More booting USB drives with ISO images

So in a previous post (Linux bootable USB Drives )I discussed making USB drives that booted directly from a ISO. I first wanted to mention that I find this very useful when I want to install a new distro of Linux and do not want to fight my way through burning a CD or solving the mystery as to why uNetBootIn does not work for me in Linux. In theory, all I have to do is drop a new ISO in the thumb drive and reboot! How simple is that?
Not simple enough as to immediately after posting that I tried to reinstall my computer with the latest official version of Linux Mint12. When I dropped in the new ISO and rebooted I was greeted by:

"ERROR 60:File for drive emulation must be in one contiguous disk area"

I immediately invoked my Google Genius and started searching the web. Apparently booting from an ISO requires that the ISO be a contiguous file and is sensitive to FAT's issue of fragmenting files. The web offered the options of running windows tools to defragment the file, so I tried Contig.exe(Contig.exe). Maybe it does not work on linux, maybe it does not work with Wine, maybe I am a bonehead. I could not get it to actually fix anything as I ran the tool and then rebooted over and over. The real issue was that I had backed up a few files on the thumb drive then deleted the old ISO then added the new one. The thumb drive was actually fragmented, so I moved off all the files and then moved them back and it worked! So if you try the method in the previous post and you get a ERROR 60, try cleaning the thumb drive and then copying the files back.
In my haste in getting the files back together for the drive, I managed to edit the menu.lst too many times. I messed it up hard. When I was back and booting to the thumb drive, I started getting another error:

"Unable to find a medium containing a live file system" at a "(initramfs)" prompt.

Now what? Well Google told me that there are issues with people's motherboards where the thumb drive must be plugged into a port that Linux can see without extra drivers. Linux must also need to see the hard drives so if you have SATA on an unsupported 6meg connection, youmight need to move it to a 3meg connection. There are also problems on some motherboards where the SATA is in IDE mode and must be changed to AHCI mode. My problem was none of these, my problem was my Menu.Lst. I had goofed and put a space on the line that reads:

"kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casperiso-scan/filename=/mint.iso splash quiet --"

The space was after the "iso-scan", so if you have a problem like Idid you can save yourself a few hours and check the syntax closely. I hope this helps someone someday!

Automate Cisco ssh connections with plink in Windows

So, you are a hard working nerd and have a windows computer to manage
routers with. You also have a lot to do and would rather automate
some stuff with scripts. I can help you learn to use Plink to make
simple batch files to automate work!
*(unlike most of my other posts, this one is for the Windows universe
and does not cover use of plink or scripting in Linux)

Plink basics:

Plink is part of Putty and available at
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html (don't
download it from other places, this is the official location). It is
the command line interface for Putty and can be used in scripts. Be
sure to download the installer or the zip with all the files as Putty
is a great tool if you ever SSH, SCP or connect to network hardware in
general. The "latest development snapshot" is what I used for this
post, as things might change in the future and bugs be introduced or
other issues that would alter the information in this post -- please
use the stable release if you are timid.

Plink.exe is simple to use, but I have had problems with it and Linux
machines ("server refused keyboard-interactive authentication" issue).
That is why this post is all about Cisco, I have not had problems
there. An example to connect to a Cisco device is: c:\putty\plink.exe
cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD! where the user name is "cisco" with a
super secure password of "P@55W0rD!" connecting to a Cisco device with
an ip of 192.168.0.1. This command should get you a ">" prompt on the
device.

Scripting:

Wait! How to I script this? How do I get enable access? To do much
else you need to make a command file.

A command file is just a text file with the list of commands you want
to run, in the order you need to run them. Here is an example
(command.txt):

enable
3N@b73
show clock
show mem
show cpu
exit

If I were to run: c:\putty\plink.exe cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD!
-m command.txt then I would get the memory and cpu statistics
displayed on the screen. If I were to redirect the output to a text
file with a "double waka" (>>), like this: c:\putty\plink.exe
cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD! -m command.txt >>
router_utilization.txt then I could have a text file with the date
and time, memory and cpu statistics. If this command were in a batch
file that was scheduled to run periodically then it could keep a
running log of the device.

For extra credit, how might we get this script to run and check stats
on different devices? If we make a separate file called "devices.txt"
that contained the IP addresses of the devices we need to monitor like
this:

192.168.0.1
192.168.10.22
192.168.10.24

Then we could run this command (provided that the account name,
password and enable password were the same on each device):

for /f %i in (devices.txt) do c:\putty\plink.exe cisco@%i -pw
P@55W0rD! -m command.txt >> device_utilization.txt

(if you put this in a batch file, be sure to use "%%i" and not the
"%i" as the batch will strip the single percents)

Enjoy!

Linux bootable USB Drives

I have a problem, I am not the proper combination of crazy/sexy/cool
to get the common tools for making bootable USB drives to work. I can
get uNetBootin ( http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net ) to work from
Windows, but not from Linux. As I have ditched Windows, having to use
windows to get the latest Linux distro CD image to boot from a USB
drive is... dumb.

I tried a bunch of tools and only succeeded in pulling out my
remaining hair. Then I found this article:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick and way,
way, way at the bottom of the article it has "Create Bootable USB
Manually". The manual process looks complex with extracting files
from the ISO and other business. As soon as I was happily taking
notes on how to follow this procedure I got to the part titled
"Simpler way using the ISO file"...

OMG! You can boot right from the ISO file itself?

So here is the process to create a bootable USB drive for a Linux LiveCD:

1. Download a LiveCD iso file. I chose Mint Linux 12 (it is my
favorite distro so far).
2. Download and extract Grub4Dos (
http://download.gna.org/grub4dos/grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-06-20.zip ).
3. Grab a junky USB drive with ~1 GB capacity and format it with FAT.
Pay attention to the device node of the USB drive.
4. Drop to a terminal window and run the following from the Grub4Dos folder:
#bootlace.com /dev/sdb (if your USB drive is at /dev/sdb!)
5. Copy grldr from the Grub4Dos folder to the USB drive.
6. Copy the LiveCD iso file to the USB drive. Pay attention to the
name of the ISO file.
7. Create a "menu.lst" file on the USB drive
The menu.lst file should look like this:

title Mint12 x64
find --set-root /mint.iso
map /mint.iso (0xff)
map --hook
root (0xff)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/mint.iso splash quiet --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

(it is one line starting "kernel" and the new line starts with "initrd")

8. You might need to change the Title to match your distro
(optional), replace "mint.iso" with the file name of your LiveCD iso,
and open the ISO to check for the name of the /preseed/.seed file
(ubuntu was "ubuntu.seed" and mint was "mint.seed").

Your mileage may vary, but I was able to use this to install Mint 12
on my laptop. When a new version comes out and I want to have a USB
drive that can be used to install it, all I have to do is replace the
"mint.iso" file with the new iso and I am all set.

This is the easiest way to get a bootable USB drive with a ISO... even
easier than actually using uNetBootin!

I am sorry Fire Fox, but I did try.

So I re-installed my computer over a week ago. I had been running
Ubuntu for a month and then thanks to the frustrations with Ubuntu
11.10 I went to Mint Linux (yeah, I used Linux full time for a month
and became a distribution snob in that amount of time.) The install
of Mint 12 went well and I really liked the layout and features (too
bad I really liked Ubuntu 11.04 more but I guess there is no going
back there).

Mint 12 claims support comes from, in part, the use of "Go Duck Go" (
http://duckduckgo.com/ ) as the search engine. I figured that while I
was trying Mint 12 that I would go all the way and avoid Google Chrome
and Google.com. It was very hard to break the habit. I almost fell
off the wagon several times the first day. After a few days I started
to work things out and enjoy the Google-free experience.

I don't like the idea that my web searches provide me results that are
based upon my geographic location and how often I visit specific
sites. Google tunes itself to provide results that are slanted toward
what it determines is your tastes. If you visit Fox news often and
perform a search, the results might be more along conservative lines.
If you visit Mother Jones and Huffington Post then the search results
might be more liberal. I consider myself very independent politically
and I don't like Google acting as a proxy to censor and spin the
world's news by various political groups. Sometimes I want to know
what Glenn Beck has to say and other times I want to know what John
Stewart has to say. I don't need Google deciding if I am 49% liberal
that day.

So, Go Duck Go is good, it is like google circa 2006 or so. You
search and you can guess that a similar search performed by another
person will yield similar results. So I used Go Duck Go a lot. The
problem is that I have become a Google power user.

I love to search from the browser bar. Firefox has mixed results with
that. I search images and videos and Go Duck Go has mixed results
with that. When I start up my browser and it just sits there waiting
for me to type the URL for where I want to go, I hate it. I have
become used to the Google "Most Visited Places" page. I just was
uncomfortable in FireFox, like a pair of pants or a sweater that were
just too tight in the wrong places. Today I gave it up and went back
to Chrome.

I want FireFox to be a success. I don't think Google dominance over
the web and phones is any better than a Microsoft Dominance (or Apple
dominance). I wanted to say that I switched back from Google to
FireFox just like I left Windows, but while I could leave Windows and
not look back (I love Gimp, Libre Office, Blender and have already
ditched NetFlix) -- I could not leave Google.

Thanks for nothing Adobe.

So Adobe is offering Flex to become open source (
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/1538209/adobe-to-donate-flex-sdk-to-open-source-community
) when they themselves admit that HTML5 is a better option.  So, Adobe
is basically abandoning Flash just after they added a 3d graphics game
engine and a bunch of zero-day vulnerabilities.  In looking back, the
lack of Flash was supposed to be a bad thing about the iPhone/iPad and
that Apple was wrong to think that Flash was unstable and bloated.
Then more features were added to Flash and it became unstable and
bloated on Android and Blackberry platforms.  More recently Adobe
killed Flash Lite so there would be no expectation to see Flash on
lower end devices, now Adobe is killing Flex.

I loved Flash.  I should preface that, I loved Flash the application
and not the plug-in.  I loved making cartoons and drawing with it, the
vectors in Flash were better than in Adobe Illustrator and the fact
you could animate and program with it sent me over the moon.  As I
became a web application developer, I saw the programmer oriented
nature of Flex to be very exciting.  With a MXML file I could write an
application that compiled into a SWF and could be used right away.
Flex was very exciting for programmers to make web applications that
didn't look like a programmer made it.

Then the dark days came.  Adobe bought Macromedia and didn't invest in
Apple, almost expecting Apple to roll over and die.  That was a bad
bet to make as the iPhone was about to become the most powerful
web-enabled tool ever.  Since Flash didn't run well on any Apple
device, ever, Steve Jobs hated Flash -- and now by proxy Adobe.  As
web pages worked to become more iPhone friendly the first thing to go
was Flash content, and in it's place HTML5 content supported by Webkit
in the Safari web browser.  As people invested in HTML 5 and fled the
old, old days of mandated IE 6 support, they realized HTML 5 was easy
and cool.  Suddenly it came to be understood that many of us were
using Flash to bring modern content and designs to IE 6 and now that
IE 6 was not the compatibility goal we became free to the new
possibilities of HTML 5.

Adobe dug in their heels and insisted the whole "HTML 5" thing was a
fad and that Flash was here to stay.  They pushed Android to use
Flash, they touted Blackberry Playbook's ability to run Flash...
(yuck)... in the end they are betting on a dead horse.  Flash will all
die and go away.  It will become irrelevant but not because better
solutions came along but because Adobe was dumb and tried to bring a
knife to a gun fight.  Had Adobe immediately re-tooled Flash to
compete and be compatible with HTML 5 and the associated technologies,
had Adobe taken Apple's distaste for Flash seriously, had Adobe
believed that if Steve Jobs says something is buggy, bloated, slow and
unstable -- it was... Had Adobe done anything different then we'd be
talking about how cool it is to run flash applications on Android,
iOS, Wii, XBox and everything else.

Instead we are talking about a half-hearted attempt to revive a
technology that held so much promise had it not been under Adobe's
control.  Open Sourcing Flex will not do anything.  Adobe had proven
their hate for Open Source when they killed off Air for Linux (another
promising technology for rich desktop applications developed in
Flash).  The Adobe Flash builder (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) remains
closed source and overpriced as a plug-in to Eclipse (they charge
money for an Eclipse plug-in!!).  Adobe turns to Open Source like a
guy asking a girl out on the night of the prom, it is just insulting
that Open Source would be their last choice when they have done little
to nothing for the movement in the past.  If they were serous about
Flash, they would Open Source the Flash Plug-in and then maybe get
back some stability.  Saying that Adobe is committed to Open Source by
giving away a mechanism to compile Open Code into closed (and buggy,
unstable, bloated, insecure...) plug-in bytecode is not helping
anyone.

Graphic Designers WAKE UP!

The Huffington Post has a logo contest. They are "crowdsourcing"
their logo design ( http://huff.to/p2cYht ). This is wrong! (
http://bit.ly/p8FEqy )

This is called speculative work, and it is wrong ( not just me saying
it, http://bit.ly/ocT9KO ). This adds to the mindset present in most
business students that creative people are a dime a dozen and need to
have business type people "manage" them. After all, no business
student would go out and set up a corporation in a contest but one
would figure graphic artists would line up for the chance to "win" the
opportunity to provide a logo (and "get credit for it, of course").

Imagine going to a doctor and telling them they have an opportunity to
"win" the chance for them to perform an appendectomy, for free (but
get credit for it, of course). A mechanic to compete for the chance
to fix your car for free, but get the credit (of course).

But compelling graphic design, creating a logo to represent all the
work of a popular web site, is work that they should pay nothing for.
I would argue that a graphic artist is every bit as skilled as a
mechanic yet a mechanic can charge an hourly fee without people
raising an eyebrow.

If photoshopping a logo was just as easy as that, then I am sure some
MBA can powerpoint up a OK logo in a few minutes.. then they would
have the crap they deserve and the price they are willing to pay.

Bing/Yahoo Search Effectiveness: Hype or Truth?

I use Google for everything -- almost a literal statement.

Prior to Google I used to have to write things down, remember things
but typically would forget things. Now we have Google. If you have
an inscrutable error message when you use Railo to call a Python
script calling a Mappoint COM object, you can Google it (rather than
paying for incident support from Railo and Microsoft and then have to
listen to them blame each other and then Python). If I want to
quickly know how much $47 in Canadian dollars is in US Dollars I can
search "47 CAD in USD" and know vs the old days where I would have to
call a bank or look for the exchange rate and do the math myself.
Google has made itself the center of the internet and have become rich
via ad revenue in the process.

As Google is the top dog, many others are trying to bring them down.
Google's main competition is Bing. I honestly never go to Bing (as I
never go to Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail or use Internet Explorer). I was
actually surprised to find out that Bing did offer a lot of the
features that I have come to count on in Google. If they are truly at
least equal, the remaining question is how equal are they?

Recently Experian Hitwise recently announced that Bing/Yahoo is more
efficient than Google ( http://bit.ly/mT5Qzc ). Can this be true? Is
Bing the better search engine? Is there an anti-Microsoft bias that
prevents habitual Google users from enjoying this "decision engine"?

Experian Hitwise defines a successful search as a search that results
in a user clicking a link to search results. So, if we are to accept
their methodology and definition, Bing searches result in the user
following a link to a web site more often than via Google. If Google
users do not follow a link on the results page, then what do they do?
Google visits must result in secondary searches or the user just
closing the tab more often than via Bing or Yahoo.

As a big, big Google fanboy I have to admit that I have had search
issues with Google for the past few months. While I don't know if
this report counts Google Calc queries or when I search something just
to find out the proper spelling, something subtle has changed, but I
don't get the results I am looking for like I used to. The above
example of the Railo/Python/Mappoint COM issue, I could not seem to
get the right combination of quotes and keywords to get the results I
needed. In Google's defense, Bing was of NO help either -- but the
Experian report didn't go into details about if the users then went to
Bing and were able to search and click a link. I was a user who
searched and searched again and added to the number reported. It
seems that if you are searching for something rather unusual but have
a more popular keyword in the search field, that popular keyword will
override the entire search. For example, if you were searching for a
scientist's paper who just happened to be named "Miles Kardashian" you
will never find him by name.

This is less a "Bing is superior" and more of a "Google fails to
provide results from time to time". I will still use Google as I was
able to eventually tweak my search query and get my results and that
would be a total mystery in Bing (plus I am still VERY angry about the
crappy Bing ads Microsoft put out).

End of Flock

Flock ( http://www.flock.com/ ) was a web browser ahead of its time.  It sought to be social before Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace.  In the age of blogs Flock was able to make posts from within the browser as easily as one might click "like" or "share" on a modern web page.  There was a time before "like" and I think Flock was a big reason why we have things like Twitter and Facebook.  Back then who could have imagined that the future of the web would be locked in content on just a few web pages when back then it was the wild west of blogs and user-owned sites.

These days, the process of buying a domain name, getting hosting and setting up a blog are totally alien to the average Internet user.  Can you imagine if each Facebook or Twitter user had to do that?  Services like Blogger simplified blogging and the process of posting to blogs was further simplified by Flock.  We now have an age where even blogger is too complex and inaccessible for modern users.  Even if such technologies were just as simple as Facebook or Twitter, between competition in the plugins added onto modern browsers and the use of mobile devices, a browser like Flock didn't stand a chance.

I used Flock for a long time.  I saw a lot of promise when it was first introduced to us.  I wish each developer well in the future, they have my thanks for a great tool and my admiration for such forward thinking (I'd love to pick their brain to learn what they think is the next big technology!)

DIY audio books with text to speech for free

So, recently I heard of plans for Guillermo del Toro to make a movie of HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness".  This news took me to google to find any Public Domain HP Lovecraft stories.  Specifically, HP Lovecraft stories published before 1923 are public domain.  The others might have to wait to be in the public domain in the United States thanks to the US Copyright acts of 1976 and 1998.  For example, "At the Mountains of Madness" was published in 1931, so the copyright should expire in 2026 -- only 15 more years.  Lucky readers of this in Europe can consider any of Lovecraft's work to be public domain because in Europe the copyright for a work is limited to 70 years after the creator's death.  Lovecraft died in 1937, so his work would have entered European public domain in 2007.

My desire to read his stories is limited by my time to do so.  With kids and work and everything I need to do in a day, I don't have the time to sit and read much of his work.  I am not a steady customer of any audobook service, so I decided to make my own audio book as read by a computer.  To do this I used ESpeak ( http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ ).  Just download the program by clicking the link at the top of the page and downloading "espeak" compiled for Windows about at the center of the following page (not espeakedit that is a different program).  Once downloaded, unzip the file and run "espeak-setup.exe" (simply hitting "next" at each step will be just fine for this process.)

Once installed, get the text you wish to turn into a audobook.  Project Gutenberg ( http://www.gutenberg.org ) is a great source for public domain texts, but I chose to get a Lovecraft story "The Rats in the Walls" ( http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.asp ).  You can either download the text as "txt" files or select the text from a web page and paste it into notepad and saved as a text file. 

Once you have a text file ready (be sure to look the file over for stray text if you copied it from the web), open espeak (it should be in your c:\program files\espeak\TTSAPP.exe ).  The interface is simple and does not offer much feedback when you are actually creating the audiobook file, so as you go through this process the program will seem to freeze but that is the application creating the audobook file.

The first setting to address in the TTSAPP program is to select a voice.  To get a feel for the voices, leave the text "Enter text you wish spoken here." in the main window and hit the "speak" button.  I suggest you use the "Microsoft Anna" voice, but test each one and decide which you would want to read a whole story to you.

To create the audiobook file, the first step is to use espeak to create a WAV file of the voice reading the text.  To do this, hit the "Open File" button and select the text file you wish to be read.  Once you are ready to have the voice read the text into a file, hit the "Save to .WAV" button and select a location to save the wav output file.  At this point the system will freeze.  The recording appears to occur near real time, so if this is a long story then the TTSAPP program will be  running for a long time.  Once the file is done, TTSAPP will pop up a message that it is complete.

Now you will have a decent sized WAV file, about 10MB per minute of audio.  This must be compressed before you put the file in an MP3 player.  The simplest way to do this is to import the WAV file into iTunes and then right click the file and hit "Create to MP3 version".  

If you don't have iTunes then another option is use Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) and LAME ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&i=lame-mp3 ).  Install Audacity and then download and install LAME into the LAME folder in the Audacity program files folder.  Once Audacity and LAME are installed and the WAV file is complete, open Audacity and use it to open the WAV file.  If you are feeling extra nerdy, you can split the WAV file into sections to make it easier to listen to.  To create a compressed MP3 version of the WAV file just hit File, Export and MP3 files in the location with the name of your choice.  Audacity will prompt you for the metadata for the MP3 file, this will be helpful if you plan to use this MP3 in an MP3 player.

Now you can enjoy your favorite public domain texts as read by your own personal robot!  Enjoy!

Google ChromeOS: Pundits miss the point.

Recent coverage of the Google ChromeOS CR-48 makes me think that the tech media is missing the point.

For example, PC Magazine recently posted an article "Six Things Chrome OS needs to go to work" ( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374294,00.asp ).  The writer feels that there are only 6 things that the CR-48 will need to be used in an office environment.  It needs:

- To join a windows domain: Why?  How? For network accountability?  To know who is on the corporate network?  You don't have to join a windows network unless you want to have access to Microsoft resources (Exchange, Windows Shares, etc).  The Google ChromeOS netbook has no business with such things.  Loading Microsoft Office for Outlook and Sharepoint is useless, the web interfaces are the only way to access these services.
     The author mentions security as a reason to join a Windows domain...  this is silly as the ChromeOS gets updates like the current Google Chrome web browser.  It will not connect to Microsoft Windows Update or be updated via Microsoft System Security Configuration Manager.. it is a highly customized version of Linux.  In this situation Google knows best.

- A way to browse network shares:  This is a very slight need.  With network shares you could use the netbook to browse printers and pull PDF files off a share.  But a better way is to just email documents or use Google Docs for collaboration.  If network share browsing were to be included it would be a feature not needed by users unless they were logged into a corporate network, the ChromeOS would need to add the Microsoft network protocols, printer applications as well as applications to handle all the files a person might encounter on a network share.  This increases the amount of software needed on an average installation of ChromeOS as well as increase the processor and memory needs, forget what issues it creates for security and licenses to Microsoft to allow Google to use these protocols.  It is a minor feature normal users can live without which by inclusion would impair the netbook.  Sounds like a loose-loose to me.

- Hardwire Ethernet:How many home users will use a hardwire ethernet connection?  Even most commercial businesses run wireless networks.  A wireless network is the most common network now and more so in the future.  Suppose it had a gigabit Ethernet connection (which has bandwidth several times greater than wireless), the extra hardware for this legacy connection and associated costs will be added to every laptop when most users will not ever need it.  The added bandwidth would not be useful as it would only let you connect to other local computers at a high speed as your internet connection will remain slower than your wireless network speed.

- VPN:  I agree with the VPN.  If we are stuck on wireless networks of limited security, a VPN would help secure our data to at least some systems.  The problem?  The netbook is designed to connect to Google for Google apps.  A VPN will not help as your data is still traversign the open internet and is just as likely to be intercepted while carried wirelessly as it would over the internet.

- Another Web browser: What browsers can you run on a specialized Linux install?  Internet Explorer? Nope.  Safari? Nope.  Opera? Nope.  The only candidate other than Google Chrome is Firefox.  I support the idea of installing Firefox but doing that will lower security (and I use Chrome 90% of teh time anyhow).

- Customizable Interface:I agree that an interface should be the way a user wants.  They should be able to customize the heck out of the interface.  That is the reason why I hate Windows 7 Starter edition.  Now this is Google and I am sure they will offer "skins" and other ways to customize the interface.  Even Apple lets you put up a wallpaper.

The point of ChromeOS is to offer a low cost and light (price, hardware, power) netbook.  The idea is to remove as much complexity as possible.  Many of these features are by nature complex and will make the device heavy and expensive.  The ChromeOS CR-48 is not a business computer, don't expect to do your taxes or edit a movie on it.  Expect it to help you connect to the internet and use the web.  The same complaints can be applied to any Apple device, yet 1 in 6 people will be getting an Apple device this Christmas - I'd copy them.

XBOX Live anguish

I want Microsoft to be successful.  While they are not the best corporate citizen, they are less draconian than Apple.  Should Apple's business model be repeated as a success story, it would mean the demise of most Open Source software I have come to cherish.  After all, which apps in the Apple App store are Open Source?

I had felt that Microsoft's dominance in the game console market would be their rock in these stormy times.  I was sure the XBox 360 and associated services were the software giant's shining light, applying the best practices in automation and customer service.  I could not be more wrong.

My trouble started when my son wanted to renew his Xbox Live subscription for his birthday.  We found a good deal and bought a pre-paid one year XBox Live subscription card.  When he went to enter the code we got a "can't retrieve information from xbox live. please try again later. Status code: 80169D3A" error.  We tried entering the code from the XBox, we tried entering the code from the xbox.com web site.  We tried google and even a little voodoo.

The Xbox.com website was a mess.  Broken links and indecipherable error messages such as "Oops, you have found a glitch in the system" and "information not available" were the most helpful things we could read on the web site.  After a lot of this insanity, I found a phone number indicating I can cancel my service by calling it.  Hoping for the best, I called the number.

I was told via auto-menu hell that there were a lot of phone calls ahead of me and that the web site was more helpful than calling the phone number.  Thinking it was impossible to have my time more wasted by sitting on the phone than reading broken link error messages, I remained on hold.  I was informed I would need the "gamertag", phone number, email address, home address and credit card information used to activate the account a year ago "so they could help me".  

While I tried in vain to find the information I was sure they would need a human answered my call.  While I tried to explain my situation the nice Canadian gentleman interrupted my statements with "yes", "go ahead", "uh-huh", "ok" and so fourth.  At one point his responses were so close together that I stopped talking to see if he would notice.  As my frustration peaked to the point where I tried to "sith choke" him through the phone, he directed me to the web site to give him the information he required to verify me on the phone.  I told him I didn't know any of the crap he wanted to know and tried to give him my email address and my son's email address to see if he could look us up.  After wrangling with the phonetic alphabet and his ability to interrupt you with affirmative statements, he managed to misspell "Gmail.com" a few times and finally look our account up.

Come to find out, we could not use the prepaid card to renew the subscription because our account had unpaid charges for the auto-renewal of the subscription which was charged to an expired credit card.  Praise the living God I didn't get a bill for $60 on my card unexpectedly!  

After my joy at their inability to suck money from my pocket subsided I said "Well, why can't I use the prepaid card to renew the subscription."

"Well, your account is suspended because you have an unpaid balance."

"Well, I don't want to pay that balance as I want to use the prepaid card."

"Well, I am not sure what you want me to do."

"Well, let's get rid of the auto-renewal balance and unlock my account so I can use the prepaid card."

"Ok, I can do that."

So, after several hours of attempting to use a purchased item, searching the web, calling support, sitting on hold and then dealing with a crazy person on the phone I was finally able to successfully give Microsoft money.  I had to work several hours to give THEM money.

The number one rule of business is to not make it hard for customers to give you money!  If you had a great boutique at the other end of the "Wipeout Zone", you might not get that many customers (and the ones you did get would be wet and pissed off.)  There is nothing that says "open for business" at Microsoft right now.  They don't work hard enough for my money, I end up with all the work.  I load the patches, I deal with the crashes, I have to scour the web to figure things out, I have to sit on hold while they sit back and expect prompt payment.  Why?

Look at the Nintento Wii.  Do I have to jump through these hoops to buy and download games? Nope, it just works.

Look at the Apple App store or iTunes.  When you don't have a valid credit card on file can you still add money from a gift card?  Yes!

Xbox???  --And I can't wait until the "Windows Marketplace" is where I have to go to buy applications for Windows 8.  I'd bet there is some "Windows Live" subscription I will have to have just to change my wallpaper.

I want Microsoft to be successful, but maybe they don't.  I wonder how many Microsoft-ies have their money in Apple, Google and Nintendo stocks?

What Microsoft Should do..

In light of recent news about the declining market share of Internet Explorer, corporate dependence on Internet Explorer 6 and reviews of Internet Explorer 9: I think Microsoft should licence Firefox.

Children, I will tell you of days when computer technology companies envied IBM, Digital Equipment Corp and Sun Microsystems.  Each had their own version of Unix and massive hardware to run it.  IBM got an idea, if they made a small computer which could run simple software then more people could own computers.  IBM worked with Microsoft and others to create the first PC.

We'd still be talking about using our "IBMs" if it weren't for Microsoft better capitalizing upon the market.  They stood the most to benefit from IBM's idea and IBM didn't even realize it until it was too late.  The lesson was the smaller company with the software on the most systems won.

We all knew computers get smaller and faster.  We all knew the computer that took up the whole desk would one day fit in a briefcase and then one day in the palm of a hand.  We knew it would happen but we didn't know WHY!

Who would buy these tiny computers?  Why would people buy these tiny computers to fit in their hands?

A collective slap on our foreheads as we stared in awe at the first iPhone.  Duh! That is the tiny computer in everyone's hands.  Apple was ready with a brilliant idea.  The iPhone was a game-changer.  But the only company ready to compete with Apple was a search engine company?  Where was Microsoft?

Microsoft had been making phone software for years before Apple came out with the iPhone, but their approach was like an IBM approach and centered in old thinking.  They were competing with Blackberry for mobile email, text, when Apple offered us the web with pictures, sound and video.

So with the phone battle almost lost we should all wonder what will be left.  To see Apple's direction we should use iPhones, iPads and maybe Air laptops.  I don't disagree, but my checkbook does not offer such options.  My option is more like (maybe) an Andriod phone, (maybe) a Chrome tablet and (definitely) a netbook.

Facing the fact that Microsoft will not play a part in the first two devices because if I were to spend the money necessary to buy a Windows Phone and Windows TabletPC I would be in line at the Apple store instead.  Price is the main factor keeping me from Apple, but Microsoft devices are not the least expensive and there is no compelling reason to buy them when Google is on the block.

So the netbook, which I will be buying soon, might have Windows on it.  I say might because it bothers me my two options are Windows XP (old, insecure and heavy) and Windows 7 Starter (new, can't change the wallpaper and heavy).  Why?  I know they must charge money for their OS buy why is it the same price to buy a locked down OS where I can only run "x" number of programs and not change the wallpaper or the old and insecure OS?  Microsoft, you know what I will be doing with this netbook?  Surfing the web with Firefox or Chrome -- I can do that with the latest Linux distro for free and they let me change my wallpaper!

So thinks look bleak for Microsoft.  They are expecting brand loyalty and product tie-ins to trump common sense.  As things move to the Internet cloud, why pay the Microsoft tax?  Microsoft has nothing compelling, just bad copies of existing products.

What can they do?  They need to cut losses in some areas, focus on their core and strengthen their brand.  

Consumer devices are a lost area.  If they have decided that both Google and Apple are the enemy then they need to back out of the consumer device market, they will not have an effect there.  They are priced in the middle but offer nothing better than Google who is priced lower.  They don't have an application store or an exciting space for developers to make cooler stuff than they can with Apple or Android.  In the business handheld area they have been loosing to RIM's Blackberry for years, why would they win now?

Browsers are a lost area.  Most of the future computer users will never see Internet Explorer (or only see it long enough to download Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari).  Why fight the fight to at best tie with the best.  If people are willing to go through what it takes to install a different browser it shows that the default browser is not good enough, and efforts to fix that fact still fall short.

Netbook operating systems will be a lost area.  Once Google Chrome is out there, Microsoft will have a lot of saber-rattling to do to keep vendors in line.  I predict they will risk increased OS Licence fees to offer netbooks preinstalled with Linux-based operating systems.  Windows 7 starter is just not good enough to compete.  Windows 7 Starter would only kill the versions of Linux from 2003, not modern distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Silverlight: I guess it is not hurting anything, and it is a major part of Netflix's business so it can't be killed.  But how many people are developing it?  What is the plan?  Further pushing of Silverlight to capture Adobe's fading influence is stupid.  Since I still hope Microsoft and Adobe merge, I guess keep silverlight, but I am not happy about it.

So here is my idea: Release Windows 7.5... 

Starter edition: Get rid of the application, memory and processor limits on starter edition and let people change the wallpaper.  Why would you intentionally cripple the performance of your operating system?  You are branding the frustration your users feel.

Home Basic/Premium: Why is there the racist/classist division?  Anyone should be able to have Basic and then upgrade to premium.  The assumption with Basic is that no one can afford Premium in the other countries, while the other assumption is that in "first world" countries everyone can afford Premium.

All editions?  Partner with the Mozilla foundation and merge the good things in IE with Firefox for Windows.  Default FireFox to Bing and give people a chance to use it.  Optimize new Microsoft Web services to look great on the new FireFox (not services that cannibalize existing software like Office).  Also optimize these web services to be compelling on BOTH Google and Apple handhelds, thus beating them at their own games.  Mozilla will not mind since Google stabbed them in the back with the Chrome web browser.  Microsoft developers can learn a lot from the Mozilla culture, and Mozilla needs some cash and strong OS support to push back Chrome, Safari and Opera.  Microsoft still has the desktop market share, so it is still in the driver's seat.

This will not fix the damage done, just hopefully stop the bleeding.  The issue will be that once everyone's windows laptop dies will they buy a Linux netbook or a windows notebook for twice the price?  That is when the chickens will come home to roost.