Instead of just replying in the discussion section of my previous (and most popular to date) post, let me do this once:

I’m sorry I picked on the Mac. ;-)

I was trying to illustrate a simple, universal story:

a) boy meets technology
b) boy likes technology
c) boy runs into same-old-same-old problem with technology
d) boy’s friends assure him that technology would never do that
e) boy rants to great wide world about it

See, its a universal story. ;-)

Regardless, I was not trying to single out the Mac. It just happened to be the experience I’d just had. I’ve had it a hundred times. Linux-zealot friends telling me that Linux never crashes (ask my SuSe box…heh) or Windows-zealots telling me that Windows 2003 is the best thing since Wonder Bread (ask my printer). The point is, and continues to be, not that you can’t be passionate about your platform. Just, if you are going to try to convince *me*, make sure you have something specific to say. And try not to catch me right after I’ve had a big blowout with your favorite platform.

After a long day of traveling (up at 5:15 AM is not this writer’s idea of a good way to start a day), I arrive at my hotel and proceed to check in. As I hand my American Express to the clerk, I notice a sign to my left that reads “Complimentary High-Speed Internet Access.”

Wonderful, thinks I, now I can catch up on e-mail and put the finishing touches on my presentation for Saturday, and I won’t have to pay for it.

I wander to my room–up and left and then right and then left again and straight for a mile but turn at the vending machine and go northeast at the housekeeping closet and then left and right again and it’s just right there, room 257–and scour the room, looking for a CAT5 data port. Nothing.

Perhaps this free access they speak of is wireless access, which is even better, I ponder. I open my notebook and Windows XP courageously samples the airwaves and returns two available but unsecured wireless networks–SDBay and iDockUSA.

Neither work. I fiddle for half an hour, and then I go back down to the front desk. I stopped off in Los Angeles on the way; it was more of a straight shot. The clerk sees me coming and pastes her grin on.

“How can I help you?”

“I’d like to know about this free Internet access,” I say, pointing to the sign. “I’ve fiddled for a while and I think you need to activate it or something.”

“Oh, that is only for our Harborview guests.”

“Come again?”

“We can give you the Internet access, but it’s $10 extra per day.” She smiles a bit harder now to emphasize the deal I am getting.

“But the sign says ‘complimentary Internet access for guests,’ and I’m a guest. You just billed me for a nine-night stay; I think I qualify.” This is a $95/night hotel, not some Days Inn truckstop.

“I’m sorry, sir, but would you care to have the $10 billed to your room?”

“Give it to me for one night and I’ll decide,” I retorted. The clerk disappeared into the back room for a second, and then returned with a bunch of equipment in a Ziplock bag.

“Let us know if you need help setting it up!”

I retreat to my quarters and unpack the bag, which consists of a cable modem, a splitter, three coax cables, and an impossibly short CAT5 patch cable. They gave me a modem?

I look out the window across the street, to the Dolphin motel. The billboard beckons: “$39/night - FREE WIRELESS HIGH-SPEED INTERNET”

Next time.

What are your experiences with high-speed Internet access in hotels? Do you share in my frustration or do you have a happier report?

Related link: http://www.springframework.net/

Continuing a theme from my many blog incarnations, I am continually dumbfounded by the general lack of rabid open-source support in the .NET community. I teach a lot of developers, on a lot of technologies, and my .NET developers are far and away more open-source-averse than any other group.

That’s just a shame. There are a lot of great projects out there worthy of passionate community support. NUnit, NAnt, CruiseControl.NET are just a few of them. Granted, NUnit is really kicking butt, and NAnt is catching on, but still. How many .NET developers surf SourceForge every week looking for hot new stuff? Not nearly as many as any other community of developers.

One project that I hope has an impact is Spring.NET. Spring is a fantastic, lightweight application framework for Java that has some real benefits over more traditional, heavyweight frameworks. It may not be the be-all, end-all, but for a wide variety of projects, it is a better target platform then some of the big boys.

Spring.NET has the chance to revolutionize the way .NET applications are configured, deployed and hosted. Its “inversion of control” or, more recently described “dependency injection” model has a lot to offer if your team is struggling through issues of over-coupling and objects that are hard to unit test. Additionally, if you are looking for a host environment and COM+/EnterpriseServices seems like overkill, Spring.NET will have a lot to offer.

The project is only in development right now, no distributions available yet, but I’m hoping that as the project grows and matures, it will garner more attention. I’ll certainly be talking about it…..

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

Four incredibly passionate technologists (and, [full disclosure] friends of mine) have started up their own community at Pluralsight. There just simply isn’t a better collection of .NET talent in one place anywhere else. You’ve got some of the foremost experts on security (Keith Brown), XML/Web Services (Aaron Skonnard), ASP.NET (Fritz Onion) and .NET in general (Mike Woodring), all together under one (virtual) roof.

w00t w00t, guys!

Religous OS wars are so tired. Yet, there are still OS warriors crusading against the heathens out there. But they generally don’t know what they are talking about; they just repeat the party line.

Recently, my wife’s (Windows XP) laptop finally gave up; it simply couldn’t keep up with her digital photos or movies anymore. It barely wanted to get off the couch to download her email. It was out of gas.

We started looking into replacements. I couldn’t convince her to try Linux, but she fell in love with Panther. We went out and got an iBook G4 with the cute, snow-and-ice case and its cute blinking light on the panel and its user-friendly interface and its rock-solid BSD chassis and all that goodness. I’ll admit that I am hooked by Apple’s sense of style and even started to believe the hype about the software and hardware just being better.

Fast forward…no, wait, no need. I get the thing home from the Apple store and install the Airport card. When I carefully replace the keyboard, SNAP. F12, F11, esc and ~ are now irrevocably cockeyed and the whole keyboard casing is tilted. We trudge back to Apple. Now, this I have to admit, was nice: no questions asked, they just went in the back and got me another one.

Now, fast forward. Its about two weeks later. Lisa loves her Mac. It is so easy to work with photos and movies and burn cd’s and maintain her multiple email accounts and everything else. She’s in heaven. She logs in and gets an innocuous message: Software Update available. OSX 10.3.3. Just click here! Press the jolly, candy-like button!

This manages to bring the Mac to its knees. Long story short, the following results occur:

1) Printing is broken. CUPS is fouled up because of a bad inode corresponding to the CUPS folder.
2) CD Burning is hosed. Regardless of whether I allow the verification step to proceed, discs come out unusable and the OS spins its wheels post-eject.
3) Permissions to some system folders are irretrievably damaged.

I learn, over the course of three days, that the built-in disk repair utility is essentially useless. I learn to log into single-user mode, where I can work in a more familiar environment (ahh, a Mac that can boot to the command line. Near-heaven.) I learn that even fsck is helpless in the face of my disk problem.

I go buy DiskWarrior. I do not understand why this is not bundled with every Mac. I run it. It fixes about half of our problems. But not all. And I am out $109.

I take the iBook to the “Genius” bar. When our “genius” comes out, I begin to tell him our problem. He scratches his chin and looks thoughtful. Meanwhile, I’m booting into single-user mode to show him the output from fsck. When I flip the notebook around so he can see the screen, his face kind of scrunches uncomfortably, and he says “what is that? I have no idea what you are showing me.” He’d never seen a command line.

In the end, I borrowed an external firewire drive, copied off what I could, and reinstalled the original version of Panther. All is well now, and my wife has agreed not to allow her computer to update itself from the software update dialog.

What’s the point of all this, you may ask? Is this some kind of random rant against Apple? No, and far from it. I love Panther, and as I said earlier, I think Apple is as close to perfect in styling as possible. No, this is a rant against Mac zealots (and Linux zealots, and Windows zealots) who keep finding me in the hallway and telling me that I need to switch to the Mac because it is “so much more stable” or “just all around more solid”. Don’t bring that weak stuff. Give me something concrete, or quit talking about it. Give me technical reasons, not propaganda.

Every OS has its place, its uses, and most importantly, its quirks. The same for the companies/communities that make them.

At the TechEd conference, Microsoft is banging the drum very loudly about its new-found security chops, touting the upcoming release of SP-2 as prime evidence of how closely it’ll pay attention to security from now on.

It’s true that SP-2 is a big step forward. The new pop-up blocker is a very well-designed piece of code. There are a variety of new security features under the hood. And the newly renamed Windows Firewall is now a usable, functional piece of software, while previously it was well-nigh worthless.

But ironically, at the same time that Microsoft was crowing about the security built into SP-2, Zone Labs was releasing a new version of its ZoneAlarm firewall and security suite that is far superior to what’s in SP-2. I’ve been using the beta for a while, and also using the beta of SP-2, and the ZoneAlarm firewall beats the new Windows Firewall hands-down. It blocks more dangers, it’s easier to use, it offers advice about which programs you should block and which you shouldn’t (the Windows Firewall offers no advice), and is far more configurable.

In addition, there are features that keeps people from eavesdropping on your instant messaging conversations, and that will block instant messaging attacks and instant messaging spam. SP-2 does none of this.

So yes, it’s nice to see that Microsoft is paying more attention to security. I hope they keep it up. But even after SP-2 comes out, if you want a great firewall, you’ll have to look to ZoneAlarm, not to the Windows Firewall.

Is SP-2 secure enough for you? How about the Windows Firewall? And what do you think of ZoneAlarm? Let me know.

In WindowsDevCenter, we take our first in-depth look at Longhorn this week, and even though it’s not yet even beta software, the biggest disappointment for me so far is Internet Explorer. The problem isn’t what Microsoft did to Internet Explorer – it’s what Microsoft didn’t do to Internet Explorer.

It didn’t give the browser tabs.

If you’ve only used Internet Explorer to do your browsing, you might not even know that browsers even had tabs. They make it easy to browse multiple sites simultaneously, and switch among them with a mouse click. Netscape has them. Opera has them. Mozilla has them. But Internet Explorer doesn’t, and if the Longhorn preview holds, it won’t have them several years from now, either.

I know this isn’t earth-shaking. But I find tabbed browsing immeasurably easier than browsing without tabs. It would be a simple bit of code to add in. The world wouldn’t end. People wouldn’t go running in fear away from their computers. It would bring Internet Explorer into the modern world.

For whatever reason, for now tabs don’t seem to be in Internet Explorer’s future. That doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of them, though. Check out this article to find IE shells that offer tabs and more.

What do you think of Longhorn or tabbed browsers? Let me know.

Related link: http://www.townonline.com/acton/news/opinion/act_coltbliberty05062004.htm

For those of you interested in my political as well as my technical writing, I’ve published my second political column, The Importance of Being Out

I look forward to your feedback here, or on my dedicated support site.

I’ve been testing XP, and I’m impressed, despite some bugs. But system administrators and IT folks beware: There are some gotcha’s here that might jump up and bite you.

On the up side, the new firewall is much easier to configure than the old one. It’s easier to add exceptions and poke holes through it for specific applications, and I especially like the way it’s easy to apply it on a connection-by-connection basis, for example automatically turning it on for WiFi HotSpots, and off if you’re behind a corporate firewall.

The new WiFi client is far superior to the old one – amazingly enough, it actually makes WiFi configuration and use simple, compared to the brainteaser-like interface of the old client. And the pop-up killer works like a charm.

SP-2 is still buggy – for example, it still won’t recognize that I run Norton Anti-Virus and keep it up to date. Presumably, though, that’ll be fixed by the final release.

But if I were a system administrator or in IT support, I’d be prepared for the worst. The new firewall will be turned on by default, and that means a whole lot of tech support calls and nightmares. Users will be bombarded with firewall messages, and many of their programs will no longer work.

Also, SP2 automatically blocks file downloads in many instances. Sure, you’d like it if no user ever downloaded a file, but face it, that’s not going to happen. And so they’ll want to know what’s broken with Internet Explorer, not realizing that the download blocking is a feature, not a bug.

The bottom line? It’s more secure than existing XP, and adds some nice new touches. But it’ll be tough for some users to get used to, and as usual, system administrators and IT folks will bear the brunt of the problems.

By the way, if you want a fuller report on SP2, check out Wei-Meng Lee’s inside look.

Have you used XP-2 yet? What do you think? If not, what are your worries?

Related link: http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/05/10/ftpdotnet.htm

Recently, I was asked by a client to create a programmatic interface to FTP. I expected to turn to the help files and find an FTP class with methods like get and put and so forth. Oops. No such class. Fortunately, the FTP protocol is very simple, and the .NET framework does provide enough of the plumbing to make creating an FTP client very easy. My newest article on the O’Reilly Network shows how to do it; it is easier than you might imagine.

Every computer user suffers from it several times a day: premature dementia. There’s an important email you’ve sent or received, but for the life of you, you can’t remember when you read it, or in which folder you’ve stored it. Or there’s a spreadsheet or a Word file that you absolutely must get your hands on right now.

But you can’t remember its name. Or where you stored it.

Windows, Outlook or Outlook Express offer little or no help. Sure, they have search tools. And if you have an hour or two to wait while they chug through your hard disk, they might actually find what you need.

We’ve been told that Longhorn will solve the problem, but I’m like you and can’t wait the two or more years until it’s actually released.

Well, I’m here to report that there’s a solution to the problem close at hand. It’s called X1, search software that I’ve been using for more than a month now, and it’s the fastest search software I’ve ever seen. It literally searches as fast as you can type. Type in your search term, and by the time your fingers leave the keyboard, the search is done. It lets you fine-tune your search as well. When searching for email, for example, you can limit the search by folder; by To, From, and Subject fields among others, including even the BCC field; by size of the email; by the .PST file…well, the list could go on, but you get the point.

It indexes not just your email, but your files, contacts and email attachments as well. The first time it does its index, it will take a while, depending on your hard disk size and processor. It did mine in about 15 minutes, and I have an email box stuffed with thousands of messages going back more years than I want to remember, and a hard disk clogged with the manuscript of dozens of books and hundreds of articles. Regularly throughout the day, it freshens the index, and it behaves well when it does it, not slowing down your normal work.

Is this software perfect? No, certainly not. It doesn’t do Boolean searches, for example, a clear shortcoming. And it’s introduced some flakiness into the way my Outlook works. (Of course, there are those who might say that flakiness is inherent in the way Outlook always works.)

But it’s so fast that you can live with its limitations, and speed makes up for the lack of true Boolean searches. It’s try-before-you-buy software, so you can download it from the X1 site, try it for free for 15 days, then delete it if you don’t want it anymore, or else pay $99 to keep it. Yes, the price is a bit steep. But after all, how much is your time worth?

Do you have a favorite search tool? Have you tried X1? Tell me what you think.