On vacation

I'm leaving for a 2-week vacation today -- all analog, no digital.  Don't expect to see anything here until September 8.

OK, Apple -- you win

Completely coincidentally, I happened to dig into Mac OS X at precisely the same time InfoWorld is running its online special report and print cover story on Apple in the enterprise.  Because I didn't have much to say about Apple just over a week ago when I filed my column, my column appearing in the magazine this week is about paying money for open source solutions.

In the meantime, the hard drive on my home computer died.  Hard drives are replaceable, of course, but seeing as this particular machine was a vintage 450mhz Dell from late 1998, I took it as a sign that I needed to change.  I've had a spare 450mhz Mac G4 (not even close to the newest one, mind you -- we're talking $600 on eBay) at my desk at work for a while now and only used it occasionally, so I decided to give OS X a more serious whirl by using that machine as my primary computer at home for a while.  I made a date with the G4 for Saturday -- it was clearly a "meet for coffee, get to know you" kind of date, not even as serious as a lunch date, and not even approaching the gravity of a dinner date.

Two days later, and I'm head over heels -- I've asked the G4 to move in for good.  I converted my iPod from Windows to Mac (it's easy folks -- just plug the Windows iPod into your Mac and run "Restore"), dove into iTunes, configured Samba to share the Mac filesystem to my wife's PC, and made the G4 and OS X the center of my household computing universe.  If you're partial to Unix like me and you've been hearing about OS X for a while now, thinking, "yeah, yeah, whatever, Mac frontend, Unix backend -- I'll check it out fully one of these days" . . . . well, give it a try.  There's just something about it.

Look for an InfoWorld column with more about my switch experience in a few weeks.

Wonders of e-business

I always hear that the two largest financial commitments you make in life are your house and your car.  In the past year, I purchased a car online and re-financed my house online.   The car purchase experience was fairly unremarkable -- I did some test drives at local dealerships and pretty soon a new car was at my doorstep.  I signed the papers while sitting in the passenger seat, the man who delivered the car left, and then it was over.  The home loan experience was a lot more interesting consider the complexity of the process itself.

If you've ever financed a mortgage in the traditional way, there's a lot of back and forth phone calling between the buyer and the bank/broker.  Rates go up and down every day, so buyers are rightfully concerned about when to lock the rate.   Typically, the bank/broker calls and rattles off a list of rates and terms and the buyer scribbles the numbers down on the other end of the line.  It can get confusing with the points, interest rate vs. APR, etc.  Throw in options for all the various adjustable-rate mortagates (ARM) and it gets confusing.  If rates go down, your bank/broker gets busy and you might not get through to the person who needs to press that one button you need pressed to lock the rate.

I decided to use E-loan for my recent refinance.  I registered on their site and did the application online, and after the initial pre-approval (which was delivered quickly),  I was presented with a list of possible loans.  Any time I wanted to check on things, I logged into their E-Track service to check the status.  I was given plenty of time to decide what rate I wanted  (i.e. days)  When I decided to lock my rate and go for a particular loan, I just clicked "lock rate" beside the loan I picked -- a stroll in the park.  After I locked my rate, I ordered and paid for the appraisal with a few more clicks.  Very shortly, all the usual pre-loan disclosure papers were posted online for me to review.  When the appraisal came back, it was posted as a PDF and I downloaded it. Anytime I wanted to check my loan terms, I logged into the site -- no shuffling through the mountain of papers that typically accompany such transactions.  I communicated with the people at E-loan primarily via e-mail, which was convenient and productive.

There were only three analog elements to the mostly digital process: 1) the faxing of W2's, pay stubs, bank statements, etc. (I did this with a regular fax machine, though I could have scanned them and faxed them electronically had I wanted absolute digital purity), 2) the appraiser's visit to the house, and 3) the actual signing of the papers, which took place in a coffee shop in Berkeley where I live.

The theme of decentralization runs pretty thick through this particular transaction (direct access to locking rates for distributed Internet consumers, the signing of documents in a random coffee shop), but I have a simpler word for it:  cool.

The agony of spam blacklists

A critical e-mail I was sending to an InfoWorld business partner today was rejected, which threw a wrench into my day.  Upon investigation, one of InfoWorld's mail servers has been blacklisted for being an open relay, and the not-so-funny thing is that the mail server in question is behind a firewall where you can't hit the SMTP port (25) at all from outside, and it's been that way for a really long time.

Just to check myself, I ran a test on our server from this page, and it failed because it couldn't connect to our SMTP server to see if we were an open relay (uh, exactly).  I tried to telnet to port 25 on the server from outside our firewall and couldn't connect (and frankly, I'm glad, because I can't type SMTP commands from memory).  You can't be an open relay if your SMTP server is un-contactable.

Finally, I followed the link to check why our server was listed as an open relay (since it's clearly not), and was greeted with a 500 Internal Server error inviting me to send e-mail to root@localhost to report the error.  Gee, thanks.

This is the equivalent of a life sentence on our mail server with an invisible judge and no actual evidence.  Granted, the mail rejection was based on the policy of the business I was mailing to, but the blacklist maintainers have some obligation to keep their reporting systems up so I can figure out why I'm on their list in the first place.

<sigh>. . . I guess we'll go through the retest process, where we're guilty until proven innocent.

IT garage band

From this week's InfoWorld column:

My column on invisible IT definitely struck a chord, and the sometimes-invisible IT people who read my column made themselves fully visible with some excellent feedback. [full column here]

There are indeed plenty of parallels between music-making and IT.   There are the usual relationships between music theory and computer programming, and if you've ever tried to program a drum machine or a digital multi-track recorder (like I have been lately), the similarities become even more clear (and actually, the IT might actually seem much easier).

No Wi-Fi at Linux World?

Yes, I work at InfoWorld, so I'm a little biased, but it's really cool to see our own Mark Jones blogging a live status report about the availability of Wi-Fi at Linux World via our new Tech Watch blog.  A big thanks to Doc Searls for helping Mark and others get hooked up. 

Globalization and IT

From this week's InfoWorld column:

Recently, I got an e-mail from Dave Hoerman, who has worked in the IT industry since 1985 as “a software tester, developer, and system administrator for just about everything,” as he puts it. He is concerned about reports that IBM is considering moving IT jobs overseas to China and India. He asks: “Can any of the remaining American IT companies be successful with a pro-American developer attitude?” Judging from the e-mail I get and what I read in magazines (including InfoWorld), Dave’s concern is shared by American IT workers, employed and unemployed alike.  (read the rest)