After months of trying to ignore the growing problems I was forced to switch to BusyCal when iCal just stopped working with Google Calendars. We’d hired a few more folks and my delegated calendar list was getting longer. My own calendar stopped syncing, and then these modal dialogs started popping up every 15 minutes. I’d come back to my laptop overnight and find myself forced to close each one individually. No amount of Googling could find a permanent solution, and it’s clear plenty of other folks are affected.

BusyCal is a little rough at the edges. I certainly find myself a little less clear about my schedule than I did with iCal. But it has one huge advantage: it actually works! No longer do I miss meetings because the calendar stopped syncing.

If you can bear a slightly less slick look, there are other apps out there which work better than the Apple ones.

CoBook has quickly displaced Address Book as my default contact manager. Combined with FullContact for Individuals I’m way ahead of where I was: my address is book is up to date and duplicate free for the first time in years.

But I spend most of my OSX time using a browser or an email client.

Browser choices on OSX are easy. I’ve been switching between Chrome, Safari and Firefox for a while. Firefox had got really bloated and I only used it as a ‘clean’ browser (where I could trash all cookies for testing & stuff) but Firefox 18 is a big improvement, and I’m giving it a try for a while. I’m sure I’ll switch back to Safari or Chrome several times in 2013 as I hit problems or new features are released.

The big challenge when cutting the Apple cord is the Mail client. I need a desktop client for two reasons: I really don’t get on with Gmail’s web interface, and I fly a lot, using the time to power through email while offline. Google swallowed up the awesome Sparrow leaving just Postbox as a realistic alternative to Mail.app.

By the end of last year I had a ton of email and my Mail.app client was running like glue and occasionally crashing even after vacuuming. When I did my annual inbox clear out on New Year’s Day it just wasn’t able to keep up, but Thunderbird was. The only problem: it’s really clunky and it’s no longer being developed. So I turned to Postbox, and you know what? A month later I’m still using it.

Postbox is based on Thunderbird but don’t hold that against it. It was a bit of an adjustment but I’m able to do pretty much everything I did on Mail.app. Intelligent folders? Yeah, they’re not so intelligent in Postbox but good enough for me. Spotlight? Again, I struggle to find emails from time to time, but when that happens I just cut over to Gmail.

The biggest on-going sore spots I have with Postbox are:

1. It insists on placing signatures below quoted emails.
2. It doesn’t have the feature that highlights addresses in red when composing if they aren’t from a specific list of domains.
3. The PGP plugin has a bug that means it can’t detect emails signed using OpenPGP in Mail.app
4. There’s no real support to speak of.

You can fix item 1 in the Advanced Settings dialog. Just set mail.identity.default.sig_bottom to false.

I’m still looking for a way to avoid sending colleagues email to their personal or last employer addresses, and to detect properly signed emails. If you know of a way to fix these problems please let me know and I’ll update this post.

My biggest problem is the lack of proper support. There’s simply no way of filing a bug or asking a question to a real person. There’s just a black hole called “request a feature”: file a request and never hear from them again. This is my biggest problem with Postbox, and I hope it changes soon.

Overall my experience cutting the Apple app cord has been exhilarating. Maybe I’ll experiment with some other OS next, now I’m not really dependent on OSX based apps. But for now I’ll be focusing on seeing if I can do the same on my iPhone. I’ve already switched to Sparrow/Fantastical/Chrome and I’ll write up my experience in another few weeks.

Google threw up an answer: reflash the unit. But following the instructions didn’t work, it just sat there still winking.

After consulting a friend, I tried the TFTP instructions DD-WRT provide for OSX, which includes the crucial setting the transfer type to binary. OSX TFTP defaults to ASCII, who would have thunk that?

Setting to binary sorted the issue very quickly. This is a just a quick post to save any other poor soul a few hours as I guess the next step would have been to obtain an RMA.

tl;dr The Netgear docs are missing a critical step for OSX and Linux users: set your mode to BINARY before attempting to PUT the new firmware.

I live in Vancouver, WA, which is about 20 miles from my office in the Pearl District of Portland, OR. When things go well my commute takes about 25 minutes each way. When the traffic gods are angry this jumps to 45-75 minutes each way. So you can imagine my utter lack of surprise when I learnt that Portland has the 8th worst traffic in the nation.

The result is a lot of time spent sitting in traffic thinking about how to reduce or eliminate these kinds of delays, except for the time thinking about what I’d do to whichever idiot caused the problem in the first place of course.

The Interstate (I-5) and Glenn Jackson (I-205) bridges together handle an average of 264,000 movements a day. Some back-of-envelope math (US average non-farm hourly wage of $24, 66% of traffic movements occur during rush hour and a guess that there’s an average of 1 worker per vehicle) throws out an estimated $2MM in lost productivity each and every time there’s a 30 minute delay during rush hour.

Whatever the real cost, traffic has a real impact on the area. Which makes me pretty tense when I notice there are some really obvious easy wins that nobody in government appears to be even considering.

To start with, despite hard times, there is some time and money being spent on transport in the Portland area. The mayor likes to talk about safety and traffic improvements, and there is some big money being spent on transportation projects. Here’s a sample:

1. A new bridge is being built to extend the Max to Milwaukee.
2. Various improvements to US-26 (like widening stretches to 6 lanes).
3. Safety initiatives on inner-city streets like 82nd Ave.

Local government and startups have one thing in common: very meagre resources. But the similarity ends there. If our startup worked on things like this while ignoring the easy wins we’d go bankrupt pretty quickly. And taking a closer look at current transport initiatives, I really don’t understand why they got priority over other things that would have a broader impact.

Here’s a quick sample of some cheap and quick changes that would really make a positive impact for commuters all across the area:

1. Use the existing digital traffic signs to provide “time to : 15 minutes” messages so motorists can decide if they want to route round traffic jams or bridge openings.
2. Use the same signs to show the next the Interstate bridge is next due to open.
3. Properly policed HOV lanes on I-205, I-84, I-5.
4. A public/private partnership to develop a simple Portland traffic app to notify you of which routes you use are getting congested and why, in near real-time, not the 30 minutes delayed stuff we get on map sites.

While we’re talking about it there are a few other more expensive items on my shopping list that cost a considerable amount but are still affordable and would have an even bigger impact:

1. Variable speed limits on all the Interstates and US-26, to reduce the impact of traffic waves. (These are a big problem in Portland, especially in wet weather.)
2. Upgrade the I-205/Airport Way junction to have a separate on/off lane from I-205. Backlogs of traffic caused by vehicles joining and leaving I-205 at this junction cause massive tailbacks onto I-84 during rush hour.
3. Expand the I-205N/I-84 exits so that (a) there are two lanes of traffic joining I-205N and (b) those lanes are not entering the slow lane of I-205N.

And then there are a few projects that are more focused on commuters from outside of Portland. These should still be on the list since they benefit Portlanders by reducing congestion and increasing the dollars spent in town (less traffic = more visits):

1. An upgraded Park’n'Ride program operating frequently, through late evening. See C-Trans for the existing routes. Count the number of times it says ‘limited’ and ‘peak hours only’.
2. AmTrak trains running every 30 minutes between Vancouver and Oregon City via Portland during peak hours.
3. Tweak the Airport Way/I-205N on-ramp so that it can take two lanes of traffic instead of one. Anyone attempting to leave the airport during rush hour will attest to the long backups on Airport Way thanks to the way the on-ramp works.

These items are pretty modest compared to some really big projects like the Columbia River Crossing ($4B), upgrading the I-405/US-26 interchange and expanding light rail.

There seems to a real lack of leadership in transport for the metro area. Maybe it’s the co-ordination it needs between city, county, state and federal levels. I would love to hear from people in the know about either why some of these initiatives can’t or won’t ever happen. As an outsider I don’t even pretend to understand the local politics.

In the meantime, I’ll go back to dreaming about a more consistent commute while sitting in my daily jam on one of the interstates.

Earlier this year I hit a problem compiling native extensions, bundler couldn’t find gcc even though which gcc found it no problem. I got round it with CC='/usr/bin/gcc' prefix to my bundle and gem installs.

Today I hit a new (for me) issue related to g++ this time. I decided it was time to take a deeper look and find out why I kept hitting these issues.

Turns out there were two problems with my setup that might be affecting others.

First, I Had a bunch of environment variables defined in my .bashrc file from a few years back. Variables like CC were set, so I cleared these all out which fixed the Nokogiri issue (described above) but didn’t get me any further with the g++/EventMachine issue.

Secondly, I found some incorrect and missing symlinks for gcc, g++, etc. in /usr/bin. It turns out that my compiler used to live in /Developer but at some point they moved to /usr/bin/llvm. My gcc symlink pointed to /Developer while the symlink for g++ just wasn’t there.

As I don’t know how this happened you may have different missing and incorrect llvm symlinks. On my system these commands fixed the issue:

sudo rm /usr/bin/g++ sudo ln -s ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-g++-4.2 g++ sudo rm /usr/bin/gcc sudo ln -s ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-gcc-4.2 gcc sudo rm /usr/bin/g++-4.2 sudo ln -s /usr/bin/g++ g++-4.2

This left my /usr/bin folder looking like this

> ls -alh /usr/bin | grep llvm drwxr-xr-x@ 13 root wheel 442B Aug 7 21:44 .. lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 13 17:21 g++ -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-g++-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12B Aug 13 17:23 g++-4.2 -> /usr/bin/g++ lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 13 17:22 gcc -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-gcc-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12B Aug 7 21:49 gcc-4.2 -> /usr/bin/gcc lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8B Aug 7 21:44 gcov -> gcov-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 28B Aug 7 21:44 gcov-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/gcov-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 52B Aug 7 21:44 i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-g++-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-g++-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 52B Aug 7 21:44 i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 7 21:44 llvm-cpp-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-cpp-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 7 21:44 llvm-g++ -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-g++-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 7 21:44 llvm-g++-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-g++-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 7 21:44 llvm-gcc -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-gcc-4.2 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32B Aug 7 21:44 llvm-gcc-4.2 -> ../llvm-gcc-4.2/bin/llvm-gcc-4.2

Obviously something went wrong and I can tell from Google that quite a few are suffering from this or some variation of it. A couple of coders in our team got round it by installing tools from sources like Fink and Ports. You may have different missing/wrong links, so just make sure your /usr/bin ls output looks as above and you should be ok.

For the sake of completeness:

1. you must always install XCode.
2. if you’ve recently upgraded to 10.8 you’ll need to open XCode and tick ‘command line tools’ under the ‘Downloads’ tab in Preferences or you’ll have nothing to link to.

Enjoy!

Addendum: Andrew Cronk of Tempo-DB points out you don’t need to download all 4GB of XCode. If you only want the command line build tools you can download them from here https://developer.apple.com/downloads Thanks Andy!

There was a time when I didn’t buy everything from the web. As a boy I often spent Saturday afternoon on the phone calling every breaker’s yard in the county until I found the obscure car part my dad was looking for.

Now I do the same but it’s on Google and the outcome is pretty similar. Once I’ve found what I am looking for, I want it now. The longer I spent looking for it the more likely I’m going to buy it right now. Vendors know this: if whatever I want is widely available and in stock everywhere, make it as cheap as you can, otherwise find a way to raise your price. Go too high though and I’ll keep looking. Even if you’re the only source but the price is too high you I might just decide not to buy (I’m looking at you Logitech remote controls!).

This week I received two appeals for money that illustrated a different pricing dynamic I hadn’t noticed until now. One was for the Colorado wildfires, the other from a well known politician.

In the first case I donated $50 but at checkout there was a $5 charge tacked on. I was outraged: a 10% handling fee?? A quick read of the blurb revealed it was a suggested donation but 10% as starting point was so offensive to me I almost didn’t donate at all. I went ahead anyway but set the donation to 0% despite there being cheaper donation options. By now I just wasn’t feeling that charitable.

In the second case, I read the political email and thought ‘meh’. But they wanted less than $10 and I knew it wouldn’t take a second. So I clicked the link and somehow along the way I decided to give a bit more.

The politician vs the non-profit interaction made me realize this unintentional and adverse outcome may be happening more often than people realize.

For instance I travel a lot, I’m on the road two days out of three, yet I almost never stay in a hotel. They feel massively over priced to me, but that’s probably because I only stay in them when I have to, and that’s only when all my other options are exhausted because my destination is packed out. Of course the room is going to be expensive.

This is how hotels make money nowadays: sell rooms at a low price in quiet times to cover your costs and then make hay during conference or vacation season. The problem with this algorithm is it doesn’t take into account the other 200 nights each year I would have stayed at a hotel until I was trained to think of them as overpriced. Nowadays I don’t even bother checking hotels the rest of the time when I might consider them. I’d almost certainly be a customer if I could commit to buying 30 or 50 nights in a specific chain at a fixed price but as far as I know nobody offers me this and the hotel trade is $20,000 a year poorer as a result.

It is possible to get this right. I almost always rent my cars from Enterprise: they are efficient, friendly, cheap and most importantly they never leave me in the lurch (take note other rental companies!). And they have the upsell perfected. I’m usually offered an upgrade for just a few dollars more per day, and I usually take it. Virgin America does this with their first class upgrades. I’d never buy a first class ticket but an upgrade for $40 is a steal.

Competition for very qualified buyers – I must have it and right now! – is very high (some CPCs on Google after over $50) while developments in behavioral targeting and big data permits increasingly profitable interactions with less motivated shoppers.

So the motto of this story is that companies need to focus not just on margin but also making sure they are not scaring potential customers away in more subtle ways than we are used to when they do find ways to charge more. Caveat venditor.

Even today, voice recognition is poor enough that I’ve often wondered how we it would ever enter every day use. Plus, I couldn’t see us all sitting there in an office, or on a bus, or at the coffee shop talking to our computers. It’s noisy and you look really silly, just like when you use a bluetooth headset.

For voice recognition it’s got to solve a specific problem, not just be a fun demo and/or neat concept. Mice solved the issue that GUIs had too many function combinations for a person to remember (hey WordPerfect ALT+SHIFT+F8 I’m looking at you). The touch screen solved the problem of a lack of a keyboard. Which problem is voice recognition 1.0 solve first?

Recently I had two experiences that I think shows how this evolution will happen.

I had a the fortune to get some free upgrades and the fancy cars I rented had bluetooth phone links, which is easier than using a headset. The Volvo allowed me to voice dial using Siri, whereas the Volkswagen made me use the car’s built-in voice system. Oscar Mike Foxtrot: going from Siri to Volkswagen was excruciating. In my opinion, Siri is now easier to use than dialing with hands. Despite the inevitable typos it’s still quicker to have a couple of goes at dialing than fiddling around with a dial pad or list of text messages.

A few days later I was browsing the news over breakfast when I came across an article I wanted to tweet with a comment. Doing this with one of my kids on my lap and a cup of espresso in my hand was really hard. I would have loved to have spoken the commentary out loud and felt the urge to use Siri once again. That’s a killer sign the app is working. I didn’t do so only because I was on my MacBook and not on my iPhone but I would have if I could have.

Siri still needs a lot of work, especially if you don’t speak American (I’m from the UK), but it’s clearly now usable enough for folks like Apple to spend millions on improving it, and for others to spend even more making their own versions. We’re on our way.

For instance, I saw a tweet about the new Tesla S going on show and headed off to the Tesla site to enjoy these beautiful machines. On the page where you get to actually build your own Tesla (yes! my Tesla! and I built it! pity I can’t buy it…) I saw this:

Yeah, that’s right: battery size has replaced engine size. Instead of “3.5 liter” it now says “85 kWh”. Maybe my kids will hear about petrol engine sizes and wonder what they mean like I used to hear about old (British) money and wonder what a tuppenny-bit or a half-crown was.

I for one love living in the future.

Enjoy!

These photos were taken during the filming of the new Eurofighter Typhoon jet from the back of a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft (why?).

Apparently they asked the pilot “How much closer can you get?” Quite close as it turns out….

Source: Major HH.

So far the phone is highly recommended. I just wish Motorola sorts out at least the Ugly list real soon.

Enjoy!

The Great

• Boy it’s fast! I wonder how much faster on 2.2?
• It basically works – no crashes, no hangs, no dropped calls (but see bug list)
• Decent processor means even when running stuff in the background little noticeable pauses or slow downs
• Nice large screen (not as hires as a retina but still very nice)
• Regular on screen keyboard way easier to use on larger screen
• App store doesn’t feel like i’m missing all my favorite apps any more (‘cept Netflix!!)
• installed 40 apps on the phone in no time and with very little slow down
• It’s Verizon!

The Good

• Loads of very nice smart improvements over my N-1:
  1. smart power: turn off power after 15 mins of no use but only at night (why not 15 mins of no move too?)
  2. smart vibrate: place the phone face down and it automatically goes to vibrate mode
  3. automail and quick upload of clips & pics is a big time saver
  4. speed dial: hold down a number and it dials (just like regular cell phones)
  5. dial pad autoshow for things like service numbers
• Loud speaker, good for playing music and hearing the phone from another room
• Surprisingly light, it feels less hefty than my N-1
• It’s not as big as the reviews make out
• Great noise cancellation
• Google Voice is just marvelous
• 720p HD video
• Bright flash
• LED flash is actually a very usable flashlight
• Bulge at back may look ugly but gives it a pleasant angle when using on a flat surface
• Cool hdmi output handy for family events and watching stuff like netflix (when it gets here)
• Car dock works like a real car dock
• it goes into a full driving mode and works like a Garmin
• FM Radio
• Swype keyboard as standard
• Deskstand turns phone into a nice alarm clock automatically
• The Motorola widgets are useful (things like speed dial on the desktop)
• Nice soft back
• Fast bootup vs N-1

Niggle List

• I don’t like the real buttons. I know it’s silly but N-1 screen buttons are nicer. Maybe I just got used to them?
• Would be lovely to hook up a bluetooth keyb & mouse, and pump out via the hdmi
• Standard screen protector only covers display area and not the whole front, giving a sharp edge and some glass exposed to keys, scratches, etc.
• Radio doesn’t work unless headphones are plugged in (must be the aerial)
• Google N-1 seems to have a slicker interface, for instance the scrolling app page
• Would love to see a rotate lock switch

The Bad

• Universal inbox now has all your twitter & facebook sH*t in it
• Already some scratching on the back!
• No front camera
• Dial assist puts an ugly icon up top
• It’s 2.1, not 2.2 (froyo)
• No flash player available yet
• Connectors aren’t really made for seamless docking
• You still have to have a gmail account (but you can configure it so you don’t really know)
• Rear camera has the inside a swimming pool signature cellphone pic effect
• Autoupload of pics doesn’t work very well
• No netflix or hulu plus apps yet
• Camera use is unintuitive, still can’t figure out how to take a pic on demand reliably
• We saw some weird contrast issues, for example yelp front page and the wallpaper app scroll buttons

The Ugly

• The only options for picture source in address book are Twitter or Facebook. Drives me crazy when some silly Facebook pic pops up when a buddy calls me.
• When looking for an address the filters (by account) don’t stick between uses. As the address book is now cluttered with all your Twitter & Facebook friends, this is a big deal
• Cancel/ok button wrong way round on account setup, resulting in too many times you press the button that everywhere else means OK but in this case means Cancel. Especially irritating it’s on this screen as you’ve just painstakingly tapped out a password using your keyboard.
• $20 a month for mobile hotspot
• why???
• One email notification icon per inbox! Why not one for the universal box only
• No easy way for me to sync with itunes music and iphoto pics (but we knew that right?)
• Crazy power cord for docking station which takes up 2-3 plugs if you’re using a power strip, it’s the most insane design I’ve ever seen for a power adapter

First there is the iPhone. Over the two years I’m likely to be an owner it’s going to cost me about $1750 in extra data fees + the original price. And it doesn’t work as a phone. Pretty much 75% of the time I’m on a voice call for more than 10 minutes it drops the call. I don’t live in a big city, I live in Kansas City (the biggest small town there is) yet they can’t even make it work as a phone.

Then there is the iPhone store. You can buy Mein Kampf and an app that provides you with soft core pornography but not an app showing (very flattering) bobble heads of your members of Congress or a better version of the mail program. The very idea that you can review and approve each app is so out of tune with today’s web it’s just silly.

And now I’m onto iTunes and the Apple TV. At last, after several years, there is some decent content on the iTunes store: Star Trek, Up, free Sesame Street programs, etc. And here I am baby-sitting my two kids while the wife has an afternoon’s R&R. So you know, I’d like to watch some cartoons with them. Let’s drop $20 on the HD version of UP.

Most movies download a bit and you can start to watch them immediately. This was the case with UP but when I started to watch, it said I “wasn’t authorized to watch this content”. Hrm. A few Google searches suggest I should restart my unit, so I did. Now it’s 3 hours from being ‘ready to watch’.

What god-forsaken moron decided it should work this way? Why doesn’t it just fricking work? This is an Apple unit. You charge me 2x to 3x what everyone else does but it Just Works. If it doesn’t Just Work, then it’s called Windows or Dell or something like that.

If you don’t get your sh*t together you lose your value proposition. Get your sh*t together, please Apple, before you become just like the others. And send someone round here right now to keep my boys happy as they’ve got nothing to watch right now.

Grrrr…..

* “The Steve Club”: you pay $395 every month to Apple and they send you one of everything.

UPDATE: I’ve been inundated with the latest Apple Fail example: they won’t repair computers used by smokers due to claimed OHSA violations.

After a lot of digging around I solved the issue by getting off FileVault. I travel a lot and don’t want somebody to be able to get all my data when the inevitable happens and I lose my laptop. I’m not certain whether it’s my machine (I didn’t do a clean install for Snow Leopard) or 10.6(.1) itself. Either way, even if I created a new user with FileVault I saw stuck processes, without FileVault they are very rare.

Sharing with the world in case you too are in this boat.

PS: Yes, I did run Disk Utility and fix preferences both before & after install. SMARTD is showing no problems either.