Technology for Mortals

EDIT: It’s become obvious to me from the comments that people are failing to see that this article is specifcally about “GMail” (the free email product) and not “Google Apps for Business”. GAfB is an entirely different ball of wax. While it’s not perfect, it’s a lot better than GMail for business purposes and I have no major complaint about it.

Something I’ve been seeing more and more is the use of GMail for business. The problem is, GMail is absolutely unacceptable for business usage, but the folks who use it don’t see it that way. To be honest, I’ve never used GMail personally. But GMail’s handling of business scenarios is so poor, I don’t have to use it to know that it is not the right tool for the job. I just need to send and receive email from GMail users.

I understand why people like GMail. The UI seems to be good. It can act as a single collection point for a dozen other accounts and let you work with them. It hooks up easily to a variety of smartphones. Android phones in particular work much better with GMail than they do with Exchange, that’s for sure. And for the consumer level user, these are all excellent reasons to make GMail your primary email client and account.

But business users have different needs and different use cases, and in those situations, GMail not only falls flat, it can be outright harmful to both your ability to work and your appearance as a professional.

Problem #1: Over-aggressive spam filtering

This seems to have gotten better, but I still get reports on a regular basis that my emails have not come through. Quite frankly, this is not acceptable. The email account I use for much of my business has been established for over 10 years. I don’t understand how a GMail user can send me an email, I respond to it, and somehow my response ends up in their junk mail bin. This happens with startling frequency. Isn’t GMail smart enough to figure out that a response to an existing email is ALWAYS legit, regardless of content? And can’t GMail figure out that since hundreds of its users reply to emails that I’ve sent, from the same SMTP server with the same IP address (at least 6 or 7 years now!), that I should be considered golden? The tendency to filter spam out incorrectly may be fine for personal use, but in business where dollars are on the line, it is not acceptable.

Problem #2: “… sent on behalf of…”

GMail as an inbox collator makes perfect sense, until the recipient sees “… sent on behalf of …” in their email client. It is insanely unprofessional, particularly when the base address is nowhere near business-acceptable. For example, my GMail account is “jmjames78″ or something like that (don’t recall off hand, it’s hooked up to a phone I no longer use). Now, if someone sees, “From: jmjames78@gmail.com sent of behalf of justin.james@example.com” it isn’t the worst thing in the world. It still looks bad in my opinion, but your professional image won’t be ruined. But when I see stuff like “yourhotsweetcakes@gmail.com sent on behalf of john.smith@example.com” I have a real problem with it. If you can’t understand what the issue is… well, I hope you don’t have to communicate much with customers! When people see this kind of thing, it makes you look like you are working for a lot of companies at once, which doesn’t convey a good image.

Problem #3: Fixing “… sent on behalf of …”

To be fair, the previous problem should be easily solved. All you need to do is set up GMail to send through the SMTP server proved for the actual account, in theory. In practice, this does not seem to be too easy. I’ve set a couple of different people up with standard POP3/SMTP accounts for my company, and all of the ones who try using GMail to pick up the email have problems. The standard email client users do not. I thought it was the mail server, so with a great headache, I moved from a self-hosted email server to a third-party email server. The problems persist. I have lost close to ten hours of my life trying to get GMail users able to get their email and send it out without the stupid “… sent on behalf of …” message. Meanwhile, I have critical features in my flagship product undeveloped, and important contracts in the works. Guess what adds money to my pocket? Guess what doesn’t? Why am I wasting my time because GMail can’t do what a copy of Outlook Express that shipped with Windows 98 can do?

Problem #4: Calendars

GMail includes some calendar functionality. It’s even nice enough to cooperate with the way Outlook and Exchange work. Sadly, it has one insanely critical flaw: in a common situation, it refuses to send invitations where you ask them to go. You see, Google accounts allow you to assign a backup email address. This is a useful idea; it is for situations like the need to send a password reset to a customer. Google, in their infinite “wisdom”, decided that if a GMail user sends an invitation to one of these backup addresses, it should really send it to the GMail account instead. This means that if I have a personal GMail account, it is now exposed to someone else who I might not want to have or see that address. It also means that if I don’t use that GMail account, I’ll never see the invitation. I’ve missed and almost missed a number of meetings in the last few months because a GMail user sent the invite to my address and it ended up in my GMail account.

Problem #5: Customer Service? What’s that?

Google is notoriously bad at customer support. Good luck even finding the phone number of someone to talk to. I’ve tried many, many times to talk to someone there, the best I was able to do was when I leveraged a PR contact I had there. Google doesn’t want you calling them. Google wants you to either email them so they can send canned responses, or to post in their forums so that other people with the same problem can say “me too” and “let me know if you ever find a fix”. As someone who’s been a paying Google customer before, I can tell you that they suck at support and service, the assumption is that anyone too stupid to not figure out their product shouldn’t be a customer, and if you don’t like the way the system was designed, you can take a hike. Google loves large scale metrics to drive product development, not actual customer feedback (even though that can be turned into a metric too!). As a result, when you have a problem… well, good luck. With other vendors, free or paid support typically rangers from “not that good” to “stellar”. For example, $259 gets me a ticket with Microsoft and their engineers are amazingly good at solving problems (once I get through the language barrier and they know what I’m talking about). Google doesn’t even have a paid option, on the other hand (hmm… I smell opportunity!).

In summary, GMail is a fine product, but its fit and finish, as well as some design decisions, make it totally inappropriate for business use. Your mileage may vary, of course. But from where I sit, as someone who interacts with GMail users on a regular basis, it has no business in a business environment.

J.Ja

Something that I have heard a number of times, is that people beleive that piracy (usually music) is justified as a way of protesting copyright laws that they disagree with. While I understand that they disagree with the laws themselves, the idea that piracy is a “protest” of some type is absolutely laughable. The fact is, a protest is pointless unless the people who can change what you are protesting (in this case, Congress, the RIAA, the record labels, the musicians, etc.) are aware of the protest. Simply copying a CD or firing up a BitTorrent client and downloading a song isn’t a “protest” no matter what you beleive about copyright law.

Look, I know the score with the record labels. I’m not going to debate it, because I really understand both sides to it and empathize with each one for different reasons. But when people try extending this to movies or software, it is just plain dumb. The economics around both give a lot more money to the people who put in the real work than the music industry. Let’s face it, the average programmer or even a gaffer on a movie set makes more than the average signed artist does. So don’t pretend that copying a movie or piece of software is even about something justifiable, because it isn’t.

If you want to have a true protest, try this: first, pirate the album. Next, look at the liner notes for the album, find out who the producer is, the songwriter, etc. Send them each a dollar or two (it’s more than they get in royalties), and a note explaining that you pirated the album that they worked on because you don’t think its fair that the record label is ripping them off, but at the same time, you don’t want to be the one ripping them off either, so you are including payment far above their royalties. Send the band or artist five dollars with a similar note, and encourage them to esell their music directly. Also let them know that you compensated the producers and songwriters as appropriate. Don’t worry about “studio musicians” because they got a paycheck to play and aren’t in the royalty game. If you’ve got a lot a nerve, write a letter to the record company explaining what you did as well.

And there you go. You accomplished your goal of having the music without giving any money to the RIAA or a record label, the people who can actually make the situation change (the artists, producers, and songwriters) are actually aware of your protest, and at the same time, you are not ripping anyone off.

I am sure there is an alternate approach that does the same thing. But the point is, if you claim that piracy is a “protest”, you need to get honest with yourself. You aren’t protesting anything, you are justifying ripping off the artists that you claim to love, because even though they see pennies on the dollar in royalties, they don’t see a cent when you pirate an album.

J.Ja

So, Google has opened up its own, free, public DNS server. The sales pitch is that their DNS server is faster than your ISP’s, and therefore, you will save a ton of speed browsing the Web using their DNS server. Fair enough. But something occurred to me, just as I was about to change my DNS setup here to use it… do I trust Google to have a history of every DNS lookup I make? Umm… not really. I note that the service’s privacy policy says that my IP address will only be logged for 24 hours (makes sense, given the prevalence of dynamic IPs anyways). But it also says that the service is compliant with Google’s primary privacy policy. And we all know what that entails… “anything and everything”. And of course, Google is always free to change the policy without notice or warning.

So, how comfortable would you feel knowing that every single DNS lookup you do is logged by Google, regardless of whether or not your IP is associated with it?

J.Ja

The story that the new BitTorrent client uTorrent 2.0 is “network friendly” is making the top headlines on the Web and mailing lists.  The only problem with this story it that it has no actual data to back up its assertions.  I took the time yesterday to run some tests on the new uTorrent 2.0 beta build 16850 which supports the new “friendly” BitTorrent UTP.  Based on my initial testing, the claim that the new BitTorrent client is network friendly appears to be false.

Read the rest at Digital Society.

The GAO concluded that just 40% of the workforce staying home from illness would lead to severe Internet congestion, but what happens every day after school and after work when everyone is home?  That’s just one obvious hole in the GAO report but the draconian conclusion it draws about the need to block recreational services, especially low bandwidth applications like online gaming is particularly alarming.

Read the rest of my article at Digital Society.
GAO concludes 40% sick employees can cause severe congestion

If the bad news about all the new critical iPhone and Mac OS X vulnerabilities announced at BlackHat 2009 weren’t bad enough, there now appears to be a new vulnerability in Apple’s hardware.  This type of a hack h0wever isn’t something where you can go into an Apple store and have an Apple “genius” exorcise because once the Apple keyboard is infected and locked; there is no practical way of undoing the damage.

Read the rest and see my video interview with the researcher at DigitalSociety.org

Mass media and blogosphere hysteria ensued after several ISPs (including AT&T) responded to customer complaints and blocked an IP address that was transmitting massive amounts of Denial of Service (DoS) traffic. For something as routine as and essential as blocking a malicious attack from a computer on the Internet, all hell broke loose late Sunday evening and early Monday morning because the IP address belonged to a popular image sharing site called 4chan whose members are infamous for perpetrating porn flooding pranks on YouTube as well as organizing DoS attacks against other websites.

Read the rest at DigitalSociety.org

This video is shot with the Canon 500D (AKA Rebel T1i).  While the footage looks great (considering the fact that I didn’t really have much light in the room, Canon really needs to give us manual aperture and exposure control for video mode on this camera because of the erratic exposure behavior in video recording mode.  When I zoom in or out, you can see a quick change in brightness and hear some clicking noises when the aperture mechanism becomes erratic.   Canon added manual controls for video mode on their higher end 5D Mark II in a firmware upgrade, so all the 500D owners need to unite and demand the same firmware upgrade for the 500D (Note that full manual control is already supported in still photo mode).

Regarding the movie star in this video, this cute little orange tabby was feral 2 weeks ago when he came to my house looking for mommy, and now he’s nearly doubled his weight and became tame (and spoiled).

Note that despite the fact that I set the embedded video to so called “HD” 720P mode (which is actually only ~2 Mbps meaning it’s lower than DVD quality for everything other than completely still footage), Google changed it so that you have to manually toggle the “HD” button to see the higher quality. I’m sure the bandwidth costs are killing Google so they’re hoping that most people won’t opt in on the higher quality.

Update 7/26/2009 – This guy hacked a Sigma lens to do manual aperture.
Update 7/27/2009 – This problem appears only when I’m using the Tokina 28-70 2.8 lens, which happens to be my favorite lens as far as optics and zoom characteristics are concerned.  It doesn’t appear on the 18-55 USM/IS 3.5-5.6 Canon lens that came with the Canon 500D camera, nor does it happen with an older Sigma 70-300 macro-capable lens.  Also noteworthy is I can pretty much shoot ants with the 300 mm Sigma.  And because the resolution demands of even 720P and 1080P video isn’t that high compared to still photography, I can pretty much use any lens with great results.

Update 6-22-2009 – Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content.  Ironically, that’s the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.

Update 11/20/2009 – The cache for 720P or even 1080P content is working again.

With skyrocketing bandwidth costs due to 640 Kbps “HQ” video and 2.25 Mbps 720P “HD” video, Google is getting a massive bandwidth bill every day to deliver all those YouTube videos.  To alleviate their bandwidth load (and your’s), they now cache all the video content on your hard drive.  Not only does this perform better, but it also makes it easier to snag copies of the videos.

To archive a copy of the videos, watch the YouTube video stream in full and then go to the C:-Users-MyUserAccount-AppData-Local-Google-Chrome-User Data-Default-Cache folder (note that the – represents backslash because I can’t use that character for the web) or whereever your browser stores its cache, and sort the files by date.  Then you can see the latest large file (typically in the tens of megabytes) and copy it out of the cache folder to somewhere permanent.  Then for the higher quality videos, append the file extension .MP4 to the extensionless file and make sure you have something like K-Lite Mega Codec pack installed (Windows 7 will play .MP4 files out of the box) to play the file.  The lower quality videos require .FLV extensions.  I’ve never seen any DRM on the content either so it works on any computer or any device capable of playing the video format.

You could already do this to a certain extent with keepvid.com, but it didn’t always work and the file you grab from the link keepvid provides is often of inferior quality.  Keepvid was also unable to show you the link to the 720P content and this cache copying technique works for 720P content as well.  Just make sure you don’t switch to 720P midstream because the cache doesn’t start from the beginning of the clip.  Make sure you stop the stream and start it from the very beginning to cache the full copy.

Ms. Maureen Callahan at the New York post seems to have struck a nerve and become somewhat of a villainess for her article “Fairytale Ending: Why is no one suspicious of Simon Cowell’s latest creation?” criticizing the Suzan Boyle YouTube phenomenon. Someone should have pulled Maureen aside and whispered to her that writing this article is tantamount to standing up in a WWE wrestling event and shouting “IT’S FAKE!” Yes Maureen, deep down inside we all know it’s a show but we want to maintain the facade that it’s real. What you’ve gone and done is burst that facade and a lot of people are very angry with you. People (especially in a down economy) want to believe in a fairytale and acknowledging the fact that it was less accidental than a calculated stunt sort of ruins it for people.

The reality is that I don’t know if Mr. Cowell was aware of Ms. Boyle’s talent level or not. I would think that the acting surprised part for the judges would be easier if they haven’t heard or seen the contestants before. What probably happened is that Mr. Cowell simply instructed his production team to find interesting contestants especially if it’s a good fairy tail story out of the available pool of sincere contestants.  Ms. Boyle certainly qualifies as extremely interesting because of the large disparity between her visual apperance and musical talents and that was likely the reason she was selected to go on the show.  However, she has had to earn her new found fame with the performance that she gave and everyone is rightfully happy for her.

If you’ve watched the show before, you know that this is a reoccurring theme where the judges and audience willingly heckle the contestant and perform a 180 degree turn when the contestant shocks them with talent. That simply makes for good entertainment just like the audience at a professional wrestling event play along with the act while being in on the whole thing.

Maureen, we’re all performers on TV or print. I would even wager that you probably weighed the risk of backlash in your story with the insane number of page views you got from the DrudgeReport. Heck, you even got me to go off topic and link to you so you’re doing something right. The problem is that you’re being somewhat hypocritical.