Murray’s Blog

There’s been so much wild speculation about what Steve Jobs is up to with the new Apple Boot Camp tool for Intel-based Macs. For those who haven’t been already inundated, Boot Camp is a boot manager that makes is possible to install both Max OS X and Microsoft Windows XP on 2 different partitions of an Intel Mac. When you start up the computer, you can pick which one will start up. (I don’t know if it provides any ability for one OS to see the partition of the other.)

Speculation has included some crazy ideas like Steve Jobs wanting to get out of the Operating System business by embracing Windows Vista, writing a OS X compatibility layer to cover old Mac software. Others talk about Windows Vista and OS X running “side by side” at the same time on Intel Macs. I’ve got my own 2¢ on a specific angle, and it has to do with my previous rant about how the new Windows Vista is nothing but Windows 2000/XP with a slight face-lift.
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Personal Information Management has been on my mind for years. There’s never a time when I’m not striving to improve the way I organize “bits of daily information” like my calendar, phone numbers, etc. In fact, a number of close friends and I have been experimenting with some of the (life) organizational techniques in the (slightly cultish) book Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Being a Mac enthusiast, I’ve embraced the Apple PIM (personal information management) offering, which consists of the Address Book, Mail, and “iCal” calendar application. One other very important addition is Mac’s iSync application which, at the cost of $100 per year for a .Mac account, allows me to effortlessly synchronize my Address Book and Calendar between all my Macs (my desktop and laptop) and my Palm Pilot and my Razr mobile phone. It also allows my Safari (the Mac web browser) bookmarks to be synchronized between the desktop and laptop.

iSync was the must-have application which locked me into Mac’s Address Book and iCal—and by extension, the Mail program which I really like anyway. Keeping contacts between the laptop and desktop was simply impossible and trying to do so drove be bonkers. I also hate hand-programming (and updating) phone numbers in my mobile phone. I revel in not being stuck when my phone dies, I change providers, or just want to upgrade it.

But this total buy-in has locked me into using iCal, whose “todo list” management is it’s weakest link.
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I’m posting this on a blog entry, not because I think my loyal blog readers are going to be interested by it, but someone out there on the web might run into this issue, and some googling suggests that nobody has reported on it.

There were two strange software failures going on recently, both of them quite troublesome, and it took until today to realize they were directly related.

On the one hand, I noticed that three people (who now work distantly together) were having problems with iChat on their G5 computers. Basically, an attempt to initiate a video chat would die with a cryptic—and misleading—message: Disconnected from Video Chat because: Can’t get video from the camera. The problem could only be solved by rebooting the computer.
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Arguably my website owes a lot to the iBlog application. When Apple released a free license of iBlog to all .Mac subscribers I downloaded it, played around with it, and quickly discovered a glaring security hole.

I wrote a warning article about the security issues and posted links to my article on a few Mac news sites. Thousands of visitors flooded my site and ever since I’d say it’s been “on the map”. Even though I have hardly done anything since December (until now) the site still draws dozens of people per day.

Later on I decided that if I was going to write an unpopular article about the application, I should really be fair and give the package a good shake-down and ended up writing a review of the package and got another several thousand visitors.

I would say the review was mostly favorable. The application had a couple bugs, particularly when publishing the blog, and especially if I tried ever jumping from one computer to another. Really I was forced to pick one computer and use it exclusively for my blogging activity. But otherwise I though the design was nice, the templates were customizable… enough. Of course, I wasn’t a blogging expert—I had just started about a month previous—so I didn’t have much of a comparison.

Time to return and write the epilogue, or more specifically, the post-mortem.
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