The music / video files are all still there – even if the iPod app doesn’t appear to recognize that fact.  Thankfully – it’s not terribly difficult to GET the iPod app to recognize that the files are there.

I was able to do so a few minutes ago by hooking my iPhone up to my mac.  iTunes opened and said it was syncing the phone.   I cancelled the sync (the phone is synced with another mac, not this one) then opened itunes on the phone – I got the message “updating library… this may take a few minutes”  before poof – all of my media and playlists appeared.   It would seem that kicking off the sync is what triggers this – and my guess is it was supposed to happen during the update process but for some reason did not.

A few weeks ago I was introduced to a gentleman – Ed – by a former business partner of mine.  Ed has founded a startup called HoneyApps, with a SaaS vulnerability management product called Conduit.  The whole idea of this product is to tie into the vulnerability scanners, and the change management tools your organization is already using and allow for clean, concise and easy management of the vulnerabilities in your environment.   Throw in some asset management capabilities and the ability to automate re-testing of “closed” vulnerabilities as well as dead simple reporting and it’s a pretty powerful tool that takes management of vulnerabilities from a large, complex and often frustrating endeavor down to being an easy, straight forward process.  

I’ve seen a personal demo of Conduit in action and have to say – I’m honestly impressed.   As someone who manages vulnerabilities and remediation as part of my job I can immediately see the value here.   I could easily see it saving me hours of work wrestling with spreadsheets and scan results and change management systems and streamlining what is nothing short of a painful process.

The product is still pretty new – so the number of connectors they have available are still fairly slim, but include some very common tools (Nessus, JIRA, WhiteHat, Qualys, etc) with more already in the works.   Given the young age of the product, though, and the already “pretty damn good” quality – I definitely am looking forward to watching it develop.

The major drawback for people like me is that I quickly feel burnt out and numb to work because I’m subjected to it constantly (even if I am subjecting MYSELF to it), which makes it difficult to find motivation and much harder than it should be for me to focus on getting the job done.  The issue isn’t so much that I don’t like what I do – I like most of it – but more a manifestation of an imbalance in the work – life balance.   I realized that I am causing a lot of that imbalance myself (a realization that Ann doesn’t know she helped me make, even if I won’t admit that out loud).

Last weekend I tried an experiment – Ann and I took a long weekend trip up to Kalamazoo Michigan to tour the Lake Michigan Shore Wine Trail, and I decided that I was going to remain as unconnected from work as I could manage.   I took a laptop, but only for the purpose of being able to map out daily plans and look up info on the wineries.   The laptop stayed, unused, in my bag the whole trip.

I looked at email far less frequently than “normal”, and left nearly all work related emails unopened.

So how did this work out?    Honestly – incredibly well.

Our trip took us up to Kalamazoo, where we stayed at the Kalamazoo House Inn,  an 1870′s Victorian house that was converted to a bed and breakfast.  The inn keepers were incredibly friendly and welcoming and really made the experience a great one.   The inn itself is quite charming (yes, I said charming) and felt very open, welcoming and inviting.  If you’re ever looking for a place to stay in or near Kalamazoo – you owe it to yourself to check this place out.  (The food, btw, was quite excellent).

As I mentioned, we were there with the intention of visiting area wineries on the Lake Michigan Shore Wine Trail.  There are 12 wineries on the trail, and we ended up visiting 8 of them and sampling wine (more on that in a minute) – as well as some chocolate shops, and a cider mill.

We started off our day Saturday by heading to the wineries farthest away from Kalamazoo.   There were 6 of them clustered pretty close together and we figured we could hit those Saturday, and visit the closer wineries on Sunday.

Most of the wineries we visited had wines we liked (a couple did not),   and most were very welcoming and friendly (a couple were not).   Each place allowed us to try up to 6 of their wines, which was plenty to be honest – lots of them were sweet, but each place had a few dry wines as well (which Ann and I prefer).   What struck me most on Saturday, though, was how absolutely beautiful the area was.   Easily half the fun was just driving around the back roads of rural Michigan and enjoying the scenery with Ann.

Sunday was more of the same – enjoying time out at the wineries closer to Kalamazoo.   The chief difference was that we stopped first at Grandpa’s Cider Mill for doughnuts and apple cider.   Ann still talks about how great the doughnuts were and I’m positive we’ll be stopping by there on our next visit.    From there we went to the Chocolate Garden,  makers of handmade chocolate truffles.   It was a little disappointing in that it was quite small and they didn’t seem overly friendly.  The truffles are good, at least.     From there we went to another chocolate shop just down the street (I can’t remember the name) where they have all kinds of homemade chocolate items.   In contrast the the Chocolate Garden they were incredibly friendly and welcoming – letting me sample some of their fudges.  Their chocolate items are all hand-made as well, and were absolutely delicious.  We will definitely be going back there as well.

For those who are wondering – yes we did visit Bells Brewery.

The weekend was exactly what I needed – a nice peaceful relaxing weekend with Ann where we got to enjoy  each others company, good food and good wine.  The best part was that I felt unencumbered by work – I felt no obligation to be connected there and because of that I was better able to enjoy the time I spent with Ann.  The lesson I’ve learned is that I need to ensure that the work – life balance is more evenly balanced.  The last thing I want is to find myself 30 years into the future and realize that I spent all my time working and never got to enjoy life.

If you look at technology that’s been wildly successful – like Twitter or the iPod – you will see examples of things that are dead simple to use and understand.  Nobody has hours to spend learning how to use or configure new technology,  we just want something that works, out of the box, with little or no configuration.

You can see this in pretty much every successful social media outlet – Twitter and Facebook are both easy and intuitive to use (I would argue Twitter moreso than facebook, though more people get and understand the idea of facebook than understand what Twitter is for).  This simplicity and the ease of which you can use them has helped them become wildly popular and successful. In most cases you don’t think about how to use them, but rather you think about and consider the content you want to provide.  The use of the technology frees you from the how, and enables you to consider the what.

When designing new technologies – whether they’re gadgets and devices, software, or websites  - it’s important for the designer to keep it simple.   Think like the end user and pretend you are them using the program/device/site.  Is it easy to use?  Do you have to think about HOW to achieve what you want to do?  If so – go back to the drawing board and rework it until it’s intuitive.  This is one lesson I learned first hand from my day’s working on Proxito.   Our interface was not easy or intuitive, which ended up being a huge hinderance.  We made a lot of strides on that front, and had a much higher degree of success with Bouncepad, but it was too little too late.

Linux has also suffered greatly in this regard – it has consistently failed to take hold in the desktop computing space because it’s not intuitive or easy for the average end user.  Nobody wants to learn a new way of doing things – especially on the level of a new operating system – because it’s just TOO complex for them to invest much time in it.  Ubuntu has made great strides in this area – making desktop linux much more accessible for those who take the plunge,  but it’s still not 100% there.

Apple owes at least part of it’s success to making beautiful looking products that are also incredibly easy to use and work great out of the box.  That’s what made the iPod a huge success,  as well as the iPhone, newer Mac’s and the iPad.  They look great, function great and because of that lots of people want to use them, and enjoy the experience.

Technology is a great and wonderful thing, when applied appropriately.   If designed to be easy to use and intuitive in it’s purpose it can, and likely will, go far.  It will also likely make doing something a whole lot faster and easier than otherwise would be possible.  It’s when these criteria are met that I choose to use technology.

I don’t usually do fresh installs anymore.  With the advent of Time Machine I usually end up having all of my applications, files, directories, etc there waiting for me after a restore.   This time, however, I had no easy way of doing that as the SSD is not large enough to house all my files.  This gave me the excuse, and opportunity, to clean out the cruft, start with a clean slate and have only those files and programs that I know I’m going to use.

That, of course, got me thinking and considering what programs I would need to download and install.   What programs do I feel are essential?  Thankfully, I found that to be incredibly easy to answer, and decided I would share my list of apps I can’t live without.

1. Dropbox:  Many of the applications I use are able to be kept in sync between my different computers by using Dropbox.  Beyond that, it provides me with a place I can put things and have it appear on all of my machines.  Since I started using it in early January it has become absolutely essential for me.
2. 1password:  Like most people, I find it incredibly difficult to remember many 15+ character passwords.  I found myself greatly sacrificing password integrity and strength, and using the same password everywhere.  Enter 1Password by Agile Web Solutions. Never before has an app made it easier to have large, complex, secure passwords,   but also can help you easily identify which sites of yours are using the same password, and easily help rectify that.   If you use a Mac, you should use 1Password.
3. Things:  Prior to using this beautiful app from Cultured Code I struggled to become, and stay, organized.  I was never able to find anything that clicked quite right with me until my friend Jason recommended I take a look at Things.  I’ve been smitten ever since,   and now entrust Things with nearly everything I have to do.
4. TweetDeck:  For those of you who are big into Twitter, I probably don’t have to explain why TweetDeck is great.  Aside from the fact that it runs on Adobe Air (a sin I can forgive it), it looks fantastic, works fantastic and just plain is fantastic – it makes managing Twitter a lot easier.
5. Kindle for Mac:  We all need down time, and this allows me to read my books from the kindle store on my mac over lunch.   Stays in sync with my Kindle, and my iPhone,   pretty damn awesome.
6. CoRD:  If you find yourself having to do remote desktop sessions into Windows machines often then you can benefit from CoRD.   The main benefit I see over Microsofts RDP client is that this makes it easy to “save” servers with the appropriate settings so that you just click a server and are logged in.
7. Alfred: This app launcher is still in beta but has performed incredibly well for me over the past few weeks.  Faster than quicksilver ever was and just seems to… work.   Added ability to initiate several web functions (wikipedia / google searches, etc) make it just a little bit more useful without adding in an intrusive amount of clutter.
8. Adium:   This is, by far, the best IM client I’ve ever used.   My only complaint is that its not available on Windows/Linux.    If you have a mac and use IM with any frequency,  you owe it to yourself to try Adium.

There are other programs that I use, naturally, but these are the apps that are my go-to apps for any Mac that I own.  I like Safari, so generally don’t NEED to have another browser (until Chrome is more stable I’ll stick with Safari),  I use Feedly in my browser for RSS and Apple’s Mail.app for email.  These 8, though, are guaranteed to be on any Mac I own.

The easiest fix for this is to tape a piece of white paper (cut to size) over the cliff sensors (four of them).  While this works fairly well,  I found with my Roomba that often this taped on paper gets torn up and dirty over time, requiring it to be replaced – which means further upkeep and maintenance beyond the fairly high routine maintenance you already have to do.  I often would not have the motivation to re-fix the cliff sensors,  meaning my Roomba would be benched for weeks.

Last night I got tired of fighting with my Roomba over this, and decided to implement a more permanent fix.

The way the Roomba’s cliff sensors work are that they fire a beam of IR at the ground with an IR Transmitter,   which bounces off and is received by a separate IR receiver.   These are kept separate from each other in the sensor housing.   When a “cliff” is encountered, the IR signal doesn’t bounce back, and the Roomba backs off.   This also occurs with dark colored flooring.

The fix involves an almost complete dis-assemble of the Roomba (following directions found here: http://www.pottsland.com/roomba/Roomba_5xx_Cliff_Sensor.html), an effort that is not difficult assuming you’re comfortable taking apart and re-assembling electronics,  and taking the IR transmitter and Receivers out of their housings, taping them together, and putting them back in the clear sensor casing.   This way – when the IR Transmitter sends its signal, the receiver always sees it.

For obvious reasons you should not do this to a Roomba that will be operating where it can fall down stairs or where it needs to avoid falling from heights.  Mine cleans the ground floor of my house, so I don’t have to worry.

The fix worked great – no more worrying about cliff sensors for me.

Now if only I could get the Roomba (his name is FloMar by the way), to clean his own brushes….

Back in January, PGP Corporation released a much anticipated update to their PGP Desktop lineup -PGP Desktop 10.0.  This update was much anticipated because it finally added support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  The great benefit here is that those who would be so inclined to utilize whole disk encryption on mac, and choose PGP as their platform of choice, could now upgrade to Snow Leopard and have their drive encrypted.

In testing this new software I discovered a bug, however.  When utilizing PGP Desktop 10 for Mac in an environment managed by PGP Universal Server (2.12), I was frequently asked to re-enroll my Mac with the universal server.   Until I was able to re-enroll, PGP Desktop was unavailable.   Whole Disk Encryption was thankfully NOT affected.

After working fairly closely with PGP support on this issue it was determined to be a bug,  and after providing them a wealth of information from our environment they were able to reproduce the issue on their end and provide a list of steps that would reproduce it 100% of the time.

Thankfully,  we’ve also been able to determine a successful workaround for this issue.

The underlying cause for this behavior appears to be on-access scanning by antivirus products on the Mac interfering with the PGP plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/

The workaround that has worked in my testing so far has been to create exclusions in the scanning policy for:

~/Library/Preferences/com.pgp.pgp.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.pgp.desktop.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.pgp.admin.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.pgp.engine.plist

With those four files excluded from on-access antivirus scanning, I have been unable to get PGP Desktop to prompt me for re-enrollment,  indicating that this does, in fact, provide a workaround for the issue.

A huge thanks goes to the PGP Support team who worked this issue hard and were a pleasure to work with in finding a resolution to this issue.

(note: I am in no way affiliated with PGP Corporation.)

As my Mom always told me: Never say never.

Last week, Ann and I came upon a $200 gift card to Best Buy.  We collectively decided that the best use of that would be to break down and get a gaming console.   We wanted something fun we could do with friends when they come visit, and another thing to pass time and relax.    Our options were a PS3 or an Xbox.   Both are good systems and I would have enjoyed either one,  but the main draw for the PS3 (the fact that it also plays Bluray) doesn’t really matter all that much since we already have two Bluray players.   The big draw for the Xbox – the fact that I have a handful of friends who have them and play online regularly – ended up being the deciding factor.

And so we got an Xbox 360 Elite,  a second controller, HDMI cable and a couple of games.   Currently we’ve got the games that came with the bundle (which are as you’d expect, nothing to write about), as well as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,   and Dragon Age: Origins.   Ann and I have played some CoD:MW2, but haven’t played any Dragon Age yet.   I’m pretty sure Ann is planning on playing Dragon Age while I’m at work tomorrow.   I’m not sure yet when I’ll get a chance to play it…. but I’m looking forward to it.

Now – if you’ll excuse me, I have two litter boxes that apparently need cleaning.    Why the cat’s cant learn to flush a damn toilet is what I want to know… if they can figure out how to open a door, they can figure out how to flush a toilet.

There are, however, ways you can securely delete files from your computer.  These tools will overwrite the space on the hard drive where the file resided,  usually 7 or more times (and often the number of passes is configurable).  This morning my boss brought to my attention the fact that one such utility is available by default on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).   The command, srm, is used via the command line and will securely remove your files.

David (my boss) helpfully created an automator workflow, however, which when saved as a service on your machine will add an option to the right-click context menu in Finder that allows you to securely delete the file.

I – being in a sharing mood – have shared this automator workflow HERE for your enjoyment.

A few notes:   In the actual shell command – pay attention to the switches after srm.  Specifically, you may want to change the s in “-rsf” to an m ( so -rmf).  The s will do a single pass at overwriting the file, while m will do a full 7 passes.

This is provided as-is, though I will answer any questions I’m able to.   As always – use at your own risk, if it breaks your stuff that’s not my fault.

Special thanks to David Meade for providing the automator workflow.

[Update:  I forgot to mention that you can also securely delete files by moving them to your trash folder, and selecting "Secure Empty Trash" from the finder menu...]

[Update 2:  A friend of mine has pointed out that you can set it up so that Finder uses srm to securely empty the trash by default, to do this go the the Finder menu -> preferences -> advanced, and check the box for Empty Trash securely. Enjoy]

Thanksgiving, along with the help of two days of PTO (Paid Time Off, for those who don’t know), allowed me to enjoy a nice six-day weekend.  I did thoroughly enjoy the time off as it allowed me to unwind quite a bit and disconnect myself from work.

Over that weekend I finally broke down and installed our new garbage disposal – which we’ve had for almost six months – replacing the old battered and abused garbage disposal that came with the house (and couldn’t perform it’s primary duty at all, was loud as hell and made the entire countertop shake).  The new unit, an Evolution Compact series from Insinkerator is nothing short of wonderful in comparison.   We can put things down the garbage disposal now that would have resulted in a clogged sink before.  It’s a lot quieter as well, and does not cause the counter to shake either – making it better on all counts.

The installation was significantly easier than I was expecting,  even though I decided to remove the old mounting from the old unit (same mounting type, or so it looked) in favor of using the new hardware.   Installation – for me anyways – required nothing more than a little upper body strength to hold the disposer in place, plumbers putty, and enough wiring knowledge to connect wires with wire caps.   Thankfully I had my wonderful wife to help me,  which did prove to be quite helpful.

This weekend I also found myself looking at Bento (from Filemaker) again as a tool to get some things organized.  I’ve had mixed feelings about Bento since I first tried their beta release,  not FULLY understanding what I could use it for (or would use it for). With the release of Bento 3 recently, though, I decided to give it another look (since the upgrade was only about $30 since I had a valid Bento 2 license).

I have to say,  when combining it with the $5 iPhone app,   Bento has become a bit more useful for me.   I’m working on building a home inventory of our electronic and expensive equipment – a project that is going very well since I can take my iPhone around with me to the various equipment, enter in the details, and sync it back to Bento on my Macbook Pro.   I’ve also used it to organize and catalog my wine collection.   Admittedly it’s not a large collection (currently only 9 unopened bottles),  but Ann and I are planning on going to a local wine store to find some new wines to try.  This will help me organize the new arrivals.

My Dad has been using Bento to catalog his wine as well, though he is using a custom built template to do so (whereas I’m using a new template in version 3 for wine collections).   He’s got a very large collection of wine,  and his process involved going to each bottle and taking a picture with his camera,  uploading into Aperture, Selecting the images, exporting to a directory, and importing into the correct record in Bento.

My process was much easier (and I believe he’s going to switch to my process after I showed it to him):   I create the library on my mac, and sync the blank library to my iPhone.   I then take my iPhone with me, enter the data straight from the bottles – and from within Bento on my phone, use it’s camera to take the picture of the wine.    It’s then already stored in Bento and I can sync everything back to my Macbook Pro.   I think all told it took me about 15 minutes to catalog my wine.

As I’ve gone through this process, I’m starting to see more and more of the capabilities of this software, and I’m actually starting to get excited about some of the things that I could possibly do with it.   It’s certainly not for everybody, and some people just won’t get any use out of it,  but I am really starting to enjoy it myself now that I’m finally “getting it”.

And lastly – while setting up my old Macbook Pro (after Apple replaced BOTH of the dead batteries I had for it.  Applecare FTW!) – I got to thinking about how great it would be to have my 1Password data sync between my various macs like it does between my iPhone and Mac.  I tweeted about wanting to be able to do that, and had SEVERAL people (Including the folks who made 1Password, which is just plain awesome) suggest using Dropbox to do it.   This turned out to be incredibly simple to do and has me wondering why the hell I didn’t do this sooner.

The fact that the folks from Agile Web Solutions responded to my “I wish there were an easy way to sync 1password data between my macs” tweet with the answer to how to do so, is awesome.   They’ve proven to be very responsive to their customers, and in the process are building a lot of goodwill and a solid base of supporters.  I think that’s definitely an example of “The Way It Should Be Done”.