by Ron Miller

Saying Good-bye to My (borrowed) iPhone

Today, I packaged up my iPhone and returned to it to its owner. Notice I still refer to it as *my* iPhone even though it really didn't belong to me. I was just borrowing it for a few short weeks as part of an article I was writing. Even though I knew I couldn't keep it, it was still hard to say good-bye.

Although we only had three or four weeks together, the relationship grew and developed and I added my own music, photos and customized it just for me. My biggest surprise was I liked watching You Tube video on it, I who have always claimed I couldn't watch video on the small screen. It was actually kind of fun in short bursts.

When my wife and I bought a new vacuum cleaner last month, we brought along the iPhone and did some research on the one we bought right in the store. It was cool having the internet in my pocket. My favorite review was from a guy who didn't like the unit because when it fell down the stairs, it broke. He felt it should have been made better. Most people, however, loved it and we've been very happy so far too.

This morning, I connected the iPhone to my computer for the last time. I removed my music, stripped off my photos, cleared my cache and deleted my email. I cleaned its finger-print covered screen with the black cleaning cloth that comes with it, put all of its parts back into the box, filled out the FedEx slip and sent it home.

Maybe next year when my contract comes up for renewal I'll buy my own iPhone, but more likely I won't be able to justify the monthly fees and I'll stick to something a bit more conventional. For a few brief, shining moments though I held the state of the art right in my hands and it felt good. And I was a more than bit wistful when the FedEx man came and carried it away.

You Would Think World Wildlife Fund Would Know Better

As everyone knows, this is catalogue season and as such, each day a new batch arrives, 99.9 percent of which end up in the recycling bin. Yesterday, I received two identical catalogues from the World Wildlife Fund.

The first had my name first and my wife's second, the second had them reversed. Aside from the colossal waste of funds a group like the WWF could put to better use in its programs, it's a huge waste of resources to produce and send the same catalogue to the same address. A group like the WWF should know better and should have a database management system that finds matches to the same address and avoids duplication.

There really is no excuse for this and the organization devoted to preserving endangered species should find ways to reduce waste in its own operation and avoid Database Management 101 types of mistakes.

Should You be Afraid of Google?

On the heels of Friday's social networking announcement, comes the next in the seemingly endless grind of the Google PR machine. Today's news: a mobile networking platform No, it's not the so-called Gphone, not yet anyway, but you have to wonder where else has Google set its sights.

Last week I was interviewing an executive at a company who told me a story about two business partners who recently gave up GMail for business when they realized that the ads next to the mail were related to the content of their emails. Not exactly earth-shattering I have to admit, but if you didn't realize that Google did this you might find it disconcerting when you discovered it. The colleagues told my source, they  were giving up Gmail for business use because they could never be sure that Google wasn't collecting business information (even though they very clearly state they don't).

I go back and forth with my Google paranoia, but as the pile of announcements grows and the fingers reach out further into more and more technologies, and you store more and more information within Google's servers, you have to wonder if you should be afraid of Google, and I mean really afraid.

• Look, man, they give you this really cool web-based email client with all this storage and they have all your mail.
• Oh and the RSS Reader, online, get all my news in one place. It's fantastic. I love it and they have all your news sources, know what you read.
• Don't forget the online bookmarks of your favorite sites, so they know the sites you like to visit.
• Google Checkout, wow, how convenient is that, and they give you 10 bucks off and they know what you buy.
• Now they want to take over your cell phone and make it cheaper and faster and better and who can argue this is a good thing, but then they know who you call and what you do when you're mobile too.

It goes on and on. Is Google plying us with free technology in effort to fatten us up and collect the biggest database of personal information in the world? The company of course will tell you nothing could be further from the truth, but it's best when dealing with any large company to look at everything with a healthy dose of skepticism

Should you be afraid of Google? I know I'm beginning to be, but then I like the free tools as much as the next guy.

Now It's Google's Turn to Go After Social Networking

You may recall it was only last week when Microsoft announced its ground-breaking deal with Facebook. I guess Google just couldn't let that go unanswered, so today in another round in the battle of the corporate software superstars, Google announced it was teaming up with MySpace to launch the OpenSocial web development APIs. Take that Microsoft.

Google describes OpenSocial as "a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features."

Like the Microsoft deal, the underlying motivation is undoubtedly the ad platform. When it comes to Google it is invariably about selling ads, but whether this will fly with developers remains to be seen. Google likes to throw a lot of different ideas out there and see what sticks. Developers may be drawn to this, or they may ignore it.

But whatever happens, I'm just holding my breath wondering what next Friday is going to bring, a deal with LinkedIn maybe?

Installing Leopard on an External Hard Drive and the GUID Partition Error

I picked up my copy of Leopard the other day and a friend suggested I load it on an external hard drive to play with it before I upgrade my main system.

Seemed reasonable, so I unpacked my freshly minted copy, placed it in the CD/DVD drive, connected my OWC external drive and started the install process. I picked my language, agreed to the license (as though I have a choice if I want to continue) and came to the point of choosing the drive where I wanted to install the OS. In this case, I wanted to put it on my OWC drive, so I clicked it and it triggered the following error:

Open The Disk Utility and repartition the disk as GUID Partition Table. You will lose all data on the disk when you do this.

OK, seemed simple enough and Apple is even intelligent enough to provide access to the Disk Utility during install, but when I opened it tried as I might I couldn't find any trace of a so-called GUID partition option. I couldn't even find a partition option.

Discouraged, I backed out of the installation and decided to restart the computer and take a look around. I entered GUID partition into Google and I immediately found this explanation on the Apple Tech Support site. It seems the problem is related to loading OSX on an external hard drive on Mac-Intel machine (for which my Mac Book Pro qualifies).

Rather than trying to repartition the drive during installation, I chose to do it in OS X Tiger. Sure enough when I opened the Disk Utility and chose my drive (not the indented volume), lo and behold the Partition tab showed up.

The actual GUID option is buried. You need to click the Options button and a window opens with several options including GUID. Click it, then click Partition and you're good to go.

Keep in mind that when you repartition the drive (even if you only create a single partition as I did), you end up erasing what's on it. Since this was my data back up for my MBP it was a bit disconcerting, but if you want to load the OS, in this instance, you need to blow away the data when partition the drive. Just don't forget to back up your files again after you install the OS.

I loaded the OS install disk, and this time when I chose my OWC, it installed without a hitch. Be aware that it took about 45 minutes to complete the install. I'm not sure if it's faster when installing on a hard drive.

By the way, to run the OS from the external drive, follow these instructions:

1. Turn on your Mac as usual and boot into the old OS.
2. Connect your external hard drive.
3. Open System Utilities.
4. Click Startup Disk.
5. Select the external disk and click Restart. When you reboot, the system opens in the new OS, in this case, Leopard and you can play with it safely until you are ready to upgrade.
6. If you want to return to Tiger (with all of your apps and data), follow Steps 3-5, but select your Mac hard drive in Step 5.

ThinkFree and Glide Review Published on Information Week

This week I published a review of two Microsoft Office alternatives, ThinkFree and Glide, on Information Week.

ThinkFree tries to give you a one for one exchange for Microsoft Office applications: Word, Powerpoint and Excel, and does a decent job, although you won't find the range of features you find in MS Office. For instance, the ThinkFree spreadsheet doesn't support multimedia elements such as sound and animation, but it does give you a decent basic set of functionality for a reasonable price.

Glide OS, is more than just a Microsoft Office replacement, it's an entire online operating system complete with email, media exchange tools, high-level security, chat and many more features than I can list here. It also offers a seamless exchange between the desktop-web experience and the mobile experience.

If you are looking for an inexpensive online alternative (although both are coming out with local versions soon as well), either of these tools is worth a look. With Glide, however, you get a richer more collaborative environment. ThinkFree gives you some interesting features such as sharing and posting to blogs from a document. In either case, if you are looking to escape the Microsoft hegemony, these tools offer reasonable alternatives.