I hate to use a cliché, but you really can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I logged in to Flickr yesterday rather innocently – I was updating some information on my Facebook profile and couldn’t remember exactly when I moved out of my first apartment in Indianapolis, many moons ago. I opened a new tab in my browser, navigated to Flickr, and – holy crap! A new site design! And what’s this about Pro accounts? I have a Pro account and have for awhile now (it was cheap enough to justify the annual $25, and it was a great way to backup all my photos), so I clicked the little alert to see what had changed.

I figured that this was something that had been rolled out a few weeks ago, and I was just behind the curve. Turns out that no, I had walked smack into the middle of a huge user fallout only hours after Flickr had made their new design and account upgrades public.

Now, I have been around on social networking sites for awhile – I’ve been through at least three major Facebook upgrades, and before Mark Zuckerburg even started that site, I was using LiveJournal very actively (some might even say obsessively). Every time that a change was made to these social networking sites, people inevitably lost their minds. There would be cries of “I’m leaving and never coming back!” and “So this is how you treat your paying users?!” and “Why didn’t you let me opt-out?!” and on and on. Of course, once the brouhaha had passed, things went back to normal and users generally found that it wasn’t actually all that hard to adapt to a new environment on their favorite website(s).

What I find absolutely fascinating is that these changes to Flickr – both the UI changes and the major overhaul of the paid options – were long overdue. We as users on the Internet have become so accustomed to getting what we want that we generally feel very entitled to things. No services provider has any obligation to notify their users of a UI change. Likewise, there is no obligation to provide an “opt-out”. I mean, really. When did we become so needy? Did people inch to the brink of hysteria any time their favorite print magazine or newspaper made changes to the logo, the layout, or the position of the table of contents? In the 80s, did the publishers of Time and Newsweek and the Washington Post find themselves constantly inundated with angry letters from subscribers, demanding to be given the option to op-out of design and layout changes and threatening to cancel their subscriptions if their demands were not met?

Adapting is part of life. If you want everything to be exactly the same all the time, get off the Internet and move somewhere really boring, like North Dakota. Otherwise, perhaps its time that the high-maintenance babies of the Internet accept that things will change, and you either roll with it or you don’t – but regardless of your decision, it might be worth keeping your mouth shut for once.

Now that my social commentary is out of the way, let’s look at what Flickr’s changes are actually about.

R.I.P. Pro Accounts

Pro accounts are officially dead. This is sad for Pro users, but completely anticipated in my personal opinion. You may be wondering what a Pro account actually gave users for their hard-earned annual $25…

• No ads – This is a little humorous to me. It’s extremely easy to eradicate ads from your browsing experience. AdBlock+ is available for Chrome and Firefox, it’s free, and combined with the Element Hiding Helper addon, it’s extremely effective.
• Unlimited bandwidth and storage – Instead of going by storage used, Flickr used to go by bandwidth consumed. Free users were allowed to upload 300MB per month, and only two videos, at a maximum of 90 seconds long and only 150MB per video.
• Full-resolution photos – Free users were only able to view and download resized and compressed versions of their photos. Pro users could access the original, full-resolution copy of each image, which made Flickr a very inexpensive way to archive a huge quantity of high-resolution photos.
• Access to more images – Flickr Pro users could view all their photos, whereas free users were only able to see their 200 most recent photos.
• Pool membership max increased – Pro users could join up to 60 photo pools (communities where you can share your photos with others in the pool, view their photos, and post in the forums). Free users were limited to ten pools.

There are a few other benefits, but you get the idea. The limits on pool membership and number of accessible images was less about “we can’t afford to give you this” and more about “we want compelling reasons for you to spend money on a Pro account”. The bandwidth and storage limits, however, were very cost-oriented. Storage is a lot cheaper than it used to be, and there’s a lot more of it, but that doesn’t make it free. All told, $25 a year for unlimited photo storage is an excellent deal, especially if you’re a professional (or dedicated enthusiast).

It was just too good of a deal for 2013. Times have changed quite a bit since Flickr was introduced nine years ago, in 2004. Looking at DPReview’s archive of camera models from that year, your average affordable consumer point-and-shoot camera could shoot images anywhere from four to seven megapixels. According to this handy calculator, that’s anywhere from one two two megabytes per photo. Compare that to today’s hardware, where $150 can get you a 16MP camera that takes photos around 3.5MB per image. It doesn’t seem like a huge increase, but it does add up when you consider that there are people uploading thousands and thousands of photos every month.

Not only that, but DSLRs have become considerably more affordable, and more hobbyists are investing in quality camera equipment – which means they’re interested in uploading much larger images to sites like Flickr. Couple that with the fact that average broadband Internet connections have exponentially increased in both upload and download speeds, and users can now upload a massive quantity of huge photos very quickly. No longer can $25 per user sustain the bandwidth and storage usage that Flickr is seeing.

Instead of archaic limits for free users, everyone gets a flat terabyte of photo storage and no limits on viewing old photos or downloading high-resolution copies of images. Overall, this is a major upgrade for many Flickr account holders.

The Two Terabyte Upgrade

It absolutely makes sense that Flickr needed to make a change. Their business model was, I’m almost certain, costing them a lot of money. It may not have been losses in the millions or billions, but the powers that be knew that they needed to make some changes in order to stay competitive and profitable. A terabyte of storage is more than enough for most users. For the very small percentage of users who legitimately need more storage, a $500-per-year option is available to add another terabyte of storage.

I’ll grant that Flickr should make some other more affordable plans available, but it turns out that $500 for a terabyte of cloud storage is actually a pretty good deal. Box offers a terabyte storage upgrade for $540 a year, with three user accounts at $15 per month per user. Dropbox has no terabyte option, but 500GB storage is $500 a year. Skydrive has no terabyte option either, but the 100GB option is $50 a year – which would theoretically be $500/year for a terabyte. Google Drive is even more expensive, at $600 a year for a terabyte. Once you step back and look at the competition, Flickr’s pricing is on par with other services.

The Ad-Free Upgrade

If you want to go ad-free and are morally opposed to using an ad blocker in your browser, you can pay $50 a year for an ad-free experience. This option is definitely a total ripoff. It’s easy to remove ads for free, and $50 is a hefty price tag to “legitimately” remove ads from Flickr. That’s all I really have to say about that one.

Interface Changes – Always A Challenge

Even bigger than the account changes are the UI changes. Flickr’s design was old and stale – the layout was fixed-width with an XGA (1024×768) viewport in mind. This was fine in the mid-2000s, when most laptops and many desktops used XGA displays. Today, every laptop on the market is widescreen, and even the most inexpensive models are equipped with a WSXGA (1280×800) display. If you’re still designing your websites with a 1024-pixel maximum width in mind, you’re stuck in 2002. It’s time to update.

The new interface puts your photos front-and-center. Instead of a small image in the corner of the page that you have to click through to see a larger version, you can now see large, beautiful photos as the focal point of any user on the site. Other content is still there – EXIF data, comments, tagging, and sharing, but the star of the show is your photos.

In the past, when social sites were implementing major UI overhauls, there was usually a fairly lengthy beta rollout, where users could choose to try the new interface before it went live to the entire site. There would inevitably be a lot of bitching about the new interface, but as we have seen time and again with Facebook’s changes, people generally suck it up and get used to it.

A beta rollout of major UI changes can allow a services provider to work out bugs and issues that their private testers may not have discovered. Flickr’s lack of a public beta means that there will probably be more bugs in the interface, but if they handle those quickly and efficiently, it shouldn’t be too painful a transition.

In the meantime, I can’t help but laugh at how very angry some of Flickr’s users are over these changes.

I recently found myself in need of a driver for Mac OS 9. Since the hardware I was using was ancient and from a now-defunct company and OS 9 is equally ancient, this task was much easier Googled than actually completed.

After a lot of searching, I had to admit defeat and use the much-maligned Driver Guide to get the driver.

Now, I primarily use Windows at home. I have machines that run Linux, OS X, and old versions of the Mac OS, but for the most part, I use Windows 7. Note that the website tells me that only “Premium Members” get access to direct downloads, for the low, low price of only $15 a year. Otherwise, I have to use their “helpful” installer tool.

Although there’s a checkbox to disable the installer, this actually just displays a popup informing you that for “only” $2.99, you can buy the direct download.

Now, as a Windows user, this is your only choice. So, if you download the installer and run it, you are presented with what looks like a tool for downloading the file.

Don’t get me wrong – download tools have their uses. Microsoft used to use a downloader application to handle downloading large ISOs from TechNet. You could use direct download links, but I found that Microsoft’s tool was noticeably faster and, since it didn’t contain any malware, I had no problems with using it.

This is a different story.

Once you get past the first screen informing you that you’re about to download your file, you are presented with this:

How nice!  A quick option! After all “Advanced” options in most installers are for people who know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, in this case, the “Advanced” option is really just your only route to opt-out of installing a crap toolbar that hijacks your browser’s default search engine, home page, AND new tab page.

So, skip past that, then…

This is one that really drives me mad – sneaking in additional malware by making the “Accept” button for the malware visually appear like “continue” or “next” in your installer. If you click “Accept”, this takes you to the next step – but it also will install adware on your machine that will hijack your browser and puke “coupons” all over the place when you’re browsing the web.

If you’ve managed to make it this far without throwing your computer out the window we’re now on the third attempt to slide malware, adware, and/or general crapware in with the driver you want or need.

Another don’t-forget-to-uncheck-the-box screen – and keep in mind, once you click “Next”, you can’t go back.

Browse Android apps from my desktop? Really? What I don’t even have an Android device? This one is even worse on the visual cues – the green button is labeled “Next Step”, while the gray “Decline” button will still take you to the next step, but skip the adware.

By the way, for those keeping score – we’re on our FIFTH crapware screen.

And, finally, we get to the point where the software actually downloads the file – without letting you choose where to save your download.

When you click “Next Step” and then the “Close” button to exit the downloader, it adds one last jab into the mix by popping up a new browser window begging you to buy their premium membership.

All in all, this is a ridiculous process just to get a driver. The worst part is that, in many cases, the driver in question can be obtained free of charge and without the bullshit directly from the hardware manufacturer. I had no choice in my particular situation because the driver I needed was, unfortunately, impossible to find anywhere else.

However, all this being as it is, the real kicker is that Driver Guide doesn’t force this on non-Windows users. All you have to do is change your browser’s user agent string, which for Firefox can be accomplished through an extension like Override User Agent. If you switch your user agent to a search bot, Safari (which changes the OS to OS X), or a mobile device, the checkbox is gone, and the site magically will let you download your file directly.

I have some pretty serious beef with this. In the end-user computing world, this kind of behavior is more or less equivalent to the predatory lending practices that got banks into serious trouble and ruined peoples’ lives. Sure, several rounds of crapware just to access a single file won’t ruin your life, but for your average uninformed user, it’s going to cause a lot of headaches with a device they use daily.

Can you imagine if you had to plaster advertising stickers all over your car just to be allowed to get gas – or pay a highly inflated fee per gallon to avoid becoming a moving billboard? That concept is ridiculous. Unfortunately, a site as long-running and established as Driver Guide is more interested in underhanded, predatory advertising tactics than providing a useful service to their customers.

I have more respect for shady file hosting sites that have slower download speeds for “non-premium” users than this kind of behavior. At least with those sites, all you have to do is see a couple annoying ads in your browser – which can easily be blocked with something like AdBlock Plus – to get the files you want.

I’m thoroughly disappointed and frustrated by this. I’m not remotely surprised, but that doesn’t change the fact that this kind of behavior is pretty despicable. I’d like to see more users bring to light questionable advertising tactics like this, but I know that won’t happen any time soon.

In the meantime, if you find yourself with no choice but to get something from Driver Guide, just switch your user agent to something non-Windows so you can access the file without all the fat.

I rather like Packagetrackr.com, which has recently been migrating to a new site, Faranow.com. I buy stuff online a lot (mostly eBay these days), and having a single place to track everything is awesome, especially since I can get email alerts and the like.

Another nice feature of Packagetrackr was its Windows Gadget – that is, until the gadget broke many months ago. The site hasn’t updated the gadget since 2010, and I figured it was just broken and that was that. However, this afternoon, as I was idly looking at stuff online, it occurred to me that the gadget’s failure was probably due to one of Packagetrackr’s URLs changing. Windows Gadgets that get information off the Internet use XML, RSS, JavaScript, and similar technologies. That said, there had to be something in the code of this particular gadget that I might be able to fix to make it work again.

Lo and behold, a quick search of the gadget’s files and a subsequent search for those scripts (this gadget uses JavaScript to pull data from Packagetrackr’s service) online confirmed my suspicion. A quick change to main.html and maps.html fixed the problem, and I can once again obsessively track packages until the moment they hit my doorstep.

Courtesy of xkcd.com

If you want to get the fixed gadget, download it here.

On January 31, 2012, in the middle of the day for many users, Apple silently and stealthily blocked the Java web plugin on all Mac computers running 10.7 or 10.8.

This has not been getting that much news coverage, which is unfortunate given how serious this action actually is. And, of course, we all know that if Microsoft did something similar, it would be making national headlines on many news sites.

There’s a bit of history to be told here. Apple chose to maintain tight control over Java for their operating systems for many years. Even in the classic Mac days (OS 9 and prior), instead of allowing users to obtain versions of the Java runtime directly from Sun, Apple released their own builds of JRE through their Software Update service. Why this wasn’t considered anti-competitive is beyond me, especially considering that Microsoft is permanently prohibited from distributing copies of Windows 9x, even for free, because they included their own version of JRE with those operating systems.

At any rate, the release of OS X 10.7 (Lion) brought with it a major development in Java for Mac – Apple was withdrawing from the Java market and releasing control of JRE builds to Oracle. Users are no longer bound to Apple’s software release schedule when it comes to updating (or downgrading) Java.

So what exactly happened here?

On January 10, the United States Department of Homeland Security released a security advisory stating that there was a serious security flaw in Java 7, and users were recommended to disable the Java web plugin until Oracle patched the flaw. The next day, Apple disabled the Java web plugin using their built-in antimalware technology. The flaw found by DHS was confirmed to be exploited in the wild, and there was known, published code available to exploit the flaw. Much like what happened yesterday, Apple implemented this “fix” without warning and without an option to circumvent it.

Mozilla did something similar with their popular Firefox browser. However, instead of blanketly disabling the plugin without providing users with an alternative, Mozilla opted to simply enable “Click to Play”, which gives the user a one-click enable for Java the first time a website tries to use the plugin.

Oracle released an update for the Java plugin on January 13. Because Apple’s method of disabling the plugin just changed the minimum required version, the update automatically allowed Java to start working again in Safari (and Chrome, since it uses Safari’s plugin implementation).

Everything was happy again, right?

Wrong. A proof-of-concept vulnerability was found yesterday in the web plugin for Java 7. Unlike the previous security hole, which was announced by DHS as being knowingly exploited in the wild via malicious websites, this one appears to be theoretical only, with no known exploits. Apple’s response was to, yet again, block Java from all Internet-connected Macs.

It’s easy to understand why they did this. They saw a security hole and wanted to fix it until Oracle patched it. The problem is in how they decided to implement their fix.

It is never okay to disable core functionality in a user’s operating system without notifying that user and obtaining their consent to do so – or, at the very least, providing a workaround to re-enable that functionality. For home users, this action prevented people from playing certain browser-based games or using legitimate websites that require Java. This is an annoyance, but not disabling for most home users.

The problem here is with businesses and enterprise environments. Why was Apple able to take such a serious action without needing root access? Why was it possible for this update to be pushed to machines in managed environments where the logged-in user doesn’t have any elevated rights in OS X? The workaround requires root access, since it involves editing a plist file and changing a security setting that requires admin rights to change. With this being the case, does this mean that Apple has a root access backdoor that allows them to make system changes at their discretion, regardless of whether or not the user has that same administrative access?

If this assumption is true, we have a serious problem on our hands. Theoretically, Apple could silently push any changes they felt appropriate to thousands of business machines in environments where those changes haven’t been tested and approved for use in those enterprise environments. These changes that Apple deems necessary may break business-critical software. If they aren’t providing a way to revert these changes, what is their answer for businesses?

Why should any business, large or small, invest time, money, people, and other resources into implementing Macs if this is the risk that must be taken? This situation doesn’t even touch the myriad other reasons why Macs in enterprise IT are more trouble than they’re worth. Even if you’ve managed to make everything else work the way it should with your servers and software and infrastructure, all of that falls apart as soon as your operating system manufacturer decides it’s okay to push system changes to your managed machines without your knowledge or consent.

Then you turn around and look at Windows, which does system management through Group Policy. A simple change to how Windows Update works allows an IT admin to make sure that none of his machines are able to get any updates from Microsoft. This is critical in many business environments, where a seemingly innocuous Windows update can completely cripple legacy software a company may rely on to function.

Until Apple is able to recognize the very different needs of IT in the business world, and until Apple is able to learn to accommodate those needs in a truly uncompromising way, they are not going to gain traction in the most profitable sector of the computer hardware market. One would think that a company as big as Apple would be able to recognize this, but it appears that their continuing desire to maintain godlike control over their products has superseded their ability to address the needs of the enterprise.

An awful lot of software these days is released open-source, under various licenses. Gnu GPL is a popular one, in its various iterations. It’s a pretty great idea – software is released for free, the source code is made available to anyone who wants to take the time to compile it, people get access to useful applications without paying exorbitant license fees, and everyone wins. The really big projects like Ubuntu and Firefox get donations from generous users, which allows them to focus on developing great software instead of just making it a hobby they work on during the weekend.

For smaller projects, it tends toward a group of devs who have Real Jobs™ and work on their programs in their free time. For those people, the GPL allows for anyone else to take your source code, compile it, and sell it. They can’t say they wrote it, but they’re more than welcome to profit from your work. And, if they decided to make a few tweaks here and there, other developers can go so far as to include anti-piracy or DRM features in derivative works based on your code. GPL v3 explicitly prohibits software released under that license to attempt to legally enforce anti-cirumvention laws regarding getting around DRM (such a provision exists in the DMCA in the United States), but there’s nothing keeping a developer from putting those anti-piracy measures in place.

How does any of this protect the original developer? I’m not a professional programmer by any means, but I’ve written a few apps in C#, a lot of web-based stuff, and a number of addons for a popular MMO. I’ve always been a proponent of free, open-source software, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. I certainly don’t want to invest days, hours, months, or even years on a quality piece of software just to have someone else take all my efforts, change a few things or make some updates, and sell it for profit – especially when that developer goes so far as to include anti-piracy code that prevents users from being able to use the software freely. That seems to be the opposite of free software – both in “freedom” and “price”. The same people who believe it’s unfair that iTunes encrypts their purchases with DRM have no problem including their own DRM in software that they didn’t even write themselves.

I feel bad for FOSS developers who become victims of enterprising developers looking to make a quick buck without much work. Sure, you have to keep updating your own fork when the main trunk is updated, but that’s not much work compared to writing an entire application from scratch, is it? That attitude seems to fly in the face of why a developer might want to release their software under an open-source license. I suppose this is why I’m in favor of software that has a plugin API available. This allows developers to enhance an existing product without changing the core product – and then distributing it for a fee. WordPress is a great example – there are commercial themes and plugins available that may (or may not) be better than what’s out there for free, but the user can still install and use WordPress itself at no charge. Seems like a much better solution all-around.

So what about ports? If I write a tool – let’s say a nice text editor with some extra features for editing source code in various programming languages – and make it available for Windows, someone else might come along and port it to OS X or Linux or even a mobile platform like iOS or Android. Then what? Is it fair for that developer to profit off my work? It might be technically legal under the provisions of the most popular open-source licensing models, like GPL, MPL, and BSD, but is it in the spirit of FOSS? Personally, I’d say no. I am all about getting software into the hands of everyone, not just those on a certain platform or device. At the same time, I may not have the resources to provide compiled binaries of my software for every platform out there – but I also don’t want someone else making money on my efforts, just because they can.

It seems like there is a missing seat in the rotation of open source licenses commonly used. I’d like to see something that allows for free source distribution – but also guaranteed free binary distribution. And, if such a model is either unreasonable or unenforceable, perhaps open source software isn’t the panacea we would like it to be.

I’ll try not to give too much commentary on the way Apple does things, but the company has certainly made its mark in how we view personal technology and computing in 2012. Just as the iPod revolutionized portable media players and the iPhone made waves in the smartphone world, the iPad changed how we look at the way we access our media, data, social networks, and the Internet as a whole.

Don’t get me wrong. When the iPad first came out, I thought it was a ridiculous product. I used it quite a bit right at release since I was working in Apple retail at the time. It just seemed like a giant iPhone to me, which wasn’t saying much. I have three netbooks and found them far more useful than a limited, locked-down touchscreen tablet. But, being a new Apple product, the iPad sold like gangbusters and we quickly started seeing premium tablets hit the market in an attempt to compete. I’d say it worked. Apple’s market share continues to shrink as electronics giants like Samsung, Acer, Asus, and Motorola present us with non-Apple options that are both functional and sexy.

Still, I didn’t really see the allure of the mobile OS tablet. Windows 7 is such a fantastic operating system, ran great on my 1.6GHz first-generation Atom netbook, and let me do every single thing I wanted out of a computer. I finally bit the bullet and got my first Android tablet, an Archos 101 Internet Tablet. It had a terrible screen, poor build quality, and was still running Android 2.2 (Froyo) when 3.0 (Honeycomb) was about to make its public debut. It was also s-l-o-w. Suffice it to say, that particular product was a poor way to enter the world of mobile tablet devices.

My next purchase was an HP TouchPad after the fire sale. I got lucky and found someone selling one locally, already rooted and dual-booting WebOS and ICS, for a very reasonable price. It was worth it. The TouchPad had the potential to be a fantastic product for its time. However, it was too expensive and a little too limited, lacking storage expansion and a useful selection of applications. Unfortunately, HP’s adoption of WebOS was too little, too late. But we’ll save that article for another day. I mostly used ICS on my TouchPad, and really enjoyed the ICS experience. Android had matured from a mobile phone OS to a true mobile device OS, and the new “HD” applications hitting the Android Market were absolutely fantastic – things like Moxier Mail, high-resolution web browsers, and tablet versions of social networking clients.

It’s only gotten better since the initial release of Honeycomb. Google Play is now full of tabet-optimized applications that can give you a near-computer experience on a device that weighs less than a netbook, has a great multitouch IPS display, and offers excellent portability.

And now we come to the real game-changer – Asus’s Transformer series. Looking back at reviews of the first hardware iteration, it had its share of problems – dead displays, failing keyboard docks, and some seriously questionable customer service. Asus is on its third hardware revision with the Transformer TF300 series, available with 3G and 4G cell radio options as well as a wifi-only model. I have been fortunate enough to get a TF300T (wifi-only) for Christmas from my wonderful partner, Jay.

I gotta tell you – this is a mind-blowing device. The TF300T is light years beyond what the iPad can do. Asus has already released an official Jellybean update, which I installed as soon as I got the tablet. This turned out to be a mistake, since now I can’t root Android without installing a warranty-voiding bootloader unlocker, but we’ll worry about that later. What I really want to bring to light is the capabilities of this device.

The hardware is nothing to sneeze at – a quad-core Tegra 3, 32GB onboard storage with a microSDHC slot, a 1280×800 IPS display, an 8 MP rear-facing camera, and HDMI output. Add the keyboard dock to that, and you’ve got yourself a full QWERTY keyboard, multitouch trackpad, a full-size USB host port, an SDHC slot, and an extra battery. As of December 2012, the whole package can be had for around $500 USD. Not bad, considering that even the most expensive ultrabooks still don’t offer the all-critical touchscreen. And, of course, the Tegra 3 is far more battery-friendly than even a clocked down i5 or i7.

The software is where Android really starts to shine. I’m writing this article using the official WordPress Android app, which painlessly connected to my self-hosted WP installation and gives me an excellent, tablet-optimized interface for managing posts, comments, and other content and settings. In the four days I’ve had my new toy, I’ve already found a great file manager, RDP client, and multi-protocol instant messenger app. I can do everything on this that I could do on my Windows 7 netbook. The only thing you might say I’m missing is Photoshop, but that’s the best part – if there’s anything I really need to do without going over to my main desktop, I can just remote into it. The more I’ve used Android on a tablet, the more I’ve realized how much better the mobile OS experience is on a small screen.

Face it – low-resolution displays with full operating systems like Windows 7, OS X, and all-in-one Linux distros like Ubuntu are plagued with problems. Even a 1280×800 display isn’t optimal if you want to get to your widgets and use a lot of modern websites. A native Google Maps app in Android is light years better than using Google Maps in a browser when you’re using a small display. You can see more of your map and the entire experience is a lot smoother. Native applications for accessing message forums, Wikipedia, and blog sites make it significantly easier to consume that content compared to trying to use a standard web browser. Even light word processing is easier – as much as I love Microsoft Office 2010, the ribbon is just obnoxiously bulky on a low-resolution display.

So what’s the point of this monologue? Mobile devices are inevitably the future of personal computing for many consumers. That much is clear. What is less obvious is how important these devices should be in enterprise IT. The agency at the USDA I currently work for has been piloting both iPads and Android devices – including the TF300T – as a cheaper, more portable alternative to traditional laptops. And guess what? It’s working. We have Citrix environments set up for Android and iOS access, which gives users a complete workstation environment from a device that costs half as much as a laptop and provides twice as much convenience and functionality for the average business user. As these mobile OSes become more prevalent in the enterprise world, we will see more security and management solutions, similar to what has given RIM an edge for so long with its BlackBerry Enterprise Server product. The open-source nature of Android fundamentally makes it possible for businesses and government agencies alike to develop secure, locked-down versions for large-scale deployment.

What I think is even more interesting is to look at how little Apple has really adapted to this changing landscape. The company has become particularly complacent about the products that both revolutionized consumer devices and skyrocketed the company to the financial behemoth it is today. iOS has very little to offer business users compared to the expandability and customizability of Android. And, of course, this doesn’t even touch the threat that Microsoft presents to both operating systems with Windows 8 RT. Metro may not be wildly popular yet, but it’s a new product, and it’s only a matter of time before we see the same breadth and diversity of applications already present in Apple’s app store and Google’s Play store. It’s also very exciting to see the new convertible tablet ultrabooks hitting the market in Q1 2013, but again – part of the allure of the mobile OS is how well-suited it is for small, portable devices. Metro does that. The traditional Windows and OS X desktop doesn’t.

The iPad’s been out for just shy of three years now, but if you ask me, the tablet revolution is only just beginning. Devices like the Transformer bring the missing link – a real keyboard and mouse for doing real work – to an already fantastic product. I’m looking forward to other brands developing similar solutions, especially as Windows 8 gains traction in the mobile device market.

I have been waiting a long time for a mature, stable build of CyanogenMod for the ViewSonic gTablet, and I have to say that I am quite pleased with the effort that the CyanogenMod team has put into the version 7.0.3 build. In fact, the only complaint I have is about the lack of built-in CIFS support on the gtab build. This is a guide on how to mount CIFS/SMB shares on your gTablet running CM7.

The reason the gTablet build of CM7 doesn’t allow mounting CIFS/SMB shares is because the cfis.ko kernel module was left out of the ROM. Fortunately, this is a fairly easy fix. On the official CM 7.0.3 gTablet build, the running kernel is Linux 2.6.32.39, and the correct module can be found on DroidBasement in the following lib package:

http://droidbasement.com/gtab/kernels/2632/37/lib-2632.39_gb.tar.gz

If you are running a different version of CM7 (or perhaps another ROM that is likewise lacking cfis support), you will want to run “uname -a” from a terminal emulator or adb to determine the correct kernel lib package to get from DroidBasement, and make sure you get the correct package for your device.

$ uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.32.39-cyanogenmod #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Apr 24 22:06:49 EDT 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

Anyway, there’s only one file in that archive that you should be concerned with at the moment:

lib-2632.39_gb.tar\lib\modules\2.6.32.39-cyanogenmod\kernel\fs\cifs\cifs.ko

Once you have located this file, extract it and copy it to the internal storage of your ViewSonic gTablet using a micro-USB cable or the microSD card. Once you have it loaded onto your tablet, open the Market on your device and install CifsManager. Load the CifsManager app, click Add New Share…, enter the server IP and share name as instructed, enter the mount point, username and password (if applicable), then click on Save Share. Be sure your mount point exists in a location that is writable so that CifsManager can create it.

Before you mount the share, you have to tell CifsManager how to load the cifs.ko kernel module. Click on Menu, Settings, then check Load cifs module, and Load via insmod. Finally, enter the full path to the location of cifs.ko, then hit back and attempt to mount the share. If all goes well, you will see a message that reads, “The share has been mounted successfully.”

Unfortunately the version of CifsManager I had installed failed to set the permissions correctly when it created my mount point. Particularly, it left out the execute bit for everyone except the owner. In order to fix this, open up your terminal emulator, ssh client or adb, and type:

$ su
# chmod a+rwx /mnt/cifs/mountpoint

Replace /mnt/cifs/mountpoint with the actual name of the mountpoint you are using for your share.

And that’s it! You can now access files on your smb share directly from your gTablet within any Android app. I use it to access my music library as well as pictures and video files.

We recently started working on an old Unisys Aquanta EN (which is a rebranded Acer AcerNote Pro 950cx) for the lulz. However, since the thing won’t boot off any external disks and we have no internal floppy or CD-ROM module for it, it turned out that getting an operating system onto it wasn’t so easy. After several hours of fiddling with USB sleds and other possible solutions, we gave up on doing it directly to the hardware.

Enter virtual machines. We first tried VirtualBox, but it turns out that there’s not any easy way to install an operating system directly to a physical hard drive attached to the host OS. We decided to try VMWare Workstation.

Trying to install was a little disconcerting – we could get it booted and going, and the Windows 98 SE installer saw our 4GB IDE hard drive attached to my computer over USB, but as soon as the installer tried to format the hard drive or write files to it, it choked and VMWare gave us a “could not write to the disk” error.

It turns out that, unsurprisingly, UAC in newer versions of Windows prevents software like VMWare from directly accessing a hard drive and writing to it – even though VMWare presented a UAC prompt requesting elevated privileges to access the physical disk. After a little swearing and a bit more Googling, it turns out that you need to manually unmount the hard drive and set it as writable. This isn’t all that hard, but it does require a few minutes of command line work.

Open up a command prompt, type diskpart, and hit enter. Once diskpart launches, type list disk and hit enter to view a list of attached physical drives. You’ll now need to identify which of the drives listed is yours. Once you’re certain you’ve got the right disk, type select disk $n (where $n is the number of your disk). To take the disk offline (unmount), just type offline disk. Once you’re sure the disk is unmounted (you can double-check by looking in Explorer), type attribute disk clear readonly to make the disk writeable. Type rescan to wrap up, and you can now exit diskpart.

Open up VMWare, start your virtual machine, and now you can format your disk normally.

VMWare is a great way to get an operating system on to a disk when you’re unable to do so from the real host computer. VirtualBox is a good free alternative, although it’s a little rough around the edges in a few places. If you have problems or need a more advanced configuration, you can find an in-depth article on this issue on VMWare’s website here.

Happy geeking!

I’m a big scary IT contractor now, working for a relatively small Texas-based company on a contract for the USDA. It’s pretty awesome, and I’ve learned all kinds of things since I started here. One of the cooler tools made available to us is Microsoft System Center, which allows for a single application to manage a huge variety of tasks, including pushing updates to users, working with virtual servers, and installing software remotely. It also has an awesome remote control feature that allows working on a customer’s machine without having to log them out and use regular RDP (remote desktop).

I had the client console installed, but it never worked, mostly because my user account wasn’t in the right domain group, so I didn’t have access rights to connect to the MSC server. Then it turned out that I had a typo in my server hostname, which was causing the SCCM application to crash every single time I loaded it.

Since I couldn’t get the application to stay open long enough to rename the server it was connecting to by default, I figured I’d just uninstall it, which would (theoretically) wipe out any settings that had been created for the application.

Not so.

I mean, really, Microsoft, really? It’s just good manners to take any registry edits and config files with you when your application’s uninstaller is used.

It turns out that I had to search through the registry for the bad server name, rename it, and presto! My client console works perfectly. If you’re having a similar issue, the server string is located in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ConfigMgr\Admin UI\MRU\DefaultSite. Change ServerName to whatever the correct name is, and you should be back in business.

Maybe the System Center 2012 client uninstaller will actually, you know, uninstall everything.

There’s no doubt about it, Microsoft Windows Media Center is a pretty fantastic product. There are competitors out there (Boxee, Front Row, and MythTV come to mind), but WMC is undeniably an amazing piece of software. It has continued to evolve and improve since Microsoft created its Media Center Edition of Windows XP, and now most home computers come with Media Center – it’s a standard component in Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate.

Combined with a good codec pack, Windows Media Center can handle pretty much anything you throw at it – I have no problems playing many different video formats, from the popular XviD and DivX to the slightly-less-common MKV format (which is frequently found as uncompressed 1080P video). However, as I started using WMC more and more with my little Acer L310 HTPC, I discovered I wanted a little more out of my MCE remote.

I’d had the good fortune to come across a used Microsoft MCE Remote v2, which undeniably offers the best support for MCE, seeing as it’s a Microsoft device made specifically for Microsoft hardware. Shortly after acquiring this remote and its accompanying USB receiver, I ended up getting a refurbished Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote for even more awesome control of my home theatre system.

I was disappointed to find out that the Harmony remote and its software can’t easily accept keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl+C) as remote commands. This makes sense, I suppose, since the remote uses standard IR commands for the many devices it supports. I was stuck with only the buttons that my MCE remote had, and I wanted more. There are handy keyboard shortcuts to access the media sections of WMC – pictures, videos, and music (the DVD menu button will take you to the movies section if a DVD isn’t currently playing). I wanted to program these shortcuts to the multi-function buttons around the LCD on my Harmony remote.

I first tried an older solution with an application called HIP, which theoretically could have let me reprogram the buttons on my MCE remote. Unfortunately, HIP relies on a modified driver for the USB IR receiver…which isn’t 64-bit compatible. I knew that Microsoft used to market an MCE keyboard that used IR, so if I could get my hands on one of those, I could teach my Harmony remote all the IR commands I was looking for. However, this particular keyboard is no longer sold, so I’d be stuck searching for one on eBay and elsewhere – not to mention that I really don’t need yet another keyboard floating around my apartment.

Finally, I happened upon a post on Logitech’s customer forums that mentioned the Microsoft MCE IR keyboard is in the Harmony software’s hardware database – you just have to know how to get to it! Instead of adding your HTPC as its own device, use the keyboard itself – it’s under Computer > Computer > Microsoft. Enter MCE Keyboard as the device, and presto! You have access to all 104 keys of a standard keyboard, plus some extra shortcut keys and MCE controls present on the original Microsoft hardware! With the Harmony software’s ability to enter key sequences in the “additional buttons” section, you can make your remote do anything you want – you can even further extend its ability with something like AutoHotKey, and assign a simple two-key shortcut to whatever scripting needs you might have.

With this discovery, I have exactly what I need to get the most out of my Harmony remote and my Windows Media Center experience. Keep in mind, however, that this solution will only work with Microsoft MCE-specific eHome IR receivers. Third-party MCE remotes use different receivers and IR commands; the keyboard’s IR codes will only work with an original Microsoft receiver.