Robert’s Ramblings

Adobe recently released a version of Photoshop for the iPhone. It is a great little  program that makes it easy to edit photos that you have taken on your iPhone or photos that you take using the program. You can crop, resize, and flip your pictures. It also includes ways for you to adjust the exposure, saturation, and tint of your photo. Many other options are included which is surprising for a free iPhone app. One that I thought was interesting was an Andy Warhol-like series of cubes with different tints. This is called, “Pop” in the application.

The user interface gives you tips on how to use the software. Once you are familiar with it, you can turn off the tips. I loved this feature and it is an excellent example of how good software should be written. Another feature that I think is fantastic is the undo feature. You can make as many changes as you want and then undo them if you think you have made a mistake or do not like the result. The “save” function will save the image in your “Camera Roll” and does not overwrite the original photo. I was unsure about this and was quite nervous to save my creation because I did not want to overwrite the original. I should have known that this would not be a problem.

The program will also allow you to upload to photoshop.com. I have not tested this feature yet, but you can sign up from within the program. I recommend this iPhone app wholeheartedly. Get your copy now!

One of the most amazing things about NASA’s flying a rocket into the south pole of the Moon today was not the rocket, explosion or analysis that will follow, but instead the minimalist control room that was used to direct the rocket to its intended location on the moon. If you had a chance to see it on television, you would have noticed that the control room was about the size of a large conference room. It had several computer monitors and some laptops. This is in sharp contrast to the huge control room that was used in 1969 to direct the first Moon landing. Computer technology has advanced so much in the intervening forty years that one of the engineers packed up his laptop and power cord shortly after the explosion and walked out of the room carrying it. If one of the engineers had decided to walk out with his computer in 1969, he would have needed a crane to lift the massive computers of the time.

I was very young when man first landed on the Moon, but I was fortunate enough to see it live on a small black and white television. It was one to those amazing and never-to-be-forgotten moments of my youth. I am hoping to witness a new landing on the Moon or perhaps Mars in my lifetime. If it happens, I will be able to watch it in high definition on a huge flat screen television set. I will be able to record it to Blue-Ray disks for future review and will also be able to direct my friends to watch specific moments of the landing on YouTube.com or Hulu. I don’t know about you, but to me this is all amazing progress. My hat is off to the engineers of this world—especially the ones who brought us the transistor and integrated circuit.

Having lost Norton Ghost’s backup functionality when I upgraded to Windows 7, I began looking for an alternative that would keep my machine safe in case of a catastrophe. I have years worth of documents on my machine that I do not want to lose to a virus or hard drive crash. I looked at third party software and open source options and found that nothing is ready for Windows 7 yet.

Since Windows 7 is not being sold on retail shelves yet, one could argue that I was being a bit unreasonable in my search. However, you would think that someone had developed software for Windows 7 backups in advance of the release of the operating system. It turns out that someone did–Microsoft.

Windows 7 comes with an integrated backup program that will create images of your hard drive and will also backup files incrementally. I decided to give it a try. The following screen shots and text show how to set up the backup software.

Type “backup” in the search box that comes up when you click on the Windows Start menu. You will see a program called, “Backup and Restore.” Start it. Once you do, you will see the following image.

 
Click on “Set up backup.” A dialog box like the one below will be displayed as the software scans for backup destinations.

Read the rest of this entry »

The bane of all PC users existence is malware, virus, trojan and spyware infections. It can make the PC unusable, send out hundreds of unsolicited SPAM messages to your friends and colleagues and/or consume a day or more of time to remove it. The lost productivity and tech support costs can be significant. Fortunately, there are commercial and free applications that do an adequate job of protecting against malware. Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Norton, McAfee and AVG are all good solutions.

Microsoft has finally decided that they should offer protection—something I believe should have been part of the operating system since the fist malware was ever detected years ago. The new offering is free and is called, “Microsoft Security Essentials.” You can download a free copy with updates from here.

I recommend that every reader of this blog install one of the anti-malware products mentioned here. If you don’t, one day you will discover that your machine is infected and that you have very little recourse but to call tech support. If you have tried the free support from companies like Dell, then you know that their solution is to do a system restore from the manufacturer’s CDs. You will lose your data if you do this. Paid support like the one my company, Alonso Consulting, offers will result in the removal of the virus and the saving of your data, but it will not be free. It is, therefore, in your best interest to install one of these tools now. What are you waiting for?

Robert Alonso
Alonso Consulting

Products mentioned:

One of my favorite tools for backing up my Vista machine was Norton Ghost 12. I had it set to automatically back up My Documents to an external drive on Tuesdays and to make a complete image backup of the hard drive on Fridays to the same external drive. The best part of this was that it ran in the background and was scheduled for times when I would be out for lunch.

Although not perfect, this backup strategy saved me from losing my Vista installation once. Something I installed, or a virus, caused my system not to start and to display a black screen with a blinking cursor. I took out the Norton Recovery Disk, booted from it and restored my entire PC from my last image backup. This process took a few minutes and left me with a completely functional PC.

Unfortunately, I do not have this safety with Windows 7. Norton Ghost 12 and even the newer version 14 do not work properly with Windows 7. The Windows 7 upgrade process even recommends that you uninstall them before upgrading. This is something that I ignored, hoping that the incompatibility would be minor and I could still use the program. I was wrong. It does not work properly.

The Symantec message boards have some messages saying that Norton Ghost 15 will include support for Windows 7. It will also feature user interface improvements and added functionality. There is no release date announced yet, but I can’t wait.

Robert Alonso
Alonso Consulting

If you own an iPhone, there is good news from AT&T today. You can connect your phone to iTunes and an update will be downloaded that enables multimedia messaging from the phone. It enables the sending and receiving of photo and video messages to other phones. The functionality even works across networks which means that you can send to Verizon Wireless users and to other wireless carriers. The update takes about two seconds to download and install automatically. That being said, why are you still reading this, get on with it…

Robert Alonso
Alonso Consulting

Gizmodo, a very successful blog on gadgets and technology, uncovered information about a prototype tablet computer from Microsoft that is in the late stages of development. This is remarkable because Microsoft kept this device secret for a very long time and also because it could remake a company lately thought of as a technology has-been into cool and exciting again. The device uses the portfolio metaphor and opens up into two seven inch screens that can be manipulated by touch with fingers or with a stylus. The tablet shields the user from the operating system and works like a tool that a business person or student would use to take notes, doodle, set appointments and take pictures. It does not give you a Windows-like experience, but instead a very cool, super-iPod or super-iPhone experience. The following video gives you a sample of what the device can do.

The device has one button and has indicators along the edge of one of the tablets for displaying battery power and Wi-Fi connectivity. At this time, it is unknown how the device will be charged. The back side of one tablet has a camera with flash. Pictures of the camera lens indicate that it will be 3 megapixels and that it will also have a 4X zoom. It is not clear whether the zoom is digital or optical, but I’d bet on the former. I can easily see this device being used to read books or newspapers in full color and with a page flipping metaphor. (Watch out Amazon Kindle and Sony PRS-505.)

If and when Microsoft releases this as a product, the device could eliminate the need for notebook computers while travelling. From what is visible in the video, it has excellent handwriting recognition. The tablet user in the video writes an Internet address in the browser and is taken to the site. Perhaps this will also work with some yet undisclosed email client. If you can have your schedule, a note taking device, a web browser and email in this handy form factor, why would you lug around a notebook or even a netbook. It is not known if the device will offer any entertainment options, like the ability to play music. If it does, then Microsoft will have a hit on its hands and will finally have a tool that can take away the “cool” designation from Apple.

For pictures click here.

Robert Alonso
Alonso Consulting

Google just introduced a new way of reading news on the Internet. It provides news content from a few major print publishers that have agreed to participate and a few web site publishers. Its claim to fame is that it allows you to “flip” from one news article to another one by clicking on left or right buttons on the web page or pressing the left and right on the keyboard. The “flip” is more like a slide, but I’m sure most of us will overlook that fact. The site is still part of their lab effort, but you can access it here.

Google Fast Flip includes, among many others, The New York Times, Esquire, US, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and The Atlantic in its index. You can search for a topic or just peruse what Google displays for you. If an article grabs your attention, you can click on it to view it in its entirety on the publisher’s web site. This is a more visual way of looking at the news and improves on Google News—something that I have been happily using for over a year. Most of the magazines, publications and web sites that are included are liberal so this may not be a good choice for conservative-leaning readers. The image to the left shows a sample of what you will see on the site. (Please click on it to see a bigger version.)

When you click on one of the displayed news items, you are presented with the flip interface and Google ads. These are  now being displayed to the right of the articles that you are reading. Google has agreed to share ad revenues with the publishers that have partnered with them. This is a big difference between Google News and Google Fast Flip. The Google News product does not share (and perhaps does not generate either) any revenues with publishers. I suspect that Google Fast Flip will be more popular with content creators and publishers. The image to the right shows what you will see when you click on an article. Note that other articles are displayed on the left in a scrollable region. I recommend you give this web site a try. Let me know if you like it.

If you thought that incompatibilities only occurred in the Microsoft-centric computing world, you were wrong. The new Snow Leopard upgrade (OS X 10.6) makes several applications not work correctly on the Macintosh. One that I had grown fond of came with Roxio’s Toast Titanium 10 application set. It is an application for transferring video from a Tivo to the Mac. It is appropriately named, “Tivo Transfer.” (Yes, I am a major geek who likes to connect all his electronic devices together.)

When you launch the application, it bounces a few times in the dock and then ends. If you look at the console, the error message that is displayed describes an apple.cocoa.foundation.NSRuntime error. It appears that the error is related to Apple’s removal of a Java to Cocoa interface. It is no longer possible to call a Cocoa framework from Java. Although this problem sounds irreparable, the good folks at Roxio have already made a beta fix available on their web site. The new version uses no Java and can then circumvent this issue. If you are a registered user, you can get the fixed version here.

News reports indicate that this video game is a huge success. Best Buy in NJ has reported that there were people lined up outside stores for a chance at being first to buy the video game. The game is available for the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The official web site is here.