shahine.com/omar/

2008 Will mark the end of Personal Finance Software. Quicken will de-emphasize being offered as a shrink wrapped/downloadable product and move to a subscription model.

Mint.com and Wesabe will continue to steal users away from the shackles of Microsoft Money and Quicken.

I look forward to this...

Here is a feature that Google Reader needs: Mute.

Why, Cause subscribing to a lot of tech bloggers, a-list folks, and news outlets is extremely annoying when they write about the same thing. You get tired of seeing dozens or hundreds of posts about Kindle, Facebook, ThinkSecret and on and on.

These days I feel like my blogging info is like the local news (which I stopped watching some time back in high school).

So, please google, let me mute or mark read all feed items on a certain topic as read and save me the hassle of suffering through the repetition and pain.

Hopefully in time for MacWorld?

Virgin America announced they are now flying to Seattle from SFO and LAX.

So long Alaska Airlines. You suck and I will never fly you to Seattle again.

Flights start on March 18th, 2008.

Congress finally passed the AMT fix for 2007 after the Senate rejected their attempt to use Pay-As-You-Go to pay for the fix (which I was in favor of BTW). This was a rather back and forth that lasted a few months and really should have been solved a long time ago.

However, it doesn't bode well for next year. Sigh.

It will take time for tax forms and online tax software to get updated so I'd wait to do taxes till you can confirm that all the new rules have been updated.

The tax code in this country is in a sad sad state. The future budgets in this country are based on an increasing number of people paying the AMT and it's the dirty little secret that no one cares to point out when the president and our elected representatives are asking for a fix for the AMT.

I loves me some internets and hackers.

Looks like you can now get Internet Connection Sharing working on the Samsung Blackjack II. Wohoo. This removed one monster deal breaker on this device.

The instructions, and files can be found on this post at Howard Forums.

Basically:

1. Download the BJ.WM6.ICS.Enable.cab file
2. Download the secpolicies.cab file
3. Transfer both cab files to your My Documents folder
4. Install secpolicies.cab and reboot
5. Install BJ.WM6.ICS.Enable.cab and reboot
6. navigate to \My Documents and click on Certs.cab and reboot

I am now officially a happy camper. Both battery life and ICS now working.

It's important to note that ICS works over USB and via Bluetooth PAN. Super sweet.

note to self: next phone, wait 1 month before purchasing after release. not sure if this is possible.

Funny, last night I was messing with my HP MediaSmart server and my Watt Meter.

I was trying to figure out what kind of processor the MediaSmart has. You may not know but there are 2 different AMD Sempron 3400+ Manila processors.

Scott Hanselman confirmed my results. I see around 57W usage on my server with a peak of 73W at 100% CPU. I also have two 500GB drives in mine.

There is a big difference between a processor maxing at 62W and 35W. However, I think that the HP MediaSmart has the 62W processor.

update: According to this interview, the MediaSmart does in fact use the 35W Sempron.

Question: Does the HP MediaSmart Server have a power save mode or sleep type mode when I'm not using it? Is it quieter than a standard computer?

Answer: The MediaSmart Server was designed to be as quiet and power efficient as possible. Example: The processor we chose was a special 35W processor. This low power design helps keep noise levels down too. Since the server can be accessed by any network device at any time (locally or remotely) there is no "stand-by" mode.

So, given that the CPU is rated at 35W Peak, and I got my machine up to about 73W peak, that means that power consumption is about:

Frankly, I've been embarrassed for years that all my little freeware applications display a scary security warning when anyone installs them. This is because they are not authenticode signed.

I never bothered to go get a certificate to do so cause they cost about $200 a year. Well I have enough people downloading (and donating!) Send to SmugMug that I finally thought it was time to do something about this. The SmugMug folks have been kind enough to feature my downloader on their page for over a year now so I figured it was high time to stop scaring people.

Well Eric Lawrence (creator of Fiddler and SlickRun) clued me in to Tuows who offers Authenticode Digital Signatures for about $80 a year. So I bit the bullet. The process of getting a cert and signing your msi is pretty easy:

1. Create an account at Tucows
2. Buy a Cert
3. Email them your Drivers License
4. Download the Cert
5. Export your certificate from the machine and store in a safe place
6. Grab signtool.exe from the .NET 2.0 SDK
7. Sign your binary using the certificate from step 4

Voila.

The nice thing about a Certificate is now I can sign anything I distribute including Excel Spreadsheets with Macros to prevent them from working properly.

So if you are a freeware author, for $80 bucks a year you can save your users some grief.

I used the following tutorial to help out.

Windows Mobile 6 ships with a Windows Update feature we all know and love...

Anyway, Kris Kumar over at SmartphoneThoughts asks the question, is this feature going to see any action.

No.

I thought about ending just there.

It won't because the carriers won't allow it to, or they will but will take a year to test the updates (you know, by walking around the US with their phones saying "can you hear me now?").

There is a slight possibility that if there is ever a change to Daylight savings again, that this feature might see some action. Why? Cause the last Daylight savings change was a freaking FIASCO.

The bad news is if you own a Windows Mobile Device. Apparently it's up to the maker of said device to issue an update. What are the chances your carrier will release an update? I don't know; what is their track record for doing so up till now? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Microsoft ended up releasing a CAB update anyway due to the fact that this was just plain silly.

But I'm not expecting any updates while I own my device.

The way updates work in the cell phone business is called:

1. Buy a new phone
2. Sign a new contract
3. Fill out a rebate form
4. Get some money back
5. Rinse and Repeat

iPhone being the notable exception so far.

What a difference a week makes.

Today I am going to sleep with a 70% charge remaining on my phone after medium usage since 8am this morning. So that's 16 hours the phone has chugged along using on 30% battery. Now either it's lying or something was very wrong with it last week when I first got it. But that's actually really decent battery usage and better than the BJI. I've correlated these results with my co-workers who are anxiously sporting their BJ IIs after hearing my sob story.

I suspect there are a few things going on:

• The battery is now calibrated. I know these things have all sorts of circuitry so my guess is something was not right.
• I didn't use GPS today. I have a sneaking suspicion GPS can do bad things to the battery.

I'm still VERY VERY annoyed at the removal of the Internet Connection Sharing feature and if I traveled a lot, this might have to be replaced with a Moto Q. However, I like that the Blackjack is, smaller, lighter, and has the cool jog dial. I have a temporary workaround for the lack of ICS thing (using it as a modem) but that's kinda a pain.

update: see this post to get ICS working.

I really genuinely hope that AT&T and Samsung release a service pack for this thing to make it whole. They have a horrible track record of doing so though.

I had to turn off push email during peak times to prevent the backlight from coming on a zillion times a day, but setting the sync interval to 10 minutes increases my battery life and makes more sense during the work day.

I am very much looking forward to Windows Mobile 6.1 for the following features:

• Threaded SMS
• Copy/Paste Support
• Awesome Home Screen Navigation

But my guess is that I'll have to wait for the Blackjack III to get it.

In the mean time check out:

• Extreme Text for Threaded SMS
• Vito Copy/Paste for Copy/Paste support

One of the "Experimental" Services offered on the Amazon Kindle is called NowNow. The way NowNow works is you send it  question you want researched and you get back 3 answers within a few minutes. These are answers that human beings research using Amazon's own Mechanical Turk.

I've not had much use for the service but today I had a question I could not get an answer to.

"how can I find out about new Amazon Kindle book releases?"

Trying to search the world wide web using Google and Live Search netted nuthin.

So I asked NowNow. Within 10 minutes I got the following answers:

Answer #1: It's a little complicated...

Go here
Sort by Publication Date
Then you'll see the latest items added.
Currently this is the only way to see new releases, and there is no notification tool.

Answer #2: Check the Amazon website

But if you own a kindle chance are you will get emails from amazon telling you about new kindle release.

Answer #3: On Amazon's website, there is a Kindle store, where all the Kindle books are listed for purchse.

At the Kindle store, there are other listings like Kindle Magazines, Newspapers, and Blogs. There is also a support menu for your Kindle

Answer #1 was the best, and Answer #3 clearly the worst. But at least it worked .

Still, even with the no DRM nonsense, iTunes is still placing restrictions on what I can buy and charging me more for the privilege.

Here is the new Daft Punk Alive 2007 Album in iTunes:

And on Amazon.

Amazon lets me purchase each track individually, iTunes does not.

Album is:

• $11.99 on iTunes
• $8.99 on Amazon

Harder Better Faster Stronger indeed.

Love the Amazon MP3 service. Bubba has a detailed review.

Somehow my Blackjack II got wind of all the nasty things I've been saying about it and it decided to behave today. Same thing happened to 2 other folks at Microsoft.

As of right now, my Blackjack II has been unplugged from the charger since 8am. It's been 12 hours and it's got 70% of its battery left. I have been syncing mail every 15 minutes for 4 hours and using Direct Push for 4 hours.

I didn't do anything to the device that would cause this type of change.

The only thing that I can think of is:

1. the battery was not calibrated yesterday, and after draining completely and re-charging it is now calibrated.
2. the network was hosed yesterday forcing my phone to do a lot of 3G <-> EDGE switching which has always been a weak point of Windows Mobile Battery Life.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

Go Figure. Now I'm perplexed as to what to do... I was all ready to return it today and get the Moto Q9h.

Only one day old and the Blackjack II is a disaster. I am so utterly disappointed in Samsung, and AT&T.

Let me start this post though by saying that the Blackjack I was my favorite phone ever. I have owned this phone and generally loved it for 12 months and 12 days which is the longest I have ever held on to a device. Something like 1 in 5 Microsoft employees I work with has this phone. It was/is a smashing success IMHO... but as you can see below, it's been a disaster for anyone I know who has replaced their BJ I with a BJ II.

Lets count the ways that the BJ II sucks:

1. Battery Life is terrible. I unplugged the device at 7am and at 10am it was 50% full. the phone did not make it to 7pm. I did not use Direct Push at all. Other than demoing to people how lame it was, I didn't use it except to check mail every 15 min and make 2 phone calls. My old Blackjack I with the extended battery lasted 2 days with Direct Push running 24/7. update: see this post, it looks like my battery wasn't calibrated and now it's lasting a full day with push mail and 50% battery to go.
2. Whenever you get an email, the screen comes on. It stays on for however your backlight timeout is set to (mine is 30 seconds). This is almost a deal breaker. update: if your phone is locked it comes on for only a few seconds.
3. Internet Connection Sharing is removed from the ROM. Gone, bye bye. update: there is now a way to enable ICS.
4. The polished black plastic is ugly, gets fingerprints on it and generally makes the phone look cheap. The rubberized plastic on the old BJ was far better.
5. There is a new and different proprietary connector from Samsung that is different from the Blackjack I. Way to go Sammy.
6. There is an LED light on the phone that blinks ONCE when you get an email or text message. Awesome Feature...NOT I mean WTF is the point of this?
7. The keyboard often defaults to the wrong input mode.

The ONLY thing I like about this phone is:

• Jog Dial
• Voice Command works over Bluetooth
• GPS uses a Sirf III chipset

Every person I know who has this phone has or is returning it to AT&T. Maybe they will get a clue and do something about it.

I can't believe a whole year has gone by and they have produced a phone that is WORSE than the Blackjack I.

I'm returning mine tomorrow and getting the Moto Q9h and just learning to deal with it's limitations (which pale in comparison to this).

Bottom line, if you have a Blackjack I don't get your hopes up on the II, it's not 1 year better.

I really don't know what to think... did a bunch of people at Samsung and AT&T sit around a conference room table a few times in the past year to dream up how to make a crappy device? Did they even test this thing to notice that the freaking screen was coming on every time you got an email and that battery life might suffer as a result? Was this thing rushed to market for Black Friday?

Since using Vista at Microsoft I've been victim to more credential prompts in the past year than I have in my life. It really drives me nuts and I had no idea why.

There are two kinds of prompts I see:

1. credentials prompt from sharepoint when opening an office document (clicking a link to a word doc
2. credentials prompt in Outlook when connecting to Exchange

Now in a domain controlled environment you should never see prompts at all unless you don't have access to a resource. Windows takes care of this via Single Signon etc.

Well FINALLY I see David Rasmussen posted an explanation of issue #1, with a link to the SharePoint team blog explaining the issue. Sadly our IT department had no clue about this when I would call them.

The issue is that you must have "Automatically Detect Settings" enabled in your proxy configuration in IE. The problem is that in Hotmail we use some custom proxy servers to communicate with our labs and you need to disable "Automatically Detect Settings" to get to work. I can't tell you how many times I go to that dammed dialog to configure proxy settings. The crazy thing about this behavior is that if you just hit cancel on the credential dialog the document would still open:

With Office 2007 running on Windows Vista, opening an Office document hosted on a SharePoint (i.e. WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007) site results in a prompt for login credentials even if the user is already logged on with an account that has access to the document. Canceling the credential prompt may still (but not always) allow the document to open in read-only mode.

And of course if you wanted to edit the doc you were out of luck.

Issue #2 is related to some configuration issues in our DOMAIN environment that have been addressed, but nasty to track down. We all suffered a lot in the interim (entering credentials as many times as > 100 a day).

Another weirdo Vista problem solved. This is why I hate new Operating Systems. Too many regressions that are very hard to understand let alone get a fix.

How mad am I? I'm as mad as an A-list blogger with a video camera and a Kindle. I mean, watch the video... Scoble is angry mad at the Kindle. Imagine if he were using a Blackjack II.

So, I just got my Samsung Blackjack II today. While it has numerous improvements over the Blackjack I, it's also got major regressions. The biggest one of all is that they crippled Internet Connection Sharing, one of the best features of Windows Mobile. There are some other smaller ones (they removed it from the ROM entirely, there is no Internet connection sharing in the \windows folder). On the Motorola Q9h the application can be found in \windows but the shortcut is not there).

I use Internet Connection sharing to get my PC on the Internet whenever I travel, work or pleasure. It comes in super handy.

Now here is the kicker. Why would they (AT&T) remove these bits from the ROM of the device? The Motorola Q9h Global that I purchased for my wife has ICS right there, and these are both brand new phones that just came on the market from AT&T?

I HATE crap like this. It's stuff like this that really has me questioning our mobile device strategy. Is it any different from crapware infested PCees? Is Apple going to out do us here as well (arguably they have as soon as they turn on Exchange Active Sync, get 3G and support tethering and apps).

More later on how you can still get on the net using the old dial strings (*99# anyone?) as well as a more detailed review and comparison of the BJ II and the Moto Q9h Global.

update: updated post to reflect that ICS was remove from the ROM... it's not there folks, not in \windows like it usually is.