It should have been premonitory – while looking for other reviews or info on the upcoming AutoCAD for Mac OS release, I stumbled upon this post by Steve Johnson, owner of cad nauseam, in which he details why AutoCAD for Mac would be a bad idea. While I agreed with some of his views, as this has happened before countless times (case example: Skype, which took years to catch up still lacks behind in features and stability compared to its Windows version), I believed things wouldn’t be that bad.

It turns out there is a list of over 80 holes which Autodesk lists here. Steve has posted this in response, and we now even have an interview with Autodesk staff with money quotes such as:

It really does not make sense for us to implement features on the Mac platform that nobody’s going to use. So basically what the customers are asking for is that we are going to deliver. So like I mentioned before Mac users on the Architecture side shouldn’t notice much of a difference.

OK so you release a trimmed product with not-so-oft used features missing, but at the same price? That doesn’t really fly, no matter how you look at it.

San Rafael, we have a problem

My first reaction when I saw the activation window, right after installing AutoCAD on my Mac Pro, was “OMG they have transplanted the Windows version using Java”. It was SO ugly – in essence, a copy-paste of the Windows workflow into a Mac window, and I suspect they load the content as HTML from a server. Scrollbars? On a modal tool window?

This was before I had to activate the product, which required creating a whole new account, as my teacher login details would not work at all. Autodesk apparently “had no record” of my email address and password, so I had to go through the account creation once more, then finish the activation process, which takes a few more, totally unnecessary, steps. A simple “give us your product code and serial” followed by a “thank you for activating” is more than enough.

Once you fire up AutoCAD, you’re greeted by this splash screen:

which is not particularly informative, but still, shows something. The next thing you are greeted with, at least with the educational version, is this:

OK, so I am using an educational product, but you don’t need to keep reminding me of this fact every time I open a drawing done with a different version – a “don’t remind me again” checkbox is all it takes. The warning would be useful if it came up with drawings you made with a full AutoCAD version, given by others, etc. but it also shows up when creating a new drawing from one of the included templates!

Finally, expecting a normal drawing area, I was greeted by this (click for full size):

It almost reminded me of a BSOD. No matter what I did, I could not even get the cursor to appear in the drawing area, never mind actually draw something. The application was completely unusable. Creating a new drawing, from a template, blank – nothing worked, I either got the blue bars of death (BBOD) or a black drawing area into which everything was sucked into, a-la-black hole. No cursor, cross-hairs, nothing.

The next logical step was to open a drawing recently created using AutoCAD on Windows, and this came up:

I give up. I will try to install it on my MacBook Pro, and see what happens. If the problems reappear, I’ll go back to BootCamp or VMWare with the Windows version, which is fully-featured, stable, and usable. Nice and commendable work on bringing back AutoCAD to the Mac, but so far, it appears the bugs and missing features, even when they are fairly unused ones, are killing the product. Again.

Linksys has always been notoriously unfriendly to non-Windows media formats in their video cameras, such as the wireless WVC54G. This camera by default streams in MPEG-4, which cannot be watched with Safari or Firefox, thus making the thing a Windows/IE-only proposition. Until now.

I’ve found a commented out code in the “Image” settings page of the camera, which allows changing the stream format to MJPEG, which can be shown by Firefox:
<br />
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#9292da” class=”sp”>Image Type: </td>
<td>MPEG-4</p>
<select name=”videotype” size=”1″ onChange=”typeChange()”>
<option value=”mpeg4″>MPEG-4</option><br />
<option value=”mjpeg”>Motion JPEG (MJPEG)</option><br />
</select>
</td>
<p>

Now, why would Linksys disable such a simple setting, which would make its camera compatible with a much larger audience? Who knows.

In any case, the trick to changing the camera to MJPEG is to paste this URL into your browser (after you have logged into the camera’s config pages):

http://X.X.X.X/adm/file.cgi?h_videotype=mjpeg&this_file= image.htm&next_file=image.htm&todo=save& message=&video_file=image.cgi%3Fnext_file%3D main_fs.htm

but replacing the X.X.X.X with your own camera’s IP address. Once MJPEG has been enabled, you can change the resolution and other settings using the web-based options. To change back to MPEG-4, just replace mjpeg with mpeg4 in the URL. Note that I’m using the latest firmware (2.11), this may not work with older versions.

Today I updated my home Mac Pro to Leopard, and proceeded to download and install the latest Parallels release. I have been a faithful early adopter, buying their very first release when it was buggy and unstable, and have since seen it outgrow many expectations. First surprise was having to “upgrade” to version 3.0, for a total of $49.99. Incidentally, this comes out to just over 31€, but they charge 39€ at the store if you choose this currency – when are US-based companies going to stop abusing European customers? But I digress.

Having made the purchase, I am told that my order “needs review”, and that it should be handled in between 12 and 24 hours. Not sure what this means, but the Internet was invented so that purchases, particularly of downloadable software, could be immediate. Well not quite, but you get my point. With the the option to receive a 15-day trial key via email, I was still a happy camper, until I get this in my inbox:

Dear Parallels user,

Thank you for registering for a 15-day trial download of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac!  Your trial activation key gives you access to a complete version of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and all of its innovative features.

Your trial activation key is listed below:

PRODUCT     : Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac
ACTIVATION KEY    : 1EL1Z-40Z99-F4ZZ1-ZONMV-TCODZ
START DATE    : 2007/12/26
END DATE    : 2008/01/10

Pay attention at the dates, and then tell me if this is not worth sending to The Daily WTF!

It took a few months, but finally we have found the model for Whisher – and it is not adding even more features than we had, but taking some away, and making the whole thing much simpler. Some of you have already contacted me asking why we have taken some seemingly drastic decisions, but everything has an explanation and a reason.

A quick Whisher timeline

To refresh your memory, here is a timeline of how Whisher has progressed:

• Early 2006: Ferran, our CEO, after parting ways with Martin Varsavsky (having worked with him on the Fon concept for months), thinks about ways to implement WiFi sharing through software, instead of a capital-intensive hardware-based model.
• Mid 2006: We start developing a Whisher prototype, in those days known internally as Universal, written in Java, which worked pretty well but was rather ugly (here shown in one moment of instability):
  

  




• September 2006: We receive some seed funding from Swisscom to develop the first full-blown Whisher, complete with UI design and website.
• November 2006: The first alpha of Whisher 1.0 was compiled, and at the same time, we started looking for a first financing round.
• December 2006: We closed a Series A round with Benchmark Capital (now Balderton), led by Klaus Hommels.
• February 2007: Launched Whisher 1.0 at DEMO in Palm Desert – we got some really good press coverage, ranking #9 in Technorati! The client was released for Windows, Mac and Linux, and featured IM, presence information around your WiFi, file exchange and buddy-style WiFi sharing management. It looked like this (minus the advertising panel):
  
  

  




• September 2007: We launch Whisher 2.0, with a wholly revised GUI, based on the feedback we get from our users, and with new features such as geolocation and Twitter updates, plus multi-platform IM (Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, and MSN Messenger!). We keep the PR efforts on a low profile.
• November 2007: After the feedback we get on 2.0, we realize the product is way too complex, and it does too many things – we get questions like “Yeah, it looks nice, but what is it?”. We decide to make a sharp course change and go back to our roots – WiFi connectivity.
• February 2008: After a year since our initial release, we launch Whisher 3.0, with most “social” features like IM, file exchange and geolocation taken out, and focusing the software as a plugin rather than a standalone client.

So what is Whisher 3.0?

In a few words – a plugin into your existing WiFi manager which gives you seamless connectivity across shared and commercial hotspots, and also allows you to share and tag your own WiFi. We have realized several things during the first year since our launch:

• Users already have their IM clients like Adium or Trillian, which do a much better job at having tons of features than we could ever do ourselves – it is their core competency, and they are very good at it. The same applies for file exchange or Twitter.
• If people are used to a tool that comes with their operating system in order to connect to WiFi signals, why change that? Initially it seemed obvious that people would like to know more about the WiFi they have around them, like average signal strength or ratings – but the reality is that the majority of users just want to get connected, if possible, with a single click and zero hassle.
• Having a software client with a ton of features running 24/7 is resource intensive, and makes crashes more likely. The user has to remember to open the client or launch it in order to get to its features. In the end, he will just use the OS built-in tool.
• There is a clear demand for seamless access on commercial hotspots, if possible, with a single click and zero hassle. Users hate landing pages, and having to enter a reel of data plus their credit card information just to get online and check their email.
• Users do not want to have a myriad possible combinations to access the various WiFi services.

With this in mind, we launched 3.0 with the following premises:

• It should work as a plugin, adding the minimum required extra information to the default OS WiFi tool.
• As much functionality as possible has to be moved to the web, as certain features like WiFi sharing are not used all the time, and thus are not needed built-in on the software.
• To solve the chicken-and-egg problem of shared WiFi coverage, we will give users access to commercial locations at the lowest possible price. We will encourage people to share by giving them even cheaper WiFi at these commercial locations.
• WiFi connectivity should be a 1-Click experience.

We now have a Windows client less than 4MB in size, and a Mac OS X client (coming soon!) less than 1MB, both meeting these requirements.

WiFi Out, the universal WiFi currency

We faced many hurdles in order to be able to re-orient Whisher into this new direction, the most important being that we had to close roaming agreements with enough providers, and implement the whole backend and client protocols to make it all work. This also had to be formatted in an easy to understand way for end users, so we came up with the concept of a universal WiFi currency, called WiFi Out. This currency would be used in any kind of transaction involving WiFi access, for example, a user could give WiFi Out credit to another in exchange for access at his shared hotspot, and this user in turn could use the credit to access WiFi at a coffee shop.

At this point, you may say “this is nice, but I can already get flat-fee WiFi plans, or just buy passes at the locations when I need them”. True, but consider these problems:

• With flat-fee WiFi plans, you are tied to paying a fixed fee per month, even if you don’t use it. We cater for those people who access WiFi on occasions, and for a few minutes to check their email or browse the web.
• At most commercial hotspots, you can buy vouchers that range from 30 minutes to 24 hours, but you cannot ‘save’ unused minutes for later. If you buy 24 hours, your access will last for 24 hours, and then you have to buy a new voucher – even if you only connected for a few minutes!
• When you fire up your normal WiFi manager, you may not always know which signals are accessible, to which ones you have access if you have a flat fee, what the cost will be, or even if some of them are free.

Whisher fixes the first two with pre-paid, per-minute access, through the WiFi Out credit. Simply visit the online shop, and in a few easy steps, you can buy credit which you can then use at any of our 60.000 commercial locations – yes, 60.000! We even have full roaming with Swisscom, giving us access to over 2.000 premium locations throughout Europe, something none of our competitors can claim. With Whisher, if you don’t connect, you don’t pay.

How do we fix the third problem in the list?

The new Whisher GUI

I already mentioned that Whisher integrates as a plugin into the existing WiFi manager you already use, as an example, the Windows XP one:

We turn this boring, not too useful interface into this:

which gives you additional information about every signal in range, including the price per minute if it’s a commercial one, or the signal’s name and welcome message on Whisher shared hotspots. On the left pane, we show your WiFi Out credit, and the remaining connection time at the hotspot you are on. You access the Whisher plugin just the same as you do the Windows manager, right click on the tray icon, and select ‘View available wireless networks’. Everything else works just the same, so the learning curve is virtually zero!

On a second post I will go over the new website, how to register a hotspot, buy credit, and more.

What is the merge between a MacBook with a busted screen and a desktop LCD panel? This:

I figured two names for it, a Macenstein or a FrankenBook (yeah I know, both are damn ugly, suggestions welcome!). I happened to drive over my one-week-old MacBook with my 30-minute-old Viano van as I tested the parking sensors at the dealer, and the screen cracked. Obviously, the Apple retailer refused to service it under warranty, and quoted around 700 Euro for a new LCD, when the entry-level MacBook costs 1000 Euro, it seems a pretty ridiculous price to pay.

Out of desperation, I had the idea of removing the screen entirely, and using the remaining portion of the MacBook as a desktop – after all, it still had a working hard drive, DVD drive, touchpad and keyboard, so a few dozen screws later, this was the result:

As you can see, the cables that connect to the display’s backlight and LCD circuit are still there, as are the three wires that come out of the Airport wireless card and lead to the patch antennas on the lid. I still have to put some connectors on these so I can drive external antennas.

A friend of mine just saw this thing, and wondered why they are not manufactured commercially – it’s an ideal space saver – computer, keyboard and mouse in one small piece that sits in front of a nice LCD display, and which comes with built-in UPS to save you from power failures.

Edit: Removed the Lapsktop name suggestion, it sound even more crappy than the others, and like a Finnish swear word.

I read with shock and horror this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog about a post by Michael Rossberg, one of the developers of Kismac, that states:

There has not been a lot of time for KisMAC lately. However the motivation for this drastic step lies somewhere different. German laws change and are being adapted for “better” protection against something politicians obviously do not understand. It will become illegal to develop, use or even posses KisMAC in this banana republic (backgound: the change of § 202c StGB).
While I cannot do much about that for now, you probably can. Make copies of KisMAC and its source as long as the website is up! Do further development outside of Germany, even better outside the US and EU! If you are a German resident, you will need to fight for your rights.

The post has also been slashdotted, and drawn 155 comments last time I looked. Kismac is a very popular WiFi sniffer for Mac OS, also boasting key cracking functionality that is not present in other sniffers such as iStumbler.

My first reaction was to contact Geoff, one of the lead Kismac developers, who reassured me that Kismac is far from discontinued or deceased, they are basically relocating their servers (the SVN is already abroad) to a country that is not falling into draconian terms which remind us of unfortunate recent history. Since June 2007, new German law makes it illegal to pretty much do any form of investigation or development in the IT security field, as simply releasing a password cracking tool could land you in jail, and possibly even cause anti-terrorist provisions to be applied to you (anally, one would guess). Some comments from the Phenoelit crew also point in this direction – there is a disbandment towards other countries, and a tacit acknowledgment on the original sites that this is to comply with the new laws.

In Kismac’s particular case, Mick seems to have put the point across in pretty blunt terms, not stating that they are in fact relocating somewhere else, making it seem that the project was dying. I actually believe we will see some pretty neat developments in Kismac real soon…but that’s just a calculated hunch

I haven’t blogged much the last few days, basically because I’ve been working 23 hour days, getting ready to launch Whisher (the 24th hour was spent going to get coffee). Some of you have noticed that we put a countdown clock at whisher.com, which shows the time left until we finally go live. I’ve refrained from talking too much about the project here, as in the past it has drawn some heat, apart the fact that we have been keeping it in stealth mode (or as much as possible!).

The official launch of Whisher is during DEMO 2007, the launch event for new startups, or companies that want to launch new products and services. The idea of DEMO is to give a level playing field to 60 companies to present their new products, regardless of how much money they have. Google would have exactly the same counter at the demonstrator pavillion as an angel-funded startup. No special signs or certain types of swag are allowed either. During the event, you are given a 6-minute slot on the presentation stage, where you will perform a live demonstration of your product. Again, canned demos, flash or PowerPoint slides are not allowed – it has to be live. This puts quite a bit of pressure on you, but also ensures that everything presented at DEMO is true, not a future maybe product.

So, if you come to DEMO, see you there, if not, I’ll keep you updated – also, the crew of Wireless Is Fun is doing a live coverage of the launch – thanks guys!

Went to my local Vodafone store to pick up the new Huawei E220 HSDPA USB modem, which with a 49 Euro monthly contract gives you 1GB of transfer at 1Mbps maximum, and free mobile to fixed landline calls – pretty good deal if you ask me. For 59 Euro you get 5GB of transfer, at the full 3.8Mbps that HSDPA offers. These are theoretical rates, as they will depend on a number of factors, such as how many people are also using the same cell, your coverage and the quality of the link.
We can argue all we want about how convenient WiFi is, being omnipresent et al, but in reality, it’s rather hard to get connected while on the road. Let’s examine the following scenarios, and you tell me the chances of getting connected over WiFi:

• Riding the train or bus home.
• Getting a lift from a friend in his/her car.
• Opening your laptop at a random location (cafeteria, bar, etc. that you haven’t before scouted for open WiFi).
• On a plane, waiting for the next free takeoff slot that you hope the pilot won’t miss because he was checking the fatness of his wallet.

Let’s be honest – free open WiFi is great once you have identified the locations where you can get connected, such as a friend’s house or the local coffee shop. Other solid commercial alternatives make it easier to find WiFi, as they tend to be present at well-known locations. Walk into any Starbucks or hotel, and you’re bound to find at least for-pay wireless.
For me, on the 30 minutes to 1 hour it takes to get home on the train or bus, being able to get connected is great. The convenience of simply opening the Mac and getting online beats the guesswork of WiFi. I tried getting the Mac working with my Nokia N93 over Bluetooth, but it was just too unstable – one day it worked, the next simply refused to even connect. A more in-depth review of the device is coming, once I get a chance to roam about with it for a while.

So far, installation on the Mac was pretty straightforward, download the setup package from Vodafone’s site (they don’t tell you this in the manual), which then enables the modem as a networking device. If you don’t follow this step, it can get recognized as a storage device, which is not particularly useful for a modem. The one thing I don’t understand is why it comes with a miniUSB cable that ends in two USB connectors, my guess is it’s power-related (some USB ports don’t provide the full 500mA they are supposed to provide).

Today I am really peeved with my MacBook Pro. This is the second time I start this post, thanks to the almighty never-ever-hangs-honestly OS X. I intended to write a short diatribe about how remaining time for various things is not calculated right.

Let’s get the first part over with. Just before the crash, I woke up the Mac from suspended animation, and surprisingly, the battery monitor reported 158:34 hours of battery life remaining…whoa! Lets assume the average battery life of 3 hours corresponds to a battery capacity of 4Ah (Ampere-hours) – then my Mac carries a 118Ah battery. For reference, your run-of-the-mill car battery has around 70Ah. Go figure.

The second time miss-calculation happened when I extracted an archive with StuffIt, which told me I had over 300 hours to wait…when the file size was only 2MB. I will try to take screenshots next time. It is obvious that these are dumb figures, but one has to wonder why there isn’t a top limit on the values, mainly so that it doesn’t look ridiculous.

Now, for the fuming rant. I am heading back home on the bus, and to kill time, I decided to write this post. To connect to the internet while on the move, I use a Nokia N70 over Bluetooth, which gives me 3G speed (you at the back, stop giggling!). Suddenly, and before I had time to click ‘Save and Continue Editing’ for the first time, the connection froze. I tried to disconnect, and Internet Connect remained stuck on “Disconnecting…”. There was no way to get it to actually finish the disconnection process…then I noticed the N70 was actually frozen too! Cursing my luck, I removed the battery from the phone, switched Bluetooth off on the Mac, tried to kill Internet Connect using the terminal…nothing. Whether the Mac froze the N70 or the other way around is unknown, but it is clear that both have a serious flaw for this to happen.

Shutdown time. I copy-pasted the text I had written into TextEdit, and saved it to the desktop. Then, without closing TextEdit, I tried to restart the Mac, but it was having none of it. As a last attempt, I held the power button down for five seconds, and finally, it shut down. The surprise came after restarting – the text file was gone from the desktop, and with it my half-written post. There was no trace of it anywhere, neither in Finder’s nor in TextEdit’s recent file list…Is this a serious problem?

I admit that so far, the Mac has proven very stable, with very few problems, and minor ones at that. But if it is possible to have incidents like the one I experienced, then the message about how Macs are un-crashable is simply not true. I know that Robert Scoble had a similar problem with a machine just like mine, his post relating to Dave Winer’s crash report. In my case, the damage wasn’t that great, but imagine this happening towards the end of a long process, like encoding a long video edit. Mac accolites will surely say “But Windows crashes too!”. I’d answer “But Microsoft doesn’t go around publishing agressive campaigns saying how Windows PCs are rock-solid in comparison with the monkey-on-acid-squeek-of-death”.

I love my Mac. But I disagree with the hype.

Today I received an email with some technical specs I was supposed to review, but the document came in OpenOffice Write format (.odt), and since on my MacBook I only had Office installed, there was no way to open it.

Checking the OpenOffice.org site, it appeared a version was available for OS X, but in the traditional open source way, I was met with thinks like:

“en-US builds for Intel based Macs will be listed here as soon as they passed QA. In the meantime please” (The phrase really ends like this, I am quoting vervatim!)

…please…what? What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Ask the guy who sent me the document to re-send it in Word format? Oh, wait, here is the solution:

“The builds use X11 and are meant for the user who doesn’t care that much about look but functionality and cross plattform integration and usability. Other prospects are the Darwin community and the Unix-savvy MacOS X user community and forming a platform for us to build the Quartz and Aqua tracks for the traditional Mac user.”

I thought Intel Macs had only been around for a few months, so how can there be a tradition? Last, but not least, the list of mirrors for the english version were empty. No problem for German or French users, so congrats to you, lucky people! The fact it was empty explained the “in the meantime” statement.

What is this rant all about? The discussion I had the other day with a diehard opensource defender – the type that scream “Linux will conquer the desktop next year, really, this time” any chance they get. I think it is really great that people are willing to donate their time to contribute to opensource projects, some as large as Linux or OpenOffice, but they have to think in terms of reality, not utopia. To think Linux will take over Windows on the desktop, or that OpenOffice will replace Office, at least in the short or medium term, is wishful thinking.

I expect to be beaten to death by the diehard Linux fans, but there is no way my mother would know how to “vi your X86 configuration file to change the video adapter so that it works”. Until Linux or OpenOffice offer similar experiences than Windows or Office, there will stay in niche or very specific target groups. Companies are migrating to these operating systems and office suites, yes, but they usually have the resources to implement the transition, both from technical and training standpoints.

So, good luck with the project, I honestly wish it every success, and I am sorry that I am not a competent UNIX programmer so I can contribute. But from a user’s perspective, it has some way to go.