Disorderly Content

Or at least say Not now. Thanks to Daring Fireball for pointing me at ClickToFlash, a Safari pluging that holds back the plague that is Adobe Flash. Install it on your Mac and it'll keep all those plugins from sucking up your CPU cycles. The cool thing is that they'll still be on your web pages as placeholders. Just click on the gradient on your page and the Flash loads. But if you don't want it, you don't get it. Simple and effective.

Update 01/27: As with any good Open Source project, ClickToFlash refuses to stand still. The bad news is that yesterday's link no longer works. The good is that there's a new location. The even better is that the new owner has enhanced CTF; Option-click on a Flash image and you have the option (get it?) to remember the site and automatically load Flash content without asking. Definitely cool, and a good example of how responsive Open Source can be.

I'd like to tell you about some spectacularly crappy software. And this time it has nothing to do with Microsoft, as hard as that may be to believe.

My story begins with my BlackBerry, a device I carry for work. BlackBerrys (that is the plural form, right?) have USB connections, which they use to charge and also to transfer files to a computer. I have no need of wired sync, over the air sync does everything I need, so I use USB just to keep the BlackBerry charged. I've generally been charging by connecting to a computer, either my Mac mini or my work Dell laptop. The problem is that in both cases the BlackBerry whines (not literally; it just puts up an annoying message) that charging from a computer won't work. In fact it does work; it just takes forever. But that got me wondering. I knew with an earlier BlackBerry that installing their desktop software on an earlier laptop seemed to make the charge work much more quickly, and without warning monologues. (If a dialogue doesn't let me say anything, it's hardly a dialogue, is it?) So I wondered if there was some software I could install on my Mac that would tell the BlackBerry to accept a charge and stop complaining.

Google is my friend, and led me to a package called PocketSync that RIM offers as a free download for those of us who don't do Windows. I downloaded it, and installed it. And that's where things went wrong...

First, the installer notified me that it shouldn't be run when other applications are running on the computer. To my surprise, clicking on Continue caused the installer to kill everything I had running. Not polite at all, thought I. But the installation proceeded, and seemed to go smoothly. I brought up the sync program, which offered to let me sync the BlackBerry's calendar with one of my iCal calendars. This seemed a fine idea, as it got past a limitation of using my iPhone with Exchange. Maybe I could finally get all my calendars on one device!

Except... what happened when it was done that the only calendar on my Mac was the one from the BlackBerry. All the rest of my appointments were gone. Vanished. And of course I didn't discover this until I was on a trip for work, and had to deal with it when I got home two days later.

My non-work calendars remained gone. Fortunately, I have been a devoted user of Time Machine, Mac OS X's new backup software. I removed all the PocketSync software from my Mac, and then told Time Machine to restore the Calendar directory from two days earlier. Everything was back, aside from a couple of flights I'd added since that backup.

The moral of our story: the people who produce PocketSync do more harm than good, or at least they did to me. Oh, and there was one good outcome: the BlackBerry now charges both quickly and without complaint. At least it does on my Mac; I'm not sure I want to go through this kind of exercise with the Dell.

My day job involves tying together hundreds and thousands of servers to solve big problems for banks, brokerages and insurance companies. Some nitwit decided to call what we do Application Virtualization, which, while not inaccurate, caused no end of confusion with products from virtualization vendors like VMWare and... well... there aren't really any others that matter to the enterprise. And VMWare matters, like you wouldn't believe.

Which is why this article is such a comeuppance for VMWare and for everybody who sings its praises. In a nutshell, it seems a flaw in the latest VMWare update processes license expirations incorrectly. And anybody foolish enough to apply the update without rigorous testing is going to see their virtual machines refusing to start. Even worse, this is happening on a Tuesday, when Microsoft issues its weekly patches. And those patches force us to reboot...

Anybody interested in some application virtualization? I can almost guarantee we won't keep your servers from starting up...

Joel Spolsky has a new article on his website called "Making Wrong Code Look Wrong" that's well worth a read if you're a programmer. But it's about more than programming. Hidden in his story of Microsoft's Charles Simonyi and the Hungarian notation coding conventions he forced on the Windows world is something I'd not heard before: that what Simonyi developed and what Windows programmers were forced to use are two completely different things. Somehow in the depths of Microsoft history, as Hungarian notation moved from the Word and Excel teams to the larger Windows base, the rules got misunderstood and mistranslated. And in the process, nearly all the value got leeched out. They still had the syntax right; they just lost track of the semantics. Put another way, they knew there was value in what they were doing; they just didn't know how to do it so they actually got the value.

Sounds like another case of Cargo Cult Science to me.

If you've been keeping up with this blog (and who but me can make that claim? or would want to?), you know that I'm a fanatic Scaper, and that one aspect of my fanaticism is a little non-business I have going where I make Farscape-inspired pins and offer them to other equally obsessed fans. Anyway, having just received pin #5, it finally occurred to me that there has to be a better way to get the word out whenever a new pin comes out than to post to my usual web hangouts (here and here) and hope people notice before newer posts roll mine off the front page.

The answer, obviously, is to set up a mailing list. So I went to my web provider to see what they already have set up. They've done so well with every other service; surely they've taken care of something as common as mailing lists. And so they had. Sorta. It seems they've had a mailing list system in development since 1998 or so. It's been in beta almost that long. And it requires manual setup by one of their administrators before I can get going. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except that it's Christmas Eve. And somehow I don't think my mailing list request will be at the top of anybody's priority list.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. One posting mentioned a package called Dada Mail, available at mojo.skazat.com. Dada Mail is both free and simpler to install and use than the Mailman package my web provider has been beta-ing since the Clinton Administration. I had it up and running in a couple of minutes. It even provided me with a form, complete with the ever popular opt-in verification, to add to my pins page, as well as a setup for inviting all my Scaper buds to join the list.

Once again, free software comes to my rescue. And once again, the best thing about my web provider, beyond their utter reliability and their excellent prices, is that they let me control my own destiny. Freedom is a wonderful thing.