Dear Google, I cannot figure out how to tell you that the sports scores feeds into Google SMS aren’t working. People are posting in the help groups about this issue. Basically the only scores you get are from April 22nd, 2007. It is reproduceable using the Google SMS web page, so it isn’t a carrier problem. I hope someone sees this post and fixes it! Having to look up the scores somewhere else is so 1998. 🙂 …Bob
Say what you will of me, I love Microsoft Excel. I don’t think my life as a system administrator would be as easy without it. Basically, I love it for Autofill in combination with it’s text functions, and also for charting. There are three things I’d love to see Excel do better, in these regards: I wish Autofill recognized IP addresses. It will increment them now as numbers, but when I get to x.y.z.256 I have to start over. Not a huge deal, just would be nice to see it say “Hey, this is an IP” and do x.y.z+1.0 or something. I wish Excel in general, and Autofill in particular, could handle hexadecimal numbers. And along with #1, IPv6 addresses …
Dear anybody who develops an application to play music, One word: FLAC. It’s free, it’s open, it’s what I’m reripping all my CDs into. Apple, it would be absolutely killer if you supported FLAC in iTunes, and automatically transcoded into MP3 for my iPod. But I’m not going to hold my breath, since you only add features that generate revenue. This also means you, last.fm. Why don’t you work with FLAC files playing through WinAMP? …Bob
I hate things that make my life difficult. Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 does just that. Its installer will not install the product on Windows Server 2003, which is what my desktop happens to be. I argue that Windows Server 2003 is higher than Windows XP SP2 (for many uses of the word “high”). This crap drives me nuts. I can see a company saying that they don’t want to support their product on certain OSes, but just tell people “This is an unsupported OS and we will not help you when you have problems.” Then give them the option to install anyhow. Sometimes I can cheat and have Windows run apps in “compatibility mode” where it pretends to be XP. …
Dear Apple, Your Boot Camp product looks cool. I applaud you for providing supportable solutions to your customers, even if you are encouraging them to use Mac OS X. However, I still won’t buy a MacBook Pro. How can I run Windows without a second mouse button? I am not going to shift-click, or ctrl-click, for everything I need, and I use my right mouse button a lot. This is also a complaint I have in Mac OS X, too, and with your desktop models you offer a two-button mouse. I have one on my G5. Using a USB mouse on a laptop isn’t practical in many cases, though. Could you offer a built-in two-button mouse option on your MacBooks? …
Dear IBM, At SHARE a couple years ago you were presenting the new stuff going into Tivoli Storage Manager 5.3. A number of us ganged up on your staff afterwards and told you we need transport encryption. Not total encryption of our data, but just something like SSL so that we could move data on untrusted networks. You asked why we couldn’t just encrypt all of the data, which is a feature you offer. We didn’t like that because there are a lot of other gotchas there. The biggest gotcha is when our customers forget their encryption key. Yeah, we know, they’re dumb, but it’s a real-world problem. When they forget their TSM node passwords we can just reset them. …
So I’ve spent more time playing with Omea. I love some of the details, like the setting to mark an item read once it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. I don’t know how many times I’ll errantly click something, or scroll through, and not having things marked as “read” is nice. The use of favicon.ico is nice, too — it helps me visually sort the blogs. Plus the app looks nice. Vyacheslav Lukianov from JetBrains posted a comment here yesterday, which I think is really cool. It’s now obvious to me that they’re watching to see what people think of Omea, so I thought it fair to follow up with my impressions after the first 24 hours. I was going …
Dear all OS vendors: Provide DVD images. Seriously. Everybody you care about has a DVD burner. Everything has a DVD drive. Well, almost everything. Some older equipment might not, so yeah, you’ll have to keep the CD ISOs around. But I hate burning five discs when I could just burn one DVD. I hate keeping track of five discs when I could just keep track of one DVD. If customers don’t have a DVD drive, suggest that they spend $25 and get one. Now, if you’re one of the vendors that doesn’t even provide ISOs to your customers, CD or DVD, here’s my message: die, die, die. Take IBM, for example. IBM, technology giant, hasn’t figured out that letting customers …
Dear VMware, I’ve noticed that your flagship product, ESX Server, doesn’t support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora, Solaris x86, or FreeBSD 5.x. RHEL 4 was released on February 14th, 2005. FreeBSD 5.0 was released in January 2003, with releases of 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 6.0 spread evenly until today. Fedora has been out forever, it seems. Solaris x86 10 is pretty recent, but with all of the talk last summer of Sun and VMware teaming up I was expecting something to happen. I am mostly concerned with support for Red Hat’s products. Back in the summer of 2005 you told me that support for RHEL 4 would come in ESX Server 3.0, which, at the time, was estimated …
Dear IBM, EMC, and Hitachi, Your storage virtualization devices are pretty neat. They let me buy lesser disk arrays and treat them as a pile of disks. They let me have different classes of storage and shuffle things around without the hosts ever knowing. They let me add cache to my storage architecture to make things even faster, and do intelligent caching in front of the arrays. And they let me do remote mirroring for storage arrays that wouldn’t do it otherwise. Sure, some of you use weird, proprietary, hard to maintain approaches like embedding the virtualization in the SAN, but that’s okay. From time to time I need to do maintenance on my storage arrays. Because I use EMC …