Software

NuevaSync

When using a Mac as a main computer, I was able to create an overly complicated setup that would allow me to sync my iPhone wirelessly with Google Calendar/Contacts.  But this doesn't work on my linux computer.  When I was looking foa a solution I found a link to NuevaSync.

NuevaSync is a Exchange "proxy" for Google Calendar/Contacts.  This allows the iPhone to be configured to sync to thie Google apps.  This solution acually makes MobileMe unnecessary. This article has a good walkthough for configuring NuevaSync with an iPhone.

This has been working fine for me on my iPhone.

One problem that is being worked on is better support for multiple calendars.  Also another annoyance, with the iPhone and not with NuevaSync is that you can not connect to multiple Exchange servers.  I would like to connect to my work's Exchange server for mail, but connect to NuevaSync for Calendars and Contacts.

Virtual Machines

VirtualBox is a free virtual machine that I have been using for a while It worked perfectly to run Windows XP on my Ubuntu computer. VirtualBox is available for Mac, WIndows and Linux. Connecting my iPhone didn't work. It looks like there is a bug where a connected iPhone is not recognized with VirtualBox.

This isn't a problem in VMware Workstation. I tried the 30 day free trial and it worked with the iPhone. I was able to easily transfer the data from my VirtualBox VM to VMware Workstation.  I backed up the VirtualBox to the Windows Home Server.  Then in the VMware Workstation VM, before I installed an OS, I put in the client restore CD.  This allowed me to restore the image to the new vm.

Moving to Windows

About the time that we got our new Dell M1530, the internal video card on our MacBook Pro died.  My wife is now trying to use the M1330 as her personal computer.  I erased the Ubuntu partition and installed WIndows Vista on it.  Also, since our Mac OS X machine was disabled, I have installed Windows XP in a virtual machine on my Ubuntu m1530 to do everything that I can't do in Ubuntu.

There are several things that I have noticed about Windows:

1. The backup functionality in Windows Home Server works perfectly with Windows machines.  (I actually have used this to rebuild a machine and it worked perfectly)
2.  There is no calendar program.  I don't get how Microsoft can ship an OS that doesn't have a calendar program.  Mac OS X ships with iCal.  You would think that Microsoft would want a computer to be functional for a family with just the base OS install.  They ship a mail program, photo and video editing programs, but no calendar.  This means that I can not sync my calendar with MobileMe.
3. I am getting tons of errors from MobileMe Sync on both XP and Vista.  The errors state things like "a sync in progress" or my "MobileMe account is expired".
4. The Windows version of Quicken is so much more functional that the Mac version.  Once I confugured Quicken for our accounts, it automatically configured itself to use the online bill pay from the bank.  With Quicken for the Mac, you have to use a third party bill pay service.

Vista on Mac mini

I installed Windows Vista on our Mac mini.  I wanted to document the process, in case I need to do this again.

When I started, I use the Mac OS X installer to  create two partitions.  One 12Gb partion for Mac OS X and the rest for windows.  This didn't work, as BootCamp can not be enabled unless you have more than several GB of space availble.  So, I had to create one partition and then reinstall Mac OS X.  Once I did that, then I could use the Boot Camp installer to resize the Mac OS X partition and install Windows.

The other problem that I had was that the DVD drive on the Mac mini is starting to malfunction.  I was able to install Mac OS X by putting the Mac mini in Firewire Disk Mode, and using the MacBook Pro to actually do the installation.  Unfortunately, you can not install Windows like this.  You only can enable Boot Camp on the internal drive.  Also, you can't use an external USB DVD drive to install windows, as Mac hardware.  Luckily, I was able to get Vista installed by rebooting without the DVD inserted, and the option key held down.  Then when in the disk selection screen appears, insert the Windows DVD, and then boot into the installer.

I was using our LCD TV as a monitor for the Mac Mini.  Once Windows was installed, I wasn't able to see any video when setup assistant started.  I had to switch to a different monitor that supported that resolution so I could finish the setup.

Once, I installed Apple's drivers everything worked perfectly.  Media Center works on this, and I am able to access this on the Xbox through Media Center extender.

I have installed TVTonic and MyMovies.  I have set up several video feeds in TVTonic, and now I need to start creating images for our DVDs.

The Cringely Plan

In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn't burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn't much different from that.

An unmanaged forest, one without the sort of fire control we attempted to provide, would naturally burn every few years. The undergrowth would build up, reach a critical mass, some source of ignition would come along -- usually lightning -- and all that undergrowth would burn. The redwoods themselves would be scarred but not really threatened, as we could see from the charring that marked them from countless such fires over centuries. Of course burning undergrowth threatened homes and property, too, so there was a natural desire on the part of that community to want the next burn to not come this year, please not this year. So there came a policy of aggressively fighting fires with the result that we eventually faced 60 (now 90!) years of flammable material growth rather than six or eight years. And the probable fire fueled by 60 years of undergrowth would have been so bad that our job changed to one of trying to prevent fires from happening, well, ever. This was an impossible task, of course. Eventually the stars would align the wrong way and the whole place would burn down, we all knew it. Just let it not happen on our watch.

Does this sound familiar?

Now America and much of the world face the possibility of recession and we handle that by first arguing about the definition of the term. Are we or are we not in recession? This distinction appears to be very important to some who view it like a forest fire: is it burning or not? Implicit in this distinction, I suppose, is the idea that if we're not burning -- if we are not in recession -- that maybe through some miracle we'll never face that problem. Whether this is a practical attitude or not depends entirely on your event horizon -- how soon you expect things to change.

The people in power in this country have a relatively short event horizon. Politicians tend to think of two, four, or eight years as the longest periods of time that matter. Corporate honchos might look out further, you could guess, but they don't since the average duration for a U.S. Fortune 500 CEO is under four years. So while the intent of the fire chief and the mayor and the governor and the Congressman and the President and the CEO is that there be no unpleasant surprises during their watch, all of them know such surprises are coming.

This short-term focus in the face of long-term difficulties leads to odd behavior at times. In the forest it is usually better to let smaller fires burn or even to deliberately set them, yet few fire chiefs are willing to take that risk, even though NOT taking the risk is so much worse. In financial markets, as companies crumble and governments prepare bailouts, short sellers pile on in scrums of doom that make the shorts rich yet hurt society. Traders with a trading mentality, they can't help themselves any more than Ralph Nader can keep from running for President. "But George Soros did it to the Bank of England," they say, as if that makes everything okay.

The American economy is at the end of its longest-ever period without a recession. Through sleight of hand and a fair amount of financial fraud we've managed to keep the "R" word out of our communal vocabulary for 14+ years. We did this through a succession of bubbles -- first the Internet bubble and then the real estate bubble with a little war bubble thrown in between. Financial bubbles are unnatural enough in themselves, but piling bubble atop bubble defies logic, yet still we managed to make it happen, helped somewhat by half a trillion dollars in war spending, all with borrowed money.

By rights the end of the Internet bubble should have sent us into recession, burning the financial undergrowth and setting up the next period of prosperity. But we avoided that and the result is what we see now -- something far worse.

Recession is inevitable at this point, yet still we talk about avoiding it. This is crazy talk. If we as an economy somehow push the next recession back a few more years, it will be all the worse when it comes. AND IT WILL COME. Everybody in power knows this; none of them argue against it; they all know recession is inevitable; they know that forestalling a recession at this point will only make it worse. Yet still they pray, "Not on our watch, please."

So we plan $700 billion bailouts on top of hundreds of billions in other knee-jerk measures all intended simply to forestall the inevitable and therefore ultimately bound to fail. "Just not on our watch, please."

The cost of delaying the inevitable is high, but we won't pay it, our children and grandchildren will. We can argue policy all day and whether this matters or not, but it is hard to argue that any such cost doesn't matter IF IT DOESN'T WORK.

So I propose The Cringely Plan -- a relatively small attempt to point public policy in a direction that makes sense for a change. The Cringely Plan won't avoid a recession because that's impossible. The Cringely Plan is intended, rather, to look beyond the inevitable recession and assist with the ultimate recovery and beyond.

What we need are energy and economic policies that play to the strengths of government, not its weaknesses. Governments are good at big moves that force changes of direction, not little moves intended to, for example, create the economic "soft landing" we'll start to hear about in a couple months.

Governments are best at turning super tankers, not at docking them.

And while governments can print money and thereby pay for a lot of stuff, they are actually most effective just telling us what we can or can't do, more than anything else. We can see that, for example, in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1960s that significantly improved the lives of all Americans without the government having to pay for it.

The Cringely Plan does nothing for banks or mortgages. That's a problem that will have to work itself out, I think, and will if we give it a chance to do so. But we won't give it such a chance, I'm guessing, because it is an election year and because government is viewed as stupid and able to be threatened into paying for the most amazing things that it shouldn't. So The Cringely Plan has to look past banks and mortgages to energy policy and economic stimulus.

It would be interesting to know what the mortgage market would be like had the price of a barrel of oil not hit $140+. There still would have been a mortgage bubble bursting, but I wonder when?

Whatever the banking situation, though, we still need an energy policy and simply have not had one for decades. So get ready, here it comes; The Cringely Plan calls for:

Prohibiting the manufacture and sale of incandescent lights.

Kind of a letdown, eh?

That's it. No ethanol subsidies, no drilling in wilderness preserves, no tax credits, no artificial price supports, no enriching good ol' boys from the oil patch. And no cost to government at all.

As our incandescent lights wear out we'll have to replace them with something else, primarily compact fluorescents and LEDs.

Yes, this will lead to the closure of light bulb and filament plants in Ohio and elsewhere, costing a few thousand jobs. At the same time it will create jobs in the non-incandescent light industries as those ramp up. But most importantly, it will within a year (based on a 700-hour life for incandescent bulbs) lead to an 18 percent drop in U.S. electrical demand.

Dropping electricity demand by 18 percent will have an interesting effect on the electric utility industry. A simplistic view would suggest that our electric bills should drop by 18 percent. Cynics will point out that fixed overhead built into the regulated industry will keep bills from dropping that much simply because doing so would unduly hurt utility profits.

I don't think so.

Our utility bills pay for power that comes from many sources, some more efficient or profitable than others. Our bills also pay for building new power plants, some of which are again more efficient or profitable than others. An 18 percent cut in demand will have a huge impact on the production strategies and capital spending plans of every U.S. utility. More expensive plants built to serve marginal demand -- plants like smaller gas turbines for example -- could be taken off-line, dropping the average cost per kilowatt. Large new plants that have been in the works (and that we've been paying for) for years can be eliminated or delayed. Cancelled plants would lead to higher profits that lead to lower electrical rates. So our electric bill won't go down 18 percent, they'll go down 25 percent, which is a savings of $22 per month for the average American home.

Twenty-two dollars per month!? Big deal. Was there an economic component of this energy policy?

Well, it's a savings of $29 billion per year EVERY YEAR FROM NOW ON, which pales the recent and easily forgotten economic stimulus package that sent $600 checks generally not to the people who needed them most. How much of a positive effect those checks had on the economy is open to debate, but how much effect they had on reducing energy consumption isn't, because that effect was nada, zilch, zero.

$29 billion also amounts to about the annual debt service cost of either the Iraq war or the coming $700 billion bailout. Take your pick.

Want another energy policy with positive economic implications? Make single-phase lighting illegal for businesses with ceiling heights above 15 feet. Three-phase power at 380 or 440 volts is more efficient, requires less copper, and saves money overall. Once you have it in place for lighting it's a no-brainer to also use it for electric motors, where the savings are HUGE. The financial payback period for such conversion is under two years, which is an imputed annual interest rate of 50 percent. What investment can you reliably make that pays back 50 percent year after year after year?

Still no government money has been spent.

Take this a step further and require all new residential construction to use 380V three-phase power for EVERYTHING, which is to say turn the U.S. into Europe, where homes already use less power for the same level of service because of three-phase efficiency. Now this is a big change, of course, because it means getting all new electric appliances, TVs, everything. What's wrong with that? It's not like the products don't exist, since the same manufacturers are already making them for sale in Europe. Market expansion leads to lower prices. Swapping out 10 percent of the U.S. appliance market per year ON TOP OF NORMAL ATTRITION would create a huge boom in electronics and electrical goods. Okay, maybe this one will cost some money, but no more than those $40 digital decoder subsidies the government is already handing out.

These are just a few examples of what can thoughtfully be accomplished. There's a natural role for government here and that's setting rules. They are good at that. Government hasn't always been as good at enforcing rules as setting them, but that doesn't mean rules aren't worth having. Let's just set a few new ones that make sense as we recover and rebuild after the economic fire to come.