I have never been a fan of Google, but when they launched Google Apps I thought it was a great idea: Leveraging Gmail (the king of web-based email at the time) for your own domain. So I opened a Google Apps account for my main personal domain, and later opened several Google Apps accounts for my current job, friends, etc. I even considered Android as an alternative for it’s great integration with “cloud” email and calendaring services (that was, of course, before the release of iOS 4).

But now that they’re “granting” incomplete Google Accounts features to every Google Apps domain, they have this Conflicting Accounts concept, and using a Google Apps user with the same email address as your personal Google Account it’s becoming a headache.

I noticed it because I use Google Reader, but I’ve read that YouTube, Blogger, Picassa and Checkout users have worst problems than mine. What can you do when the landlord of half-internet sends you a new contract and you don’t agree?

I found this thread some months ago, and I was particularly impressed with this post:

I’ve been a Google fangirl since Google debuted. I’m a loyal Android user, plus use Google Apps for two domains’ email. This move to the new infrastructure is not just painful, it’s excruciating. Why on earth would you make things so difficult for apps users? We’re your most loyal crowd, aren’t we? YouTube’s new incompatibility with my apps account causes my Android phone not to work right unless I constantly log out and back in under different accounts. I depend on my phone to work well, and it can’t now.
…
-Gardenwife

So I decided it was time to move on. My personal email and calendaring solution has been Google free for a while now, and I’m looking for alternatives to Reader.

More than 4GB on their way

A good mood-setter for the reading is this line from Syracusa’s conclusion:

…the content of the operating system itself clearly marks the start of a new journey. Seemingly emboldened by the success of iOS, Apple has taken a hatchet to decades of conventional wisdom about desktop operating systems.

File system: Bad things, nice improvements and hopes

• What’s wrong with HFS+
• File system changes in Lion
• File system future

Files / documents recovery

• Document revisions
• Mobile Time Machine

System configuration

• System Preferences
• About This Mac (I love the iTunes-esque Storage tab).

User interface

• Here’s to the crazy ones

It was not a straightforward, easy task for a novice like me. The good news is I have documented the full procedure, and you can read it in the Base22 wiki.

I will attempt the same setup for WebSphere Portal 7, and of course will be posting my results.

* The sad truth is, if you work in the web industry, you will not be completely Windows free for a long time, thanks to that web cancer old browser called Internet Explorer.

So after the release of iPhone OS 3.0 I found this guide about enabling tethering in countries where it is disabled by the carrier’s default configuration, and it has worked really well (I have an unlimited data plan, by the way).

With the release of iPhone OS 3.1 yesterday, rumors and early adopters say the firmware update would disable Internet Tethering on iPhones where the carrier doesn’t officially supports it.

I updated to iPhone OS 3.1 with certain precautions, and Internet Tethering is still functional for me.

So if you want to update to 3.1 without loosing the tethering capacity, this is what you should do:

DISCLAIMER FIRST: This worked for me, but I don’t have any way to know if it will work for you. Proceed at your own risk. If you already have enabled Internet Tethering and it is critical for you, I would recommend you to not follow any unsupported method like this.

Before updating to iTunes 9 make sure you have the last version of your carrier’s provisioning bundle:

1. On your iPhone go to Settings / General / About, and look for Carrier version. Take note of the version number. Mine was Telcel 4.4.
2. Download the list of iPhone OS updates from here, and find your carrier’s latest provisioning bundle available.
   My Carrier is Telcel México, so I found their last provisioning bundle is this:
   Telcel_mx 3.0 BuildVersion 4.4 BundleURL http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone/CarrierBundles/061-6937.20090803.3er5t/Telcel_mx.ipcc

   So, I’m up to date.

If you have the latest version of your carrier’s provisioning bundle you’re free to go; if not, you should first update it while you have iTunes 8.2, and possibly re-enable tethering using the aforementioned guide.

To install the iPhone OS 3.1 update:

1. Download and install iTunes 9.
2. Connect your iPhone, so iTunes 9 can search for updates. When iTunes says there’s an update for your iPhone DON’T UPDATE, choose to ONLY download the new firmware, but don’t install it just yet.
3. Sync your iPhone, so it is ready for upgrading (the backup can take several minutes sometimes). Then disconnect it from your computer.
4. Wait for iTunes to finish downloading your firmware update.
5. When the download finishes, enable Airplane Mode on your iPhone (first option of Settings). This will disconnect your iPhone from your cellphone network and WiFi.
6. Reconnect your iPhone and update your firmware (the one iTunes just downloaded). The operating system will be upgraded and your iPhone will restart. Don’t disconnect your iPhone until it shows up in iTunes, and you are sure it has upgraded to 3.1.
7. Disconnect your iPhone from your computer, disable Airplane mode and wait for your iPhone to reconnect to network.
8. Go and check in Settings if you still have Internet Tethering available as an option.

I have done this in two iPhones: First in my wife’s (she doesn’t use tethering, so I taught it was a good idea to test first on her iPhone) and later in mine.

Both iPhones showed the same carrier version after the firmware upgrade, but after a restart mine shows a different one (5.0). Anyway, tethering is still functional.

I suppose Internet Tethering option may disappear one of these days (when Telcel sends a new carrier configuration file to Apple), or they will start charging extra money, but in the mean time it is working well.

Good luck if you decide to upgrade.

DISCLAIMER: This information is provided AS IS, use it under your own risk. I’m not responsible if you broke your iPhone, or if your carrier charges you a lot of money, or if someone sues you.

If you really want to know what the Pre is, go here:
http://www.palm.com/pre

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Via ALT1040.

Update:
Mark Zuckerberg has clarified the reasons for the new legal terms on sharing content in Facebook:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

Read the full post here:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130

Microsoft’s new software will eventually be bundled on every new PC sold, outside of Apple’s, so there’s no need to worry about leaking features or showing off the flaws of an unfinished product. Microsoft doesn’t have to sell Windows 7, it only has to worry about market rejection. Due to the volumes of PCs it will eventually be installed on, it’s bound to be successful even if it is a marginal product.

You should read the full note; the approach taken by Apple to 64 bit processing in the upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard, is clearly explained.

Via Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Apple ups the ante (AppleInsider)

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/index.html

Disclaimer: Stickers for hiding the Apple logo on your MacBook Pro not included. ;)

Having the ugly or frightening appearance of a monster…
(from the Oxford American Dictionary)

If there were computers in nightmares, surely they would look like this.

More horrifying pictures on Engadget.

It all ends today, as Apple states 2009 will be the last Macworld they will attend, and Steve Jobs won’t address the keynote this time.

The end of an era.

Via Engadget.

If like me, you lived the web browser evolution since the early 90′s, you should read it now.

Via Daring Fireball.

Built by General Dynamics, the GeoEye-1 (satellite) is equipped with a next-generation camera made by ITT. This camera can easily distinguish objects 16 inches long, with 11-bits per pixel color. In other words: this thing can see the color of your shorts. It will be up there, looking at your pants every single day, the time it takes for it to complete one orbit. And it will keep doing that for more than ten years, its expected life.

And Google is the only non-gubernamental entity with the rights to use this information. Now let’s talk about books; how about Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Read the full note about the GeoEye-1.

To secure your place in the serial production of this buddy, be ready to spent $249 USD and go to this link.

Don’t forget to read the apocalyptical disclaimer at the end of this Disney’s website product page:

WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm.

WALL-E friend, don’t listen those people; they just feel envy because of your sympathy; you are not cancerous at all, pal.

• The email sent to your main email address (using your own domain, not me.com) automatically pushed to your iPhone via MobileMe.
• The email sent from your iPhone (using the MobileMe account) delivered from your main email address (your own domain, not me.com).
• Additional benefit: Your email, address book and calendars via web on the same place (the MobileMe web application).
• You won’t need an account hosted on an Exchange Server, the only other alternative for iPhone push email with your own domain.

The bad:

• All the email sent from the MobileMe web application will be addressed from your MobileMe email (me.com, not your own domain). This is not a problem if you always send mail from your computer or your iPhone.
• All your mail sent from the iPhone will have a Sender header; in some mail clients, that makes an “on behalf of” appendix to the From header.

What will you need:

• MobileMe account (this does the push-email magic).
• Gmail or Google Applications for domains account (will be used as a gateway to send email).
• Your main email account on your own domain. This is optional; you won’t need it if your Gmail is your main email account (typical case for Google Apps).
• iPhone with 2.0 operating system (as 3G).

First: Configure your email accounts on the iPhone

1. Configure your MobileMe account on the iPhone.
2. Edit your recently created MobileMe account; open the Settings application, and go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars / your MobileMe account (usually named MobileMe) / Account info / SMTP (in the Outgoing mail server section) / Add server…
3. Enter smtp.gmail.com as hostname, and specify your full Gmail address as username, and your Gmail password.
4. Touch Save, and go back to the SMTP screen.
5. Set the primary server (smtp.me.com) to Off.
6. Set the newly created server (smtp.gmail.com, it appears in Other SMTP servers) to On.
7. Now you can exit the Settings application and go back to your iPhone’s main screen.

Second: Configure your Gmail account

1. Login to your Gmail account, and go to Settings / Forwarding and POP-IMAP.
2. In the Forwarding section, enable Forward a copy of incoming mail to, and specify your MobileMe email address (your_username@me.com).
3. In the IMAP Access section, enable IMAP and save your changes.
4. If your Gmail account is not in your own domain (you have another email account), you also will need to follow these steps:
   1. In your Gmail account, go to Settings / Accounts.
   2. Configure your other email account; click Add another email address, and provide your full name and your main email address. Click Next step and then click Send verification.
   3. Gmail will send you a verification email to your main email address; wait for it and follow the instructions to verify it.
   4. When you are done with verification, return to your Gmail account, Settings / Accounts and click the Make default link next to your main email address.
   5. Configure your main email address to forward all your mail to your Gmail account (this is a different process for each email provider; consult with your mail administrator if you have no idea about how to do it).
5. Save your changes, and exit Gmail.

How it works

• When somebody sends you an email to your main email address, it is forwarded to Gmail and then to your MobileMe account. MobileMe pushes the email to your iPhone.
• When you send mail using Gmail’s SMTP server, you need to authenticate using your Gmail account. If your message comes from an address distinct to the address registered with Gmail, it will be replaced with the Gmail address in the From header, and the original address of the message (the one with me.com) will be placed in a special Sender header.

Enjoy.

Via Mac OS X Hints.

The application is really simple but useful, you can create new posts and edit the old ones, include images taken with the iPhone cammera or in the local library and preview the posts without leaving WordPress. There’s full support for tags and cattegories, posts timestamp and passwords. You can even locally store drafts of your mobile posts!

I can’t find a way to manage comments, but I suppose it is a feature that will come soon.

I had to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 2.6 to use it. You can read more here.

Great application; it has a privileged place on my home screen now.

(Picture taken from my workplace window attached.)

The switch from WiFi to cellular network data is automatic, as long as you have WiFi activated. In the default behavior, the iPhone will constantly look for new WiFi networks while the device is not in standby, and will ask if you want to join when it finds one. You can easily turn off this feature to save battery (and to avoid nagging dialogs about unfamiliar WiFi spots).

When you get home (or your office, or any other place with a familiar WiFi network) the iPhone will join the WiFi and turn off the cellular data connection. You will only notice the iPhone is using WiFi and not GPRS/EDGE/3G by the icon next to the carrier name; there’s no notification dialog to confirm. If you daily visit 4, 10 or 20 distinct places and you have joined the WiFi networks of all of them, the iPhone will jump from cellular data to WiFi to cellular data to WiFi again each time you get to a different location (Try this, Windows Mobile!).

You can also turn WiFi off completely to save battery, and turn it on only when you know you are near an accessible WiFi spot; in that case, when you turn on WiFi the iPhone will look for familiar networks and if found, it will connect automatically (and turn off cellular data). Turning on/off WiFi is not so problematic, as the switch control is just 2 taps away from the home screen.

Another concern of Victor are the iPhone capabilities as a music player and voice recorder.

The iPhone is also an iPod, and the best iPod: I could say it is more an iTunes mobile (an extension to your iTunes library that goes with you). It can host your albums, music videos, movies, tv shows and classify everything in playlists, the same way iTunes does it.

There’s a downside for the iPod functions here, and is that you must control the play/pause/previous/next functions from the touchscreen (as any other application on the iPhone). That means when you are walking in the street and want to skip the current track, you must take the iPhone out of your pocket, unlock the screen and tap the “next” icon, then push the standby hard button (to lock the iPhone again) and return the device to your pocket.

However, the volume control of the iPhone is managed by a pair of hard buttons on the left border of the device; you change the volume here for a call, the ringer or the music, earphones or speaker. No unlock needed.

As for the voice recorder: There is no such thing on the iPhone. I remember a 3rd party application released last year for jailbroken/unlocked iPhones, but I don’t think I would try this. Maybe in the meantime somebody will release a voice recorder application developed with the official iPhone SDK. (UPDATE) Actually, there are various voice recorder / voice memo applications in the App Store; some of them are free (Thanks for clarification, Christian).

Hope this helps.

First the bad stuff:

1. The Contacts application is kind of… slow when starting up. Maybe this is because of my 367 contacts.
2. The keyboard is not much reliable at the first impression. You need to use this keyboard some time before you feel comfortable with it and start typing at a decent speed. One good thing is the keyboard learns from what you type, so theoretically after some weeks of use, it will start suggesting me every word as soon as I type the first 2 letters. We’ll see.
3. Really miss Copy & Paste. There’s no copy & paste. I understand it is not an easy thing to do, mainly because of the user interface paradigm (How would you select text with one finger? And how would you send it to the clipboard when selected with one finger too? Now the same, but without breaking the UI?).
4. There’s no week view in the iPhone Calendar. It would be great to have a 5-day week view when in landscape mode.
5. The iPhone can’t show subscribed calendars. This is a big problem; some partners and I share our calendars by publishing them as “.ics” in some web hosting, or by setting the calendars as public in Google Calendar. At home, my wife and I are sharing our personal calendars to know about future compromises with the family more dynamically. By now this is available only at the computer, and not in the handheld device.
6. The birthdays calendar doesn’t show in the iPhone. The fact that it is not synced via Mobile Me is not a bad thing, as the Birthdays calendar on iCal and on the web calendar of Mobile Me is just a view generated “on the fly” with the information taken from the birthday field in Address Book. This it is just a feature that has not been implemented in the Calendar application of the iPhone OS.

The good news is, the good things about the iPhone are by far more important than the mentioned bad things, so I can live with them. The good stuff:

1. It feels solid and trusty. The phone has the right size and the right weight. It feels well in your hand, you never think it will slip. The back is made of plastic, but it is hard and doesn’t scratch. The glass of the front face (and the screen) feels smooth to your fingers.
2. It is glossy. Yeah, the entire device is some kind of fingerprint magnet, but when it’s clean, looks awesome.
3. It just works. The software is very responsive, very fast; whit the exception of the Contacts application (a bit slow on startup, as mentioned earlier) the entire OS reacts at your command. Everything behaves as advertised; every button and link takes you to the expected place. The scrolling, zooming and panning works very natural. The A-GPS is very precise, and Google Maps updates in real time.
4. It feels so familiar. Sometimes I just think the iPhone is an extension of my MacBook. I have my appointments on my calendar, which feels just like iCal, the Address Book makes me think is the same program, NetNewsWire shows the same information in the phone and in the computer, not to mention Safari is a great browser with the only limitation of the screen size; the overall interface is very Leopard. This is what a PDA or a mobile computer must be.

There is one more bad thing: In Mobile Me, you are forced to use the “@me.com” email account; there’s no way to configure your own domain (as in Google Applications for Domains). This is very bad for us who want to keep our email address. This is what keeps the overall experience not to be perfect; a 9 of 10.

This is by far the best phone I’ve ever had, and no doubt is the most powerful mobile computer in the market today.

In the IT world (IT is a concept that was born to the information revolution) this is kind of a cycle looking to benefit the productivity: We achieve great technological developments motivated on the need for better tools to manage more information, and the data flow becomes wider every day because we can deal with more loads of data. Then, if we can manage and understand more information, we can manage more resources to do more things.

The personal computer clearly has played an important role in this cycle during the last years, and there are just a few smart men leading this development, like Bill Gates.

I don’t say Bill Gates is the author (or the big hero) leading the modern phase of the information revolution, but I think that much of the world as we know it today is the consequence of his great and early vision.

Bill Gates co-founded and during the last 30 years has conducted the company that defined how is composed the modern office desktop, and much of the automated business processes. He thought computers would be in near every place, and he acted as a facilitator to reach that idea.

He is a dreamer, and when his dreams have not been reached, he certainly has transformed the world in that hope.

The work he is doing now in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is remarkable; now he is following other dreams, those of a mature Bill Gates compromised with the part of the world that could not evolve on his past enterprise; that’s an example we all should take too.

Here’s to you Bill, thanks for your vision and your passion.

In computing, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication (read the full article).

ESET Latinoamérica has reported fake invitations to Facebook; when you click on the links in the invitation mail, you get a page that looks identically to the Facebook website, but is coming from another source, and expects to get your credentials to gain access to your Facebook account and profile. This would compromise the personal and private information stored in the profile of the user being attacked.

We are used to know about these phishing attempts with banking websites, eBay, Paypal, etc. but I think this is the first report of a phishing massive attack to social network users.

The solution to avoid this attacks is to keep eyes wide open: Always look at the address bar of your browser, and identify if the shown URL really corresponds to the website you are supposedly visiting. Also you could use web browsers with anti-phishing methods, like Firefox 3.

Today I have a very heterogenous setup:

• iCal, Address Book and Mail (Using IMAP) on OS X Leopard.
• A Treo 750, running Windows Mobile 6 and ActiveSync-ing my mail (sometimes active-stinking, like Phil Schiller just said some minutes ago).
• Zimbra Collaboration Suite account, hosted at 01.com (for the push-email).
• MarkSpace Missing Sync, for:
  1. Transferring my multiple calendars to the Treo, because Zimbra can send only one calendar due to ActiveSync technical restrictions. Most of the time, updating my calendars shoud be done on the Mac, and not on the Treo to avoid uncertain results.
  2. Syncing my address book. Zimbra does not transfer pictures, and sometimes it randomly changes the tag of the phone fields, say “business” to “home”, “other” to “fax”.

  Missing Sync works well, but you should keep an eye on it… it’s not good to leave this guy unattended.

• A Google Apps account hosting my domain, and my mailbox forwarding all email to the Zimbra account. Google has the best antispam filters I have seen.

In the past I have tried Exchange Server (It was a good solution while I was using Microsoft Entourage on the Mac side), Kerio Mail Server, and of course .Mac, and all of them had been far (very very far) from perfect.

Now with the “pre-launch” of Apple’s new Mobile Me I can see some light… I hope all the promised features are true and transparent. It would be perfect if they allowed you to use your own domain name (A-la Google Applications for Domains), but I don’t think it will be possible (just as they did with .Mac).

Of course, I will need an iPhone to evaluate the service, so… Anybody interested on giving a new home to a young Treo?

Apparently, both lists are linked very closely in Google, so the first sync can be disappointing (and more than just that).

If you aren’t an address book freak, you are already on the safe side (not my case).

Via Håvard Sørbø.

Update: Mac OS X Hints has published a hint on this theme.

Sweet. You will need the 10.5.3 update.

Via Official Google Mac Blog

Update: Be careful; read on.