Now that my daughter is happily ensconced in her
new iBook, I’ve done some more PC shuffling around the house. It’s amazing
how long it takes just to pass down a PC: some 4-6 hours prepping the Thinkpad
for my wife to use. But the domino-effect didn’t stop there. Turning my attention
to the old, desktop that I was getting rid of, I realized I could raid it for
RAM and help out my neighbor. This is Neighbor #1 (mentioned in a
previous weblog entry) with the PC thrown in the corner because of a spyware/malware
infestation.

Stripping the RAM from my old desktop, I managed to bring my friend’s PC up
from a mere 64Mb to a more useful 192Mb. Then I scavenged a 40Gb/7200 rpm drive
to install in place of his 9Gb drive. Then, I spent all of last evening
until about 12:30 AM this morning rebuilding his PC from the ground up. Reinstalling
is such tedious work.

Operating System - Windows XP. Service Pack 2. Non-administrator accounts
for each of my neighbor and his two kids. One admin account for the parent.
Stern lecture to come about the need to use the non-privileged account for day-to-day
work.

Anti-spyware - Here I threw in Microsoft’s new
offering, which originally came out of Giant.
I’m favorably impressed. It seems easy to use, scans files quickly, doesn’t
seem to hurt performance, at least not noticeably.

Anti-virus - Computer Associates (CA) offers a great deal. A 12-month,
free-trial of ezArmor, which includes their anti-virus software. Very generous
of them, and it’s just the ticket if you’re rebuilding a PC for a cash-strapped
friend. In their review, CNET makes a point of saying how small
a performance hit you’ll take from using CA’s product as opposed to other
anti-virus solutions they’ve reviewed. (An important consideration for a 600mhz Celeron box) My experience so far bears that out.
Small download, quick install, minimalist interface. Good stuff. I’ll be installing
it on my own PCs next.

Web and Email - Firefox
and Thunderbird.
And I made them into the default browser and email applications. I’ve had good
success with Firefox. I’ve used it as a stop-gap measure to make two, adware-infested
computers useable. Longer story there…

Word Processing - OpenOffice.org.
Once again, I’m pleased
to be able to spread the word about this fine product.

Miscellaneous items - Java
Runtime Environment for Windows, Adobe
Reader, Macromedia
Flash Player, Macromedia

Shockwave Player.

Rebuilding a PC always leaves me with a good feeling. Maybe it’s because I
know that, if just for a brief moment in time, that everything is clean, neat,
and tidy. I also feel good about resurrecting a box that was obviously the source
of much pain for my neighbor. It adds even more to my pleasure to hand him a
box with useful applications installed. Thanks to the generosity of many open-source
developers, my friend now has word-processing, email, and web browsing. And
thanks too, to Computer Associates for that 12-month, anti-virus trial. I appreciate
it, because I really don’t want to have to rebuild my friend’s box again.

No, it’s not a new product from Apple. The Mac/Thinkpad shuffle is what
you do when you buy a new iBook for your daughter so that you can redeploy her
Thinkpad to the family room, so that you can redeploy the six-year-old and broken
family-room PC to the, well, to the dump.

Yes, the new iBook arrived, and Jenny opened the box Wednesday evening. She
was thrilled.

It’s the first Mac in our family since I sold my Powerbook way back in 1993.
Here are some of our initial thoughts and reactions:

• Jenny likes the iBook case material very much.

• She was momentarily upset at having only one mouse-button. I think I could carefully saw that button into two halves, but
  she wasn’t too interested in my, er, suggested hack. Really, Apple ought
  to offer two buttons as an option. I’m sure the design is modular enough
  that they could offer two trackpad configurations.

• You should have seen Jenny’s eyes light up when I went to the iTunes store
  and began playing song samples. She didn’t know what she was missing. And
  it all just worked. I’ve never run iTunes before, and I was playing song
  samples in less than a minute. No setup. No configuration. No registration.
  Just fun.

• While transfering Jenny’s files and other data, I found I can get just
  as frustrated using a Mac as I can using a Windows PC :-)

• Apple’s icon and GUI design are awesome. No Teletubbies on that screen.
  The icons are very pleasing to look at. Well done.

• Why on earth does the extension adaptor for a two-prong power adaptor terminate
  in a three-prong plug? What’s that about? Ease-of-use does not include hunting
  around one’s office for a grounded outlet.

• Sadly, OpenOffice.org doesn’t seem to play well on the Mac. Having to use
  X11 is no bother at all. But the fonts, they render terribly. We opened
  a couple of Jenny’s files, and the text was awful to look at. The good thing
  is though, that OpenOffice.org does at least run on the Mac. She’s at least
  got access to her files. We both really appreciate that.

• Hmmm… I just now opened Appleworks, typed in a few words using the default
  font, and the results there are not very appealing either. Interestingly,
  that font, Helvetica 12pt, renders better, though larger, in OpenOffice.org
  than in Appleworks. A further oddity is that clicking on the bold and italic
  toolbar buttons in OpenOffice.org has no effect at all. More research is
  indicated here.

• Jenny’s had some trouble adjusting to the trackpad. She tends to drag her
  palm across it while typing, with the result that her cursor flies across
  the screen, window focus changes, etc. She and I are both big fans of IBM’s
  little, red nub. Oh well. Can’t have everything. She’ll get used it eventually.

• Jenny was completely baffled (at first) by the slot-loading CD drive.
  It was a bit funny watching her try to put in her first CD. She was looking
  right at the slot, but couldn’t find the drive. Such are the small joys
  of fatherhood :-)

• iMail did an awesome job of importing Jenny’s old email. She used to use
  The Bat!
  (which, by the way, I
  recommend unhesitatingly to Windows PC users) I had to export each of
  Jenny’s folders from The Bat! one at a time. To my very pleasant surprise,
  iMail loaded the entire resulting directory and subdirectory of Unix mailbox
  files in one, fell swoop, and preserved the hierarchical structure into the
  bargain. I was most pleased with how easily that went.

Despite a few rough points during the configuration and setup process (I was
in iHell for just a little while), and despite a few adjustments she’s had to
make (one button mouse, trackpad rather than Trackpoint, etc.), Jenny is a very
happy teenager. When I offer to take back the iBook and let her keep her Thinkpad,
the answer is a resounding "No!" And Jeff, my nine-year-old son, he’s
completely lost eyes for Thinkpads. He could care less that Jenny’s giving us
her old one. He wants an iBook too.

If you happened to read my
most recent post, you might wonder what the outcome was. Wonder no more,
for today I finally put my money where my mouth is and bought a Mac. No, I didn’t
buy one of the new, Mac Minis (those are nice too though). Instead, I bought an iBook, and for my daughter.
She’s the creative type, loves playing MP3s, likes to take snapshots, and I
think she’ll really enjoy all that the iBook has to offer. She’s away at school.
When I phoned her today to let her know I’d ordered her an iBook, well, let
me just say they are probably still trying to pull her down off the ceiling.
She’s thrilled.

My daughter’s Thinkpad gets redeployed to the dining room to replace that 5+
year-old PC that stopped working the other day. And that works out really well,
actually, because my wife has long wanted to buy one of these,
or perhaps one of these,
and, either way, she needs Windows. My nine-year-old is happy he’ll be able
to play his Internet games from wherever he happens to be in the house. I’m
happy that I don’t have to rebuild that aging and slow PC another time. And
an additional bonus is that we can get that big, hulking PC desk and hutch out
of the dining room, because the Thinkpad requires hardly any space at all.

And what of my office PCs? I’m going to consolidate my two desktops, one of
which is already running SuSE Linux 8.0, and the other Windows XP. When I’m done, I’ll be running just one box under SuSE
Linux Professional 9.2. My own Thinkpad I’m not so sure
about. Probably I’ll leave it on Windows for a bit.

It is ironic that I buy a Mac, and yet I don’t get one. I hope my daughter
appreciates it.

Related link: http://www.logmein.com

I remember reading about a competitor to GoToMyPC.com that was offering free accounts a while back. As someone who tends to work from home, sitting in front of my PC, ‘going to it’ on the few times I break from my daily routine was not a high priority. And of course VNC seemed to work pretty well if I prepared my port forwarding ahead of time.

But occasionally I do have to travel, and having to use my own or other machines on other people’s networks is a different story. You are faced with some challenging firewall-bypassing issues, and when you don’t have control over the hardware or security policies, remote access can be problematic.

On a recent business trip to NYC, I had an excuse to try out logmein’s solution to the remote access problem. After signing up for the service, I was able to logmein-enable my primary workstation and laptop. I commuted from my sister’s place to the work site, and while there I could easily dig up information on my laptop left behind at my sister’s (protected by her apple wireless router) , or on my home workstation in Cambridge protected by my linksys router. After leaving the client site, of course I could jump back on my on-site desktop (protected by the corporate firewall) just as easily. In each case, remote-control enabling the PC’s took minutes and never needed any firewall fiddling or assistance from central IT. To get to my home office lan, I had no firewall, tunnelling, port forwarding, or ssh key-signing issues to deal with necause their easy-to-install client and server takes care of all these issues for you.

So what does their solution look like? The logmein remote control client comes in three flavors : ActiveX, Java, and pure HTML. I generally use the ActiveX version, and it compares favorably to things like PCAnywhere and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop. I’ve been able to use the Java version on a Linspire desktop (in Mozilla ), but on my sister’s iBook it locked up Netscape, IE, and Safari equally well. While visiting said sister, I really needed to look up an address on my home PC. Since she only had iBooks available, I tried the pure HTML version of logmein. It works via server push and I’m not going to describe it fully because I think it has to be seen to believed. Take a look — it truly is a feat of UI design that something so simple could be useful. You could say the experience is comparable to playing chess by mail — it works, but not something you want to rely on)

The most amazing thing about Logmein is that they’re offering their basic remote control service free — you only have to pay them if you want to synch files across machines or do remote printing. The big difference between Logmein and GotoMyPC is that the latter costs $20/mo _for each pc_ in the scenario above. It is phenomenally expensive if you come in contact with a lot of PCs on an intermittent basis, as a consultant like me does, or any techie w/tech-support-needin’ relatives does.

So, given the zero cost, how can you really maximize the value of the Logmein giveaway?

Well, install it on a lot of machines, of course. I think for most techie users, the likely candidate for “lots of machines” are all those relatives of yours stuck running Windows, but with no idea how to run it securely. Extropolating from MS sales figures, that’s a few hundred million people I believe.

Personally, I’ve certainly installed it on a lot of friends and family machines to help me help them. Because it’s much easier to support someone using remote control, I’ve been able to not only help them with difficult problems, but I’ve also been able to delegate support so that family members can help one another.

Professionally, “lots of machines” for me has meant lots of virtual machines. If you read either of my blogs, you’ll know that I have trouble completing a post without saying something gung-ho about virtualization.

In this case, logmein + virtual machines is a really potent combination. I set up one or more VMWare VM’s for every client project I work on, for many reasons (mobility, sandboxing, painless configuration management). Occasionally I would poke holes in my firewall to let clients view works-in-progress or for team-mates to do QA using straight HTTP or VNC. But poking holes in your firewall is something I like to avoid, when possible.

By tunnelling your connections securely through another server and not requiring firewall port forwarding, logmein solves this problem handily, and adds an additional security benefit for the scenario when others need to access your machines. Logmein allows you to set up ’secondary users’, to whom you can delegate specific access rights to your machines. You can grant single-use access - disabling their account after one session, require a one-time key that logmein.com will email out, and enable, disable and delete accounts when they’re no longer needed. It’s both very flexible and easy to use.

With secondary users, I am now able to easily demo software for clients or have co-workers QA my work on the client-specific VM I built it on, separate from my own desktop and other potentially confidential files and applications.

On a small scale, I have a solution comparable in power and security to a Citrix server farm with negligible administrative overhead or connectivity/software costs. That’s pretty cool.

A minor down-side of logmein is that it currently only works to remote-control Windows 2000+ desktops (No 98/OSX/*nux). I remember reading an announcement or press release about extending support to linux desktops, but I believe the ship date has come and gone without mention. Anyway, since remote access to linux servers or desktops has never been a big issue, and being able to gain remote access from this other OS’s is supported, it hasn’t bothered me too much. I really love the service, and have rapidly grown to consider logmein indispensible.

Do you have any experience with logmein.com you could share?

I’m a big fan of Apple’s new Mac Mini.
It looks great. It’s elegantly small. And I can seriously recommend it to my
friends whose PCs are saddled with adware, spyware, and viruses, which pretty
much includes all my neighbors with Windows PCs (and me too, now). Chuck points
out that there are some, potentially
interesting uses for the Mac Mini other than recruiting Windows users to
the Mac camp, but right now I want to focus on switching.

You see, it just seems to me that the time is right for Apple to make
a push into the mass-market. First, and bear with me a bit here, let me review
some common reasons to go Windows rather than Mac:

1. Windows PCs can be had cheaply
2. There’s more software for Windows than for the Mac
3. Some web sites seem to favor Windows Internet Explorer
4. Buy Windows, and you fit in with the majority

I’m sure there’s more reasons that I’m missing. But no matter. The Mac Mini
certainly answers objection #1. Not only can you get a Mac for $500, it’ll look
a whole lot cooler than any Windows PC (that I’ve seen) for the same price.

But here’s my real point: All the reasons to stay with Windows pale in the
light of one fact. And that fact is:

Your Windows PC won’t work!

Ok, I’m perhaps pushing a point too far here, but let’s consider my neighbors:

• Neighbor #1 has two PCs. One is completely nonfunctional due to adware
  and spyware. He just shoves the box in a corner and doesn’t use it. He manages
  to limp along with his other PC. Periodically I try and help him remove
  various malware. We never can get it all off, and his kids, whatever it
  is they do, seem to bring it all back again soon enough. I installed Firefox
  for him, which has been a great help, but still he has an infested and dysfunctional
  PC.

• Neighbor #2 also has two PCs. The parents recently told me that their daughter’s
  PC had stopped working because of viruses and malware. They were planning
  to reload it. I don’t know whether they have yet.

• Neighbor #3 is a semi-pro musician (i.e. he actually makes a profit from
  his music). He has frequent trouble with malware. He manages to keep his machine
  running, but I don’t think he’s happy with the amount of effort it takes.
  When I show him this new Mac Mini, and mention that he can get Garage Band
  for it, well, he may leap.

Neither of neighbor #1 or #2 have a lot of money to spend on PCs, and I don’t
think they are likely to spend $500 on a new Windows PC, which they’ll perceive
as delivering more of the same problems they experience now. But a Mac, that’s
different. This new machine will at least get their attention.

No doubt from being careful, I’ve mostly managed over the past several years
to avoid problems with malware and viruses. Lately though, I’ve been reminded
of just how fragile Windows can be. During the holidays, the neighbor kids came
over to my house wanting to use the Internet. I guess their PCs weren’t working
too well. In a fit of insanity, I let them do something I never do, should never
have done: I let them use my office PCs. In less than an hour and a half of
just browsing, they managed to infest both with viruses and other malware. I
spent all the next day and evening recovering, and still I haven’t quite gotten
all the cruft out.

Apparently, all it took to kill my two Windows boxes was two kids browsing
to the wrong websites. Wow! No wonder none of my friends can keep anything running.

In the process of fixing things, I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2. (OK,
I should have done that months ago.) That messed up Visio. My version of Visio,
which I bought just prior to Microsoft’s acquisition of that company, used to
start up, display a dialog telling me it was incompatible with my version of
Windows, and then it’d run just fine. (Go figure). Now, it displays the dialog
and quits. I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft hasn’t coded in some sort of
artificial limitation. Maybe. Maybe not. But I do wonder.

Btw, Firefox has been
a great help to me. If you don’t have it, if you are still using Internet Explorer
(IE), run, don’t walk, but run to Mozilla.org
and install Firefox. Just do it. Trust me. The one piece of adware I have yet
to clean out will pop up advertising windows almost constantly whenever I run
IE. That’s what finally got me off the dime to install Firefox myself. I’ve
not only found Firefox easier to use than IE, but, heh, it doesn’t seem to be
compatible with that one piece of adware.

To add more grief to my life, the old Windows box that my family uses just
up and died a few days ago. It begins to boot, displays a blue-screen telling
me that it cannot boot, and then, after a minute or so, it reboots. Trying the
"last known good configuration" did no good. Maybe it’s a hardware
glitch of some sort, but with Windows I’m certainly not left in a good position
to fix anything. The only solution I can think of at the moment is to rebuild
the box from scratch, which is a long day’s work and then some, and I’ve been
through it before and don’t want to go there again..

I’m not even going try and fix the family PC. It’s a six-year old budget-box
that I’ve long regretted buying, because it’s got an Intel slow-video solution.
I was ignorant of that issue when I bought the box, but I soon learned, the
hard way, that you want a separate video card (or chip). No, I’m not going to
fix that box. I’m going to replace it, and with a Mac (maybe not
a Mini). It’s down now to a question of which Mac to buy and how to reshuffle
my remaining, Windows PCs. (naturally, I wish I could replace both my office
and family PCs all at once, but that isn’t going to happen.)

There’s this concept of a tipping
point where a seemingly small thing can initiate great changes, and I wonder
whether we aren’t reaching something like that in the world of home computers.
All the time I read about viruses and malware and of successful attacks against
Windows systems. I see people who live with malware, because they don’t know
they’ve got it, or, if they do know they’ve got it, they don’t know how to get rid of it. I
see people who are so frustrated with their dysfunctional PCs that they just
shove them into a corner and forget about them. Windows PCs are just difficult for many to keep running. If Apple’s going to try and
go after the masses, this would seem like an opportune time. I wish them success.

What about you? Will the Mac Mini get you thinking about switching? How much time do you spend fighting malware on Windows?

Related link: http://www.bayden.com/fiddler/

Fiddler is to Internet Explorer as livehttpheaders is to Mozilla/FF : a tool to help you debug http traffic between IE and web server. It looks like it does a lot more, like scriptable transcoding, .NET plugins, etc. I found it really helpful today working with web s/w that (grrrr) didn’t work correctly in Firefox.

Also, in the spirit of equal time, Justin Mason suggests a transcoder-ish extension for Mozilla:

Nuke Anything is a Mozilla/Firefox extension which offers two great features in the right-click context menu:

• Remove this object: this will remove the object you’ve right-clicked on — a table TD, paragraphs, images, IFRAMEs, etc.
• Remove selection: more usefully, this allows you to select exactly what you want to remove with a left-button drag, then right-click to remove it.

Justin uses it to clean up pages before sending them to the printer. I find adblock almost always takes out the stuff I don’t want, but YMMV.