I like to think of myself as somewhat of an internationalist. Having worked in the travel industry and consulted for airlines, cruise lines, and resort chains, I’ve gotten around the “block” a few times. These experiences greatly widened my word view form that of a little boy growing up on a mountain in Tennessee. (BTW, as an adult I moved back to that same mountain in Tennessee and am loving every minute of it.)

One of the things that living and working abroad taught me was that most of the word does not speak English. Now don’t get me wrong, English is a widely spoken language, and you can argue that it is the defaco language of businesses, but on the streets in Munich, Mexico City, or Tokyo, they are NOT speaking English. So when I’ve been to places were English is not the native language I’ve made a great effort to learn enough of local dialect to make myself understood, and believe me when I happen across someone who does speak English I am most grateful for their help, no matter how broken his or her speech is.

However in business, if you are going to conduct commerce with another countries citizens it always does you well to either learn/speak the language or hire people who do so because knowing a person’s native language is always an endearing quality.

Now enter the Spam. Spam of course is unsolicited or unwanted email marketing and is the bane of the inter-webs. Once upon a time spam actually was sort of pseudo professional, not having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in direct mail costs, companies could go the extra mile in the design and crafting of their marketing materials. Not anymore.

Now I get spam with all manner of odd ball language, it would seem now that not only is English NOT the first language of the spammers, it appears that they crafted there marketing messages by stringing together phrases from a pocket English guide or a pirated pornographic movie. In fact the messages are SO bad now, I’ve started reading them. This is not because I would ever refinance my house because of an e-mail, or by pharmaceuticals via e-mail to treat ED, it is because they are now just that funny. Here are some except from my mail today that made me chuckle:

“Zillion men all over world use cure” – What is a “Zillion Man”?

“Make your boyfriennd a gift!” – Just make sure to poke holes in the wrapping so he can breathe.

“V1agra c1al1s rock bottom” – Well, duh, isn’t that the point?

“everyone is our herbal program” – Sort of like Solent Green?

“Use free pills to your woman” – Here, well call that a Ruffy.

“Top qulity swiss repl1Ca modles” – But not top “qulity” spell check.

“Invest in hottest chicks in town” – Because attractive woman always make for good venture capital opportunities.

“we free 12 pills with order” – Free Tibet first, then we’ll talk about freeing those oppressed pills.

“15% discount now available on store” – I guess it is a down real estate market.

“Unleash your animal on the unsuspecting ladies” – Yes, I have a pet Zebra that I use to attack women.

“Guaranteed growth of 3-6 foots” – Can you run faster with 3 to 6 extra feet?

“Great branded for you” – OUCH!!

“Fire and Ice In Your Pants” – No comment I make would make this any funnier.

“Land Dream Chick Here” – Unless you can’t get clearance from the tower, then fly to another airport.

“She exploded herself to me” – And left a terrible mess.

This was all from a single day of Spam. I know that some Spam uses obfuscation like “V1agra” to get around keyword filtering for “Viagra”. But perhaps we can work on a new system that scans for poor grammar in e-mail. This way we can weed out the spam AND punish inept writers like myself.

I have just completed my first full week after moving from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

Before I get to long into this, perhaps I should give some back-story. I’ve always been on the cutting edge technology, in fact I stood in line to by a copy of Windows 95 at midnight after it went on sale back in the fall of 1995, and I have been an early adopter of new software ever since.

Because I am a technology elitist, I understand that “early adopters” often have “issues”. In my time I have had issues, though not as many as I think have been hyped in the media (both new media and old media). Each time I upgrade I just expect there to be some small issues with the software, but more importantly I also expect there needs to be some time for personal retraining. I found that often people will blame the software for faults which are more appropriately cased by their own lack of knowledge. So, with each new upgrade I always give myself time to get past any personal prejedust or ignorance so as to pass a more informed judgment of the software or hardware.

I ran Windows Vista on my Primary Desktop for over a year. When I first installed it I, like most, was amazed by the visual effects of the user interface (Aero). I had read enough about Vista before hand to know that I needed a higher end video card, and additional ram, to make the first impression a good one. Having been through the last two major upgrades of the user interface in Windows, 3.11 to 95, and 2000 to XP, I had come to expect great things from the UI, and Vista did not disappoint. While I never used the “rolodex” task switching feature (that was 100% hype in my opinion), I was pleased by the format of the UI, the new start menu and the overall layout of the tool bars.

However, I have to admit that the honeymoon with Vista was short. While the UI was pleasant, I found nothing about it which I could justify the cost of the additional Video Card power to my clients. Vista of course had a non-Aero UI which worked pretty much the same, and so the “eye-candy” of Aero was simply unneeded. Aside from Aero elements, there also seemed to me to be a great deal of Video mode issues. In the first few months with Vista I would get these bizarre “Windows has lowered your Video Mode” messages. I traced most of these issues back to older versions of the Java runtime environment, but I would still get those messages from time to time right up until I stop using Vista. The UI was nice, but much like a gilded Victorian house, it may look incredible, but it is most uncomfortable to live in.

I can say that I did not have any single “deal killer” issue with Vista. It was more like a being killed by 1,000 little cuts, each not of great concern but combined proved both painful and lethal. Somewhat like a marriage that has reached its end, there were many things that caused the devoice, but here is what I put into the papers.

1. Unreconsilabale Differences. Vista and I could not see eye-to-eye on how to handle Files. In Vista there is an infinite number of ways to “view” the contents of a folder. Filename, Size, Dates, Descriptions, etc, etc, are all columns which can be added to a Folder View, and ordered, arranged, and sorted however you would like. BUT Vista and I could never seem to agree on a Folder View. As a developer I like to pile all the files I have for a project into a single folder for each client. Words Docs with meeting notes, Excel Docs with budgets, Bits of code in text files of different extensions, HTML, and anything else I might need for a project. This is how I work. I would set up a folder, start dropping files into it and the moment I dropped in a file of a specific type, Vista would change the Folder View on me the next time I opened it. Vista seemed to give NO weight to the number of files of any time. So I would have a folder full of 200+ PHP files, but drop in a single JPEG and now my folder view has changed, giving me things like “date taken” and “Rating” as columns rather than my “date modified” which is what I use most.

   I am sure that there is some logic in how Vista selects for me the file views. I am equally sure that someone from Microsoft could explain it to me. But I’m not sure that I wouldn’t slap them at the end of the explanation.

2. Adultery. Yes there was another Woman, my MacBook and OS 10.5. No, I’m not going to compare and contrast OS X and Windows Anything. I will admit that while I was having problems with Vista, I ran to the arms of my MacBook for comfort. I won’t say it was a deciding factor in going back to XP, after all I went back to XP and not a Mac Desktop. XP also seemed to play better over the network with my MacBook than Vista. Perhaps Vista is just a jealous lover. She seems modern in her outward appearance, but still is still very traditional and monogamous on the inside. I still have my MacBook now that I’m back with XP, I love them both, and neither is jealous of the other. They know my heart. (btw my MacBook’s is quite the little freak, she bats for both teams thanks to Parrells.)
3. Mental Suffering an Abuse, Battery. I’m a right clicker. My first instinct when I’m not sure what to do is to right click on it. I’ve tried this in my normal life, but pecking on things with the middle finger of my right hand does not seem to have much effect. I’m also a network user. At TCG we have over 5 TB (Tetra Bytes) of storage scattered around the empire. Some of these files are big ones 100+ GB. When I would go to a file on the network in Vista and right client on that file (out of habit mostly), all hell would break lose. I’m not sure of the technical reason, but it would seem that Vista needs to ether go through a files completely or “copy” that file locally before it will pass judgment on what I can do with a right click.

   The end result would be that when I would absent mindedly right click on a file, Explorer would go into partial lockdown waiting for whatever it needs to do. Of course on a small file over the network this was ok, but with a 20GB backup file on a slow link VPN link it is murder. I basically have to restart the machine if I want it to stop. Worse than the “absent minded click” was the deliberate right-click. On those big network files, Vista would be doing it thing, but because Vista remembers your mouse clicks, after right clicking on a file I could do NOTHING else until the context menu shows up. This is because if I had clicked elsewhere on the screen, then the moment the menu shows up, it goes away, and Vista does not cache such data, so if I right click again, I’m forced to wait the additional time all over.

   Copying the large files over my network also suffered under Vista. I have no data to support this except my “Coffee” test. I have to copy 2 or 3 Gig files on a normal bases from my desktop to a server. There is a 802.11g wifi link in this chain so the maximum bandwidth in which I could copy these file is 56MBits less the WPA overhead. In XP I could start the transfer, and it be done when I come back from refilling my coffee cup, in Vista the same transfer has a little while left after I get back with my fresh cup. I’ve believe this to be not just a fixed additional time, but a sliding scale. Larger Files seems slower, the bigger the file, the slower the transfer.

For all of these reasons and more (I got never get Kimboot to work on Vista), on Friday of last week I switched back to XP. I felt, and still feel, like somewhat of a failure. I gave Vista a year of my life, I tried to work it out, but the frustrations just kept rising. There had been a lot of hype about people “Upgrading to XP”, and I did not want to fall into the trap of being either a “fan boy” or a “hater”.

I had hoped that Vista SP1 would address some of these things, but while it did speed up the network issues, it didn’t do it fast enough to complete with XP.

So how has the week been? I think that a good test of any Software is to see what you miss. After a week with XP, the jury is still out. I miss the Start Menu Search Bar. I found myself using it to find programs rather than digging through the menus. The Start Menu itself was also very handily laid out. I think I miss that, but not enough to put up with the rest.

Once reason the jury is still out is the issues of “need to reinstall a program”. Of course after you’ve been using an OS for a year, you have everything you need installed on it. After switching OSes, you always have to reinstall software. I find that it is easier to reinstall software as I need it rather than just pile on software right from the start. So while I feel a minor a nuisance, I know that it is always that way.

In the end I’m going to give is “side-grade” a month. If I do not feel overtly completed to switch back to Vista, I’m going to just keep on using XP. I will write again on the topic after I have had some time to process it.

I own both an iPod and a Zune, (5g Video and First Generation, respectively) I paid about the same for both on the ebay/woot after market. From a technical stand point my Zune far outreaches my iPod. Out of the box the G1 Zune had Wi-Fi, a faster processor and larger screen. But the iPod is the clear market dominator, so there is a virtual sea of third party “stuff” that will work with the iPod and not the Zune. Case in point, my car’s radio head unit works with my iPod, Bose makes my desktop iPod “Dock” with speakers, and because of the economy of scale, stuff like charges are much cheaper than comparable stuff for the Zune.

However market dominance in third party add-ons is not the only reasons to pick a device. So let me compare the two devices on a one-two-one scale.

Both devices play DRM free MP3s, and nether play open source OGG file. Both devices require trans-coding of Video to play it on the device, Apple uses MP4/H.264 while Zune uses the Windows Media format. The trans-coded files are roughly the same size and quality once finished, both can be played back on their respective platforms (Mac/Windows for the iPod and just Windows for the Zune), and both can be played via the “extension” options for the Desktop, (Apple TV for iPod, Xbox 360 for Zune).

The Zune has a larger screen, which makes viewing video much easier. I watched most of the first season of House MD while on the plain to Africa last fall on my Zune. The video screen on the iPod is more like an afterthought, or perhaps it was kept small to keep continuity with the earlier non-video iPods.

The Zune also has Wi-Fi, but that Wi-Fi is COMPLETELLY useless. You can use Wi-Fi to “Sync” your Zune, or to “Squirt” crippled music files to another Zune User, and that is all, nothing more. The Zune has an FM radio. The iPod is completely without any wireless connectively, in or out.

Real World battery life on both devices is about comparable. 2 to 3 hours of Video, 4 to 6 hours of Music. Both devices can store and show resized images synced for the desktop. This is where I was caught of guard with both units. I have 100,000+ images socked away on my systems. This amount of pictures can easily fit on the available memory of both devices, but both iTunes and Zune Desktop “resize” an image to make it fit on your device’s screen (which makes the image smaller in both pixels and bytes). However the resizing/coping process takes a few moments per image, and with the amount of images I have, the process took most of a day.

The Desktop Software is where the two devices really diverge. Both iTunes and the Zune Desktop take an “all your media are belong to us” approach to your music and video libraries. It’s more fare to compare Zune Desktop 2 to iTunes rather than Zune Desktop 1. ZD1 was a joke, ZD2 is more like a farce.

iTunes benefits from it’s long standing install base, so the software guys at Apple have some experience, feedback, etc, on what iTunes needs to be. Microsoft’s ZD2 chose to live in a cave and ignore the lessons learned by Apple.

<aside> To be fair to Microsoft, a cooperate lawyer was most likely standing over the shoulder of each programmer, everyday, to make sure that ZD did not look or act like iTunes, just to avoid a lawsuit. A note to Microsoft, patent law in this country needs serious reform, and that will only happen when a) congress does something (unlikely) or b) corporate titans fight it out to prove that software and basic concepts are not patentable. Microsoft, take the hit in the court room, your save money in the long run, have a better product, and we just may have a better society. </aside>

ZD2 just seems so illogical to me, and they also have made it Pink. Now I’m not opposed to the color Pink, I have a seven year old daughter, so most of my house is Pink. However I do want my Windows apps to look like Windows apps. ZD2 goes out of its way to look “cool”, but in reality it’s user interface is just annoying.

In the end it was the uselessness of the wifi, and the sad shape of the Zune Desktop which made me chose to use my iPod as my daily PMP. Ironically the Zune has the greater potential, so if the hacking community will rewrite the Zune OS I could very will see myself switching back to the Zune hardware (less the Zune Hardware).

With just some very basic software changes the downsides of the Zune could be over shadowed by the additional benefits. With full and complete Wi-Fi the Zune could easily become a Wireless Streaming Content receiver. The Zune could also have some basic information apps like weather, stocks, traffic, etc. While the physical interface is somewhat limited, Microsoft could do an online system very much like they used for their SPOT technology. A user could, from their desktop, go to MSN and select the content and apps they would want to use from their Wi-Fi Zune. Then when connecting from the Zune the user would have a more limited, but completely mobile, access to those previously selected items.

With better Wi-Fi access the Zune could become a great and easy Wi-Fi Network Attached Storage. All of the hardware and processing power are there, this is just simple software changes.

The Wi-Fi angle on the Zune still bugs me. Why not have used Bluetooth? You could accomplish the same limited “Syncing” and “Squirting” but also have added Bluetooth Stereo headset support. While this article has been limited to the Zune G1 vs. the iPod G5 Video, the same question hold true for the newer iPod Touch.

Recently I have been working on different types of encryption. Back in March
on all the Systems at TCG we complete a project to do whole drive encryption. I’ve
been happy to report that after some time of operation, these experiments have gone
incredibly well. We have been running whole drive encryption on all systems with
no loss in speed or data. The only unexpected thing we came across was doing
complete upgrades. In the past when we have needed a larger hard drive in
a system, we have done one of two things. First and easiest, we use a program
nominally called “Ghost” which copies all the data as a block. With this process
you simply do a mirror copy of the old drive, but leave free the larger space
on the new drive. We also have used this time to keep a whole image back-
up of the drive for backup proposes. If we feel that enough time has passed however,
sometimes we elect to uses another choice in drive upgrading. Microsoft
encourages Windows users to format an reinstall thier OS on a 18 month cycle,
especially if the user installs and uninstalls a lot of software, which we do. We will
take the new drive opportunely to do a fresh install of Windows. In all cases, the old
hard drives are “Quarantined” for a period of no less than 90 days in our vault, to
insure a smooth transition and no data loss. Regardless of how many times we do this,
sometimes thing to not get copied over. Better to be safe than sorry.

Most ironically, the thing we encountered when trying to Ghost with whole drive
encryption is that you have to “decrypt” the drive before using our copy tools.
Subsequently then we would have to re-encrypt the new drive and/or the old one before
sending them to either the vault, or back into production. These additional setups add
an overnight element or two to the process, but I think it’s a small price to pay for the
greatly added security.

Encryption now has a new dimension. One of the down sides to encryption is that it
is recognizable to a person who knows what they are looking at. So while your data is
absolutely secure, it is pretty obvious that you have something to hide. I think it’s a sad com-
mentary on our society that we feel as if a person with something to hide is guilty of some
type of crime, but unfortunately that is a common perception. Times are changing, there is
hope. I feel that much like the ideology racism, this perception of guilt is slowly fading.
in the mean time until such perceptions do change, the art of “hiding” data may be just as
necessary as encrypting data. I have been working on in acutely not much encryption but
kind of “hiding” messages, especially in plain sight. This is both a software problem and social
intrigue exercises. Hiding a message is only as good as both parties KNOW where to look for the
nefarious text. Of course the best way to do this would be to both encrypt and then hide, thus
greatly deceasing the odds of discovery.

Our jewel of tools, Truecrypt, has a feature of Hidden Volumes and Plausible Deniability. Un-
fortunately, this does not extend to whole drive encryption. It would be very cool with this for
you to be able to “boot” a hidden “safe” area on a laptop that would be sanitized for public
observation, but that feature is not yet in Truecrypt. In most cases of targeted data theft or
unwanted data search, the opposition does not have enough time to inspect every file.

My quest for hidden data has leaded me to look into a technology called Steganography.
Conceptually, the ideal is to “hide” data within data. Mostly in the Internet world this
has involved hiding text inside of Jpeg Images. But there are other program to hide
text inside of MP3s, move files, or my favorite, hiding clear text inside of clear text.