In a greedy attempt to win an interesting blogger contest, and because I see this stuff all the time when dealing with inherited code or answering questions in newsgroups or forums, I decided to put together a series of blog posts designed to help fellow SQL Server dabblers to kick some of the bad habits they’ve picked up over the years. 

It actually started long before the contest, but at the time was aimed more at picking up good habits.  Last year, I wrote an elaborate post detailing my own personal “best practices” checklist that I try to follow when writing stored procedures.  And earlier this year, I wrote about always terminating statements with semi-colons. 

It can be hard to enforce good habits; it is much easier to demonstrate why bad habits are bad, and drive positive habits simply by providing motivation to avoid the negative ones.  So, the series was kicked off last week, and so far I have written sixteen “here’s why you should stop doing x” articles.  There has been great feedback on the articles themselves, several discussions have launched because of them, and I’ve even spurred other people to write their own posts to complement the series.

Who knows, maybe the series will be good enough to see my name in lights at PASS.  But more importantly, maybe it will help you, or someone you work with, to kick some bad habits.

Bad habits to kick : ORDER BY ordinal
Bad habits to kick : using loops to populate large tables
Bad habits to kick : using old-style JOINs
Bad habits to kick : using table aliases like (a, b, c) or (t1, t2, t3)
Bad habits to kick : declaring VARCHAR without (length)
Bad habits to kick : using dashes and spaces in entity names
Bad habits to kick : using SELECT or RETURN instead of OUTPUT
Bad habits to kick : using SELECT * / omitting the column list
Bad habits to kick : avoiding the schema prefix
Bad habits to kick : inconsistent naming conventions
Bad habits to kick : making assumptions about IDENTITY
Bad habits to kick : choosing the wrong data type
Bad habits to kick : abusing triggers
Bad habits to kick : using the visual designers
Bad habits to kick : using alias types
Bad habits to kick : mis-handling date / range queries

I have to admit, I’m a little worried about the companies and the people that earn their living based on TV advertisements. I am seeing a gradual decline in the necessity of paying any attention to TV advertisements at all. Even the peak of SuperBowl commercial hilarity has come and gone. The consumer has undergone plenty of innovations to help them avoid commercials:

Good: services like DVR (or PVR for you Canadians, eh?) and TiVo allow you to record your favorite shows and watch them later.  The bonus: you can fast forward through commercials.  The advertisers aren’t crazy about this, obviously.  At one point TiVo even talked about superimposing ads on the screen while you were fast forwarding or rewinding; I don’t know if they ever implemented it.  In spite of the fact that I bought a lifetime subscription for my device, it died within a few days of the warranty expiration (and the license, at least at the time, was not transferable to a new device).

Better: some cable companies are offering normal television programs through their On Demand menu.  Forgot to record Heroes last night?  It’s okay, the cable company has your back.  Missed a segment of last Thursday’s CSI?  No problem, you can catch up.  You usually have to wait a day or two, and you still have to fast forward through commercials, of course, but recent episodes are not lost forever.

Best: Verizon FiOS, at least in my service area, combines the best of both worlds.  You can record the shows you want to watch within 24 hours (I often do this when I am going to be home late but still want to watch that night’s shows).  If you want to wait a day or two, you can get most programs (minus the entire Fox lineup) from the On Demand menu.  Huge bonus here: on some programs, FiOS even strips out the commercials for you.  I was shocked by this the other day when several breaks in a show had no plugs at all, and a couple of breaks simply had one promo for an upcoming show on the same network.  How are the advertisers okay with this?  I’m not sure.  There must be some kind of kickback system in place.

Now, for those of you who don’t like paying the cable or Verizon guy, web services like Hulu and Apple TV let you watch pretty much any TV episode you want; however, unlike the services above, they can force you to watch some commercials.  While I cannot vouch for my fictional price points, a good business model might be something like: give me 2 minutes of commercials per video for free, 1 minute of commercials for, say, $5.99 / month, and no commercials for, say, $12.99 / month.  For those that watch a lot of their TV this way, the additional cost (especially if it eliminates a cable bill) might be worth it - but expect to watch sports and other live events at a buddy’s house.  Through some kind of kickback scheme, the agencies et. al. will still get their money, and as for the advertisers themselves, well, there may be a need for advertising around the video player, or for better product placement in the shows themselves.

A few weeks ago, I poked fun at the overreactions to Gmail’s service outage on September 1st.  At the same time, however, I made it clear that, for some people, such a disruption can be a seriously harmful event.  The follow-up conversations from that blog post were not exactly what I intended, but I am glad they took place nonetheless.

This past week (Thursday, September 24th, to be precise), Gmail had another unplanned outage.  It wasn’t as serious or prolonged (mainly affecting Contacts and Chat, though many were without e-mail as well), but it did not go unnoticed, both within our office walls and on our twitter feeds.  And while many are sounding the Chicken Little alarms again, there are others who have a more positive opinion about what this means for the longevity of this type of software as a service.  For example, Phil Wainewright over at ZDNet had a great article entitled, “Why you should be glad about Gmail failures” — a must-read for anyone using Google’s enterprise offering, or having doubts about its viability.

Despite the flashy headline, not enough tech people are blogging.

Some are.  Those that are blogging usually write posts that fall into one of four categories:

1. elaborate posts describing how they set up a process, or solved an engineering problem, from beginning to end;
2. brief descriptions of something someone else wrote about, and a link;
3. a collection of URLs (links of the week); or,
4. things non-techie related, or at least outside their main discipline.

There are, of course, some other posts (and entire sites full of posts) that don’t fall into these four buckets.  Two that stand out to me, and that I don’t really qualify as “blog posts” at all:

• One is where another site simply slurps your RSS feed, regurgitating your excerpt and linking to the full article on your site.  This is kind of in category 2 above, but it is all automated… the person typically does not proactively say, “Hey, this blog post was really cool; I’m going to publicize it!”  They’re usually using software that merely attempts to mimic that functionality, and of course there is no commentary provided along with the link.

• Another category is quite similar, but instead of showing an excerpt and providing a link, they simply copy the entire article, without permission, and perhaps don’t even provide proper attribution to the original author.  I call this theft.  So does Brent Ozar.  And so does WikiPedia. It sounds ludicrous, but many sites are doing this - in the SQL Server realm, it seems every week there is a new site out there that is aggregating a lot of the more popular SQL Server bloggers, simply to drive traffic (and therefore ad revenue) to their own site.  This keeps readers from visiting the original authors’ sites, where the people who did the actual work might benefit (never mind that if they make updates or spark dialog on their own sites, the aggregators are typically not going to update their own stolen content). Now, keep in mind, some bloggers intentionally do this — they syndicate their posts on multiple sites (including some where the site owners charge for access).  I pointed out one such case to a colleague recently and, while he didn’t confirm to me that it was the case, I can only assume by his lack of response that it was intentional, or at least that he was already aware of the issue.

But back to the point of my post: not enough tech people are blogging.  And I’m not sure why.

Let me qualify my statement, because it is rather subjective.  There are plenty of technical people blogging.  The problem is that they’re not all blogging quality content, or at least not all of the time.  There are some bloggers out there, who I know personally, who are quite gifted and could share a lot of their technical knowledge to the benefit of many of us.  But they blog about things like what they’re having for dinner, a commercial they just saw on NBC, or how many songs they now have in their iTunes library.  And then there are others in that same boat who aren’t blogging at all.  For obvious reasons I don’t want to call anyone out directly, but let’s just say it’s a common observation.

A lot of people are afraid to blog because they feel they are just using the technology, and don’t feel they have much to offer that isn’t already covered in the documentation or in someone else’s blog.  I beg to differ.  It’s perfectly fine to regurgitate documentation or to expand on someone else’s writing.  As long as you are not performing huge Copy + Paste jobs, you will be adding your own spin to the content… maybe sparking ideas for how the product or technology could be improved, how your readers could make better use of what’s already there, or your experience with the technology that falls outside of what might be explained in the documentation.  Even if you just have links to sites with further details, by posting about them you are improving their discoverability.  And maybe just the way you interpret the documentation and write about it in your writing style will help people better understand the topic or reinforce what they interpreted on their own.

For example, imagine the following blog post about advanced memory management in SQL Server didn’t exist, and you needed to find out allof this information on your own.  Imagine how many different searches of MSDN/TechNet you’d have to exercise before you could assemble it all?  And still it wouldn’t necessarily be explained in the right way, because the documentation for extremely advanced topics such as this are usually (and sometimes necessarily) cryptic:

Fun with Locked Pages, AWE, Task Manager, and the Working Set…

Another example is a recent blog post I wrote.  I created a stored procedure that would assist with dynamic memory management in a multi-node cluster failover scenario.  There is nothing genius or revolutionary about the code that I wrote, but now if someone is searching for a way to do this, they can borrow from my blog post instead of re-inventing the wheel and writing the code from scratch:

Managing Active/Active cluster failovers with different hardware

So why aren’t you blogging? 

Are you nervous?  Are you not sure where to start?  Brent Ozar has some great posts on blogging, including a 5-part series describing ways you can blog better.  Need more inspiration than that?  Dustin Marx had a great write-up a couple of weekends ago, explaining his thoughts on why more tech people should blog.  I recently touched on some similar points also, over on sqlblog.com.

So again, why aren’t you blogging? 

Jump in.  Write about the things you know about.  Write about things you’ve tried, whether or not you were successful.  But for the sake of all of our sanity, please don’t blog that you are microwaving a Swanson chicken dinner, or that you just got back from the busy mall.  Save those little tidbits for your Twitter or Facebook status updates.

Boston, Mass. and Reno, Nev. (Sept. 14, 2009) – One to One Interactive (OTO), a Boston-based digital marketing firm recently ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, announced today a definitive agreement to merge Twelve Horses, with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada, into its OTOi and OTOlabs divisions.

The merger expands One to One Interactive’s comprehensive suite of digital marketing services, technology and media offerings by incorporating Twelve Horses’ agency practice and innovative marketing products.

The move represents the fourth time OTO has grown through a merger or acquisition, a strategy the company embarked on beginning in 2005. The addition of Twelve Horses gives OTO a significant presence in the West and Twelve Horses’ many East Coast based clients will welcome the OTO East Coast footprint. Both OTO and Twelve Horses service accounts in Europe and Asia. Twelve Horses, frequently recognized for its innovative work in the travel-tourism industry, also services such global clients as J.P. Morgan Chase, Deloitte and Bill Me Later, a PayPal company.

The western-based Twelve Horses will integrate its trademarked and patented technology platforms, including MessageMaker™, which delivers multi-channel direct digital communications to customers via email, web, mobile, voice and fax messaging, into current One to One Interactive offerings. As a result, OTO clients, which currently include Comcast, Rite-Aid, McGraw-Hill and Partners Healthcare, will be able to leverage the company’s expanded portfolio of services and tools in executing their one-to-one digital marketing strategies.

“Our merger with Twelve Horses enhances and extends OTO into the type of unique firm brands seek in today’s digital marketing landscape, one that can come to the table with leading marketing services strategy and execution capabilities as well as a full suite of proven technology products to integrate and deploy quickly and efficiently,” said Ian Karnell, chief executive officer of One to One Interactive. “By leveraging the platform capabilities and innovative intellectual property we’ve acquired through our expansion efforts, our clients can expect greater efficiency in strategy execution and in speed to market, which is essential for remaining at the forefront of the marketing evolution.”

With its newly expanded product and service lines, nearly 30 percent of revenues will be driven from the firm’s unique portfolio of permission based digital messaging  technologies, which include multi-channel messaging platforms for email and mobile marketing, content management systems, ticketing and event management, desktop widgets and plug-ins for improved workflow. A large portion of the remaining revenue stream will continue to be generated from services such as branding, web site development, customer relationship management, search engine marketing and social web strategies.

“At a time where every marketing services firm is being asked to bring more to the table, our clients benefit from this merger by having immediate access to a broader organization with incredible experience and depth in quality, customizable technology products and solutions,” explained Twelve Horses CEO David LaPlante, who will serve as OTO’s Senior Vice-President of Sales & Marketing. “Our newly combined company significantly enhances our ability to accommodate our client’s broad and often unique set of marketing services and technology dependent requests, as opposed to simply providing a one-size fits-all-solution.”

The merger is designed to accelerate growth and innovation, including a new management structure to help achieve that vision. One to One Interactive Chief Executive Officer Ian Karnell and President Jeremi Karnell will remain in their roles, while Twelve Horses executives Steve Spencer and Martin Gastanaga will serve as senior executives for its OTOlabs division. The company will remain headquartered in Charlestown, Mass., with additional offices in Baltimore, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City and London.

About One to One Interactive
Complete One-To-One Solutions for Brands, Agencies, and Publishers

Established in 1997, One to One Interactive is the first enterprise to assemble a complete solution for brands, agencies, and publishers executing one-to-one marketing strategies. By bringing together one of the nation’s leading digital marketing agencies, the worlds most comprehensive portfolio of permission marketing platforms, performance marketing solutions, and cutting edge neuromarketing research techniques, the companies of One to One Interactive build informed and creative customer/constituent strategies on the belief that digital media’s ability to enable engaging one-to-one dialogues is the future of marketing.

One to One Interactive has recently been ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, one of the Top Interactive firms in the United States according to B2B Magazine, and one of the world’s 20 hottest independent digital marketing firms by Ad Age.

Please visit one of One to One Interactive’s web sites for more information:

    * One to One Interactive: www.onetooneinteractive.com

    * OTOi: www.otoi.com

    * OTOlabs: www.otolabs.com

    * OTOnetworks: www.otonetworks.com

    * OTOinsights: www.otoinsights.com

About Twelve Horses
Twelve Horses has historically been a global provider of Web site design and development, multi-channel marketing, business process automation, customer relationship management (CRM), search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Operating as an online brand marketing and messaging technology agency, Twelve Horses assisted businesses in translating and transforming their brands online.

Twelve Horses provides One to One Interactive with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada.

Twelve Horses has been recognized for being a “Top 30 Innovative Company” by Utah Business, and “Technology Company of the Year” by the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada.

Please visit Twelve Horses web site for more information: www.twelvehorses.com

For more information call 1-617-425-7369 or visit www.onetooneinteractive.com

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###

Earlier today, GMail went down hard. In the web interface, you might have seen these symptoms:

...taking longer than usual...

...502 server error...

...still working...

...encountered a problem...

And on the iPhone, you may have seen some of these:

In fact I am still seeing the SMTP problem on the right. But IMAP was working throughout the whole ordeal.

On Twitter, Facebook and the like, I immediately observed a lot of chatter about the perils of software as a service, how you can’t trust the cloud, and similar Chicken Little-type symptoms.  While GMail isn’t really “the cloud,” this outage shows that a virtually unlimited budget and some of the smartest minds in the industry can still leave points of failure.  One quote was, “See what happens?  Now imagine if that was something important!”

Well, e-mail is important, frankly. I make fun of social networking sites like Twitter, who fail to prepare for scale (or are simply blindsided by overnight success).  But in this case, I am not belittling the outcry at all, even from grandma waiting for her WalMart newsletter to arrive in her Inbox.  For companies like ours, that have switched from corporate platforms (read:Exchange + Office) to Google Docs, much of our work can come to an absolute standstill when this kind of thing happens. While it is not the end of the end, as the title of this post suggests, an outage of an hour (in this case it was about two hours) can range from a minor inconvenience to a complete disaster.  Don’t get me wrong; an hour without e-mail can often be like a mini-vacation, but it can also be very stressful.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough what this outage was all about. Several news outlets have already reported the issue (Washington Post, USA Today, NY Times).  The latter has instructions on how to check GMail server status.

In the meantime, what do you think?  Has this event changed your perception of GMail, the reliability of “local” e-mail services like Exchange or Lotus Notes, or Google’s ability to provide stable software-as-a-service?

For the Mac users in the crowd, I’m sure there are a lot of people wondering, “Should I upgrade to Snow Leopard?  Is it worth $29?”  For me, even though I have encountered a fair amount of issues so far, this upgrade has more than paid for itself.

 
The Good Stuff

Native Cisco VPN support

Far and away the number one reason I decided to be an early adopter.  And even without any of the other benefits, still worth the price of admission.  Several times over.  Why?  This week alone, I’ve had 6 kernel panics created by that nasty Cisco VPN client.  I upgraded from 4.9.01 (0100) to 4.9.01 (0180), and that didn’t help; it may have even made things worse.  What great timing for an update to the operating system that now includes connectivity for Cisco VPNs. 

How do you set it up?  This is more for the benefit of my co-workers, but maybe it will help you too, if you have a similar setup to ours.  We use older Cisco VPN concentrators that don’t seem to play nice with any of the alternative clients, and for which Cisco has refused to publish x64 software for the Windows platform (one of the reasons I need VPN connectivity directly from my Macs, so that my virtual machines can connect to work, and I can still do Windows-type stuff).  Tangent alert.  To set up Snow Leopard to connect to this type of interface:

1. Go to System Preferences / Network
2. Click on the “+” at the bottom left to add a new service
3. Choose Interface = “VPN”, VPN Type = “Cisco IPSec”, and provide a Service Name:
    
    
4. Click Create
5. In the “Server Address” field, enter the IP address of the concentrator, and enter the account name (this is going to be *your* domain account username, not the group name; that’ll come in a minute).  Don’t bother entering the password, as the server is still going to prompt you even if you save it here:
    
    
6. Click Authentication Settings…
7. Enter the VPN group name under “Group Name”, and enter the “Shared Secret” (which is the group name password):
    
    
8. Click OK, then Apply, then Connect.

That’s it!  If your gear is set up like ours, you should be all set.  You’ll be able to connect and disconnect right from the menu bar without opening any 3rd party applications from the dock.  And now you can take that Cisco VPN client and eradicate it from your system.  I wouldn’t just drag the application into the trash though, as there are little bits in your system.  Instead, open up a terminal window and run:

sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall

It will prompt you for your password, then whether or not you want to keep existing profiles etc.  I’ll leave that decision as an exercise to the reader.  I was so happy to do this, I honestly don’t remember how I answered the question.

Speed

I know it’s easy to say, “Wow, this feels faster!”  But I’m going to say it anyway: “Wow, this feels faster!”  I’m sure plenty of benchmarks will come out over the next few months, but right now, I certainly feel some applications and functions have a bit more pep than they used to.  Time will tell if that is just “fresh OS buzz” and whether or not I’ll have a hangover in a week.

Little UI tweaks

There are several UI tweaks that are anywhere from eye candy to downright useful.  A couple of my favorites are the new Expose and Dock integration (you can now Expose just the windows from a single application by holding down its icon on the dock), much easier access to scanners and screen shots from Preview, and better stacks. Here is a screen shot of the Expose / Dock integration (click to enlarge, at least a little, sorry my screens are large):

Tidying up

An upgrade always has me cleaning things up.  I cleaned up my desktop, several of my user folders, and I even ran some of the cleanup / maintenance tasks in OnyX 2.0.5 (I did this BEFORE upgrade, because I am not sure OnyX will still run under 10.6).  And it’s just so nice to see the “About this Mac” screen showing 10.6, without any silly minor update suffixes.

Aaaahhh.  So nice.  I’m sure 10.6.1 isn’t light years away, but for now, I’m feeling pretty clean.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t come across any problems!  On the contrary…

The Bad Stuff

Screen shots

Cmd+Shift+4 has easily been my most often-used key combination since I switched to the Mac, since I end up taking a lot of screen shots to demonstrate bugs or unexpected behavior (or to prove that I’m not crazy).  Sadly, the move to Snow Leopard has made a drastic change to the way the output files are named.  I did not see this change documented anywhere, but I’ll be honest, my searches were not exhaustive.  Screen shots used to come out in this format:

Picture %n.png

Where %n was an increasing integer; this is the same way that Photo Booth used to work.  I guess they must have had complaints about the way the numbers were chosen, as I guess if you created Picture 1, Picture 2, and Picture 3, then deleted Picture 2, the next Picture would be Picture 2, and now they didn’t sort by name.  Well, the way they “fixed” this is that the output for Photo Booth and Screen Shots is now:

Photo on 2009-08-28 at 20.06.jpg
Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 7.33.34 PM.png

I like how they assume that a screen shot needs to be unique to the second, but I would never take more than one Photo Booth picture in the same minute.  In fact it gets even better.  If you take two Photo Booth shots within the same minute, you get file names like this:

Photo on 2009-08-28 at 20.29.jpg
Photo on 2009-08-28 at 20.29 #2.jpg

Yuck.  But in reality, I’m more worried about the screen shots.  So far my only workaround has been to adapt a custom script, and use Quicksilver B56a7 to assign a custom keyboard shortcut (in my case, I chose Ctrl+Cmd+4) in order to get a more sensible file name.  Since AppleScript is not my strong suit, I ended up just using the date/time still (since I didn’t want to check the folder every time to figure out the max n + 1), but I shortened it up a bit.  My output format is now:

SS.08.28.20.15.32.png

That’s SS(for screen shot).MM.DD.mm.hh.ss.png.  I’ll agree that it isn’t all that much nicer, but it’s not overly long and verbose.  I am not bothering with the year because I imagine the odds are pretty low that *exactly* a year from now, to the second, I am going to take a screen shot.   On the other hand, adding the year will ensure that the file names will always sort both chronologically and by name.  Hmmm.  (For now, you can download the version of the script (without the year) here.  And if you want the year, it won’t be very hard for you to add it.)  If you know how to adjust the script to check the folder for the max file name, and add 1, I’m all ears.

I am also not going to bother trying to figure out how to hack Photo Booth.  I just hope Apple releases some information about how users can revert to the previous behavior without jumping through all those hoops.

Office 2008

Microsoft’s official party line is that Office 2008 is supported in Snow Leopard.  Twice when I was trying to attach one of those long-named screen shots to a newsgroup post in Entourage, and every time I save an attachment from a newsgroup post already on the server, Entourage crashes.  When I rebooted, the drafts for the messages I was trying to post were recovered, and in spite of the crash, when I was saving attachments from existing messages, they did save correctly.  I am not sure if this problem had to do with the built-in Mail taking over as the default e-mail handler, but I am hoping that the error reports that will undoubtedly start pouring in to Microsoft’s servers will spur some action.  Or maybe they will just defer the work and we’ll see a stable version of Outlook toward the end of next year.

And I haven’t tried Word, Excel or PowerPoint yet.  I’ll post back here as I’ve had a chance to use the other applications in the suite.  Exchange support that is now built into Mail, iCal etc. would have been nice if it had arrived in Tiger or Leopard.  Maybe it’s a welcome addition for you; as of now, we’re already committed to moving away from Exchange (in fact we have pretty much completed the transition to GMail), so that part is too little too late for us.

Firefox 3.5.2

I am running Firefox 3.5.2, and uploading screen shots into this very WordPress admin screen has crashed the browser four times already.  I’ve been running 3.5 for a long time, and this is the first blog post where I’ve had this problem.  So, something to watch out for, until Firefox and/or Apple come out with a fix.  If you are using some kind of editor for posting images, and if it has a “simple” alternative, use it.  That “fix” worked for me.

The fact is probably that I should be using Safari, as it has been baked into OS X better than Firefox will be for some time to come.  There are just so many cooler extensions for Firefox…

Incompatibility

For the most part, I have been pretty lucky.  I don’t use the majority of the applications that are listed as being incompatible with Snow Leopard, as listed at wikidot.com.  The only major one so far for me has been iStat Menus, which simply refuses to load.  Other than a couple of issues with Firefox and Entourage, everything else seems to be working great.  I was most nervous about Photoshop CS4, but I guess it’s just the old versions that have issues.  Several vendors have already published updates today, making their stuff 10.6-friendly, such as Marcel Bresink’s TinkerTool.  Many of these other guys are surely not far behind.

Weird anomaly on first boot

When I first booted (on both systems I’ve upgraded so far), I saw these two weird dialogs:

I have no idea what “System Events.app” is, or what will happen if I choose one of the apps listed.  So in both cases I hit Cancel to the two dialogs.  Not sure if I can give you any advice about what to do there, except that if you choose to Cancel, nothing bad will happen, as far as I can tell.  My guess is it has something to do with startup or preference panel items that no longer work, such as the Cisco VPN client or Flip4Mac.  My only hint here is that I received about a dozen errors like this during setup:

Aug 28 14:36:12 new-host-2 Unknown[80]:
2009-08-28 14:36:12.181 Mac OS X Installer[161:760f]
PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier:
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Library/Receipts/Flip4Mac Web Plugins.pkg
…
Aug 28 14:36:18 new-host-2 Unknown[80]:
2009-08-28 14:36:18.176 Mac OS X Installer[161:760f]
PackageKit: *** Missing bundle identifier:
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Library/Receipts/vpnclient-startup.pkg

Since I had read elsewhere that Flip4Mac would not work under Snow Leopard anyway, I simply removed the preference panel to avoid any further problems (as System Events.app is typically related to startup items).  And as I mentioned above, Cisco’s VPN client was the very first thing I removed.

Conclusion

Do I think the upgrade is worth it? Absolutely. But that’s about all I have on my upgrade process for now.  As I learn more (particularly about Office, and about any fixes for the above issues), I’ll come back and post updates.

In the meantime, some other reviews I found interesting:

Jason Snell @ MacWorld

Digital Daily by John Paczkowski

Andy Ihnatko @ Chicago Sun-Times

A week ago, we switched to Google for e-mail, calendar, documents, and collaboration. While our IT department did a great job in planning the move and ensuring that the migration went smoothly, there have been mixed reviews about what we have done and where we are going.

I’m sure some people are still easing their way into it; I, on the other hand, have said goodbye for good, at least to Outlook (the rest of the Office suite may take more time). I installed the Outlook synchronization tool, but did not bother letting it finish synchronizing; I haven’t felt the need to open Outlook since.

During the past week, I have learned a lot about the GMail interface; while I have had a GMail account since it was invitation-only, I have rarely used the web interface except by necessity (for example, at a hotel lobby terminal while on “vacation”). I thought I would share some of the features that I like, and a few that annoy me.

Search, Search, Search!

Let’s face it, this is what Google does best. Everything else they do is merely a by-product of all the money they’ve made doing search well. In this case, while I was initially skeptical about how fast a web-based search of my humongous inbox would be, GMail’s search does laps around Outlook’s. It is almost as if Outlook was going out and searching a stack of papers on my desk. Filters are very useful as well, though I believe I have only touched the surface there. Anyway, search is easily my favorite feature, and if you’re being honest (and didn’t just learn about Google today), you shouldn’t be surprised by this at all.

Consistency

Using the web-based version of GMail (in addition to synching with my iPhone and Entourage clients), I get a consistent look and feel no matter which operating system I’m using, which computer I’m on, or which browser I’m using. The web-based interface to GMail looks and feels almost identical whether I’m on Safari/Firefox in Leopard, or IE8/Firefox in Windows Server 2008 R2. Previously, I was using Outlook when I was physically at work, and Entourage otherwise. As you’re probably aware, Entourage is not simply a re-branded Outlook on the Mac; it is a completely different program that shares some features. I am curious what it will really mean when the next version of Mac:Office replaces Entourage with Outlook. Will it be a re-badged Entourage, or will they really make the programs more consistent across the two platforms, as they have promised? This hasn’t happened yet with Word or Excel, so I suppose time will tell.

Themes

Since I get bored easily of the same graphical interface, I like that you can change it up with Themes. I like several, but currently my favorite is “Mountains.” Also, since I now use multiple different accounts in separate browser tabs or windows, it is useful to have a different visual look and feel; for right now, I know that my work account is “Mountains” and that my personal account is not. Otherwise it would be easy to forget which account I was in and click “Compose Mail”… sending a message to a work contact from my personal account, or vice-versa.

Keyboard shortcuts

If you are a heavy keyboard user, you may want to check out keyboard shortcuts. One of my colleagues swears by them, saying that they make him much more productive. I’m sure I will try them out at some point, but I have enough trouble using the keyboard as it is; it’s nice to use a mouse once in a while, where you don’t have to associate a key to an action. You can turn them on under the main Settings / General page.

Snippets

By default, the Inbox shows portions of the message along with the subject.  This makes the Inbox look a lot more cluttered to me, and makes it harder to spot conversations of interest (since every line has text all the way across the screen).  You can turn snippets off under Settings / General.

Labs features

I currently have 9 “Labs” features enabled. These are features that have been developed, but are either still in experimental / beta phase, or are still being assessed for inclusion in the main feature set. A little green beaker icon in the main toolbar brings you right to the Labs page, but you can also get there from the Settings tab.  (I do wish the features were listed alphabetically, or organized by category.)  A tooltip over the beaker tells you how many of these features you have enabled. Here are five that I like most (or that I think you might like):

Fixed width font

This features allows you to view a message using a fixed width font (I believe it uses Courier New). This is handy if you pass a lot of code snippets back and forth over e-mail, which is pretty common in the OTO labs group.

Muzzle

This simply suppresses status updates of the contacts in your chat list. Since all that is important to me is whether the person is online or not, and since I get that with the little icon beside their name anyway, turning this feature on saves some screen space and

Quote selected text

I’ve always liked this feature in Entourage, where you can reply to someone and the message will only include the portion you’ve highlighted. Sometimes this bites me, if I’ve inadvertently selected something, then hit reply before I’ve realized it.

Right-side chat

If you use the chat feature a lot, you may want to enable this feature so that the chat panel sits at the top right of the page. I don’t really use it, and I don’t like the real estate it takes up from the Inbox, so I disabled it pretty quickly.  Note that you can also minimize the amount of space that the Chat, Invite etc. panels take up, by clicking the little plus/minus icon at the top left:

Title Tweaks

The default behavior of the tab/window title for the Inbox is to show the account you are in, and then the number of unread messages afterward. Unfortunately, if it is not the highlighted tab, this usually means that you can’t see the count, so you can’t tell when you’ve received a new message without Turning the “Title Tweaks” feature on was essential for me — now I can leave a browser window floating in the background, and immediately see when I have received a new message, regardless of how much room is on the tab:

Calendars / meeting requests

I’m not a big fan of the new calendar; I liked Outlook’s better. The meeting requests we get are also in a format I’m not overly fond of:

ANd to make matters worse, nothing in the Inbox makes a meeting request stand out as a calendar item vs. a normal e-mail.  I guess I will get used to it, but I imagine at first I might miss the occasional meeting request, since there are no notifications like we had a week ago.  Speaking of which…

No notifications

Notifications are missing. I like that Entourage and Outlook make it very easy to see when you have new mail, without needing to have the application window visible (and on the Mac, Entourage can interact with Growl as well). I am hoping that GMail introduces a labs feature that implements some kind of toolbar notification system for Windows and/or an interface into Growl on the Mac.

Message threading

I don’t like the way messages are now threaded; I have to expand each thread to get a feel for when the majority of the conversation took place. This may not be important for you, but for me, I typically wait until the last minute to fill out my timesheet. As such, I am used to going through my e-mail conversations over the past week, and this gives me a rough idea of how much time I spent on each project or task. Now this is a little tougher than it was in Outlook. I haven’t yet found an option that will allow me to display messages as a flattened list instead of as grouped conversations.

Labels vs. folders   Using labels instead of more traditional folders may be an interesting paradigm shift for a lot of people. I still think of them as folders, regardless of what they are called, but I sure wish I could display them in a tree format. My whole reason for creating a folder hierarchy in Outlook was so that (n) folders could be one click away, but tucked away without taking up (n) slots in my folder list. Now my folder tree is just a flattened list, as you can see from this beautiful screen shot on the right:

The fact that it’s a web form

The other day I was drafting a rather long e-mail message, and had been working on it for about 45 minutes. At one point I decided to indent a paragraph, and out of habit, I hit Tab while my cursor was in the body. Not realizing I had tabbed out of the control (and onto the Send button), I hit the spacebar, and when I looked at the screen, I was back in my Inbox. I navigated around frantically, expecting to be able to hit back or find my message in my drafts folder, but no such luck — as it turns out, the unfinished message was immediately sent to several recipients. So at least the message wasn’t lost, but that may be a hard habit to break for some of you, as well.

Web Clips

These are little ads that appear above your Inbox:

They don’t really do much for me except take up one line of real estate “above the fold”… you can turn them off completely on the “Web Clips” tab under Settings; just uncheck “Show my web clips above the Inbox” and then go back to your Inbox. You may be prompted if you want to save the changes.

Conclusion

No platform can please everyone. But overall, I think the move to GMail was a good one, and there are plenty of ways to tweak your experience so you can get the most out of it.