I work with a number of clients, most of whom are on MS Exchange of one flavour or another. I get meeting invites from them and accept them joyously into iCal on my Mac. For the most part this works fine, except when it comes to recurring events. My diary was littered with recurring events stretching into the future without end and I was unable to delete these since – as iCal kindly reminded me – I was not the meeting organiser.

I asked clients to send a cancellation, but this didn’t remove the event, and in some cases they’d already removed or finished the recurrence, just leaving me with an infinite stub.

I could delete the individual instances, but had to remember not to delete the whole series (or I’d lose the events that had really happened and that I’d attended) and I also had to take care not to ‘inform the organiser’ of the deletion – it’s never fun getting spammed about someone cancelling an event that doesn’t exist in your world!

In a moment of googling joy today I came across this ancient tip:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2006012408314747

where it mentioned that the ‘organiser’ was identified by their email address. The tip suggested grepping and editing the underlying calendar with a text editor (wah – destruction of data alert!) but it sparked an idea that worked… Here’s how to be able to edit these otherwise untouchable appointments…

• Open the event and look under attendees for the organiser (it says after their name, eg “Ian Jindal (organiser)”)
• Click on the organiser’s name to see their email address and copy this (an option if you ctrl-click on the name)
• Close the appointment and go to Address Book app
• Go to your own address card (Card >> My Card)
• Enter edit mode (apple-L) and add a new email address for yourself – paste in the copied email address for the event organiser, then exit Edit mode (apple-L again)
• Go back to your calendar and open the event
• Bingo! iCal thinks that “you” are the event organiser (since they Organiser’s email address is in your address card) and therefore lets you edit the event. Change the recurrence ‘end date’ to a date of your choice.
• Save.

I now have a clean calendar and a light heart

Just remember to remove the temporary extra email(s) from your address card.

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24 years ago, eh? Most people know that I’m a bit of a mac fan (or victim – take your pick). Given that I spend so much of my working life at a keyboard it’s a real testament to the OS+hardware combo that I still enjoy the very processes of _using_ the computer. Apart from the dull, awful year of the late OS9 phase (think 1997-2000, when Windows NT was a more fulfilling computing experience and Windows2000 “just worked”) every day of using 5 versions of OSX have been fun. Well, nearly.

I missed the start of macdom, only coming across my first mac in early 1988. I’d just come off a “computer course” at Ernst & Young, on an aged Epson orange-screen, keyboard-clips-to-the-front machine and there, in the middle of the open plan office, was a pretty little SE (or SE/30, or something – it was a little box, anyway). It still had its antimacassar on, it was “portable” in the way that a rickshaw makes people ‘portable’, it didn’t have multifinder and the 9″ screen was a porthole, but goodness me was it lovely. Intuitive and it ‘just worked’.

Having MS Word and Excel made the machine useful, so it’d be naive to think that the OS alone could make the machine a success. Indeed, with Apple’s vanity foray into “we be for the creatives” it was nearly wholly marginalised as a business machine. Arguably its entrenched position in the publishing and design departments kept it alive (or was that the enormous software investment in Quark that was a disincentive to change?) while Jobs wandered off and did ‘pretty unix’ via NeXT.

A combination of industrial design (Ive), good UNIX underpinnings or DNA (from NeXT), flair and confidence (from the return of jobs) and an understanding of “mass affluenza”, supporting ‘design items’ and higher prices than the cost-cutting obsessives inside the megaboxshifters would have thought sensible and we have today’s Apple.

The company today has defined a new consumer electronics niche – twice. The iPod and iTunes linked hardware and a licensing business model that was new; the iPhone is a desirable phone that’s the first to make on-the-move data access really usable, while also creating a new economic model for working with telcos (the revenue-share agreements rather than subsidised handset prices).

Still – let’s not get too misty-eyed: not until we see the 10″ Macbook Superair – an iphone-style touchscreen osx-running, optionally-keyboarded datamunching ever-connected wondergizmo – the Apple Newton re-born! I’m just going to nip off and unwrap the pristine Newton 120 that Doug bought me off ebay (in generous sarcasm, I’m sure). Your time will come again, my pretty…

UPDATE: for an amusing look at Mac obsessives, check out the trailer here: http://www.macheadsthemovie.com/ Some great quotes and much at which to chuckle: whether at aging hippies who see Apple as the new revolution, tart comments about them being misguided fools or the sensible point about ‘love the community not the mac’. It has the makings of a great documentary and – whatever your view – it’s a reminder to brand owners in a global, consumerist world, about the power of connection your brand with people’s passions.

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Well, as you’ll know I upgraded to Leopard and had an OK time of it (once I’d sorted out access privileges). Overall, I’m enjoying the new OS, but I must admit that I’m really missing MailTags… roll on the Leopard upgrade in January!

I’ve noticed a couple of things that are a bit annoying:

1) MY GOD IT’S RUNNING HOT! The laptop is too hot to hold. Toast!

2) Occasional ‘freezing’ of the keyboard. There’s an active thread on this, but my own amateur diagnosis is that it’s something to do with either the heat, the superdrive spinning up, faulty cabling, a USB driver or all/any/none of the aforementioned. Whatever, it’s spurred me to sort out the heat thang…

3) “Airdisk” – vapourware disk, more like. I have an Airport Extreme: it’s solid, reliable and pretty. I ask no more. Well, actually I do: please don’t break when you automatically self-upgrade to 7.2.1 (or whatever). Also, how’s about your claim to make attaching a USB drive a piece of cake and then sharing that over the network a reality, rather than a stalling, fumbling, inept sham?

Deep breath.

I only want the airdisk so that I can back up verily mine laptop using Time Machine… however, as I sit here it’s struggling to do the first 100Gb while tethered to firewire, so I’m wondering how realistic the suggested hourly disk snapshots are…

But I digress: back to the asbestos question…

I used to have FanControl running, but find that there’s a newer version specially for the Intel Macs and I’ve just downloaded and installed it.

Since it’s been up and running the keyboard’s been behaving, the ‘puter is definitely a bit cooler, and there’s a neat display of fan speed and temperature.

I’ve also inadvertently found that the biggest contributor to a cool laptop is wedging a pencil underneath the machine, towards the back. This lifts the rear of the machine (giving a rather nice angled keyboard) and lets air circulate. Basic and effective. Got to love pencils

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This is nice.

I’m still in love with TextMate (especially since I’ve been doing lots of editing property lists of late – yuk).

I’ve always liked the way that if you select multiple files and then cmd-click | open with… and select Textmate then it “knows” to open them all and create a working project for them.

This handy little button (which looks rather nice in the finder – a touch of colour) reduces that to one click.

It’s small, fast and effective. One could ask for no more.

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So, this was the advice I gave myself about upgrading to Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard”:

* don’t rush – wait for the war stories
* don’t rush – do some major backups
* don’t rush – do some serious housekeeping
* don’t rush – check you’ve got the serial numbers and details of all applications ESPECIALLY those little plugins that you forget about until they’re not there.

Anyway – I lasted less than 24 hours.

I had a rather horrible experience with the user accounts being disabled after log in. Ouch. I’d log in, all would be as normal, except that the Keychain (where passwords etc are stored) was corrupted. Worse, after 3 attempts to open Keychain it kindly told me that I was locked out. No problem, thought I, I’ll do something else and get back to this. Unfortunately the user account then disappeared!

There was no mention of the account on the log-in screen and even when I fired up terminal and tried to ’su’ to the user the password wasn’t accepted.

Panic was alleviated by my being able to see all of the user accounts on the drive so I knew that the data was intact (and because I had root access and the system disks as a boot option I knew I’d be able to recover everything).

Interestingly I had a realisation about backups. Even though I had a full backup of everything (read/write) and a disk image (‘ghost) I could use to fully restore the machine, the very thought of losing 24 hours of restoring time was just exhausting. I therefore chose to continue my efforts at recovery.

There’s about 250Gb of data and stuff on the G5 and if I can’t be bothered to restore then goodness help me when there’s a couple of terabytes there!

My insight from this is to fully separate the OS and vital applications from data. As of today the data is kept on an external drive and both the data and the OS on the desktop are backed up to a second external NAS drive. I sorta knew this would be better but it took a prod like this to make it happen.

I tried to rectify the log-in problems every which way. Googling gave me myriad answers and I did the basics: restart from the CD, reinstall the OS, repair privileges, recover the keychains from backup, recreate the keychains, run the keychain repair, install the keychain patch… All to no avail.

Finally, I found this most excellent support document: “Unable to log in to an account after an upgrade install”. Interestingly, this support document was created 2 days before Leopard was released to the public… Would have been nice to have been told!

Anyway, starting in ’single user mode’ (a unix-like startup) and doing some stuff as root fixed everything. Huzzah!

Armed with this knowledge I upgraded the laptop last night and, well, it took 45 mins and worked like a dream. Mac-like, indeed. I left it overnight to index my mail and 100Gb of HD contents and this morning it was zippy and lovely.

The interface is slick, perceptibly rapid and all of my plugins and apps work fine – apart from (sob) MailTags. The Apple “Discoverers” are truly awesome and astoundingly accurate but my workflow really needs the MailTags approach to which I’m now habituated. I hadn’t realised its utter non-workingness. Pity – and roll on the upgrade due at the end of the year. Note how, in my new well-behavedness, I’m not going to install the beta version…

So – what have I learned from this?

1) Backups are vital, but it needs to be a real catastrophe to make me do a full restore. The time taken and effort required are simply too onerous for a ‘minor disaster’. I need to improve my backup approach
2) Separate data and OS/apps really clearly – makes a sensible backup and recovery process easier (I hope)
3) take care to synchronise settings (keychains, preferences, licence keys etc) – this is what makes your computer “yours” and you’ll be kicking yourself for months without these…

The final lesson is the most serious one, however. Don’t mess with “production” machines! Bit by bit ‘my’ collection of Macs is no longer mine. Vicky really relies on the G5 for her design work and having me “upgrade” the computer where the improvement is, erm, being locked out and losing a day’s work is not acceptable. I’ve now taken myself off _her_ machine and will get it ready for full production support.

Of course, this means that I now need a dev/test machine…

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DPReview has a link to the new guidelines for the “Specification Guideline for Digital Cameras”. Currently in draft the document carries the collaborative weight of Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic, Sony and others.

Currently the only topic on digicams is the infernal megapixel level – an annoying and largely irrelevant metric when the camera has high noise, terrible compression algorithms and a shutter lag measured in geological time!

Standards – to ease comparison and make key features visible – are always a good thing and it’s cheering to see an industry body taking the initiative here.

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A wonderful short film on the art of guilloche – mechanical engraving. In an age of mass production or computer-controlled manufacture it’s too easy to forget the ‘original’ hand-crafting – it’s too easy to assume that it was ‘just done by a machine’.

Guilloche does something to me and I can meditate upon a fine watch face for hours (yes, I know I need therapy) so it’d lovely to see this passionate film by a suitably brown-overcoated Frenchman, clearly in love with his draft.

Check out Watchismo’s article for links to other videos in this lovely series.

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I’d rather ignored Spinvox since I wasn’t sure that the voice-to-text technology was ready to receive voicemails (that, let’s face it, often have peculiar acronyms, words and accents). However, a number of friends are using Spinvox and swear by it. Admittedly, they’re either head hunters (large volume of calls, screening etc) or tech types (who would rather not speak to anyone at the best of times) but to be fair the conversions they’ve received have been pretty good.

Allegedly, the conversion is by dint of humanoids, listening and transcribing to the VM recording, but their website makes no mention of the mechanism. The human touch could explain the accuracy – as one friend mentioned, the transcript accurately reflected a mumbling, drunk Welshman in a cab… Harsh.

Anyhoo, their latest product extension is voice to blog. Nice idea to file short pieces quickly, although I’m not sure I’d trust spellchecking, linking and suchlike to a voice interface. I can imagine ‘posting’ a blog entry only to discover an embarrassing typo a little while after Google indexes the blog…

That said, the joy of being able to huddle in a corner and pretend that you’re reading your scoop “down the wire” to the expectant news desk (like a hack in a 1950s movie) is just too great – I’m going to have to try this!

Aside from this implementation though it’s good to see asynchronous voice interfaces being developed, especially while so much attention is lavished on the visual and the ‘battle of the gooeys’.

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A while ago I posted about a lovely little app from mobile.feisar.com that allowed me to sync my Ericsson K800i with my mac. One of the best £1.49s I’ve ever spent!

Anyway, the lovely folk there mailed me today with a new plug-in that allows – at LAST – me to SMS directly from my mac via the K800i.

In case people aren’t aware, when your mac is “paired” with a mobile phone and you’re in the Address Book application, you can right-click (or command-click, as Mac Users say) on a mobile number and select “SMS” from the contextual menu.

This allows one to knock out SMS messages as if there were no tomorrow. The only reason I miss the Hated Treo 650 is for its awesome texting capabilities, but now I feel liberated.

There’s an additional nice touch in the software that, when you get an incoming call there’s an on-screen notification and you can accept, reject or immediately SMS the caller. Best of all, at the end of a call, you’re asked if you want to log the call in the contact record:

Called at 30/01/2007 10:03

is added to the notes record. Granted, it hasn’t got duration, whether initiated or incoming, or even a billing code (!) but it’s still a neat touch. Best of all it’s simple, lightweight, needs no effort on my part and – gloriously – just £1.49.

With all of this Mac-K800i Karmic Goodness I may even be slightly sad when I trade up to the inevitable iPhone… Maybe.

UPDATE: 20070326… The other day I went to sync my phone and – erk – there was an error: apparently the plugin was no longer compatible with iSync. Of course – the curse of configuration management when you run Software Update and just install all latest updates to OSX! I wandered over to Feisar’s site and found this helpful update – typically clear and helpful. Honestly, this is such a helpful site – and even better value! This really is my favourite ever £1.49 spent online!

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Not quite “being there”, and not as fast as IRC, but props to the folk at MacRumours for their line by line coverage of Job’s keynote…

Read this bottom up… I particularly like the “crowd cheers” commentary.

9:43 am one device, not 3 separate
9:43 am crowd goes wild again
9:42 am 3rd
internet communicator
9:42 am revolutionary
9:42 am mobile phone
9:42 am 2nd
9:42 am crowd goes wild
9:42 am widescreen ipod
9:42 am first
9:42 am 1984 – first mac
2001 first ipod
today – introducing 3 revolutionary products

I know, I’m a sucker, but I WANT ONE.

Just nipping off to find a way to preorder…

My only sadness is that it’s not like the Newton Reborn… Your day will come again, my sweet. Soon, yes soon.

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Interesting to see a video search technology making it to the big time (free time).

Podzinger uses speech recognition software to ’search inside’ audio and video. The cunning part is that it’s able to do this to a repository of stuff (YouTube) and then add to its index. Looking at the Podzinger website they have a number of ‘content partnerships’ and I assume that this entails a form of notification of new content for indexing.

Many moons ago, at the BBC, I was excited by the notion that we could search our TV output for text strings. At the time, speech to text conversion was execrable (back in 2000) and so the idea didn’t fly.

Interestingly, the part of the BBC in which I worked was also responsible for the closed captioning (subtitles) and so in theory we had a time-stamped, “already text” option for searching. Unlike speech-to-text software the Carbon-Based Lifeforms who were creating the captions (think of stenographers on speed) were able to spell correctly the phonetically-challenging names and technical terms that defeat generalist conversion dictionaries.

While it’s great to see a move to increased searchability of visual material, I’d love to see more use made of the close-caption resource. Any one at the BBC reading this and fancy a quick mashup??

It’d be worth it just to be able to search on “Sound of footsteps approaching” or “[loud music]“, not to mention the seminal “[Warm applause]“.

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I’m a bit of a Mac fan and I’ve already posted about getting an early MacBookPro. All was well (OK, the heat was annoying and carting such a lump around has also made me think more about getting a ‘computer on a memory stick‘[pdf]… but I digress).

Overall, life was good and even the I’m-going-to-kill-myself annoyance with the refusal to sleep problem didn’t covert me to PCs (and thankfully a fix arrived quickly).

What drove me to distraction was the spontaneous shutdown when the pooter was running on battery. Surely, the whole point of laptops is that they run on batteries (!) and so the problem was stupendously annoying, especially since the accursed battery level was reading 97%.

After this had happened a few times I read the tales of woe online: general problems with the early batteries, silence from Apple, long delays in having MBPs assessed. Sigh.

I rang Square, where I’d bought the MBP, and was told it would be three weeks even to look at the machine, and no there are no loan machines. I was also told that there was no guarantee it was a battery problem, but that I could buy another battery (gee, thanks) but – oops – no they were out of stock anyway.

So – more in annoyance than anything – I rang the Apple “Genius Bar” at the Regent Street Apple Store and, after a brief wait, got through to a chirpy-sounding person, clearly reading from a call-centre screen prompt. After asking me if I’d done the obvious (I had) and the non-obvious (firmware updates, checked RAM seating, reset power management) things went silent for a while (SFX: sound of reading notes).

Then, bingo: “there’s a website where you can check if you’re eligible for a battery replacement”. We visited the site together (ahh) and I completed the details (you need battery serial number and MBP serial number) and the site told me I was eligible. I completed my details and was warned of a lengthy delivery delay. Still, I was pleased it was being “sorted” and was rather impressed. All v easy, and I was surprised not to have found details of this on the web.

I was even more surprised and impressed though to receive the batter the next day, less that 24 hours after I’d completed the form, and on the last working day before Christmas. All arrived in a neat box with a return-paid label for the old battery (environmentally-responsible disposal).

In all, from my very low expectations, Apple turned round a major annoyance with a slick, prompt and free service.

Hugs all round – and I hope that the URL will help some other early adopters (fools as we are – or just incontinent in our desire for more Appley Kit Goodness). For now, back to enjoying the 3-hour unplugged battery life…

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Herewith a further step in visual merchandising.

The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a “visual signature” for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.

What this means – If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.

This could be deployed by retailers like ASOS.com to take actual celebrity images (say from a film premiere or suchlike) and their users can search not only for the ‘editorialised’ product but also the watch, handbag, shoes etc.

Editorial-led sites could also now offer merchandising by linking the search capability to the stock held either by a third party or an affiliate…

Complex and limiting taxonomies and product categorisations could disappear and give customers mouse-able and rapid access to product.

While it won’t sweep away navigation or searching this is a new capability for marketers to consider.

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Congrats to Mike Butcher, hitherto of mbites fame, upon his election to the Editorship at TechCrunch. Mike will bring not only journalistic rigour but also media/tech insights born of his years of commentary and analysis of the sector.

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Here’s a well-written summary of the BCS’s position on developing the “professional” aspects of IT.

As IT becomes the medium in which business progress is made, a strategic enabler and a tactical nightmare – all simultaneously! As computer literacy and management of IS/IT resources is required of every employee (from marketing to front line sales staff) there’s a point of view that holds us all to be IT people now.

The question for the BCS will be to differentiate between “skills” (eg certifiable capability in an application, coding language, architectural knowledge) and “professionalism”.
For my part I see professionalism as a code of behaviour, conduct and commitments that sit on top of an arcane body of specialist, necessary knowledge. One can have all of this knowledge without being professional, and equally act in a professional manner with a less than comprehensive knowledge.

The BCS is putting great energy into this initiative. Rightly so, since it will define the role, remit and indeed purpose of the BCS.

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I’ve finally managed to dump the abominable Treo650. After years of Palm use I’ve called it a day: crap OS, daily restarts, fat form factor, pathetic microphone and a camera that’s like a myopic squint. In my time with Orange I’ve had three of them (Threo?) due to problems, breakdowns and general crapness.

Welcome, then, the new Sony Ericsson K800i. Small, nicely built, good camera and it’s just a phone! I will miss the QWERTY keyboard of the Treo but that’s it.

Anyway, first impression led to the realisation that here’s yet another thing that doesn’t sync with the Mac via iSync (should be renamed “MightSync”). A quick google however led me to the rather excellent mobile.feisar.com and his iSync plugins.

After a vast £1.49 (honest) later I had a plugin that just worked exactly as stated. Brilliant!

It reminded me of the wonders of micro-charging. For £1.49 it’s not worth not trying it, if that makes sense. The cost of time looking for options or fiddling in vain is far greater.

So – with a quick “thank you” and a plug for the site I’m off to enjoy good sound quality, good build, decent camera and reliable operation…. I hope!

Now all I need to do is the Sucker’s Dance of buying more new format memory cards, chargers, adaptors etc.

Progress, eh?

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The BBC has announced a wide-ranging change in responsibilities at BBC Towers to fulfil the promises of its Creative Future review under the Director General, Mark Thompson.

People outside the BBC will no doubt either boggle at the number of people at the top table or wonder what the fuss is about: both views are valid.

The announcement seeks to streamline the responsibilities for content, commissioning and the technological and organisational resources to deliver. For “new media” business (used to seeing all content as digital from the outset, and by definition multi-use and multi-media) then this will seem sensible and belated. For people used to working in either focused business or highly matrixed businesses then the allocation of responsibilities will also seem like a no-brainer.

For people who’ve worked at the BBC (disclosure: I was Head of Online Operations back in the prehistoric days of 1998+), or people who work closely with the BBC then the sound of tectonic plates moving painfully will be clearly discernable.

The BBC was structured (despite its many restructurings) along the lines of people who owned the channel, people who made stuff, people who had money to get people to make stuff and people who owned the technology to allow the stuff that was made to get to people people who paid for it – ie viewers and listeners (and now ‘mousers and clickers’). Along the route the fiefdoms of News, Sport, Radio and TV guarded their content jealously. Latterly, while many of the silos were cracked and ostensibly working together, there remained a shortfall in achievement mainly due to lack of co-ordination, integration and systems to allow teams to work together, and others to access material created elsewhere.

This change signals from the highest level that the Corporation is now focused on putting money, resources, processes and ideas into delivering eduction, entertainment and information to the customer – across all channels.

The challenge (apart from the not inconsiderable cultural and operational ones) will be to retain the distinctive voices of the BBC channels via the Channel Controllers and exploit the capabilities of each medium. This is what the BBC has been doing for years, though, and a structure that provides improved visibility, direction and cohesion has to be welcomed.

The overall feeling though is a ’so what?’. This reorganisation is no more than one would expect from a modern business, focusing (at last) upon the customer. That the BBC is responding to ‘web2.0′, social networking phenomena etc is commendable, but to what extent is the BBC driving these initiatives or indeed what has it to contribute?

There’s no need for the BBC to become the “myspace” of Middle England (although Gather.com is an interesting new network in the US – a sort of Myspace for adults who like public radio – you can imagine this in the UK as a sort of space for Radio 4 listeners!). They certainly have a role in bringing the late majority to understand and use technological developments, but to be fair the late majority would arrive eventually.

Ultimately, the BBC’s uniqueness is its compelling content – hence the excitement over its promises to open its archives. I can’t help feeling that further efforts in this area would be to our (customers’) best advantage, while a great openness to commercial and third party partnerships would deliver the social networking, web2.0, innovation benefits without the angst of navel gazing, structure reviews and continual worrying over the commercial:government:funded interface.

To the extent that the new structure can deliver a freer way of working I welcome it. Other than that this is one for historians of the Corporation, or who are writing PhDs on organisational structures.

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This is a great article, explaining some of the options available to web designers who wish to use the data resources of other websites via that application interfaces. It’s a quick, readable summary of the main options and I’d recommend it to all marketing and eCommerce people who’re happily bandying the “API”, AJAX and “feed” terms around as part of their Web2.0 awakenings

You can skip all of the code with an admiring glance: read it as logical English and it’s quite digestible. It’ll give an idea what’s needed to create these links to flickr and others services (or, frighteningly, how little!).

What are the “take-aways”?

* that so many thing are visible from a URL. Compare this to the difficulty of accessing corporate information…
* that the webserver is able to pretend to be other servers and rewrite addresses and results on the fly
* that there are many ways to skin the proverbial Cat2.0.

Most of all, though, eCommerce Marketing professionals should realise just how easy it is for technically savvy people to create new, sophisticated offerings, standing on the shoulders of giants. These are the new competitors. And while Yahoo!, Google and others are happy to provide the data free of charge there’ll be no stopping innovation at this micro, niche level.

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