Microsoft's Killer Application

It's well...it's Microsoft.

Frequently I'll hear people refer to the product of a company with a single product (or a single predominant product or range of closely related products) by the company name (for example Citrix of VMware). But (mostly non-technical) people also seem to refer to Microsoft products as just being Microsoft.

Not only does Microsoft not have a single product, Microsoft has a range of duplicative products--products which perform the same task but which do so in inconsistent and sometimes even incompatible manners: Outlook and Outlook Express/Windows Live Mail (mutually exclusive support for differing mail servers or services), Office and Works (differing file formats for the same task), Outlook and Windows Address Book/Windows Live Contacts.

But its all called Microsoft and I think its that confusion between products and what is in the Operating System and what is not that has benefited Microsoft and made it really difficult for Apple and the various Linux distributions to supplant it.

I know this is a rough idea, and I'll return to it, but I just wanted to say that.

A letter to an old friend:

I remember being very angry at what I felt was an unnecessarily self congratulatory tone of Unzipped, the movie about Isaac Mizrahi. I remember that you seemed somewhat shocked by that.

I now know that I was wrong wrong wrong about that--celebrating one's life is, well, a celebration worth having; failing to celebrate one's life and one's feeling of accomplishment is a wrong thing to do.

Lonely Saxophones

I remember one summer at home--I think it was the summer of '98--when a single lonely saxophone would play out over the roofs of the neighborhood in the evenings. It was one of the insanely beautiful moments that made Raleigh seem at so much more urbane and cosmopolitan than it seemed during the day.

In any event, yesterday was the first day of spring when doors and windows were flung open and people just stayed outdoors. Usually the music of balmy afternoons in my neighborhood is of a Mexican or Salvadorian flavor, and occasionally jazz or even classical music. Unfortunately this time it was abrasive sensationalist Hip-hop of the most banal and vulgar kind.

Somehow I managed to shutout the lyrics and think of that saxophone until the language was brought to my attention, and it kind of put a damper on the afternoon.

F-16s at night

I've been at Shaw AFB for work for the week, and frequently hear fighter jets overhead. They are impressive little engines with wings and at night they look like the pilot is sitting on an open flame when they take off.

MobileMe and Incompatible Browsers

I had gotten used to using my iDisk to hold personal stuff that I need when I'm at drills, but was surprised to see the following when attempting to get to it:

While it turns out that I can read the iDisk with Internet Explorer , I did have to consult Apple 's support site  to do so. Luckly, Apple is not so picky about how you can access that. Unfortunately, Firefox does not yet seem to be widely available on DoD computers on the NIPRNET yet, or I never would have noticed.

Upgrading to Fedora 10

Yesterday morning I upgraded my work laptop from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10. Other than a couple of issues outlined below, the experience seemed reasonable:

Issues

• The bootloader (grub) did not upgrade correctly, leaving me at a grub prompt when the computer started. Apparently this is a common issue. The fix was simple in my case:
  1. root (hd0,1)
  2. setup (hd0,1)
• VMware Workstation refused to heal from the upgrade. Usually VMware Workstation just heals itself after I update the kernel, but for some reason it refused to heal itself. Again a simple fix:
  1. rm /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary
  2. vmware modconfig --console --install-all
• Immediately after installing Fedora (on only the second day after its release) there were a ridiculous number of updates to be downloaded, so I basically the first thing I did with the system was let it download and install updates for three hours.

References

• Fedora 10 Upgrade Experience | tofu.org
• Geekdom » Post Topic » Fedora 10 + VMware Workstation 6.5.0

Spanning Sync

I use Spanning Sync to synchronize the address book and calendars on my Macs with my Google accounts  (yes, that's plural - I have one Google account, and one account at a Google Apps site). It has been working great, allowing me to use my iMac as the central hub by which everything else just stays in sync.

However, it is not free software, and being a heavy user of GNOME and other open source software projects, I spent some time shopping around for a free solution that performed as well as this, as easily as this, and just failed to find one. It's the first software purchase that I have made other than Mac OS X in a long time, and I think its been worth it.

Spanning Sync recently (a few months ago actually) began encouraging users to advertise the software by offering a discount to both the referred-to user and the referring user.