Bravo to Microsoft for streaming their keynotes and their session presentations on their website at http://visitmix.com/2008/.  I would love for Apple to also stream their presentations.  Currently I rely on blogs such as Engadget or Gizmodo to distill those presentations for me.  This is a disservice to both me and Apple.  

I was intensely geeked out by streming the live video of Scott Guthrie's keynote on my phone while at lunch today.  The experience was amazingly and surprisingly good. 

Now that Mark Zuckerberg has seen the evil of Facebook's ways, you can now opt-out of Beacon's spying (as far as we know.)  The process is simple, despite it not being so obvious. 

1. Log in to Facebook.com
2. Click on "privacy" in the top right
   
3. You will now be on your "Privacy Overview" page.  Click on "External Websites" or the "Edit Settings" link to its right
   
4. Check the checkbox and hit "Save"
    

You know you're relatively* free from auto-Beaconing when the image next to Edit Settings changes from this

to this

Finally, it's a good idea to log out of Facebook when you're done with it.  That's a good rule for any site that you don't want prying eyes on.

* Note that on the External Websites profile page, Facebook warns you that,

Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.

FYI, Beacon still creeps me out.

Extra tip: Microsoft's Excel does a great job of finely formatting data that comes out of SQL's Query Analyzer a.k.a. Server Management Studio .  E.g. if you need to send a client or a partner some results from SQL, but don't want to spend the time un/re-formatting the results into nice columns, just copy & paste the results into an Excel worksheet.  Then, copy & past the Excel columns into your destination (Outlook email or Word doc, etc).  You'll magically end up with a nicely formatted document.

Specific to this post, I recently performed this 2 step dance. On closing Excel, I got the "Do you want to save this document" dialog, then the following dialog box:

which says (from snapshot above),

There is a large amount of information on the Clipboard.  Do you want to be able to paste this information into another program later?

• To save it on the Clipboard so that you can paste it later, click Yes.
• To delete it from the Clipboard and free memory, click No.

Followed by the options, Yes, No and Cancel.

Being a lazy developer/user, my eyes scanned right to the yes/no/cancel buttons, and I just froze there, thinking, "Wait, what is this asking?"  Then I re-read the information, then thought hard about my intentions, then cried a little.

Developers: please do your user a little favor by just cutting to the chase on the buttons themselves.  I.e. You could keep the dialog text, but just have two buttons (why, really, have a Cancel option here?) that are:

• Release Clipboard information
• Keep Clipboard information

If you really want to have a "Cancel" option, explain what's going to happen after you push it.  Quick quiz: can you tell from the options above what's going to happen?  Here's a clue: if you're going to follow the above examples, it would read:

• Go back to the document

In my opinion, if you need three sentences to explain a simple dialog on closing a document, something has gone very wrong.  To the developer behind this dialog box: you have failed the Mother-in-law Test**.

** With the best regards to Tim, Mother-in-law Test has a less insidious acronym than Mother-in-law Factor, no thanks to pop culture.

About 2 weeks ago, I was asked to answer a survey about a recent shopping trip I made to the Apple store.  Given that part of my company does this kind of work, I'm willing to participate in these surveys, provided they're not too long and that the survey I'm answering doesn't become invalid by my association with a survey company.

It was a relatively innocuous survey, asking me how the staff treated me, what would get me to shop at Apple more regularly, and if I had any suggestions.  This was all fairly common for a post-shopping survey.  As usual, the end of the survey asked if I could be contacted by Apple for further information.  Not expecting to hear anything further, I said yes and provided my cell number.

On Sunday afternoon, my cell rang and it was the store manager from the store I shop at.  There are two remarkable items to note about this call.  The first is that the manager didn't call me for more detail per se, but just to thank me for the information, as "Apple is very interested in making their stores a better place to shop, and are taking these surveys very seriously."  The other interesting bit was that we spoke for the better part of 20 minutes about my experience and the answers I provided. 

Now, this is a store manager who surely is dealing with all sorts of consumer related issues on a busy shopping day (in the last year, I've never been to this store on the weekend without it teeming with potential and actual buyers).  That he called me was a small miracle, but that he actually talked to me was a little more than that.

We talked about my particular issues with the store (not using stantions at the checkout queue, and none closer to my house/work) and my experiences in the store.  I noted that on one trip, my wife and I specifically visited the store to inspect iLife '08 to help us understand if we need to upgrade.  The sales reps were particularly useless.  Sure, iLife had just been introduced the day before, but I expected to be able to roll in to the Apple store and have all of my questions answered by anyone dressed in black.

What the manager said at this point was particularly interesting.  He claimed that because Apple keeps so much information about new products secret, people walking in to the stores often have more information about the product than the store employees do.  He particularly pointed out this being a problem with the release of the iPhone and iLife, in that Apple did not provide any advance training for their sales staff.

His candor shocked me, but not as much as the obvious issue with being overly secretive.  Joe Consumer really needs help from the technically advanced sales staff at these kinds of stores, or else he's going to - at best - be confused about the product, and - at worst - have a bad experience with a product and never purchase it.  Case in point: my wife and I did not upgrade to iLife '08 as the sales staff was unable to provide us with a convincing argument for the cost.

Bravo to Apple for taking the time to understand their customers a little better.  Boos to Apple for being insanely secretive with their products.  In my opinion, Walt Mossberg shouldn't have more information about or experience with a product than the staff in charge with selling it.

I just got an update from Citibank notifying me of several upgrades being made to their online features.  Among the other items noted, they specified that they will allow you to "request PDFs of your statements as far back as 15 years."  Note to other banks, utilities, and major service providers: please look at what Citibank is doing, and take notes. 

Will I want to see what regrettable purchases I made back in 1992?  Not likely.  However, being able to go back 2, 3 or possibly even 5 years is absolutely understandable.  Although I'm ultimately holding off judgement on their implementation of it (what exactly does "request PDF" mean, exactly?), I applaud Citibank for offering up services that make using their products just that much friendlier.

I mention this because there are many downright horrible online services out there.  As a counterpoint, I offer up my city water online "service."

To log in, I must present my account number and my address.  That's it.  No secret phrase, no user ID.  Anyone who's interested in my payment history need only stake out my mailbox and look for my water bill.   Once in to the super-high-tech system, I'm offered the following information:

Now, here's the magic question: given the above information, how much do I owe at this moment?  $0.00 or $157.12?  Only because I've been using this horrific UI for months do I know the real answer.  (Hint: it's not $0.00.)

The takeaway (as a developer) is this: make sure to have your application reviewed by an unbiased outsider every once in a while, and look to see what the best-of-breed is up to.  Although you may not have the time to implement 15 years of statements, it's obvious that in the above example the developer/developers that created this application never had anyone review the code and/or final product, and may have never even looked to see how other bill presentment applications work. 

Situation: You've been asked by Mr. BigShotCEO to create a proof-of-concept of that new whiz-bang website idea you told him about 8 weeks ago.  Oh, and he wants it ready for an 8am presentation in the board room.

Problem: If you use PowerPoint, or better yet, iWork's Keynote, you can whip together a presentation that won't embarrass you or get you fired.  [That's assuming you don't use any sound effects, but that's another matter.]  With websites however, it becomes a bit trickier, as many application developers a(including me) are frustrated artists, not getting much beyond still lifes in high school.  Unless you have a designer available at your beck and call, your hard work might lose it's punch if the audience is concentrating on why you chose to use puce and electric orange for colors.

Solution: there are a few good sites out there that will do the job in a pinch.  Since they're free (as of this writing), and have snappy interfaces, you can get a fairly unique and (generally) visually acceptable site with nominal lifting.  Getting the design out of the way will allow you to concentrate on the task(s) at hand.

Free logo design

• LogoMaker.  Good: the site allows you to position the graphic and any accompanying text however you want, using "layers" a la Photoshop.  Bad: they want your personal info.  Use: create your logo and take a screenshot.  Sure, you'll have hash marks, but this is just a demo.
• VistaPrint.  Good: no hash or watermarks.  Bad: no positioning of text elements.

Free web templates (available templates in brackets as of Oct 18, 2007)

• Open Designs [761] You can search by #of columns, license type, main color and validation type
• Open Source Web Design [2080] May be hard to find since they only show 12 a page, but all open source
• Open Web Design [2527] Tells you up front if the design uses CSS, which can be of great help
• Open Source Web Templates [~300?] Hard to search, as proven by the inaccurate number of designs
• Smashing Magazine They have more links, so I couldn't exclude them; good if the others fail

So there you have it.  I hope you get a big promotion and commensurate raise by Mr. BigShotCEO.

I've been running Vista as my main dev box for about 12 weeks now, and I couldn't be happier that SP1 is going to be rolling out soon.  In my opinion, it can't get here soon enough.  Vista, in my opinion, is just not mother-in-law-proof.  For the record, my laptop is rated as an overall 4.5 "experience index" (on a 1 to 5.9 scale)**, which is not too shabby.  A 4.5 (with 5.9 video scores) allows me to see all of the glassy UI Vista effects.  For argument's sake, I'm going to ignore my personal beef(s) with developing on Vista, and will discuss general interaction I've had with the OS.

Last week I had all sorts of slowdown issues that required me to download Process Monitor to chase down a rogue process that was eating my HDD I/O.  What was that process?  Windows Defender.  Defender decided to run a full HDD scan in the middle of the afternoon, despite the schedule being set to run in the middle of the night.  The result?  My laptop came to a screeching halt, barely allowing me to get at Task Manager to perform emergency shutdowns of my freshly edited VS code.  Awesome.

Then there was this kicker: I played IT-guy for my niece.  She was having issues with her relatively new, relatively fast Compaq/HP notebook, and when I took a peek at it I noticed how much crapware was installed.  Seemed like the perfect example for an FDISK with a fresh XP install.  So, as that computer was being wiped, I was using my Vista box to download all the latest drivers.  I thought this would be a time-saver, as the plan was to download it all, then burn it to a CD.  Boy was I wrong.  Downloads worked like a champ, but when I went to burn the CD (using the internal Vista DVD/CD burner), this is what Vista calculated:

No, I am not kidding.  No, I did not Photoshop this image.  17 items.  578 MB.  This wasn't the first "best guess", but rather 3 or 4 excruciating minutes into the 578 MB copy.  Let's do some math, shall we?  32,996 days = 2,850,854,400 seconds. 578MB/2.85B seconds = 0.20 bytes/second = 1.62 bits/second.

My circa-1980 Commodore 64 had a 14.4kbps modem that was 8,878 times faster than that.  You know what?  It felt like it.  I could nearly see the electrons moving. 

[**Note to Microsoft: fire the idiot that determined a 1.0 to 5.9 scale.  1 to 5.9??  What the heck?  Was this built by the same joker that decided 0 to 158 1/3 is a good passer rating?]

I do enjoy the NYTimes.  I also enjoy the NYTimes online site.  I don't however, enjoy having to logon, providing personal information just to get that content.  Two notes to online content creators:

1. if you think your content is very special, then make people pay for it and you'll see just how special your content is
2. if you think your content is kinda, sorta special, then don't make me provide you demographics just to get at your content

If you decide to lock down your content and make money, congratulations.  If you decide to collect demographics, you better make sure you test your users well, or at least check out BugMeNot.com to see if you're being gamed.

What's interesting is that the Times seemed to have a very special set of content, and I thought they would not stray from the pay-per-view model.  Interestingly, they decided to let their content go free tonight at midnight, realizing they will make more money from online advertising than pay-per-viewers**.

The best news is that they are also opening up their historical search tools.  Hooray!  I no longer have to keep the famous no-knead bread dough recipe in my safe deposit box.

**I wonder if the Times is going to start redirecting Firefox users who employ AdBlock extensions?

[Irony note: when I went to read the details about this article, the Times asked me to log on (see image).]