Gadgetopia

A friend called me the other day and asked to sit through a software demo for a new company.  I get these requests all the time, but I really trust this guy so I agreed.  I’m glad I did, because it blew my mind a little.

Go watch this video for Liaise.  This is an Outlook add-in (for now – there are integration plans for other platforms) that analyzes what you write in an email in real-time and creates tasks and follow-up items based on.

So, if you email Bob and say:

I need you to send me the tickets for the concert next Tuesday.

Liaise will – while you’re typing – create a task called “Send concert tickets,” assign it to Bob (the Bob you were emailing, because it recognizes the pronoun “you”), and put a due date on it by next Tuesday.  It’s really remarkable.

Go watch the video.  I was crazy impressed, and I get more and more cynical every day.

At the end of the day, my only reaction to these guys was, “You are so gonna get acquired…”  Seriously – Microsoft is going to snap these guys up in a heartbeat.  It’s that cool.

Parallels Starts Its Own Apple Switch Campaign - Bits Blog : Parallels is trying to get you to switch to a Mac.

But the heart of the switching software revolves around some more basic things. For one, Parallels has video tutorials on how to use a Mac and how to find Windows-type functions on a Mac. I’ve seen the videos in action, and they’re pretty slick as far as these types of tutorials go. The videos try to keep up with your learning curve by presenting fairly detailed menus that let you skip around to various parts of lessons.

Side-By-Side: Snow Leopard And Windows 7 : The buzz about Windows 7 is good.  The buzz about Snow Leopard…not so much.

Windows 7 may be the closest Microsoft has gotten to offering a desktop operating system as performance-nimble, aesthetically pleasing and, dare we say it, as potentially secure as Apple has delivered with OS X.

Microsoft backs long life for IE6: Don’t worry, folks — IE6 will be around for a long time to come.

Microsoft has underlined support for its Internet Explorer 6 web browser, despite acknowledging its flaws.

The software giant said it would support IE6 until 2014 - four years beyond the original deadline.

Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6: CNN is on the case, folks.  The end is near.

Some Web designers are staging an online revolt against an old version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which they say is hampering the ability of the Web to move forward in a cool and interactive way.

Melody: Community Powered Publishing: Now that Movable Type has gone open-source, it has forked.

Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature. We believe that a vibrant community is the foundation on which all successful products and services are built today.

I think is probably a pretty friendly fork, however.

Outlook’s broken—Let’s fix it: Why would Microsoft do this?  It doesn’t make any sense.

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images […]

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

If you don’t need any more information that what I’ve provided here, don’t click through.  The site consists of about a thousand Twitter profile pictures (and adds more in real-time).  Load times are not great.

So, I have to install Vista. Not thrilled about it, but we need to start developing locally (rather than on a shared server), and XP still has IIS 5.1, so I don’t have much choice.

I don’t want to upgrade — I want to do a fresh install. It’s about time to pave the machine anyway. However, the fear in these cases is that you’re going to format the drive and then remember, “Oh, crap, I needed X…”

So, I figure, I’ll just write my entire hard drive somewhere. Handily enough, I have a Maxtor OneTouch drive sitting on the desk with 1TB of capacity. Given that my laptop only has an 80GB drive, I could back the whole thing up 12 times.

I thought about Norton Ghost, but that’s a little scary — it actually does a low-level disk image that you can restore from a recovery disk or something. That’s way too black box. I just want a brute force file copy that I can browse if need be.

I have Genie-Soft backup, which has been quite good so far, so I decide to use that to back the whole thing up. I set up the job so it doesn’t even zip — it just copies like a mofo. And copy it does…until about half way through the drive when it throws a low-level “do you want to debug?” type of error. I reset the job a couple times, but still get the error (bummer, because I’ve never had a lick of problems with that software before).

Okay, so let’s just use XCOPY, right? That’s a command line utility that will do a recursive file copy. And you can suppress errors with it, so it can skip right past files that are locked or whatever.

So, I set that up, and it starts copying like crazy…until I get an “Insufficient Memory” error. A little Googling tells me that the error is deceptive. The problem is that some of my nested folders result in paths longer than 254 characters. Bummer.

So, I go looking, and I happen on a great little command line program called “XXCOPY.” This was apparently built to handle the 254-character path limit, and it’s evolved from there into what could be the ultimate manifestation of a file syncing utility.

XXCOPY has about 200 switches to configure the behavior and output every which way but Sunday. It started with mere duplicates of the default program’s switches, but now can configure log output, skip or include files by pattern, consolidate directories, re-timestamp files, etc.

As I write this, XXCOPY is brute-force copying my entire hard drive to my OneTouch. I expect it to take 5-6 hours.

They have a freeware version and a “Pro” version for $40. Functionality appears to be the same, it just depends on what you use it for.

I love little programs like this that has evolved around doing one thing well. You can take it too far (see the past posts on WS_FTP, for example), but XXCOPY has a hit nice, sweet spot in terms of functionality. In this sense, it reminds me of another great command line utility — FDate.

So, that’s the meandering story of how I backed up my drive and found a snazzy little command line utility to boot.

FoxGlove: Google Apps Portal: This is, I believe, the next evolution in the Single-Site Browser (SSB) phenomenon. Not only are you running Google Apps in a different instance, but that instance is customized with special functionality specifically for the app it’s intended to run.

And this is why I so totally love FoxGlove. FoxGlove is a customized Firefox Portable installation to tightly integrate with Google Apps. As you can see, FoxGlove is complete not only with add-ons that will enhance and integrate Google Apps in Firefox, but it also has a Chrome-like theme, custom homepages (that auto-load in tabs), and web site favicons.

I discussed before how I thought larger Web apps should offer customized browser environments for their apps:

What I’d like to see in these apps is a way to give Web sites “superpowers” that they wouldn’t normally have, like access to your local file system or registry. While the security implications are daunting, this is one of the last miles to bridging the gap between local and remote applications.

However, I never thought of using Firefox extensions for it, which only makes sense.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Salesforce lately. That’s an app monolithic enough to need something like this.

DearIE6 - So Long: I don’t know what’s cooler — a chance to publicly insult IE6, or the idea of content management via Twitter.

Wanna say goodbye? Great, simply follow DearIE6 and send your goodbye as a @DearIE6 reply… we’ll look after the rest

Respondus LockDown Browser: This is apparently how they do e-learning testing and assessment via Web-based curriculum. Tools like this essentially make the machine a kiosk while the student is taking a test.

When students use Respondus LockDown Browser they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading.

Here’s another one that is literally a kiosk system — the browser runs full-screen with no option to close.

Linux Foundation: the kernel is worth $1.4 billion: No problem. We’ll re-develop this by lunch.

[…] the Linux Foundation has concluded that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel from scratch and $10.8 billion to develop the complete platform stack.

Fluid - Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard: This is like Prism for Firefox.

[…] Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.

“SSB” is fast becoming a semi-official acronym for “Site Specific Browser,” although the next step along that line is for that browser to allow the site to have some special functionality or access to the parent system.

For much more on this theory, see “Owning the Container” from a few years back.

CIA, Intelligence Community to Adapt Social Media via “A-Space”: On the heels of Intellipedia comes A-Space, MySpace for the intelligence community. James Bond wants to friend you…

All jokes aside, it is apparent that even government understands the increasing importance of social media and how it can benefit organizations seeking to collaborate more. The national intelligence community has oft been criticized for its inability to communicate between bodies, so this seems like a natural step.

Review: Movable Type Goes Virtuals: Movable Type has made an “MT Appliance” as a VMWare instance.

Virtual Movable Type turns installation into a four-step process: download the virtual appliance from either JumpBox or Six Apart, unzip it on the computer, open the configuration file (.vmx for VMware Player) inside the appropriate virtualization environment, and point a Web browser to the VM’s IP address to get to the configuration page. Enter a machine name for the VM, an administrator e-mail and password, and the time zone information. […]

The actual virtual machine image is called JumpBox. This is the container server—it is running a fairly recent Linux kernel (2.6.x) and has all the required software preinstalled. The software includes the Apache Web server, Perl and PHP with appropriate modules (such as CGI, DB, and SOAP::Lite), MySQL, and the Movable Type software. The JumpBox appliance handles all the port configurations, such as opening up ports 80, 443 and 3000 for Apache. The appliance also sets up the MySQL database and configures the system appropriately so that the Movable Type software can read and write to the tables.