Goodbye linkblog, hello del.icio.us linkfeed

The linkblog that I announced never really quite got going, mostly because I think the interface I was using wasn't ideal for the task, so linkblogging was kind of a pain.

That has all changed now that I'm using del.icio.us to tag items of interest as I find them, using a bookmarklet that allows me to post links to del.icio.us with one click, along with tags and a few comments about the link. For now, I'm tagging what I would normally put in a linkblog with the tag "links," and one of the beauties of del.icio.us is that an RSS feed for my items tagged as "links" is automatically generated. Very easy.

This simple "discovery" (along with some other indicators) makes me think that the linkblog as we know it might be dying. Much better and easier to do your linkblog in an open system.

I've added my del.icio.us RSS linkfeed to the navigation on my weblog homepage, but you can just cut and paste this URL into your aggregator if you want to subscribe:

http://del.icio.us/rss/chadd/links

Unswitch?

My last post focused on some of the issues with Macs in the enterprise, but some of the things that Tim writes about are starting to bug me, too. Is the Mac-love of alpha geeks starting to wane? I realized recently that maybe Scoble's Tablet PC evangelism might finally be seeping into my brain. . . . Apple better come out with a new PowerBook soon.

Help -- under Mac attack!

Boy, my last column about Macs in the enterprise really touched a nerve. My editor probably ratcheted up the intensity of the response with a headline and deck (what we call the subheadline in the biz) that went beyond the point that I was making. The headline was "Want a Mac? You're on your own" and the subheadline was "I love Macs and I use one myself, but I can’t afford to spend time supporting them." Those are not the headlines I would have written for my column and I'll definitely take a more active role in watching the headlines for my more controversial columns (and, frankly, I could write the most glowing tribute to Apple imaginable and someone would find a reason to say I was shilling for Microsoft between the lines. Believe me.)

I go into the reasons I didn't like the headline in my current column, "Under Mac Attack":

Despite the overzealous headline my editor placed above my column, which suggested that Macs were not supported at all at InfoWorld, I want to assure you that Macs are embraced and supported at InfoWorld in key areas. I suspect that InfoWorld is reasonably typical in that approximately 20 percent of our environment consists of Macs. In the past year, we have upgraded our entire Mac environment to dual-processor G5s running Panther -- with Remote Desktop, Retrospect, and so on -- and everyone in our IT department is a Mac user and fan. That said, I think it's generally a waste of time to try to evangelize Macs to departments like sales where everyone prefers PCs or (gasp!) doesn't care. When IT pros with the crazed eyes of street preachers accost passersby in the hallways to push a new platform, people generally wish they would just shut up and stop blocking the route to the coffee machine.

Now before I get any further into this post, I want to emphasize that my motivation in bringing up any issues about Macs in the enterprise is to demonstrate that in enterprise IT, making platform choices can be somewhat complex due to the particular needs of your business, legacy systems, budgets, staffing issues, etc. I've been a Mac user for 17 years now and Apple definitely makes great products that continue to be worthy of enterprise consideration, but I've never quite made it to the "blind devotion" stage. A Mac environment is not perfect because Apple products exist in an interdependent IT ecosystem in which Apple can't exercise full control over third-party products that might introduce complications into the platform. Our job in IT is to make everything work within whatever unique constraints we face, not to blindly commit to vendors. I also think it's unfair to take any criticism of Macs in the enterprise as a tacit endorsement for Microsoft. (Don't forget Linux, or Solaris, folks). Finally, there are really smart and very technical people out there who have run into issues with running only OS X for various legitimate reasons.

Aside from the mound of e-mail (about 50% "you're an idiot," 25% "I disagree, and here's why", 25% "Hey, good points"), there's been a lot of commentary around the web and I wanted to be sure to link to it, acknowledge it, and comment on it more fully than I can in a 600-word column. Aside from the usual predictable Mac-can-do-no-wrong zealotry (and if that's tiresome to someone who uses and loves his Mac, imagine how tiresome it is to the true "opposition"), there were plenty of thoughtful comments worthy of consideration by IT managers. Below are links to a couple of the major Mac sites who covered my column -- follow these and read the forums for a variety of opinion (I decided to list the names I was called and adjectives used on each site for your amusement -- you really have to have a sense of humor to write about your job in public):

MacDailyNews -- Names called/adjectives used: idiot, incompetent, dolt, lazily arrogant, "techie" (quotes used to cast doubt on my competence), "not that smart", smirky (referring to my photo -- I'm terrible in front of a camera, folks), (last but not least, an inexplicable pun on my last name) DickArson (note: first pun on my last name since, I don't know, 5th grade).

MacNN -- Names called/adjectives used: very dumb, TOTAL IDIOT

My e-mail -- Names called/adjectives used/insulting phrases: "callous ineptitude", "really lame", "lazy whiner"

First, a few suggestions from my inbox:

• I should make all applications web-based and use a truly cross-platform standards-based solution like Firefox (which is why I listed "Developing web apps for IE only" in my "Top 20 IT Mistakes" story a few months ago). More on the standards issue below.
• For companies who like Visual Basic, REALbasic is an option (supports Mac, Windows, and Linux). More info here (claims to have a conversion tool for VB6 code).
• There are companies (like OnDeckTech) who offer remote and on-site Mac support on a subscription basis.
• Some folks suggested iBackup and .Mac Backup for subscription-based Mac backups (see more details on this below).

Aside from the name calling, most of the criticism was more or less thematically consistent:

So, let me get this straight. You're claiming that it takes less time to support a PC vs. supporting a Mac?
In this particular case, yes. Adding a solitary Mac into a mix of salespeople all using PCs would add more incremental support overhead than supporting the standardized PC image we currently use. One reader put it well: "I'm a 20-year Mac user and agree that it's a pipedream, contrary to the hype, to throw a Mac at someone and expect them to know how to use it." Granted, this sales user was using a Mac at home, but I think this reader makes a reasonable point. Part of the intended point in my first column was that a home user who primarily uses iTunes and iMovie at home might not be ready to jump in head first in a corporate setting, especially when his comrades are all PC users.

The salesperson wanted to use a Mac -- why not let him? Wouldn't he be more productive?
Based on my conversation with him, probably not, and that was my point. Macs are computers, not magical devices with self-teaching powers that transfer computing omniscience to all who touch them. They are not automatically the "best tool for the job" for every person in every department. Every person has different capabilities and we have to evaluate the need for support in each case. Sure, Mac users in general might be easier to support, but a single Mac user in the sales department will have unique support issues compared to the rest of the Mac population at InfoWorld. We need some level of standardization across particular job functions, and this salesperson understood that. Sometimes being like everyone else is a good thing. I agree with one reader who wrote this: "People take a bit to shift gears going from PC to Mac. I'm with you in many regards on this. In fact, I tell people not even to bother getting a Mac if they aren't willing to spend time and learn the basic ins and outs of their new machine. I tell them it's a very straightforward platform to use, but like ANY piece of machinery... you have to learn it by spending the time... something that most people are not willing to do." (And again, yes, the user in question was already using a Mac at home, but was accustomed to using a PC at work in the past.)

You're just trying to protect your job by only supporting an all-Windows environment that has lots of problems to chase to keep you busy.
Nice try. :) I outsourced that function already, so I'm obviously not holding on to that function to keep my job. During the absolutely wrenching downturn in 2001, I outsourced Windows support out of business necessity. I was not a fan of outsourcing in the least, but it made sense and still makes sense. You can read more on that here and here. One important note: I didn't outsource this function because I didn't understand it. I outsourced because I understood it all too well, and the Centerbeam solution I chose dealt with the difficulties of Windows management in a smart way (especially patching). I would rather have a team on-site to deal with this, but budgets just won't allow it and the technology has made it possible to outsource the function relatively painlessly. See Everdream for a similar model. I think this model is clearly the future of IT support and IT support staff who ignore this cost-effective method of providing remote support are doing so at their own peril. In any case, had I wanted to go all-Mac during the downturn instead of figuring out a cost-effective way to manage our Windows machines. . . well, I couldn't. No hardware budget and not much appetite for turmoil and high short-term expenses when the company was focused on our revenue situation.

OK, you don't support Windows. What does your IT support staff actually do?
Our support staff is SMALL -- two people. They mostly focus on our web operation (which is directly attached to revenue), meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL, Oracle, load balancers (Foundry ServerIron), etc. InfoWorld.com is part of the Keynote Business 40 index, so we're one of the sites that is monitored to set the standard for web site performance. We keep pretty busy with all of that, but we also use Macs ourselves and do the Mac support (just not for random salespeople, remember). I would go so far as to say our IT manager (Kevin Railsback) is an absolute Mac freak, and I wouldn't write this if I didn't think he would view it as a compliment!

If you embraced open standards, you wouldn't have this problem.
Who doesn't love open standards? Here's what I wrote in this week's column about open standards:

Others said that if I more fully embraced open standards -- the IT version of world peace, and who doesn't want that? -- I wouldn't have to deal with the platform problem at all. Unfortunately, the reality of corporate IT intrudes. InfoWorld is more than 25 years old, and we are part of a larger global company that is nearly 40 years old. I am constantly pushing toward open standards with all our key systems; but we are still working with a few aggravating proprietary systems, and there is no magic wand to wipe them away immediately. Such is life in a company that has been around for a while. While admonishing me for not having a fully open standards-based environment that could support Macs in all functions, one developer noted that he used Virtual PC at his company for a few "horrible applications that only work with IE." It sounds like I'm not the only one with some work to do.

Legacy systems can be really stubborn, and the battle is inch-by-inch at times. We have an eight-year-old web-based financial system here at InfoWorld (but run by the IT staff at our parent company) that I use every month for budgeting and it doesn't work in Safari, so I use IE on Windows to view it. Maybe they'll make it more standards-based, maybe not -- it's good enough for almost everyone in the company as it is. When the system is rebuilt, I will ask that they certify it in a variety of browsers, but until then, I'll just fire up IE for Windows and deal with it.

You can use Remote Desktop / Citrix / Cisco VPN / Lotus Notes on the Mac
Without a doubt, that is basically true -- but no one who wrote to me mentioned any problems, just that "it works." I can't make any arguments about the Cisco VPN not working well (it does), but I think using Terminal Services with Remote Desktop Client for a highly-mobile sales user who needs regular access to PC-only apps would invalidate any support advantage the Mac might have, as I wrote in this week's follow-up column:

When I got several e-mails telling me that the obvious way (you dolt!) to support Mac-toting InfoWorld salespeople is to use the OS X RDC (Remote Desktop Client) to access key Windows apps via Terminal or Remote Desktop Services, I knew we were really getting into Mac-wagging-the-dog territory. To be fair, I know that the RDC approach can work because we've done it at InfoWorld -- on our local LAN. Still, I can only imagine the frantic support calls from a stranded salesperson in an airport with no way to connect back to that critical Windows app via RDC. Network connectivity is not yet ubiquitous, and, until it is, a solution that depends on a high-speed network is going to be unpredictable at best. When a PC-only app is absolutely critical, give that person a PC.

A little research also suggests that the current Citrix client for OS X has some aggravating problems. Yes, there are workarounds, but if this printing issue affects your daily work, using the Mac is more painful than using a PC. Any platform has its annoyances when using third-party software, even the Mac. This isn't Apple's fault, of course -- just an annoying fact of real-world IT. Again, Macs are not magical. (I won't get into Lotus Notes because I have beaten up on it enough, though I will say that the OS X version of Notes is inferior to the Windows version, at least in my opinion.)

I also don't understand why you would choose, however excellent it might be, a subscription backup service that was not platform agnostic.
I wish someone would point me to a simple subscription backup service that *is* platform agnostic, because there isn't one that I can find. Connected (the Windows-only service we use) provides a cost-effective way to seamlessly backup all of our Windows desktops in a way that they can be easily restored. "Seamlessly" means secure backup of an ENTIRE system over the Internet with only a client on the desktop, so I don't have to run any infrastructure (tape libraries, backup servers, etc.) to make this happen reliably. Connected has been working for over three years. Some people wrote to suggest using .Mac's Backup, but the standard membership only offers 250MB of storage, though you can upgrade to 1GB. Nice functionality, but not enough space for full enterprise backups. Another reader sent me a big "tsk-tsk" for not finding the Mac-supported service from iBackup. Only trouble with that service is that the backup portion is only supported on Windows and Linux, though there is a suggested workaround that leverages Retrospect Express and FTP -- this seems like a lame "make-this-work-on-a-Mac-at-all-costs" approach to me. There is an iDrive option that works with Macs, but it functions as a big remote drive, not a backup application with incremental backups (and I've seen the "manually move the stuff you want backed up to the server" approach fail enough to know to avoid it). So, I chose Windows-only Connected because it limits my backup problem to my Mac environment, and regardless of what we do there (Retrospect), I end up with a smaller backup problem overall. Having two working backup solutions (Connected and Retrospect) is not a problem when the overall effort to keep them both going is less than standardizing on one. I just wished there was a viable solution for the Mac that would work like Connected. Why won't Apple turn .Mac Backup into an enterprise offering? Here's hoping they will. Late-breaking update: As I was finishing this blog entry, I got an e-mail from fellow Connected user Coty Rosenblath who checked with Connected regarding Mac support -- they say they will be supporting it in "late 2005." Very, very cool.

I did ask three people who sent me categorical statements about Macs (of the "they are ALWAYS easier to use" variety) to send me some backup information, and here are some suggested links (didn't have time to check out all the claims, so I'm using the nofollow attribute for the sites I don't already know well -- trying to be responsible with my and InfoWorld's Google juice):

• Macintosh justification
• Apple drinks its own juice
• http://macvspc.info/
• http://systemshootouts.org/
• http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins/ratiopaperv2.html
• http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138610&cid=11624254
• Macs a better deal than Wintel systems (I found this one, actually)

I have to say, the oddest thing about Mac justifications is that the advocacy seems to sound roughly the same through the years despite serious improvements in the platform that would seemingly provide more compelling justifications. To me, OS X was the watershed that really made the Mac platform interesting again, and prior versions of Mac OS were just not even close. I would be really interested in seeing more recent studies that factor OS X into the equation in any case.

I could go on and on about Macs in the enterprise, but I have probably said enough for now. Again, I love Macs, but the sooner Mac zealots stop the scorched earth strategy of insisting that their solution is the perfect solution to everything in a world that reasonable people know is imperfect (and everyone else is an idiot), the sooner more people might see the true benefits of the platform through the screaming. Thanks to those who sent me thoughtful responses!

Final note: if you search for "negative impact zealotry" on Google, for the first result you get this really well-written plea against Apple zealotry -- by a Mac fan. Well worth reading.

RSS: Really Shortsighted Statement

Our own Matt McAlister reports from the ABM conference on online revenue strategies.

I'm at the ABM conference on online revenue strategies in New York and just finished listening to Geoff Ramsay of eMarketer open the session.  He seemed to feel that blogging is no threat to existing publishing and that nobody really reads these things anyhow.

Matt has some great data in his post about blog readership, but the thing that stuck out to me was Geoff Ramsay's personal view of RSS:

Strangely, Geoff doesn't subscribe to any RSS feeds because, "I don't want to go out there and have to get the stuff every day.  That's the pull model.  My research team does that."

Why not pull the RSS feeds of a few trusted bloggers out there and expand your "research team"? Anyone in online marketing not subscribing to the Marketing Vox RSS feed, for example, is missing out on a great (free) resource.

Using external non-TypeKey auth systems with Movable Type

We've been using Movable Type here at InfoWorld for a while now, but we've never enabled comments and haven't upgraded the software since we installed it (that's real-world IT for you). We're planning an upgrade to MT 3.x which has better comment management features, but it's not perfect and works best when you require TypeKey registration (great run-down on the various issues here). TypeKey is cool and all, but we already have a registration system and that last thing I want to do is ask our users to register in another system. Admittedly, TypeKey does provide single sign-on for TypeKey enabled blogs, making it easier to post comments at some non-InfoWorld blogs, but it's an irritant to those who suffer from AGATM syndrome. I've already enabled TypeKey registration on a personal blog of mine, but I don't think it's the right system for InfoWorld.

In any case, thanks to Everything TypeKey, I was able to start figuring out where to go from here. Here is a HOWTO on hooking MT into an external authentication system in 3.0, and here is someone who hooked his own auth system in Movable Type's. However we decide to do this, it looks like we have some work to do.

Things I hate about my new Treo 650

Note on April 14: after all these struggles, rebuilding my Treo from absolute scratch (i.e. fresh desktop OS, hard reset of Treo, fresh install of Palm Desktop on pristine OS, a firmware update, and fresh install of my latest third-party software -- Bob's Alarm and SnapperMail) seems to have made my Treo usable again. For now. I'm leaving the post below intact in case others recognize their own predicament.

Several weeks ago, Cingular finally offered support for the Treo 650, so I signed up and got one. It has a better screen, Bluetooth support, and actually feels a little lighter than the Treo 600.

That being said, it's not feeling like much of an improvement. In fact, I'm not sure if it's my hardware, software, Cingular service, or what, but I'm experiencing serious pain. Thankfully, John Yunker has a detailed run-down of the problems I have been having, and I'm not the only one. Cingular, are you listening??

Here are my problems:

Voice mail: The "favorites" button for voice mail (which was installed by default) keeps reprogramming itself, which makes getting voice mail a pain. Where it is supposed to dial 415-XXX-XXXX, it will now randomly set itself up to dial a dozen or more zeroes, or just random numbers. Finally, I just put the voice mail number in my Memo app. It's not anything I'm doing, because it often resets itself to the proper number without any intervention from me. [Update on April 13: Looks like there is a firmware fix available now!]

Crash-o-rama. With no changes in over a week, the Treo 650 suddenly started crashing when I picked up an incoming phone call. People calling me reported hearing me pick up, then a quick busy signal as my phone rebooted. For a while, I could dial any number in the universe but my voice mail number -- that would cause the phone to crash.

My reading suggests that a new SIM card will solve the problem (some Gemplus ones are defective and Axalto SIMs have helped some people). In the meantime, for the voice mail problem at least, here is a workaround.

Update, March 24: I got a new Axalto card earlier today, and while my voice mail dialing troubles seem to have dissipated, I'm still getting weird crashes on incoming calls. Hmmm. Could just be an unstable app, but everything was fine with the 600. Stay tuned.

Update, March 30: Still a little flaky (some crashes when I pick up a call), but seems to have improved somewhat. The phone also seems to randomly reboot at times, not just when I'm picking up a call. I had the Treo 600 for about a year without these problems, so I don't think it's me.

Update, April 13: Some other ideas on how to fix this. I decided to wipe my Treo completely clean, install the Palm Desktop for Treo 650 on a Windows machine (I'm using a Mac), and sync from there to see if my problems go away. More later. . . . (keeping this how to do a hard reset link handy)

Movable type upgrade tips: 2.63 to 3.1

This morning, I've been upgrading a personal weblog from Movable Type 2.63 to the latest 3.15 release and thought it would be useful to throw out a couple of notes:

• Because the TypeKey comment system was introduced, you'll need to change various templates to handle comments properly -- look here for hints.
  
• If you've used MT-Blacklist before, the old 1.6 version no longer works because of the extensive changes to MT's comment system. The new version looks great (at least after the first ten minutes of using it).
  

One challenge of "serious" blogging

My former colleague and all-around cool guy Mark Jones writes about the pains of setting up blogs for internal communications, the principal one being setting up the individual user accounts for everyone. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that Mark is using Movable Type, or at least something similar.

I'm not sure Movable Type is positioning itself as an enterprise intranet tool, but we use it as such at InfoWorld and the account setup is a pain when you want passwords and access controls managed centrally (i.e. Active Directory or LDAP). If only MT had LDAP integration. . . well, apparently someone else has done some work on this, but the project page hasn't been updated since late 2002.

It looks like the more interesting work in this area is going on with Word Press. Alistair Young has introduced LDAP integration that works with the latest version of Word Press.

In looking for this stuff, I found a useful rundown of multi-user blogging tools.

My advice to Mark for now -- just start typing those individual usernames/passwords and let me know if anyone offers a better option, because I'm looking for it, too.

Triangle Technology Executives Council (North Carolina)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a meeting of the Triangle Technology Executives Council (TTEC) held in Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). I hooked up with the TTEC a few months ago when I wrote about the benefits of local CTO clubs several months ago and got an e-mail from Anders Brownworth, CTO of Bandwidth.com, who is on the board. Anders invited me to stop by the next time I was in town. At yesterday's meeting, Justin Gehtland gave a well-balanced talk at this meeting about the futures of .NET and Java (heavily-stripped-down nutshell: both are just fine in the right context.)

If you're interested in joining the group, go to the TTEC web site for details. These groups are well worth your time if you're a CTO.

Logging in from Duke

While I was an undergraduate at Duke (1990-1993), I was basically oblivious to the Internet as I wandered the hallways of the English department muttering about semiotics and Shakespeare. It wasn't until immediately after I left school that my first job turned me onto the new world.

Anyway, I just had to post something from Duke's wi-fi network -- I'm on campus to do a presentation about weblogs and RSS tomorrow. It only took twelve years, but I finally plugged in at my old school.

RSS on a Treo 650 -- argh

Since I've been on the road a lot lately, I decided it was time to install an RSS newsreader on my Treo 650 (just upgraded from the 600 a few weeks ago). HandRSS seemed to be the only game in town the last time I checked. I investigated further, and Standalone Inc. (the creators of HandRSS) recently released a new product called Quick News to replace HandRSS. It looked like it had all the features I wanted, including OPML import capabilities so I wouldn't have to type in the 100+ feeds I normally access through Bloglines.

If only it was that easy.

The setup of Quick News was like any other Palm app, but when I tried to import my OPML feeds (you can do it by providing a URL to your OPML file), my Treo seemed to do something, but whatever it did, it didn't import the feeds. You can also import from an OPML file on an SD Card, but I didn't have my SD Card reader with me. I never read the instructions for my Treo or the Palm Desktop software (yeah, violating the sacred RTFM principle), so I didn't realize until I tried it that dragging a regular file (not a .prc file) to your Hot Sync program just syncs it to the SD Card on your Treo/Palm. Convenient. My HotSync log said this after I dragged my OPML file over and ran a sync:

Installed export.opml to the SecureDigital (SD) Card

Only trouble is that Quick News can't seem to find my OPML file. This time, I did RTFM (for the Quick News product), but it was one of those unfortunate manuals in which the author assumes everything works (and no "Troubleshooting" section. Incidentally, the title of the manual in the <TITLE> tag is "Workout Tracker Users Manual," which hints at a bit of general sloppiness). In any case, it's a cool product and the feeds I manually entered work well, but I want my OPML!

If anyone uses Quick News or HandRSS and has a solution, let me know. I could be making a mistake somewhere.

One additional note: I thought to check my web server logs to see if the OPML file being requested by Quick News from my Treo was actually being pulled -- and it was, with a 200 OK server response no less (I deleted the IP below -- who knows what sort of DoS attack could be engineered on my phone!)

[IP deleted] - - [08/Mar/2005:09:49:13 -0800] "GET /subs.opml HTTP/1.0" 200 19408 "-" "-"

Update: Doug Harris makes a really useful suggestion (thanks, Doug!), especially considering that I already use Bloglines:

I've got a Treo 600 and I read bloglines via its standard browser. Bloglines provides a nice low bandwidth version.

I put a couple screenshots in an article I wrote for my blog on rss aggregators. Load http://wemmick.net/writings/aggregator/ and search for "Treo" in the page to find the links to the screenshots.

One thing to note, however, is that creating a bookmark to http://bloglines.com/myblogs won't work as you expect. You need to start at http://www.bloglines.com and then click through to "My Feed'. It appears that the cookie which designates the browser as a mobile device does not persist -- I'm not sure if the is the Treo's browser's problem or bloglines' code problem.

Of course, if your goal is to read your RSS feeds completely offline, you're out of luck with this solution.

Wow, problem solved -- I just tried this and Bloglines interface is great on the Treo. I didn't have the same problem Doug had with the cookie, but the browser on the Treo 650 is different from the one I was using on the 600 (the new one is palmOne Blazer v4.0). In any case, just another example of how blogs solve problems -- if I hadn't posted this barely an hour ago, I would still be suffering while Doug knew the answer.

Update #2: Ben Gottlieb from Stand Alone Inc. (the makers of Quick News) sent me an e-mail just a little while ago offering help with my OPML problem. It seems my OPML file might possibly be too big -- I'm sending it on to them so they can try it out in the lab. You know, I actually don't mind when I have technical problems when the company in question offers help so quickly -- especially considering that I didn't contact them directly. Smart companies watch blogs. Nice job, Stand Alone.