Microsoft Office self-incompatibilities …

I received an post on a group I follow reminding people not to send out documents in the Office 2007 format of Word. Now, I’ve been using the 2007 suite since the first betas (way before 2007), and have learned this lesson more than once (mostly because of lost settings when I’ve had to do a reinstall).

The new format for files in Office was created by Microsoft in an attempt to create an open file structure. Any file you save in a default install of 2007, will have the letter “x’ appended to the file extension, signifying that it is saved in this new format.

There are many ways to deal with this problem, and the most successful strategy is actually to simply configure your 2007 products to default to saving in the older format.

You can also point the person who is using the older version to the Microsoft dowload pages to get the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack which lets Office 2003 open the new files. The problem with this approach is that many organizations don’t allow their users to do installations (in a lame attempt to keep spyware and viruses out of the company network), so it’s either not possible, or difficult to get done.

You can do a “Save As” to create a copy in Word 97-2003 format, RTF, or even as a PDF (yes, the new product lets you create PDF files). But doing a “Save As”, requires you to remember to do that each time, and you end up with multiple files which could end up with version problems (you start with the docx, save as doc, then make a change – now which one is current?)

So the trick is to go into the options, and set your save format to the “Word 97-2003 (*.doc)” format, and then you don’t have to worry about it.

To change the options in Word (or for that matter any of the Office products), click on the

You will then see the menu pop up, with the “Word Options” button at the bottom:

Click on the  button, to get to the options, then click on “Save” in the left hand column to display the save options:

If you haven’t updated yet, you will see “Microsoft Word (.docx)” as the option for the “save files in this format”. Click the drop down and choose “Word 97-2003 (*.doc)” as shown below:

Finally hit the button at the bottom of the dialog that says “OK”, to save your changes.  Create a new document, and save it, and you should no longer see the “*.docx” format.

From now on, whenever you save a document, it will save in the old format unless you do a “Save As”.

Advantage Mac (again) …

This month has been a bad one for me and computers. First my MacBook Pro died (due to a video card that had been recalled), and then my desktop PC decided to fall over dead.

The Mac failure was another study in why I love Apple service: The video just died one day, no screen, external monitor wouldn’t work. Since a Mac has a real operating system (Mac OS X – a Unix variant), I was able to determine that the machine was actually still working by connecting from my desktop PC using ssh.

I did a bit of system administration black magic, and turned on the remote desktop service (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2370 or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2081446&tstart=1 for a writeup of how), and was able to connect to my MBP using VNC. That allowed me to validate things were working, and to make sure I had a current backup before doing anything else.

A quick call to Apple’s support desk, and the helpful tech looked up the problem, found there was a recall on the video logic board for certain MBP systems, and walked me through a few things to validate it wasn’t just user error. He gave me a case number, told me to go to the Apple store, and have them check for the recall.

So I made an appointment at the store, got there a little early, and waited for that piece. In a reasonably short time, my “Genius” was testing my MBP for the recall issue, and sure enough that was the problem. Next a few minutes as he got the RMA set up, inspected the machine (noting that there was a small ding on the case), and asked me if I wanted it shipped back to my home address. The usual disclaimer about “if we can’t fix it, we might charge you $100 for looking at it”, and it was off to the races.

A couple of days later, I get a call from the Apple Repair Center. The guy on the phone tells me that yes, the recall is covered, but it appears the machine was dropped (which it was many moons ago), and there are all sorts of things that need to be replaced to bring the machine back to factory specs. This all comes with a price tag of $1,200 … Once I recovered my breath, I tell him “but at the store they said all I needed was the recall”. He tells me that, yes that would give me a working machine, and they could probably have fixed it at the store, but since it’s at the repair center they have to apply quality to it.

I tell the guy I’m not in a position to come up with the $1,200 right now, so can he ship it back to the store and let them do the repair. At this point, he tells me, that since I’ve been nice, and since I’m a good customer, he’s going to waive the fee. So Apple basically solidifies my glowing opinion of their service, and I get what for all intents and purposes is a brand new MacBook Pro.

I’m so relieved that this didn’t happen with my wife’s PC …..

Murphy’s law bites me again …

…. But while my MBP was off for service, I revived an old laptop I have for backup purposes. I had it almost completely configured when I got my MBP back. Then, a few days ago, my desktop PC (a Sony) crashed.

I go to the Sony web site, and do one of those instant chat sessions, and through a little back and forth, the chat agent tells me it is either a bad video card, or my memory has gone bad. In either case, it will require service. Now the wheels start spinning, because I know how much video cards cost, and I know I’ll have to pay a few hundred bucks just to get somebody to look at the machine (no Genius bar to bring my Sony to).

In the old days I would have just replaced the video card and memory with spares, but since I’m greener (and don’t really work on hardware any more) these days, I don’t keep things like that around. So now I have a useless desktop, with an unknown problem, with 500Gb of data that I can’t get to. Worse, the Sony has a RAID card, so I’m not sure the disks will be readable  except in that machine (it’s really 2x250Gb).

So I’m still trying to figure out what to do to recover the PC, but I’m guessing that will wait for a while …

Restoring my wife’s PC

Luckily for me, I had rebuilt my spare laptop, so I’m able to get the most important files onto my spare laptop, and within a few hours, it’s happily driving my big Gateway monitor (with Quicken and email files restored).

This is possible because of two backup strategies: Quicken online backup (which is a remarket of Connected Backup), and Microsoft Live Mesh.

I’ve used the Connected product ever since I learned about it while working at Cisco. They use the enterprise version, and it does a great incremental backup of your PC, that helped me recover accidental deleted files more than once. For a few bucks a month, the home version does the same thing for a few gig of data.

Live Mesh on the other hand, is a synchronization tool, that is a bit like the old Microsoft Briefcase on steroids. You mark a folder as being a Live Mesh folder, and it gets replicated to the Microsoft cloud. You can then synchronize that folder across systems, and even share it with other users. I created Live Mesh folders for all of my web site work as a way to share files with my clients, and to keep data on my Mac and PC in synch.

What I hadn’t really realized was that I was in effect getting a backup with this as well. I simply shared the folders to my backup laptop, and voila, I had all of my important data back and ready to update. For me, this is one more bit of evidence that there will continue to be interesting applications brought about by the cloud: I hadn’t really thought of Live Mesh as a backup strategy, and it lacks the versioning piece, but in a pinch it’ll do.

Hey you get offa my cloud …

I’ve been using some of the more interesting “cloud” applications recently: Google Apps, Live Mesh and a few others.

I’m really impressed with the capablities and use of these free web applications. It’s a really interesting marketing tool as well: give away the low end product to build user acceptance, and then add a bit more to give value to the enterprise.

My first foray into the personal cloud was Google docs. This product has to be the coolest idea ever: create your documents on a web site, and let them be shared and simultaneously editable. The concept is awesome, and works really well for some documents (most notably spreadsheets). I can share a spreadsheet with any number of people, and they can all edit it at the same time.

Sort of like Netmeeting on steroids, I open my spreadsheet and there’s a little notification that somebody else is editing or viewing it. As they make changes, I see them in real time, and they see any changes I am making. Now the interface is not quite as friendly as Excel, but for most of the spreadsheet light users like myself, it’s more than adequate.

This is supposed to work for documents as well, but I’ve had less success with them (changes seem to get overwritten if more than one person updates at a time).

The other beauty of this is it effectively gives you a network storage for all of your documents, solving the problem of how to keep them safe and secure. I no longer have to worry (as much) about backing up my hard drive, since I know Google is taking care of the hardware. If a drive crashes there, they are ready with a failover, and I never even know that it was lost.

After using docs for a while, I also started playing with the other apps and found them all well thought out and useful. One of the main reasons that I had a Windows VM on my Mac was to support Outlook because of it’s tight Exchange integration, and ability to handle my calendar well. I combined Outlook with Plaxo to keep my various calendars and contacts in synch, and was very happy with this.

The bad thing about Outlook however is the way it stores its’ data: the dreaded PST file. They’re notoriously tempermental, extremely space wasteful, and difficult to back up. So I started trying other methods for dealing with email, including the built in mail client for Mac, and Entourage. None of these were as easy or as complete as Outlook.

Then I tried GMail‘s client. I’d had an account for years, but had never really tried the mail client. But as I thought things through, the benefits were clear: I get a huge amount of storage for my email, and I don’t have to worry about losing any history ever. I’ve lost years of email in a single PST or drive crash before.

At first I wasn’t convinced. The UI seemed cluttered, and I wasn’t a big fan of the way the conversations were threaded (in Outlook I used to categorize, and had lots of options for sorting folders just so). With GMail, everything is in a big pile, and you filter by tags. After a few weeks, another benefit became obvious: the fact that I could search for anything in my mail.

In Outlook, there was always a find feature, that if you could get it to work, took a very long time. Worse, it wasn’t possible to search across different mail accounts unless you added some search add-on. I had been using Google Desktop for this for some time, which worked well as long as the index had seen the message I was looking for (it only indexes message as they are opened, so when they get archived the search may find them, but you can’t get to them because it’s pointing to the wrong place).

With GMail, everything is indexed, no matter where it is. And interestingly, this also includes your instant messages, so if I remember I talked to Warren about something, I can search for it and GMail will find it in both my email and chat conversations with him. And when I look at a message, it shows me the whole thread of the conversation, with the bits that match the search expanded, making it easy to put the whole thing in context.

So now I’ve got free document storage, free email with more storage than I’ve ever used (a PST with 10 years of email had to be split because it was over a gigabyte in size, yet contained less than a hundred megabytes of data). I don’t have to manage my email any more than to tag it in ways that are useful to me (and I can tag it for multiple things, and there is still only one copy of the message to worry about, unlike with folders where you had to have two copies if you wanted to categorize things that way).

So how does Google monetize this? Well, it turns out they have an enterprise version that they sell for $50 per year per user. Compare that with the cost of hosting Exchange, and a file server, and you have a no brainer for most small enterprises. And even for the standard version, they let you use it for free for up to 50 users, so a SMB can get started for even less than the $50 per user.

Considering the Microsoft equivalent functionality would require the full Office suite, and Exchange server, and some collaboration server, you’d be looking at an outlay of a few hundred dollars per user. The clear win here is that you’ve now got a suite that works for the home user, and can also be used effectively by business users. Google wins on the marketing front, leveraging the lessons of open source to gain customer base and entry into the enterprise market.

Next: Live Mesh …

Waves of Grief …

I was reminded today of the peculiarly clever way that grief occurs over time. I was watching a documentary on Teddy Kennedy yesterday and was struck by the depth of feeling I had to his words at his mother’s funeral. He spoke about how she would be greeted by all the other family members who had gone on before, and I felt that profound grief for every loss that I’ve experienced in my life.

The greatest (and most recent) of these for me was my dog and companion Bo. I lost him a couple years back after 14 years of loving companionship. I grieved as deeply and profoundly as I ever have for him, but from the very beginning, I noticed that the grief came in waves.

At times there are the pleasant memories, then some consolation from kind words about how dogs wait for us in the after life. Other times, there were simple pleasant memories of times with him, things he did to amuse and warm the heart. And sometimes there was the pain of the fading recollection of what he looked like, or how his fur felt under my hand.

But always the relief and sadness taking turns, with each stretch of sadness being more manageable and more level with the good memories.

My belief about this is that we had to develop this way in order to survive. If we simply grieved until we were done being sad, we wouldn’t be able to do anything for months. If we “cried a river“, we’d die of dehydration or starvation. Our minds give us the reprieve from the grief so we can deal with the business of living, and to allow us to continue to connect with the world.

For me, also faith helps in this, since it gives us a way to view death as a transition rather than something final. Feeling that there will be a time to see your loved ones again, takes away the sting at times (although that comfort doesn’t seem to be available at other times, when your heart feels as if there is no point and faith has no power).

Adventures in iPhone beta land

…Or how to brick your phone with an upgrade, and recover…

Earlier this month, Apple released the fifth beta of their 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. As usual, I raced to the site to download it.

I became very excited by the email that I got saying that submissions to the Apple store have to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, which to me means it won’t be long before this is a production OS. With that in mind, I strapped on my crazy cap and decided to upgrade my phone to beta 5.

After downloading the firmware and software for the new beta, I began the upgrade. According to the instructions, you needed the new beta of iTunes to do the upgrade, so that was the first thing that I installed.

Once that was ready, I followed the process that has become familiar to me for upgrading the phone:

1. Launch iTunes
2. Dock the phone
3. Right click on the phone and choose backup
4. After the backup click the “Restore” button while holding the option (alt) key.
5. Browse for the new firmware and watch things roll.

As it turns out, the mistake I made at that point was clicking the “Restore” button, later I learned that beta 5 won’t install unless you click “Check for Update” while holding the option key.

The first thing I noticed was that there was an odd cartoon that flashed up on the screen with a pink background. I figured it was some developer’s Easter egg, so I didn’t worry too much. After the usual series of minutes of resetting the phone and iTunes validating the software, the upgrade told me it was done, and I waited for the final reboot. This is typically the point at which the phone reboots, and iTunes detects it and activates.

Instead I ended up with an endless wait, as the phone never rebooted. So I went through the usual tricks to get it to come back to life. Eventually it worked, and I got a pink screen that showed the graphic you see with a new phone.

I plugged it in again, only to find that it wasn’t recognizing the phone (which after several tries led me to believe that the upgrade was not complete).  Not only was the phone stuck, but I couldn’t seem to get it back into DFU to restore the software.

At this point it occurred to me that perhaps there was something nefarious going on: my phone had been jailbroken prior to the upgrade, so perhaps that was the issue. Luckily for me, I had my wife’s phone to play with, and it hadn’t been jailbroken, so I decided to try and upgrade it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work, so now I had two phones that were basically useless. Digging around the web, I found some references to problems that people had with updating to beta 4, and a workaround for the pink screen problem. The workaround talked about the problem being related to a change in the USB drivers for OS X 10.5.6 that made getting a phone into DFU mode difficult, so I thought it was worth a try (see: http://gizmodo.com/5166029/how-to-install-unofficial-apps-on-your-iphone-3g-or-ipod-touch-easily-and-safely) .

After downgrading the USB drivers on my Mac, I was able to get it into DFU mode, and restore the 2.2.1 version of the firmware. Inspired by this, I tried upgrading my wife’s phone on a PC (figuring the problem was something in the USB drivers). Sure enough, her phone loaded the 3.0 software just fine.

So, once again, I tried upgrading my phone, and couldn’t get it to go. I tried it on the Mac, then on the PC, same results both times. For some reason it wouldn’t work. I could downgrade to 2.2.1, but not upgrade to 3.0.

More digging on the internet, and I found a posting on the iPhone developer forums that talked about installing beta 4 then upgrading to beta 5 if you have an old silver back phone (both of mine are the metal backed pre-3g phones). I figured it was worth a shot, so I downloaded a copy of the beta 4, and ran the upgrade. Eureka!  The beta 4 firmware upgrade worked !

At this point it had been a few days since I had my phone working, so I took a breath and decided to run with beta 4 for a while. I kept scouring the web and watching the discussion on the beta 5 upgrade problems to see what people were doing to get it to work.

In the mean time, I ran into an interesting (and scary) side effect of the USB driver downgrade. I forgot to upgrade the drivers after my successful downgrade of the firmware, not thinking that those drivers were actually for a different version of the OS. Whenever I plugged a USB stick into my machine, it would go into panic mode and shut down. I thought my hard drive was dying until I realized it only happened when I plugged in a USB stick, and remembered the driver downgrade. Upgrading to the current drivers fixed that issue.

Finally, I saw a post that talked about clicking the “Check for Upgrade” button while holding the option key instead of the “Restore” button. I decided to try this, and was amazed when it worked. So apparently, all along the secret was to use the upgrade button instead of the restore button. There’s some evidence that the reason this fails is because of part of the upgrade to the firmware, so it makes sense that there may be a difference in the way that iTunes processes an upgrade as compared to a restore.

At any rate, my current thinking of the process is as follows:

1. Download the firmware and iTunes beta
2. Install the iTunes beta
3. Dock the phone
4. Do a backup of the phone
5. Option click the “Check for Update” button
6. Choose the beta firmware IPSW file you downloaded
7. Be happy if it works.
8. If it doesn’t work, follow the link above to downgrade the USB drivers.
9. Go through a normal restore (should put you back to 2.2.x)
10. Repeat steps 5-7

Hopefully Apple will have this all figured out with the next release (and especially before the production update). As near as I can tell, this only affects the older phones, and doesn’t happen with the 3g iPhone.

I’ve been pretty happy with this iPhone OS, it seems to be quicker and more stable than the 2.2.1 was – still looking forward to the actual release.

Oracle and Sun – Better Microsoft competition ?

I was thinking about this as I drove to work this morning: what is the real business value to Oracle of buying Sun ?

It occurred to me that part of the many benefits to Oracle are the products that help them compete better with the Microsoft offerings. Could this be another in a long line of acquisitions by Larry Ellison in his quest to make Oracle a more successful company than Microsoft ?

Microsoft has owned this market for some time now, and has had some tools that Oracle has tried to compete with over the years. Microsoft had Access, which is at a surface level a database, but has over the years served much better as a front-end tool for database access. Oracle has tried to  address this over the years, first with Oracle Forms, then with JSF and ADF, and now APEX (formerly known as HtmlDb).

These tools, while extremely capable, have never had the low entry to use that has been available in the Microsoft product line, and now with the rapid introduction of Silverlight, Microsoft is threatening to dominate the RIA market.

There is tremendous buzz (hype?) in the market about the RIA competition, with both Adobe and Microsoft claiming a market penetration of over 70%. Sun has similar figures with Java, and has recently entered this market full force with JavaFX.

JFX combined with MySQL looked to have the potential for introduction of new products that would displace both the rich media and rich data driven applications that have been dominated by Flash (Flex).

With the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it is entirely possible that a solid Flex and Silverlight competitor could emerge due to the capabilities of the Java platform for producing UI, combined with the simplification in coding provided by JavaFX. This could also give rise to an easy to use tool that could replace Access as the easiest way to build an application, by integrating the JavaFX UI capabilities with the Oracle developer tools.

The only missing piece in this puzzle for me is that focus on the end user as being capable. Oracle has great tools for developers, and they help build applications extremely easily, but they haven’t done a great job with figuring out how to bridge the gap between the technical types and the consumers. I don’t think it’s a vast chasm to cross, but they would need to focus on improving the ease of use to compete head to head with Microsoft and Adobe.

Not only does the Sun acquisition continue to strengthen the web tools that Oracle has recently improved with their WebLogic tools, expand their hold in the database market, and solidify their place in the SOA market, but it also allows them to compete better in the hottest area of competition at the moment: Rich Internet Applications.

What will Oracle do with these capabilities ? Only time will tell.

How to delete your Google account

If you’re like me, you eventually end up with too many identities. I haven’t figured out how to associate different email addresses with a single account, so I have to maintain several different Google identities.

For example a client invites me to join his Google group using his company email, so I have to set up a new account to access and manage that group. At some point I try to consolidate these to use my GMail identity, but that isn’t always possible (the client may for instance have decided to restrict their group to only allow access by people using their corporate domain addresses for instance).

Eventually though, I do end up with accounts that I’m no longer using (and sometimes I just would like a fresh start). Google actually has a link in their help about deleting an account, but it took me a bit to find it, so I thought I’d post a step by step guide.First you must be logged in, so go to one of the Google pages like http://groups.google.com and look for the link at the top right corner of the page that shows you who you are logged in as:

If you see the “Sign in” link instead, just click that and log in as the user you want to delete:

Once you are sure you are logged in with the right account, click the “Account” link and you will be taken to the management page for your account:

Click on the link next to “My Products” that says “Edit” and you’ll go to the accounts page, where you can choose to remove your web history OR account:

Click the link that says “Close account and delete all services associated with it”, and you’ll get the delete account screen, which has a number of options and validate with your password. Unless you want to keep a membership in a group, check all of the boxes here, then hit the button that says “Delete Google account“:

Once you have done this, you’ll get a screen that tells you that the account has been deleted:

That’s all there is to it – you can recreate the account by following the steps from my prior post Getting a Google Login for Your Existing Email Account