The Bartonsville Covered Bridge lasted 140 years but couldn't take the flooding caused by Hurricane Irene. My 2006 photo (above) has become the defining image of the bridge before it was destroyed.

Vermont is a strange state. Something of a cross between Switzerland and Kentucky, is a mass of contradictions. Home to rich and poor, hippie and reactionary, mud and scenery, Vermont is famous for being an odd little corner of America. It’s also famous for its covered bridges and home to most of my family, and this is a story about both of those things.

When I lived in Massachusetts, I would often drive 3 hours north to visit my family who live in the mountains around Rutland, Vermont. Although home to just over 17,000 people, Rutland is the second largest city in Vermont and is located centrally on the western side of the Green Mountains. Vermont is somewhat challenged in terms of transportation, with few high-speed roads.

The quickest route from Boston to Rutland doesn’t touch either of Vermont’s 2 Interstate highways. Instead, one cuts across New Hampshire to Route 103 through the Green Mountains. This route passes directly in front of the second, touristy Vermont Country Store (“Vermont Disney Land” as one local put it), home to Bag Balm, penny candy, and cheese samples.

103 clings to the side of the hills above the small but quick Williams River. Down in the valley is Lower Bartonsville Road and the old Green Mountain Turnpike, once one of Vermont’s main routes. This is a lazy, unlined road passing in front of muddy farms and over the river on a single lane covered bridge.

Sometimes, when I was not in a hurry on my journey between home and Rutland, I would hop off 103 just to enjoy the drive, the corn, and the Bartonsville Covered Bridge. This 140-year-old structure was very like the nearby Worrall’s Bridge, built a few years earlier by the same man, Sanford Granger. It allowed the little town of Bartonsville to exist, and many residents feel that bridges like these are still the root of their existence.

The "town lattice" style was state of the art for bridge building in the 1870s. I took this photo of the Worrall's Bridge the same day.

Both bridges are built in the “town lattice” style, featuring diagonal planks bolted together to form the walls. Covering a bridge with walls and a roof greatly enhanced its durability, especially in the rough conditions of Vermont. In fact, just about the only way to destroy a covered bridge is to undermine its footings or drive a loaded dump truck through it!

In March of 2006, on the way home from Rutland, I stopped to take photos of a few bridges and other sites along the route. It was late in the day, and my girls were tired by the time we reached Bartonsville, so they stayed in the car while I quietly walked across the covered bridge. I stopped to take a few pictures and to read the plaque posted there. It was cool in the river was slow.

The older Worrall Covered Bridge features a unique wooden ramp, since it (like the Bartonsville) was built low in the flats along the river.

Many covered bridges sit high above the river in hilly Vermont, but these two lie in the flats along the river bed and this would prove to be their undoing. Earlier this week, Hurricane Irene pounded the East Coast of the United States. Although well inland, Vermont was inundated with rain, swelling the steep rivers that run through the mountains there and flooding the plains.

The Williams River bed was unable to contain itself and carried away the Bartonsville Covered Bridge. It was utterly destroyed, and the Worrall was heavily damaged. The town is now raising funds to replace the bridge, but it will never be the same. I suppose this is life in the river bottoms, that I will miss that old bridge.

The photo I took on that March day lived on, however. I uploaded it to Wikimedia and it remains the sole illustration used in the Wikipedia article about the bridge. In the days after the hurricane, my snapshot has appeared on numerous websites and publications. I’ve misplaced the original image now, so I guess it’s good that it will be preserved forever online!

This USGS graph shows the flooding on the Williams River that destroyed the bridge

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Farewell to the Bartonsville Covered Bridge
This post was categorized as Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, November 19, 2010
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Adaptive Audio Controls and Portrait-Mode Screen Rotation Lock

The double-click task switcher isn’t as well-known among regular iOS 4 users as I would have guessed, but even less well-known is what happens when you double-click the home button and slide right. Rather than listing running apps, the task menu shows some incredibly-useful icons: A screen rotation lock and audio controls!

Double-click the home button and slide right to reveal audio controls and a screen rotation lock

Earlier iPhone OS versions included a pop-up audio control screen, but it wouldn’t appear when no music was playing. This new control screen is always accessible and is a great way to get to the iPod function if you want to replace it with a different app (or a folder) in the dock.

Third-party audio apps can be controlled here, too!

As an added bonus, iOS 4′s unified audio engine allows these buttons to control any other background audio-capable app as well. Run Pandora, MLB, NPR, or any other app that supports the new iOS 4 frameworks and you can switch tracks or pause with a simple double-click!

The screen rotation lock is disappointingly portrait-mode only (as is the multitasking menu itself) but it’s a start. I find myself using the lock switch on the iPad constantly, and it would be nice to have all the same functionality on the iPhone.

Support for Multiple Exchange Servers

It might not be obvious why regular people would use multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts at once on an iOS device. Here’s a hint: Google contacts can only be synced over-the-air with the EAS protocol. Although you may want your email and calendars to use iMAP and CalDAV, respectively, anyone who has contacts stored in more than one Exchange or Gmail account needs this capability!

I’ve covered this topic extensively before, so I’ll just leave it at that. See How To Set Up Multiple Exchange ActiveSync Accounts in iPhone iOS 4 and How To Enable ActiveSync For Google Apps Accounts for more.

Camera Zoom and Movie Refocus

Zoom in to compose better snapshots

The camera app was touched up, too. Photo-takers have been able to tap a spot in an image to refocus (and reset exposure) for quite a while, but tapping now also brings up a zoom slider. This makes composing photos on the iPhone that much easier and improves the resulting image for quick sharing. Image crop and other edit controls in the photo app would be nice, as would more-extensive image controls, but this is a good first step. Digital zoom generally stinks, but the high-resolution camera in the iPhone 4 makes it tolerable.

Apple also enabled the tap-to-refocus square during video recording. This allows for some (gasp!) artistic video shots to be composed, despite the limited depth of field of the iPhone camera. It’s especially useful outdoors, where brightness can vary wildly.

Spellcheck

iOS now detects misspellings and offers suggestions

The iPhone has always had inline spelling correction using popup “tags” as you type, but iOS 4 does this one better. Like desktop computers, the iPhone and related devices will now underline potential misspelled words in red and offer suggestions when these hotspots are tapped.

“Data Detectors” for Dates, Addresses and FedEx and UPS Tracking Numbers

iOS 4 detects dates, addresses, and tracking numbers and converts them into useful links

Users of Mac OS X have gotten used to the “data detectors” embedded in Mail and other apps. They are capable of converting dates, email addresses, and other plain text into smart links. Receive an email that says “let’s meet next tuesday at 10″ and Mail creates a link to create a new appointment for that date and time in the Calendar app.

iOS 4 has this capability as well, decoding dates and addresses as well as popular package-tracking codes. This is incredibly useful: When someone sends you a UPS, FedEx, or USPS package tracking number, the Mail app will convert it into a link for the appropriate web site, allowing you to quickly check on shipment.

Web and Wikipedia Search

“Spotlight” search has been a part of the iPhone OS since OS version 3, though I never used it much. It offers full-text search of all data, including email messages. But most people don’t store more than a month of email on the device, reducing the usefulness of search. Now that we have folders, search doesn’t even save time locating apps.

iOS 4 now integrates Wikipedia and Web search with Spotlight queries

Search for data not already found on the iPhone, and Spotlight will suggest a Web or Wikipedia search option. This is nice, but would be more useful if it also suggested searching the contents of mail servers, LDAP directories, and other more user-specific online data sources.

Simplified “New Contact” Screen

You can select information types in the streamlined "New Contact" screen

The iPhone always allowed one to add a contact from an email address or phone number. But the “new contact” screen was annoyingly limited. It categorized all new phone numbers as “home”, for example, an assumption that is almost always incorrect in my case. iOS 4 adds tap-to-select field categories, allowing you to correctly enter information right from the start.

Resize Photos When Sending

The iPhone camera is a great companion, allowing serendipitous photos from everyday life to be grabbed for posterity. But sharing these photos was a hassle, with the phone automatically compressing any mailed photos to save space.

iOS 4 now gives you the option of compressing photos and videos in mail messages

iOS 4 now gives you the option of leaving your photos in their original size, or compressing them to “Medium” or “Small” size. The same options appear for video attachments, and multiple images are supported as well.

Create Real Playlists in iPod

No more playlists called "On The Go 4"!

iPods have had the ability to create lame “On The Go” playlists for almost a decade, but until iOS 4 none could create a real full playlist, complete with a name. Finally!

Birthday Calendar

Happy birthday to who?

Lots of my contacts included a Birthday field, but there was no easy way to use this information on an iPhone. iOS 4 automatically creates a new calendar called “Birthdays” that automatically includes these in the new unified calendar view.

Stephen’s Stance

There are lots of great features hidden in iOS 4 besides folders and multitasking. Background audio, VoIP, selectable wallpapers, saving PDFs as iBooks, and many others compete for attention. But I found the 10 listed here to be the most useful and surprising to me in everyday use. What are your favorite iOS 4 features?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | My 10 Favorite Hidden iOS 4 Features
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Well, a big gear turned again today as Google recalculated their calculated PageRank values for just about every domain and page on the Internet. This is only the third PageRank refresh of 2009, and it’s likely to shake up the standings of every Google search.

How It Works

Rehashing my previous post, which pointed out the perils Google faces in a world full of real-time links and nofollow tags, PageRank is one of the cornerstones on which the search giant relies. Simply put, every page gets a rank on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the number and quality of links pointing to it. Google also seems to rank whole domains this way, using the domain’s rank to weight the scores of pages contained there. Top-ranked sites like Wikipedia (PR 8 ) show up much higher in the Google search results pages than lower-ranked ones like fosketts.net (PR 5).

It certainly surprised me to learn that PageRank isn’t continually updated. In fact, it’s only recalculated every few months! The January refresh bumped my blog from PR 4 to PR 5, driving literally 1,000 more daily visitors my way! The calculation must take some serious horsepower, too, since Google doesn’t include the latest pages. Today’s refresh appears to stop at content from May 6, suggesting that it took the big brains in Mountain View three full weeks to complete their computations!

What It Means

You should care about your sites’ PageRank if you’re at all interested in attracting visitors. As I mentioned, a single-digit PageRank bump drove thousands of visitors to my blog in January, prompting my curiosity about this critical number. I’m not obsessive about it, but it is interesting to watch how PageRank affects site referrals. This is especially important for new sites, like my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog or Gestalt IT, since their readership expands rapidly as PageRank climbs upward.

If you own a web site of blog, you might be interested in checking your own PageRank. One simple tool is a JavaScript bookmarklet like the one from Google Blogoscoped. Just navigate to a page and hit the bookmarklet to see a popup with that page’s PageRank.

If you use WordPress, you can add a plugin like SlaptiGooglePR, which displays the overall site PageRank in the Admin Dashboard. It also includes the PageRank of individual pages to the Posts and Pages lists (which is how I knew which days were included in the calculation!)

At the end of the day, PageRank isn’t the most critical part of the Internet. But like a self-winding automatic watch, it’s really interesting to learn how Google does what it does, returning relevant links as if by magic.

Are you enjoying these posts on the Internet and social networking? Let me know with a comment, tweet, or email! If you’re an RSS reader, you can filter which posts you will see by subscribing to one of my specialized feeds, as seen in the left column at blog.fosketts.net.

Update: Google again recalculated PageRank on June 24, incorporating pages through the middle of June 16. They’re getting faster!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Just Recalculated PageRank!
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

• 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
• 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
2. Server Virtualization
3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

What Is Mobility?

The meaning of mobility, to me, is expansive. It doesn’t just refer to taking a copy of your data with you, ubiquitous connectivity, or portable devices. Mobility is a new paradigm of computing.

• Your data no longer “sits” in one place – your data lives out there in the network!
• Your applications no longer “live” on this device or that – your applications live out there in the network!
• Your productivity environment no longer requires a particular piece of hardware – you expect to be productive everywhere on every device!

This doesn’t sound strange to the modern Internet user. We have completely accepted the role of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the rest in our personal lives. Just as they did in the early days of the PC, business people have transitioned these concepts into the professional world – witness Salesforce and LinkedIn! In all cases, we have endorsed the idea that certain types of information want to live in the cloud because it makes them better!

Once you’ve used these services, old-fashioned email, contact management, encyclopedias, maps, and the rest seem incredibly limiting. A GPS system that can’t update its maps seems antiquated, and we want it to have real-time traffic data, too. An iPod that needs to be physically connected to a PC to add music or applications is simply unacceptable. Time- and place-shifting technologies like TiVo To Go, over-the-air podcast downloads, and Slingboxes reset our expectations about availability and choice of entertainment, but they are mere symptoms of our changing perceptions. We want mobility of data, applications, and platforms, and we are getting it.

Consider two truly revolutionary platforms: the iPhone and the netbook. In both cases, we knowingly accept limitations in the name of portability, knowing that the cloud will give us what we can’t hold in our hands. These devices are limited in ways that would seem inconceivable just a few years ago: Apple has locked their platform up tighter than any in history, and netbooks are too small, underpowered, and cheap in all senses of the word. But we love them because they get us where we want to go, which is up and out!

Mobility and Enterprise IT

The concept of mobile data, applications, and devices is just as applicable to enterprise IT infrastructure as it is to personal technology. Some enterprise data must be kept close to the vest, especially where privacy laws and litigation concerns are applicable. But there is certainly a vast pool of corporate data that wants to be out working in the field! Setting this data free is the enterprise equivalent of the mobility megatrend!

Cloud computing is hype. Server virtualization is hype. Flash storage is hype. XaaS is hype. Web 2.0 is hype. But once the cloud of hype passes, we will be left with solid technologies to enable mobility and transform corporate computing. Why should corporate email have to punch through your firewall? Why should the intranet be limited to internal or VPN users? Why can’t customers interact with a (limited/controlled) set of your corporate records? Salesforce showed us that roaming users (sales teams) need greater access than most IT staff were ready to build. What if we applied the same ideas to other data types?

Many companies are already doing this. Microsoft offers a variety of internal/external services for their customers through Live (see Connect, for example). Many companies are using mail and productivity applications in the cloud from Google, MessageOne, and Zimbra. Backup and archiving as a service to mobile users is widespread (see Iron Mountain Connected and Mozy). And more and more corporate PR relies on blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. Corporate security and legal types are worried about data “escaping” from the eggshell of control they exert, but this cat is out of the bag. Enterprise IT will never be the same!

It comes down to a single core question that IT folks ought to have been asking themselves all along: What should be held internally and what should be let loose? We already “outsource” many non-core corporate functions. Sometimes we do this for cost reasons. But the most effective outsourcing decision is when a third party will do a better job, offering levels of expertise or service that an internal group could never realistically reach. We already buy enterprise software to leverage outside development (remember, this was not always the case!), so why not also buy enterprise services? Corporate-grade outsourced email, groupware, sales automation, and the like is not only more robust and less expensive than internal systems, they enable a disconnected, mobile workforce.

Today, I Was Angry

I bought a new album from Amazon, but I forgot to sync my iPhone with my laptop, so it was sitting at home when I wanted to listen to it in the car. Then I couldn’t find a colleague’s phone number because he moved to a new company and my address book didn’t automatically update. And I couldn’t review a presentation because I needed a special account to access a corporate document system behind a firewall.

These little accomplishments would have seemed like miracles just a few years ago: I remember the joy I felt ten years ago when I could read a web page offline on my Palm Pilot using AvantGo; I was amazed when I first fired up 802.11a wireless networking and could work anywhere in the office; I was gleeful to be able to take 5 GB of music with me on the train. But all this is past. Today, I want to access my portable data and work anywhere. We are in the midst of a revolution in the mobility and ubiquity of computing.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This blog post is probably out of date. If you want to set up Exchange ActiveSync, you should instead consult one my guides:
	iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Setup		iPad Exchange ActiveSync Setup
	iPhone ActiveSync Troubleshooting		iPad ActiveSync Troubleshooting

It’s finally here!  The iPhone now has most of the functions of the BlackBerry – over-the-air push and sync of Exchange email, contacts, and calendars!  Apple let the 2.0 OS out of the bag earlier today, and intrepid souls (and me) have taken the plunge and installed it.

While most people, including me, headed to the (also active) App Store to try out the native games, I quickly turned the other way – towards the new Microsoft Exchange integration.

Read on for my first impressions and instructions on getting it up and running.

For the most up-to-date information, see my iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide!

This post is part of my series focused on integrating the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange using ActiveSync:

• iPhone OS 3.0 information:
  1. First Look: iPhone 3.0 And Exchange ActiveSync Integration
  2. How To Subscribe To Internet Calendars In iPhone OS 3.0
  3. How To Access LDAP Directories In iPhone OS 3.0
  4. iPhone 3.0 Exchange ActiveSync: Better But Not Perfect
• How To Set Up iPhone Exchange ActiveSync
1. A Few iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Gotchas
2. Can the iPhone Sync With Multiple Exchange Servers?

By the way, the apps are great!  Sega’s Super Monkey Ball is touchy, but I think I’ll get the hang of it.  And my 4 year old loves Jirbo Match!  Too bad the Red Sox weren’t playing or my test of MLB At Bat would have been much more exciting!

Up and Running With Exchange

Seriously, why are you still reading? Head over to The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide for current/useful information!

Here’s the quick how-to for getting Exchange up and running on your iPhone.  Note that this works on any iPhone with the version 2.0 software – the iPhone 3G comes with this out of the box, but original phones will need to be upgraded.  Update: You do not need to buy the Enterprise Data plan from AT&T in order for this to function – it will work with any plan, and even works on the iPod Touch! Update: The process is pretty much the same with iPhone OS 3.0!

We will set up the mail account first, then enable sync for Calendar and Contacts.

1. Install iTunes 7.7 and upgrade your phone to iPhone OS 2.0 if necessary
2. If you already have your Exchange server running with IMAP, disable the account in Mail Settings.  I left mine set up – no telling when or if I’ll need to revert!
3. Set up a new mail account, selecting Exchange as in the photo above.
   
4. Enter your email address (e.g. “billg@microsoft.com”) in the Email box.
5. Enter your Exchange domain and username (e.g. “msexec\billg.microsoft”) in the Username box and watch the text magically shrink to fit.
6. Enter your password (e.g. “OuttaHere!”) in the Password box and marvel at the nifty new “show the last letter entered” feature.
7. The iPhone will now try to automatically discover your Exchange server.  If you don’t have Exchange 2007 with Autodiscovery turned on, it will fail and warn you that it couldn’t validate your account.  You will have to manually enter your server name in the window.  Make sure you enter your ActiveSync server name, not the OWA server (as in Entourage) or the real Exchange server (as in Outlook).
8. Now tap the home button and go into Mail.  You should see your new account appear, and it should show your folders and email messages within a few moments.  Congratulations!  Email is now set up!
   

Next we will enable sync for Contacts and Calendars.

Note:  You can’t sync Contacts and Calendars from both Exchange and iTunes! You must choose one or the other! And the iPhone will delete your old entries when you enable this! Update: You can do both desktop and over-the-air calendars in iPhone OS 3.0!

Ok, enough shouting, on with the show!

1. Once you’re sure email is working, go back into the Exchange Account Settings tab (shown above) and tap Contacts to “ON”.
   
2. The iPhone will warn you about deleting your existing entries, just like I just did!  If you’re sure, tap “Sync”.
   
3. Now the iPhone will enable Sync.  Do not go running up to the Calendar or (new!) Contacts App and expect to see everything there immediately.  It took my phone about 5 minutes to populate these, and I was worried when I saw nothing there at first.
4. Do the same for Calendar and you’re all set.  Wait a few and you will have pretty much full over-the-air Email, Contacts, and Calendar integration!

Initial Impressions

Prepare to be confused by the new Calendar and Contacts apps.  They now include categories, and you can find yourself scratching your head at seeing no entries when you’re in the wrong category.  I left my calendar in “Home” and there were no entries.

I had to tap “Calendars” at the top to return to the screen at right and select “All”.  This could be really nice – I could organize multiple calendars here for work and home.  But it’ll take some getting used to.  Update: Don’t bother with multiple calendars! Update: Multiple calendars rock in iPhone OS 3.0!

Note that calendar entries are color-coded in the calendar, too, which is a nice touch.  I don’t remember any similar functionality on my BlackBerry, but it could be that I just never discovered it.  It took me about five years to figure out how to see missed calls, after all!

The same problem appears with the Contacts application.  Here again, we have groups of contacts, and what you see is dependent on which group you’re currently “in”.  I’ll have to work out how to manage these using Outlook or Entourage.

Thankfully, Apple finally includes a Contacts application on the home screen in OS 2.0.  It was always frustrating to have to go into the Phone app just to look at someone’s info!

The App Store is good, but a little perplexing.  There are about 500 applications up for sale right now, and not all are worthwhile.  There are three “flashlight” apps, for example, all at different prices.  I think the App Store will be quite a mess once all 25,000 or so applications have been added!  It’s already hard to locate anything.

Apple released just two native apps:  A $5 Texas Hold’em game, and a free remote control app for iTunes.  The latter is pretty nifty – it seems to use Bonjour in reverse to present itself to iTunes instances running on the network.  The iPhone shows up in the sidebar and you have to enter a PIN to activate it.  This would be much cooler with an AirTunes device – maybe I’ll have to snap up one of the old 802.11g AirPort Expresses currently offered at MacMall for $59!

There are some other worthwhile apps, too.  MLB At Bat is great – live game updates and video clips of major plays.  I think I’ll be using this a lot!  Definitely worth $5 to me.

I already mentioned a couple of games, but I was more interested in trying out the social networking applications.  AOL released a free version of Instant Messenger, but I’m not sure if it (yet) supports Apple’s always-on push service.  There’s a FaceBook app, too, but it doesn’t look much better than the web version.

This brings me to a major concern about the App Store.  Why make a native app to do something the web does just as well?  I can see where an offline book or map reader would be handy, but why MySpace?  There are lots of Bibles in there already, but where is the off-line/on-line version of Wikipedia that I had hoped for?

Google added a search app, covering both the web and local content on the phone.  But where’s Google Talk?  Shockingly, after literally sharing the stage with Google at the iPhone’s introduction, Yahoo! is entirely absent from the App Store.  Microsoft isn’t there, either.

But there were some nice surprises.  Yelp, Pandora, and Paypal all have free clients that look useful.  Time will tell which of these apps really get used!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How To Set Up iPhone Exchange ActiveSync
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

First, let me clue you in to a secret.  I’m a car nut.  More precisely, I love the engineering of cars – and once delighted in documenting esoteric details of engines, transmissions, and chassis on Wikipedia.  I still delight in seeing unusual engines, and have been known to take the odd photograph of them, too.

Others also suffer from this engine fixation.  Witness the regular “Engine of the Day” feature over at Gawker Media’s popular auto blog, Jalopnik.

I love reading these stories, but today’s entry (on Ford’s bad Windsor V8 engine) seemed awfully familiar to me.  Or rather, the photo did.  See, that photo was taken by me, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Jalopnik.  It’s ripped off from Wikimedia Commons, where it’s licensed GFDL and CC-by-SA.  This means that professional publishers like Jalopnik can’t use my image without attribution.

Now, some people might be flattered by this kind of use.  In fact, I was flattered by this the first time it happened.  But this isn’t the first time Jalopnik has used my photo without attribution.  It’s not even the second time.  No, this is the third time Jalopnik has used a photo I took without attribution.  I bet Gawker wouldn’t be happy to have someone use their copyrighted content without permission or attribution, but it seems just fine for them to do it!  I even offered these photos for free use as long as they attributed me, but even that wasn’t satisfactory…

I previously wrote about my experience with photos used by a German newspaper who used one of my car photos, as well as a well-known Linux hacker who ripped off an article I wrote for his book.  This stuff happens all the time, in fact.

What can we do?  I’m not sure how to fix it, but one thing I will say is that I’m certainly not happy with Jalopnik or Gawker Media.  If anyone has a suggestion on how to deal with this situation, I’d love to hear it.

Update: Murilee Martin, writer of these three entries, has added attribution to me for two of them after I emailed him, Ray Wert, and Nick Denton.  Will they do a better job in the future?  We shall see…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Who Cares About Copyright? Not Gawker Media’s Jalopnik
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

If you disagree, and think enterprise storage is more real than “enterprise chewing gum”, please head over there and edit the article! Add some sources! Expand it! At least add a comment supporting the existence of the field…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Enterprise Storage Is Nearing Its Demise!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.