Mobile Virtualization

Another nail in the PC coffin, says Kevin C. Tofel at Gigaom.

He’s talking about mobile virtualization—accessing a PC remotely from another device, like a tablet or smartphone, for those situations that require a full Windows machine. This is impacting PC sales as many users are finding they can do a lot of what they want on the other devices with less reliance on the PC.

Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.

PC sales are down, while tablets and smartphones are gaining traction with both businesses and consumers. And smartphone sales have already surpassed PC sales.

Innovation: Solve Small, Then Scale

in•no•vate |ˈinəˌvāt|

verb [ no obj. ]

make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products: the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively.

• [ with obj. ] introduce (something new, esp. a product): innovating new products, developing existing ones.

Large organizations often look for big, enterprise-wide solutions to their problems. In some cases this is the right approach (ERP, CRM), but sometimes larger problems can be solved by tackling smaller, localized challenges first.

A couple of actual cases from my work with a big organization:

Scenario One — DIY

A few years ago our business unit needed a way to capture and report on employee training hours. The company had minimum requirements for training so we needed to know who had been to training, which classes they took, the number of approved hours for each class, how many cumulative hours they had for the year, subtotals for each office around the country, and we needed the instructor of each class to verify attendance.

Our CIO had talked a little about creating an application for this and other pedestrian business processes, but there were so many other priorities competing for limited resources that I knew this would not get done soon, if ever. So we hired a small development shop to work on it and we built it ourselves for less than $10,000. What used to take a training coordinator four days to do every quarter with multiple Excel spreadsheets now took a few minutes with our new web app.

But the really interesting thing was that shortly after we implemented it we started getting calls from other business units in the company. They had heard about our training management app and they wanted it too. Why? Because most every part of the company had the same training requirements and they were all experiencing the same challenges we were in tracking and reporting. So we shared what we had created, others got the same benefits, and the company was just a little better because of it.

Scenario Two — Reverse Engineering

Our business unit needed a way to look up a few data points about affiliate companies we worked with. All of the data existed in several company databases, but none of those databases contained everything we wanted, so the current process required our users to query multiple sources just to get a small dataset. We wrote up some specs for an app that would take a nightly export from the various data sources, parse out the subset we wanted, load it into a single SQL database, and then lay a simple web interface on top of it for our users to get everything they need in one place. Our internal dev team estimated it to be a $40,000 project.

We took our plan and the cost estimate to company leadership and asked for funding to build it. Our conservative ROI calculation came to $140,000 in productivity savings the first year, so it seemed like a slam dunk business case.

Funding was denied. There were other priorities, we were told, and besides this same functionality will be delivered in another system by year end, except that it wasn’t.

Well, necessity being the mother of invention and all, we retreated to the local burger joint to talked about how we could get this app done. I was lucky enough to have a first-rate Project Manager/Business Analyst/Programmer on my team—he brought up an earlier integration project we had done and thought maybe we could reverse engineer some of the work we had done there. As we talked about it and walked through how it might work the light started to come on for both of us: this is doable. It will take some time to do it without a dedicated development team, but we don’t need corporate funding so who’s going to stop us? (By the way, that’s a useful question to ask yourself when you see an opportunity. Don’t ask: can I do this?—instead, ask: who’s going to stop me?)

I told him to get started on it and let me know when he had a working prototype. About two weeks later we sat down to look at the first iteration and the framework of it all was there (and it was built using free open source tools). A few weeks later, after much testing, tweaking and documentation, we delivered the app to 100+ business users—they are still using it today and others in the company regularly ask for access to the application. Total hard dollar cost to the company: $0.

A couple of important things came out of these exercises in innovation:

• Tangible benefits—increased efficiency and productivity, cost reduction, improved reporting and customer service—were now being realized in the company. Immediate impact.
• An innovative mindset was being fostered: the idea that we can sometimes solve problems from the bottom up, without waiting for the big enterprise solution that may never materialize.

I understand that these scenarios may not translate directly into other organizations, but the point is that sometimes we just need to get creative within our own teams and look for ways to bring about the change we want. We don’t always have to take no for an answer, and sometimes the smallest innovations can scale up to make a real difference.

OS X Lion black screen crash fix

Apple has released a patch that claims to fix the black screen crash I wrote about recently on the mid-2010 MacBook Pros running OS X Lion.

The 70.97 MB MacBook Pro Video Update 1.0 can be downloaded from the Apple Support site, and I think it may also be available via Software Update.

I don’t know if this resolves the problem or not as I no longer have the 2010 MacBook Pro—I recently upgraded to the 2011 model. If this fixes the problem for you I’d be interested to hear about it.

(via TUAW)

Mac: Find Out How

Apple.com has a helpful section for the Mac called Find Out How, with video tutorials and other instructions on how to get things done on the Mac. Some of the topics there include:

• Back up your music, photos and documents
• PC to Mac: the basics
• Setting up your wireless network
• Add an application to your Dock
• Capture screen shots
• Windows on a Mac
  
• Open applications automatically on startup

Other good tutorial sections of the Apple site:

Find Out How: Photos

Find Out How: Movies

Find Out How: Music

Find Out How: Web

If you’re new to the Mac these are good places to get started.

OS X Lion black screen crashing

[Update 10/24] See this post for a link to the patch Apple released to fix this.

[Update 9/29] The temporary fix that has worked for me to stop the crashing:

(1) Disconnect the external display
(2) Run the free gfxCardStatus app in Integrated Only mode

Still waiting on Apple, hopeful that they have a patch coming soon to fix this.

gfxCardStatus app

* * *

I waited for a few weeks after the release of OS X 10.7 Lion to make sure it was stable, and after feeling fairly confident that it was a solid release I upgraded last month. It was fine for maybe a couple of weeks and then I started having random crashes where the screen would go black. The machine didn’t shut down, it just went black and wouldn’t respond to mouse or keyboard commands, and the only way to recover was to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button for a few seconds. This is not a good way to shut down a computer and can result in disk errors and loss of data.

There’s a lengthy thread on the Apple Support Community forum about this, and it seems to be happening mostly to machines like mine: a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card. The crashes appear to be related to graphics-intensive functions—a couple of minutes in Final Cut Pro X will trigger a crash for me every time, and it’s happened a few times in the Mail app as well.

I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with AppleCare support and we tried several troubleshooting methods, including resetting the PRAM and running a hardware test from the installation DVD. No errors were reported on the hardware test and the other efforts didn’t do any good either. I took it to a local Apple Store and they suggested I do a clean installation of Lion, completely erasing the hard drive (after making a backup), installing Lion and then bringing all my data and settings over from the backup using Migration Assistant. So I did.

It’s still crashing.

Some customers are reporting that Apple has replaced the logic board for them and this has resolved the issue, but others are still experiencing problems even with the hardware replacement so there’s some speculation now about graphics drivers in Lion. I assume Apple engineers are working on this as they are good about fixing things, and I have never had an ongoing problem like this with any previous OS X upgrade. I was going to downgrade to 10.6 Snow Leopard but that’s not a viable option—Lion modifies the mailbox format in such a way that it won’t work with Snow Leopard.

So if you have a similar Mac model and are considering upgrading to Lion, my advice for now is: don’t. Check the Apple forums and confirm that a patch has been released that addresses this problem first. The 10.7.2 build has recently been released to developers but I don’t know if it will include a fix for the black screen crashes.

AeroFS: file sync without servers

AeroFS is a file syncing application, similar to Dropbox, but instead of syncing your files with their servers it runs within your own network and syncs data among your devices internally. It’s a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) filesystem that doesn’t require a ‘middleman’ server. They offer an optional encrypted sync to their servers (cloud) if you want offsite backup as well. See their Features page for more info.

The idea is a really good one: if you already have file storage capacity in your home or business you can use it to set up automatic syncing and sharing of directories and files without going through a third party service. Many companies have security policies that don’t allow file sharing through services like Dropbox, so something like AeroFS could meet that need really well.

As of this writing they are in beta so you can sign up for an invitation and be notified when it’s ready.

From XKCD:

Free Final Cut Pro X Tutorials

This is really cool. Israel Hyman (Izzy Video) has posted some Final Cut X Pro tutorials on his site. Below is a list of the various training videos he has created and provided free of charge. You can also download his entire FCPX course, including practice files, for only $37. What a great service by Izzy. I’ve only looked at a couple of these videos so far, but they provide a huge timesaving over reading the manual and figuring it out on your own.

I learned Final Cut Express a couple of years ago using Izzy’s tutorials, and he’s an outstanding trainer. A lot of work went into creating these and I don’t know anyone else who would do all this and give it away. If you want to learn about digital video, pay attention to Izzy Video.

1. Getting Started
2. Overview of the Interface
3. Keywords and Ratings
4. Different Kinds of Edits
5. Overwrite Editing
6. Using Markers
7. Clip Appearance
8. Tools
9. The Precision Editor
10. Transitions
11. Transition Details
12. Titles
13. Transforming
14. Built-In Video Effects
15. Clip Effects
16. Generators
17. Compound Clips
18. Storylines
19. Auditions
20. Retiming Clips for slow motion and fast motion
21. Clip analysis for stabilization and color balance
22. Color Correction, Video Scopes, Color Boards, and Color Match
23. Importing from a Video Camera
24. Sharing and exporting your video project
25. Managing Your Media and Projects
26. Conclusion

Posted: August 10th, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Software, Tips, Video | No Comments »

Web Intents

Yesterday’s post on Webmonkey about Google and Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser) teaming up on a new set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) for connecting applications and websites. It’s called Web Intents and provides a way for sites to pass data between each other.

So just what are Web Intents? Well, the easiest way to understand them is by example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, whether it’s Like, Tweet, +1, Read Later, Add to Instapaper and so on. Rather than adding a dozen little badges to your site, Web Intents creates a bridge that connects your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web Intents define an API for your site to use and another API for the receiving site to use. Plug them together and transferring data becomes a quick and easy process, both for users and developers.

From Tantek Çelik, creator of microformats, who refers to Web Intents as Web Actions:

“[W]eb actions have the potential to change our very notions of what a web application is from a single site to loosely coupled interactions across multiple, distributed sites…. In that regard, web actions have the potential to become a building block for distributed web applications.”

Ghostery: block web tracking

Ghostery is a free browser plugin that lets you block various scripts embedded in web sites. Many of these scripts attempt to track our browsing habits and report this info back to advertising networks and others that are interested in our personal activity on the web.

There are versions available at the Ghostery download page for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers. Their FAQ page provides some background on their efforts to “create the web’s most capable and comprehensive user privacy tool.” I have installed it in my browsers and I’m amazed at how much tracking activity is going on at most web sites.

Below is a screen shot from my visit today to the Gigaom tech news site showing the Ghostery popup list of network scripts that attempted to run but were blocked. You can configure the tool and selectively exclude things that you want to allow to run—I don’t block Google Analytics, for example, because I use it myself to get traffic info for my site, but this is not for advertising purposes, it’s only to see how many visits I receive and where they originate from (no personal identifying data of any kind).

Dont fear the internet

Don’t fear the internet has some good primers on the internet, HTML, CSS and using the browser as a development tool.