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Boot Camp is just the beginning

I believe that the name Boot Camp is a significant double entendre which references both the boot sequence of a computer (the dual boot) and also the beginning of something much more considerable — not unlike the boot camp attended by members of the armed forces. I don’t actually think or hope there’s much related between Apple and the military… Though you might look at this as training for the battle ahead.

Running Windows and Mac applications on the same machine has many benefits. I don’t think I really need to spell it all out, but just for kicks imagine you are one of the following – A recent iPod purchaser on a Windows Machine loving Apple, but not sure you’d be comfortable in Mac OS; A Gamer; a Corporate user; a casual consumer looking to upgrade your computing style.

While Dual-Booting allows for a pretty conservative approach to checking things out (separate real machines), the real path to seemless integration of multiple OSs comes through Virtualization. This is something that has been mainly used on the server side of life, but is very seriously making a move on the desktop. As Intel rolls Conroe out this fall, and Apple rolls out 10.5 virtualization will very likely reach a consumer mass market.

While Virtualization is very complicated, imagine NOT having to reboot your system to run Windows or switch to Mac OS, but rather simply clicking an app and having it run. The way virtualization has worked in the past has enabled a special window to open (if you’ve ever used VirtualPC) which then runs the new OS. Apple actually has some interesting related experience which many early users of OSX are quite familiar in Classic.

Classic just ran. You could choose to have it start on boot or on demand and when you clicked a Classic (OS9) application, it just worked. Running Windows (or Linux) this way is clearly more complicated, but I don’t think it’s impossible and actually if the goal is to make it easy for things to operate – Apple could certainly make the process transparent better than most.

There are definitely some interesting things brewing and I can’t wait to see how it all actually works out. If Apple succeeds in enabling a virtual windows system within OS X, there would be ZERO obstacles to choosing Apple – with the one exception being cost, but then you’d be getting the most superior hardware design along with the most advanced operating system — not too unlike today, but with even more capabilities.

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SurfRabbit

SurfRabbit is a pretty slick browser add-on for Safari, NetNewsWire and Shiira (all webKit) which works in a similar way to Greasemonkey does. You can create and share hacks to sites that enable them to work better for you. I’ve just installed it and find that it seems to work as expected without issue.

I really like being able to clean up pages like News.com full articles which I tend to read many times a day. There are about 20 page tweaks currently in the system, though I suspect many more will follow.

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Why, Entourage?

Dear Entourage –

Why do you think I want to keep a meeting scheduled when I cancel all the invitations? You are making me take two steps to kill something when a simple one-step would suffice.

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Adobe Lightroom beta

After sitting down with the beta of the new Lightroom application from Adobe, Derrick Story tells you what to expect when you download the workflow management tool for photographers. [MacWorld]

You can download the demo from Adobe now. I’ve only had the opportunity to install and open it quickly but I like what I see so far.

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Audio Tools

I’ve added a few new tools of note to my gadget bag and thought I’d share…

First, Ashley was kind enough to get me a new 60GB 5G iPod and it’s a wonderful change from my previous 3G 40GB model. I love the color, size and resolution of the screen. The overall size is remarkable – expecially compared to my previous full size iPod. The only negative thing I can consider is that in video mode the battery life is MUCH shorter than I might like. It’s probably around 3 hours total if you do video, so plan accordingly. I was watching Battlestar Gallactica on my flight west last week and had to end before I was really ready when the battery gave out.

On my return I decided I finally deserved some real headphones and picked up a pair of Shure E4c E4c Sound Isolating Earphones. the sound improvement is simply remarkable compared to my older Sony Fontopia headphones which I liked and in fact had used through a second pair. The Shure headphones blow the doors off previous headphones I’ve tried. I used the foam ear pieces on my flight back but have since tried all the parts and find that the smallest rubber (black) fit my ears best. I love them and will be using these on my (1 hour) commute and through all my travels.

For iTunes, I added an audio plugin called Volume Logic which I would also recommend. It’s a significant sound enhancer and makes on computer listening that much better.

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Sharepoint is horrendous

I regularly have to use Sharepoint based on a pretty significant global deal that was made far down in the enterprise that is my employer…

It sucks.

We use our sharepoint install for global communications, file sharing and client work sites. Today I discovered that I am unable to upload a file period from the Mac. The menu is simply not there and I tested this in Firefox, Safari and IE. I also discovered recently while still on Windows that Firefox gets a different URL structure than IE which causes some nice breaks when you try to share the location of files with your co-workers. Sharepoint is a 100% Windows extremist application that even with Windows XP and IE works only some of the time. I’m sure part of the pain is the implementation we have, but man is it poor.

At a prior job, we used Notes, which was painful as well, but it actually worked.

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Moving Mail from Outlook to Entourage – (or any Mac email program)

I am currently in the process of moving to a Mac at work (yes!) and my main concern in the switch was moving all my email from Outlook.  If you don’t know already (though you might expect) Outlook uses a proprietary format called .PST.  There is no obvious way to just migrate the messages and your folders to another system… at least on the surface.  Turns out there are actually a few ways, but by far the easiest was this simple guide at Riches Communications.

The basics are as follows…

  • Install Mozilla (Full version with email) or Thunderbird on your PC.
  • Import Mail from Outlook (Tools / Import)
  • On my machine this took about 30 minutes.  I have a few GB of email with plenty of attachments included courtesy of a boatload of work projects.
  • From here, I would really recommend you read the article as the visuals are probably simpler to understand than my description, but basically you just rename each folder with an extension of .mbox.
    • Mozilla uses the standard .mbox format which can then easily be imported into the email program of your choice.  I actually have to use Entourage, though this absolutely works in Mail.app and certainly Thunderbird (which probably does not require the renaming).  Entourage incidentally uses a proprietary message store as well, but can at least handle the standards on import.
  • All you need to do with your renamed folders is drag them to Entourage which asks if you want to import (yes) and brings the mail to the local folders. 

    • As I mentioned I had a lot of mail so this took a while as you have to repeat the import loop for each folder and you can only import one at a time.  Other than time and the manual nature of this process it’s actually quite painless and totally works.  I imported all my mail to my personal PowerBook at home and burned the mail database to a DVD so I can easily import it today on my new machine at the office.

    I think it’s interesting to note that you can’t actually import your mail (with all your folders) into Outlook Express!  It will import some of your mail – actually just the inbox which leaves you hanging since most people do not maintain all their mail in a single folder.

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    Dvorak on the future of PC Marketshare

    I was just listening to the latest this WEEK in TECH podcast and found myself really thinking about John Dvorak’s final thought on the logical future of the PC.  He feels and I agree, it’s bound to be Linux on the server, OSX86 (Apple) running on the desktop with Microsoft controlling the office applications.

    This of course all depends on a related POV which would have Apple both building systems and licensing the operating system.  The view is that Apple would be able to at minimum maintain their market share for hardware, if not grow it… not too mention all the new sales from the more mass makers.

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    Google Analytics… Lacking

    When I first heard about Google Analytics, I was very psyched to check it out, but as of yet I have absolutely nothing to report but disappointment.

    Since installing days ago, I’ve been checking back to see when my 12-hour delay would expire and data would start rolling in… It’s been over 3 days and I’ve seen nothing.  Today when I logged in I was redirected to the Google homepage after submitting my password.  Um, what the hell is that?

    I know the Web 2.0 loves to launch beta software, but Urchin existed before Google… why does this simply not work now? Fix it or kill it.

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    Google Analytics

    Google Analytics will let Web site owners see exactly where visitors to their site are coming from, what links on the site are getting the most traffic, what pages visitors are viewing, how long people stay on the site, which products on merchant sites are being sold and where people give up in multistep checkout processes, said Paul Muret, an engineering director at Google and one of the founders of Urchin.

    CNET News.com

    SiteMeter and StatCounter can’t possibly be happy about this – nor can the perenial favorite Web Trends (which has always sucked in my book).  What was once a $199/mo service ($495 before Google’s acquisition of Urchin) is now free!  This will certainly shake the stats world a bit… I am looking forward to adding it to my own site to see how it works.


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    The Pandora Project

    I don’t know how I missed this until now, but the Pandora Project is a very cool music recommendation service.  I’ve been listening much more to Podcasts lately on my Nano and missing some new juice in the music department… Pandora is just what I need to track some new stuff – as well as stuff I know I already like.

    With a simple selection of either an artist or song, you begin a personalized stream of music based on the qualities of that track.  What comes next is interesting… Definitely not what you might expect – which is the idea!  You can say whether you like or dislike things which of course further enables the recommendation engine.

    The system runs in Flash via the browser, so as long as you have a decent connection you can get some good tunes flowing.  Pandora could easily replace my iTunes Radio listening as well as the desire to login to Sirius for some tunes there.  It’s nice to be more in control of the experience — especially when on a system that is not easily connected to my home collection.

    The Pandora Project is a spawn of The Music Genome Project which as the site states:

    On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

    Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.

    Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

    I’d say it’s a very successful experiment in my new and limited exposure to the system.  I can already see the need / desire for plugins to work with iTunes that would allow me to carry this through a more localized application.  I could also see an extension of this (with DRM of course) that would allow for programming of iPods in Podcast format, but by single track which would allow ratings to be tabulated and tracked back up so you could continue to get more and more refined selections.

    I would definitely pay for the priviledge…

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    NPR Podcast Directory Relaunches

    NPR : Podcast Directory – Find what you want for your on-demand lifestyle.  Excellent work, NPR!  I just wish that you had direct iTunes links…but I guess that would not be as politically correct as you need to be and I could probably cruise the ITMS for the direct feeds as well, though this is a simple list of everything in one shot.

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    The future of media is here now

    Leaving aside the rights issues, which I know are large, if I were a television executive right now, I’d take my content, microchunk it, put a couple calls to a video ad server in the middle of it, and let it go whereever it wants to go, safe in the knowledge that whenever the show is viewed, I’ll get to run a couple 15 second spots in the middle of it (which I could change whenever I wanted to and which I could measure).

    A VC: The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed)

    The tools are in place… bring it on!! 

    RSS and Podcasting (more RSS) can deliver a highly relevant messsage to a highly targeted audience.  It’s not about mass marketing at all, which seems to be a significant obstacle for some clients who refuse to see the logic here.

    This is beyond early adopter, we have a whole new platform to deliver either existing content (via Microchunks as Fred calls it) or new content focused on the target (unique pod / vidcasts).

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    Amazon Mechanical Turk

    Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call – the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this Artificial Artificial Intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

    Amazon.com Help: Amazon Mechanical Turk

    Whoa.  MTurk is getting slammed right now so I can’t try it, but certainly sounds pretty cool.

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    Flickr Photocasts!

    1. Locate a Flickr user, tag, group, etc.
    2. Copy the Flickr RSS 2.0 URL to the clipboard (example)
    3. In the PSPMM, flip to the Feeds icon
    4. Press the Add a Feed button# Paste the Flickr RSS 2.0 URL into the field
    5. IMPORTANT: ensure _enc is at the end of the pasted URL
    6. Press the OK button
    7. Press the Transfer button when your PSP is connected# Enjoy your friend’s photocasts!

    Chris Pirillo

    Chris Pirillo notes a cool way to “hack” the RSS feed from Flickr to deliver photos to the PSP in the new PSM Media Manager.  For some reason, iTunes won’t deal with this which is killing me since I’d love to pull my photos from Flickr right to my iPod.  Granted I can do that from iPhoto, but this is an enhanced way to grab images from online and could really make for a nice aside while listening to some tunes / podcasts on the go.

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    Time reduction coming for Transcoding

    We’ve mentioned before what ATI’s Avivo technology will bring to the table, but ExtremeTech has got an early look at their yet-to-be-released Avivo Transcode application (pictured). When paired with a compatible videocard it cut the time to convert video clips to an amazing 1/5 of the original.

    HD Beat

    Tasty treat for sure!  Time is the second killer to managing portable video – only second to the complexity of ripping and choosing the right formats.  When you miss after waiting for (sometimes) hours, it really sucks.

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    Flock Update

    Flock was updated today and the new release includes support for blog categories which is most appreciated.  I had to switch my WordPress blog from MetaWeblog to MoveableType in order to have the categories properly update.

    Everything else seems to be working well…  Since I’ve started using Flock, there’s been no going back for me.  Performance is excellent and integrated blogging and shared bookmarking through del.icio.us have really hooked me.  I love that I have the same exact thing on both Mac and Windows without any effort… it just works.

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    Google Print

    Google Print is live and I just gave it a quick shot.  Note the highlight in the link through on my search for Steve Jobs.  That’s pretty slick if you ask me.  I’d like to see Print added to the list of options when you do a regular search, which I imagine is inevitable, unless a law suit stops things.

    You can’t get the text, the results are an image which should make copyright holders a bit less concerned.  You can however sit and read the book though if you like… though image text is nothing close to the clarity of real text on screen.

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    What’s Live?

    I don’t get Microsoft’s Live gadget.  It’s hard to call it more than just a gadget since it’s so rough around the edges, it makes you wonder how much they rushed it out the door.  They missed Web 2.0 and I’d imagine are feeling some serious heat from Google, but with the sheer number of people they can throw at things, you’d just expect more… oh but then I recall MSN, which is another site I just don’t use.

    I’m not much of a home page user.  I like my browser blank on start and choose to either fire up Bloglines or some specific site when I get going.  Live is not even in contention at this point.  Aside from the obvious, only works in IE, it’s just not well executed in my book.  The Google personalized home page crushes it in usability and they have not made any real changes there since I first checked it out a few months back.

    I’ll give them credit on the URL though… I wonder when they purchased it…   Whois shows it’s been in the system since 1994, but the last change was on Halloween.  There is no clear connection to MS…

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