Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging
Amazon is pushing their...
Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging
...for the holiday buying season. I hope a lot more products start to ship with this kind of packaging and wish other vendors can adopt a similar strategy.
Podbean’s New Podcast Statistics Feature is Broken
I've been using Podbean's podcast storage and feed service since late last year (2008). It is, quite honestly, the most inexpensive service I could find with the features and storage levels I wanted. In other words: They provide the best deal I have been able to find so far.
The recently changed their statistics reporting feature. I've been trying to convince them it is a broken user experience for me to no avail. One major change is that their statistics no longer reports near-realtime activity. It also no longer lets me display recent activity of all podcasts. Well, here's something I'm going to point them at: It is plain broken. I posted a new podcast (with Celio Redfly's marketing manager) on Friday night. As of Sunday morning, Podbean's chart for that podcast shows no activity.
However, if you look at the recent activity list just below the chart itself, you can see that this podcast is, in fact, actively downloaded through its iTunes feed or from the embedded web player in blog entry for it. I'm going to point Podbean's tech support to this blog item with screenshots in the hopes this will get them to at least fix this one aspect of this broken user experience.
FYI: My podcasts focus on mobile technology. The vast majority of these podcasts features guests from various mobile tech firms. You can find recent podcasts described at:
Time Warner Cable Data Metering: Tax for iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Video Podcast Users
DSLReports.com digs into Time Warner COO Landel Hobbs comments on the coming 100GB cable data cap for Time Warner customers...
Time Warner COO: Metered Billing Is What Consumers Want
I agree with the article's author (Karl Bode) about the purpose of this data cap plan. IMHO it is just a tax on people who use and who will use high bandwidth services such as iTunes (buying or renting HD TV shows and movies), Hulu, Netflix and even casual video podcast fans who may not notice how many gigabytes they download per month viewing the favorite (and free) video podcasts.
And, if you, like me, are an MSDN subscriber who chose the download route, this may be an incentive for us to switch back to having DVDs of software releases shipped to us instead of downloading them. This may even kill the software downloading business altogether.
Unfortunately, wireless broadband doesn't provide any threat or incentive since they have 5GB caps on their services.
HP Inkjet Ink Use & Cost Mystery Part 2 (HP 02 Cartridges)
Way back in in September 2008, I posted an item titled...
You might want to go back to that item just to read a very interesting and detailed comment to it posted by Eric Hochstein. Eric took a hard long look at the HP 02 ink cartridges and points out a couple of things I didn't know such as the fact that the different HP 02 color cartridges contains different volumes of ink!
I printed out about 200 sheets of paper (double sided) for our annual holiday newsletter last month. This behemoth annual project had over 20 photos of various sizes scattered throughout the 4 printed pages. I bought two sets of ink cartridge packs. The one purchased earlier in the year (2008) included a black. The one bought in December did NOT. The Yellow and Magenta ink were used the fastest followed by Dark Cyan. On the other hand, I still have 2 each of Light Cyan and Light Magenta (pink) cartridges. Based on this, my current belief if that given the kind of things I print (heavy mix of photos and text), it is cheaper to buy individual cartridges.
Thanks again to Eric for posting the detailed comments of his investigation of the HP 02 ink cartridges!
Wondering About State of California’s Payroll Software
Having lived in California for a couple of years and having been a state government employee for a number of years (though not in the CA state govt.), I'm trying to figure out a statement from this article in the LA Times...
Schwarzenegger orders mass layoffs, unpaid furloughs
Schwarzenegger attempted a few months ago to unilaterally reduce the pay of state employees, but his order never took effect. State Controller John Chiang said the state's payroll system was incapable of carrying it out.
Is a statute (legal) issue that does not allow a unilateral pay reduction (which would make sense)? Or is it that the payroll system software is incapable of making such a change? Is it one of those software systems that is 30 years old that no one fully understands anymore?
HP Ink Use & Cost Mystery
The use and cost of inkjet ink never ceases to amaze me. I'm glad the the HP Photosmart C6250 (which has given me a lot of problems to solve) uses individual color cartridges. I really don't understand how each color is used by my specific usage pattern. But, I am surprised that it looks like it is cheaper to buy indivdual HP 02 cartridges rather than the entire color pack (black ink is no longer included in that pack). I think someone estimated that inkjet cartridges costs something like $8,000 per gallon. So, I wish I could get a better handle on how it is actually used in my printer (given the kinds of things I print).
The Legacy Storage Media Problem: 45 Iomega Zip Disks
I've been trying to clean up and organize my home office. In the process I found a bunch of old Iomega 100MB Zip Disks. I also found my old parallel port model Iomega Zip drive. The problem was finding something with a parallel port to plug it in to. It turned out that the PC I had upgraded to Windows Vista has a parallel port. Unfortunately. Iomega does not support Vista and the parallel port drives (not a huge shock). Fortunately, I have an old 2001 era HP notebook running Windows XP Pro with a parallel port that Iomega supports. So, I plugged it in and move all the files off the Zip disks. It turns out I had 45 disks in my collection. That's roughly 4.5GB of total storage or roughly the capacity of the 4GB USB flash drive sitting in front of the disk collection pictured above. About one-fourth of the disks were empty. And, of course, none of the Zip disks were at capacity. It turned out I had 12,061 files taking up 1.03GB on the Zip disks that were used.
I was lucky to have an old PC (notebook in my case) with a Parallel port still running an OS supported by Iomega (Windows XP). I'm already out of luck if I want to deal with 5.25 inch floppy disks. And even the 3.5 inch disks are getting more problematic. It was also fortunate that only 1 of the 45 disks (which are 10+ years old) was unreadable. And, even more fortunate was the fact that it looks like 95+% of the files I found had been migrated to other media over the years. Still, I found a couple of old photos and even two short video clips of my daughter that I don't recall seeing in my collection.
Paper photographs may be difficult to preserve. But, they are accessible by any sighted person without any special tools. What happens to digital family photos decades from now when the person who organized them is gone and the retrieval technology is difficult or impossible to obtain and use?
Winer’s Plan B Post & Twitter Dependency
Dave Winer's blog post titled Plan B got me thinking about my own plan B. Winer created a new business venture (NewsJunk) that relied on Twitter. I had just started using Twitter by feeding my own 140 characters or less tech news comments and links on my personal blog sites to provide more tech info. But, when Twitter crashes, which happens daily these days, my web pages don't render making them difficult or impossible to view. I think I have a Plan B. It is not as easy or simple to use as Twitter. But, it seems very stable and provides a clean RSS feed. Will play with the idea later today.
Have Hardware Vendors Test with Vista BEFORE Windows 7!
This Information Week article...
Windows 7 Testing Must Start ASAP, Microsoft Warns Hardware Makers
...notes that Microsoft is imploring hardware vendors to test with Windows 7. That's good, of course. But, it would also be nice (nicer, in fact) if they would test hardware with Windows Vista now too! Vista still encounters daily internal blue screens with auto-recovery (i.e., I see the message but not the blue screen). Nvidia has been doing a pretty good job of providing updated drivers for my, hmm, four year old PC? But, it hasn't helped much so far.
Based on the comments on this blog, it looks like I'm not alone in having various hardware driver issues with a PC running Windows Vista.
Don’t Trust Automated Software Development Tools Too Much!
Technology Review's article...
...is alarming as-is. However, there is another issue I want to point out here. Note the last paragraph of the article's first web-page:
So how did the programmers make the mistake in the first place? Ironically, they were using an automated tool designed to catch the kinds of programming bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities. The tool, called Valgrind, discovered that the OpenSSL library was using a block of memory without initializing the memory to a known state--for example, setting the block's contents to be all zeros. Normally, it's a mistake to use memory without setting it to a known value. But in this case, that unknown state was being intentionally used by the OpenSSL library to help generate randomness.
I've never used it, but I'm sure Valgrind is a fine Open Source source code profiler. However, it is just that: A tool. It is meant to augment human work, not replace it completely. The end-result of trusting Valgrind to the extreme resulted in what appears to be a very very serious problem for many of us who use anything that uses the OpenSSL library (like SSH/SCP). Even worse, this problem has existed for two years now. And, there's more. The patch distributed doesn't correct the problem on systems that have deployed keys in the past two years based on the broken code. Ouch.