s Newsletter and also on the Computerworld site. I was attempting to take Apple to task for its lack of an apparent big business strategy. Many Computerworld and Scot’s Newsletter IT pro readers have written me over the past year to say they prefer Macs but don’t feel that Apple supports business buyers as well as their Windows-related vendors. Many readers also feel the existing Macs are more consumer-oriented than business-oriented. So I wrote about that. And I wrote that I had contacted Apple weeks earlier and hadn’t gotten any real response from it about the company’s enterprise strategy.

The week after the column appeared (after I returned from a vacation), I received a call from Apple acknowledging for the first time that, yes, it has an enterprise division headed by Al Shipp, senior vice president of enterprise sales. Only hitch was, Apple’s PR department wasn’t authorized to let me talk to Mr. Shipp or, in fact, anyone in Apple Enterprise.

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Those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know that I love my FiOS broadband connection, but I’ve had no end of trouble with my Verizon FiOS Internet account. Over the past few months I’ve written several items about my flirtation with Verizon’s FiOS TV (conventional and digital HDTV television programming — like the cable or dish companies — via fiber optic). I backed out of the idea on installation day when I discovered I needed to opt for a new router, which would be assigning IP addresses to Verizon’s set-top TV boxes along with the other 20-plus computers on my network.

There followed some several items on these pages about another concern I had with FiOS TV, the fact that video-on-demand movies and shows use the same bandwidth pool in the FiOS architecture as the Internet access. I became concerned that concurrent video-on-demand programming and heavy Internet usage might result in slower performance. Verizon has been peeling back the onion and explaining this to me. There’s a little additional detail later on in this post.

But first let me deliver some good news. The account problems I’ve had with FiOS — which have amounted to Verizon’s records showing me as having standard DSL instead of FiOS — have been fully rectified. Frank Boersma, director, set-top box and in-home network engineering at Verizon, whom I quoted in this recent post, was able to set in motion a resolution process. The problem dates back to my original FiOS Internet installation date, early in January of 2006.

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