How to disable Messenger Auto-sign-in via Outlook.com

I must say I am a big fan of Microsoft’s new web front-end for Hotmail – Outlook.com. The UI is very modern, minimalist and fast!

About the only complaint is that any time you browse to outlook.com via a web browser, it will automatically sign you into MS Messenger.  Though initially this may not be a problem, I find that you can rapidly reach ridiculous numbers of logons even though you may only consciously be using say one browser at home and another at work.  It got so bad that I was even prevented from signing into the desktop Messenger app in Windows Live Essentials.  If only there is a way to prevent automatic login.

Luckily there is.  Jonathan Kay has come up with a rather simple way to block auto sign-in which you can read on his blog.

Well No, Macs No Longer “Just Work”

Last year I wrote about how things changed once I bought a Mac, well it has been over a year now and I wonder how things are fairing?

Things have changed drastically during the past year and it’s quite worrisome. Let’s review that post in chunks:

• Apple TV and iTunes on iMac just work; do not forget each other

Well no, ever since OS X Mountain Lion (ML) if my Mac goes to sleep to conserve power, it’s too dumb to restore network connections properly once the Mac comes out of sleep.  Maybe it’s my router?  Did I mention I have an Apple Airport too? So now I have to tell it not to sleep which is sort of naughty in this green day and age.

• Canon MX850 was automatically detected over wi-fi when plugged into Airport Extreme Base Station USB socket

This still works, yay!

• Lacie 4big Quadra 4TB RAID was automatically detected and iMac kindly asked if I wished to use it for TimeMachine
• Pressing big blue button on Lacie launched the brilliant TimeMachine app
• TimeMachine is fast, intuitive, reliable

Sadly this is screwed if my Mac does to sleep; the Mac does not wait for the drive to be ready before it stupidly tries to open iTunes.  Some times I have to reboot the iMac and/or Quadra.  Did I mention Windows has no problem?

• Apple’s iMail automatically configured e-mail server settings just by me typing in my @me.com address

I have had no reason to redo this but that’s all pretty academic since iMail/Mail is too demented to restore connectivity after a sleep.  I have to rerun Mail.  At least prior to ML you could click the little alert symbol to fix it.

• MS Messenger for iMac (via Office Mac) is much like pre-Windows Live Essentials meaning it doesn’t have the annoying ads but more importantly, uses less computer resources like memory and CPU in wlcomm.exe

Well sure, but sadly it does not support pasting images into it plus it’s missing all the features in the Windows Live Essentials version on Windows.

• Apple’s Xcode IDE is only $5.00 and uses minimal CPU and memory

Xcode tends to crash – a lot!  However, Xcode is continuing to grow on me and they are adding new features all the time, sadly the debugger is rather featureless compared to Microsoft Visual Studio.

• Though Apple may make use of seemingly vertical standards such as Bonjour, historically it can be shown that Apple is more likely to adopt more popular standards with more realized use cases than say MS.  Calendering is a good example

Mail, Calenders and Chat continue to support other non-Apple tech which is nice.

I’m not sure why I said Visual Studio is bloated, particularly when such criticisms are silly when no one is stopping you to install any version whether it be Express or Ultimate or any in between.

Google 8-bit Maps, Retro Cool

Google yesterday released a 8-bit mode for its Google Maps website.  This new mode looks familiar to anyone who played classic computer games such as Ultima II.

Google 8-bit maps showing Perth, Australia in all its 8 colour glory.  Perth never looked so green.

Ultima II, image courtesy Wikipedia.

Bill Maher on SOPA – Ignorance Is Bliss It Seems?

Bill Maher created a humorous documentary on religious observations called well – Religulous.  It was similar to Richard Dawkin’s documentary and in some parts almost a clone.

After watching a recent video containing Bill, I may just have to rethink my opinion of him. Watch the video below, it is from some US talk show where he, based on his own self-admitting ignorance, arrogantly supports the SOPA and labels any anti-SOPA components in the community or government as thiefs.

Luckily, the other speakers on the panel seemed to have done their homework and not just read the SOPA coversheet.  Now I wonder if he was just as arrogant for his Religulous documentary?

No doubt if SOPA goes through this article will be in violation to the act and the entire WORDPRESS site will be shutdown because of me.   Hmmm

Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash, Backs HTML5

“HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” Adobe VP Danny Winokur said in a clear reference to Apple’s rejection of Flash support on its dominant iOS devices: the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. “This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.” [1]

Read the full article here

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/adobe-kills-mobile-flash/ [1]

 

1-year-old Thinks a Magazine is a Broken iPad

I generally do not like proxy posting but check out this article at CNET, quite sad really.

Facebook Release Management Video Just Damage Control?

On 26th May of this year, Facebook Engineering released a video detailing their release management tools. The video is quite interesting. For someone who says tools alone won’t solve problems, the majority of the video is just that – tools.   During the video the speaker is heard saying:

“…I can roll facebook.com in about 15 minutes…I can revert things very quickly” [1]

Quite impressive when you take into account the binary is 1 GB in size. Rather good I thought.  We’re concerned here how long a deployment or revert takes, not how long for a bug to be fixed.  Fixing a bug takes notably longer.

When you take into account Facebook’s public profile in the popular media, a little question arises – how long has Facebook been able to release say in 15 minutes?

2010 was a bad year for Facebook

• 30 Dec 200 – Australian IT reports Facebook down
• 24 Sep 2010 – BBC reports Facebook crash affecting 135 million people for approximately 2.5 hours
• 17 Dec 2010 – BBC reports Facebook down for 20-30 minutes because of publication of pre-release code
• 24 Sep 2010 – News.com.au reports Facebook down for third time in 48 hours affecting 500 million users

My question is  – assuming Facebook had the tools back in 2010 as per the video, why then could Facebook not simply been able to revert (in 15 minutes as they claim) to last known good release for the majority of the 2010 System failures? Not all failures were DNS-related.

Perhaps either the tools to deploy/revert in 15 minutes didn’t work as described in the video or they are a recent addition to Facebook’s arsenal, perhaps only developed this year.

Seems the phrase damage control has multiple meanings.

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[1] Push Tech Talk, Facebook Engineering

The Return of the Micro Computer, Watch Out Android

I was just watching a video on YouTube of yet another pad device entering the arena created by Apple’s iPad.  This latest offering was from computer manufacturer Asus and their product the PadFone. Possibly nothing wrong with that or was there?

Watching this video got me thinking – with so many other contemporary pad  or tablet devices in the market, I just wonder how do they all compete?  How do they convince consumers to invest in their product?  What makes theirs better than someone else’s?  It’s not just limited to these devices either, smart-phones are also quite relevant.

I guess features is one thing…but that perhaps is only a short to medium attention factor. One has only to look at say Windows Phone 7 to see what an abysmal flop it has been. (3.6% market share, 1Q11) [1]  The Windows Phone 7 also has hardly any software and the majority is an embarrassment.

So what else drives these portable devices? Software of course! Software or apps is a huge cash cow of recent years and one has only to look at Apple’s highly successful AppStore.  People just love apps whether they are social, business, games, education or simply rich client replacements for web sites.

What does that mean for the likes of Microsoft, Android, Nokia, RIM and Asus?  It’s great to make a new device but be sure to back it up with plenty of software.  A smart device without software is just something we bought on impulse. That wasn’t very smart was it?

The Micro Computer?

Which brings us to the topic for this post.  The 1980’s, particularly in the UK, were filled with dozens of different micro computers; all different, all incompatible with each other, some cheap, some expensive but all loveable and classical.  This is very much like what is happening today with the portable electronic device market.

Take the ZX Spectrum, possibly the most popular of the micro at the time.  It was the iPad of its day (though perhaps no where near the quality of the latter) and just like the iPad had heaps of software (though I doubt if any micro back then had 65,000 apps).  We had such great fun in those days.

Then there was the Dragon 64 computer.  It was arguably better made but it had much less software; then again the majority of the software was dreadful.  The Dragon’s graphical abilities were no match for the the Spectrum.  As such, the Dragon had a much smaller market share throughout its life, which was a pity.

The MSX range of micros was a reasonably successful attempt at standardising computers amongst different manufacturers.  Sadly, they were never really popular even when they were of a superior make in many respects (particularly the Spectrum).  There was a reasonable amount of software though it wasn’t really fun.

If we are to learn anything it could be that making something of a better quality is no guarantee of success.  It didn’t help Dragon, Atari, MSX or Tandy. I don’t see Asus making anything as good a quality as Apple let alone exceed it.

Similarly, attempting to introduce ad-hoc standards is not going to guarantee market penetration. MSX tried that, a lesson for Android perhaps?

Price seems to be irrelevant too. One has only to look at the huge popularity of the BBC Model B computers.

One thing that is the same with micros back then and devices today is software.  Without it, the device dies a quiet death. So, if you’re going to make a device for the purpose of standing shoulder with Apple, be sure you have plenty of high-quality software and I mean plenty.

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[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1689814

Apple iLife ’11 is Amazing

Every new Mac now comes with iLife ’11 which includes iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand amongst others. I remember looking at these apps particularly iPhoto and sort of dismissed them as entry-level app fillers.  In hindsight this was perhaps premature and I suspect it is because of us Windows users being so used to the over-the-top visual noise one is subjected to from Microsoft that unless the screen is filled with absolute nonsense that the app must be somehow sub-standard. This formula arguably shouldn’t be applied to a Mac. I’ve come to realise that Mac apps follow a no-nonsense style to UI design that Alan Cooper would arguably would be proud of.  Incidentally, running Microsoft Word on a Mac is a prime example of Sesame Street’s  “One of these kids is doing his own thing” that makes Word look so out of place just as a donkey would be in the Melbourne Cup.

iLife ’11

The reason for my change of heart was last nights viewing of the Apple Special Event, October 2010 New MacBook Air, Mac OS X Lion and iLife ’11.  In it, the demos of iMovie, GarageBand and iPhoto just blew me away.

Looking back, it’s quite clear that Windows Live Essentials is Microsoft’s very “version 1” attempt at trying to copy Apple.  I’ll leave it to you to determine the winner here.

Professional Productions Made Easy

Regardless of media – whether you are working on images, video or music, iLife can in a few mouse clicks allow you to make wonderful geographically-linked photo slideshows, hard-bound books; video trailers, facial recognition from video; and the brilliant “spell-checker for music” rhythm/groove fixer.

If you have not seen the above mentioned Apple Special Event video on iTunes, I highly recommend you check it out.

Let the Computer Work for You

We’ve all created lengthy documents or at least spent an hour trying to get that e-mail or document sounding just right when the power goes out sending your hard-worked-on composition into the digital ether.  Wouldn’t it be great if all your apps saved your work as you go without you having to hit Save or setup some auto-save interval which is always one second too late when your hamster decided to chew through the power cable?  Sure most e-mail applications have a save-to-draft feature but how many non-cloud-based document editors do an autosave.  For that matter, most e-mail apps are still dumb enough to ask “Shall I save?” when I close the window.  Of course it should. For that matter, why do we need to tell the computer to save at all?  Surely it should be smart enough to know that the thing I’ve been madly whacking glyphs into is smart enough to realise that the document is really important to me what with having spent the last hour on it that it should just save and be done with it? Hmm.

About the only document program I can think of that has no concept of saving is Microsoft OneNote – perhaps the only decent Office product that hasn’t suffered from bloatware of late or had some silly social networking attached to it.

Enter the clever chaps at Apple.  The upcoming version of the next OS for the Mac – Lion – will do two very important things

• Auto save
• Auto application hibernation and resume

Not only will this let you focus on what you are actually doing and not have to worry about mundane things such as saving, but also that you can quickly switch between applications freeing up memory as you go as the OS suspends unused apps.  Then when you return there is that document outlining how throwing hamsters into jet engines isn’t a very nice thing to do.

Oh this is the first blog from my Mac using a rather nice app called MarsEdit. Well done!