The only thing I think awards are useful for is if you understand why they are awarded. What did candidate A have that candidate B did not? The IT Pro awards appear to be a simple popularity contest. That is, random web site visitors had a set of candidates to choose from, and they chose for whatever reason. If the candidates were judged on criteria (e.g., originality, fitness for purpose, reliability, value for money) I would love to see how the winners (and losers) scored. But these awards are meaningless. There's no judging. Just popularity of clicks.What galls me is that Skype is tweeting (both @skype and @skype4biz) about how Skype for iPad was awarded "Business App of the Year" for 2011. The idea that Skype is a business app and that it is an app worthy of praise are both laughable. Unlike the folks over at IT Pro, I have criteria for these things.

What is a Business App?

To be a "business app," it has to integrate with my business. It has to do something—anything—to talk to some other IT system in my business. How does Skype do that? It doesn't. It doesn't have even the tiniest integration into anything other than its own contact list. I can't hook it up to LDAP, ActiveDirectory, or even my contacts at some other service like Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! or AIM. If it is a standalone app with zero integration into my business, it is not a "business app." Sorry guys. You might call it "the app that is accidentally the most beneficial to business" but that's a different award.

As for it being a good app? You're joking, right? It works. That's the long and short of it. It will connect to other Skype users and you can talk to them. I have had rock solid, full-motion video calls over 3G using my iPad. I loved it. So, there's props for what they do right. Beyond that, it is an unmitigated train wreck of an application. Just look at the user interface.

Abuser Interface

Skype User Interface

I have taken the surnames off the users, but I don't have 5 contacts named Adrian or two contacts named Ajoy. There are 3 different Adrians there and 1 Ajoy, but a couple of the Adrians have more than one phone number. My Skype user interface (version 3.5.454 on an iPad2 running iOS 5.0.1) puts a single gigantic icon on the screen for each phone number. That's right, one icon per number, not one icon per person. With all this screen real estate on an iPad, they choose a layout that only puts 20 contacts on the screen at the same time! (Ironically, Apple's Contacts app only shows 12 at a time! Only 3 more than my iPhone 4) Where is the list of users? Why can't I have name down one column and phone number down the other (so I can see whether I'm dialing their work, home or mobile)? And really, in 2011, do we have the technology to understand that a single person might have more than one phone number!? This app is only a few months old. How did they write something this bad in 2011?

Contacts? We don't need no steenking contacts?

And I can't jump to groups of users by letter (e.g., can't jump to users beginning with A or M or P). I have about 300 users in my phone, which means about 700 icons on my iPad screen. Do you think I'm going to flick through these with gestures? Fat chance. So I can search at the top of the screen. That's helpful, but this UI design is still totally flawed and fundamentally useless. Can I sort by last name instead of first letter? No. Can I display "Lastname, Firstname"? No. App of the year indeed. The contacts list on my Palm Professional in 1998 was better than this.

And Skype contacts aren't shown alongside iPad contacts. They're over in their own separate page. By contrast, the way Apple gets stuff like this right is by hiding stupid details like the difference between a Skype contact and a phone contact. Think of how iMessage transparently works out whether or not it can use the data connection or must use an SMS. Skype should teach me not to care whether I'm reaching my colleague by Skype or by phone. You want to sell more Skype credit, right? Hide the distinction between real phone numbers and skype IDs a little better. Blur the lines. Let there be just one contact for "James Smith" and let it include his Skype, mobile number (for SMS via Skype credit) and other numbers. When I tap on James, ask me how I want to connect. But don't give me 2 unlabeled icons for James in this screen (one for home, one for mobile) and another unlabeled icon for him back on a different page (where his Skype account is).

Only one other feature left: history management

And the history. I can 'edit' my history, but that's a stupid feature. What does it take to delete an item from the history? Two taps no matter what. I can drag left to right to reveal the 'delete' button, and then I can tap delete. Or I can tap the 'edit' button and do two different taps: tap the red delete symbol and then tap 'delete'. But only one at a time. I can't tap a bunch of them and then delete all the ones I marked. So who cares? Why do I have two modes of deleting history items that both operate on items one at a time and both take two taps to delete an item?

This is not iDevice UI design. This is half-baked mimickry of other apps. Think of the bulk delete in the Mail app and you'll see what bulk delete is supposed to look like. Notice that the iMessage feature in iOS has a 'clear all' button and you'll see what Skype is missing in its history management. And what about deleting all history items from contact A while leaving the ones related to contact B?

And configuration options? Preferences? Tweaks to the UI to customise it to my tastes? None.

Conclusion

If I were nominating Skype for iPad as an Anything of the Year, it would be "Worst User Interface I was Willing to Put Up With Because the Features Were Compelling Enough". Or "Feature So Beneficial to Business that I Would Use It Despite It's Awful UI". This app only has a handful of UI features to begin with. And each one is amateurish and clumsy. It makes you wonder if the team members that work on Skype for iPad actually own and use iPads in their daily lives. It's hard to believe that they do.

You can do lots of restricting, in theory, and that's cool. But it's targeted at one specific user group: the kid whose parents control their iPhone / iPad / iPod. You can turn on the restrictions, and they (presumably) are enforced. For example, when I turn on restrictions to prevent any content except content rated '9+' (i.e., aimed at kids as young as 9), a bunch of my apps disappear. Cool. It has a bunch of shortcomings, though, to the point that I don't actually use it.

• You can't toggle the restrictions. That is, if you disable them, it forgets how they were set. To enable them, you have to go through all the different options and set them the way you want them all over again. I want to set up the restrictions, hand the device to my kids, take it back, and undo the restrictions. If I plan to give them the device again, I'll re-enable the restrictions. But that requires me to reset each and every setting all over again.
• You can't restrict individual apps. I can't turn off Mail, for example. I can prevent changes to the account, but I can't disable access to it entirely. You can't create a group of apps and restrict access to them by a name / group / genre, etc.
• The only way to restrict TV shows / Movies (aside from not putting them on the device to begin with) is via a ratings system. However, I put a lot of homemade content on my devices. Some are my (legally owned) ripped DVDs. Others are original movies I've made, but they have content I'd rather not expose my kids to. I can't find a way to tag a movie that I made with a content rating so that iOS will restrict it. (You can do this, according to MacOSXHints, using another app)
• There are some surprising things you can't restrict:
• SMS. Think of all the "text SUCKA to 23422 to donate £2 to goodness-knows-what" billboards around. There's no way to turn it off. With the advent of iMessage (which at the moment doesn't have the chargeable SMS feature), it would be awesome to restrict messaging to only the free iMessages.
• Phone. Again, think premium phone calling, international calling, calls over the plan's allowance, etc. Wouldn't it be great if you knew that the plan had 200 minutes and you could put a 200 minute restriction in the handset itself? Funny nobody has done this yet. With all the parents of teenagers who pay exorbitant bills, you'd think someone would have pushed this through. And then I'd put a list of always-OK numbers (so you can always reach mom & dad).
• Web settings. One good way to stop kids from visiting naughty sites on their phone is the same thing that corporations do: force all web traffic to go via a proxy. There are numerous net nanny services out there that will do that. But if you can't stop someone from changing the web settings, it is trivial to bypass those restrictions.
• Data / Data roaming. This is another chargeable feature. There is no way to limit 3G data usage. E.g., disallow it or put a handset-imposed limit on it. You also can't stop the handset user from switching on data roaming. Here in Europe, you don't have to go far to go from one country to another and suddenly start racking up international data roaming charges. And just ask people who live in New York or other northeastern US states about roaming charges from going to Canada.

Of course some of the things I mentioned can be restricted by calling up your phone carrier. You can disable SMS entirely, you can turn off data roaming, you can put content blocks on the internet connection, and you can disable access to paid / premium phone numbers. However, that's only effective for the same use case as the rest of these restrictions: when you want to turn it on, and pretty much leave it alone most of the time.

If you want to disable some features, hand it to someone else, and then take it back, this doesn't work for you. If you want to have the handset support you in keeping charges down (e.g., phone, text, internet), it won't.

Obviously the RSS feed doesnt include YouTube videos, and a bunch of other parts of the page. But it also doesn't include the ads! Some sites don't have an RSS version, so you don't get it. But where they do have it, it's so much nicer.

There are (at the time of this writing) six different services you can disable. Before you do that, though, scroll down on the System Services screen to the very bottom. There you will find an option for Status Bar Icon which is disabled by default. I enabled it, then I started noticing that my location icon was always on! I started disabling system services until I got to a behaviour that I thought was acceptable.

• Cell Network Search seems like a good use of your location.
• Compass calibration also seems reasonable.
• Diagnostics and Usage smacks of the problem we had a few months ago with Apple reporting all the places we had ever been with our phones. I say 'no, thank you' to that one.
• Location-based iAds. Really? Like there's someone out there saying "please, please, can you send me more effective and targeted advertisements!?" Who really wants that? Another way to look at it is that advertisers are getting some information about you, or even just aggregate information about the movement of people near them.
• I disabled Setting Time Zone. Seems like a reasonable thing to leave running, but what I found was that the Location Services icon was always active if I had that turned on. To me, that (a) is probably running down the battery, and (b) defeats the purpose of having the status bar icon come on and off. If there's a system service that keeps it on all the time, it's not a useful indicator.

So I recommend turning on the status bar indicator and then see how often someone is snooping on your location.

Apparently you need everything under the sun just to install VLC. And everything under the sun needs everything in the stars and the moon, too. Long before I was compiling VLC, I had to compile perl 5.12. Nevermind that Mac OS X has perl 5.10 installed. And you know, there is probably nothing related to VLC that hinges on the difference between 5.10 and 5.12. So, a few minutes of compiling later, and I've got perl 5.12. Fine.

So on and on it fetches and compiles. No less than 2 packages later, it decides it needs to install perl 5.8! The system had 5.10, now it has 5.8 and 5.12 in the ports system. Surely all that was superfluous. In fact, the installation broke because 5.8 wanted to install itself and it couldn't because it found someone already sleeping in that bed. Sigh.

As I fumed over this and fixed it and let it go on, I found a blog post by Michael Weber about how Mac Ports are fatally flawed. I'm reading it thinking "yeah!" and "that's so true!" and then I get to the part where he says "It's 2007 for another couple of days..." and you could hear the classic needle scratching across vinyl. 2007? Holy crap, every point he makes is totally accurate. Every point is right on. Wow. 4 years on and it still sucks.

It's easy to tell Google you want to see the web in English. In fact you can see the button to click right there ("google.com in English"). But I want it to know that I'm speaking English as soon as I submit my search from my browser. I don't want to enter my search, see the results in a language I don't speak, and then have to click a button for English.

Google in Hebrew. Cool, but not useful to me.

The trick is to create a new search engine definition and make it pass the hl parameter, set to the value en.

The way you do this is to go find the definition of the Google search engine in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins. Copy google.xml and rename it something like google-en.xml. Modify it to have the following line in it where all the other <Param/> tags are:

<Param name="hl" value="en"/>

Search engine selection in Firefox 4

You can download my google-en.xml. The file is named .txt. Rename it to .xml. Keep it in the same folder as all the other XML files. Now, go to your list of search engines (as shown below) and pick it.

Now, even though I get redirected to a local Google site, based on what country I'm in, I will still see results written in English, not the local language.

1. I found a file called Windows XP Home.vhd.001.zip in a folder called /Volumes/Virtual PC for Mac version 7/.extras. I copied it to my DiskImages folder.
2. I ejected the disc and put in "Installation CD 2". I copied the file Windows XP Home.vhd.002.zip from /Volumes/Virtual PC Disc 2
3. I unzipped both zip files. In my case I used the 'unzip' command at the command line. Double clicking would probably work.
4. I concatenated the two files together to make one big file called Windows XP Home.vhd:
   cat Windows\ XP\ Home.vhd.001 Windows\ XP\ Home.vhd.002 >> Windows\ XP\ Home.vhd
5. To save some disk space, you can get rid of the .001, .002, and .zip files.
6. In Parallels Desktop 5.0, I went to File -> New, and selected the vhd file I just made. It started creating a Windows VM.
7. After a few minutes, it stopped and I had to do manual things. Mainly I had to enter the CD key (which I had from my VirtualPC box), and do activation. Everything went smoothly.
8. Parallels continued its installation and installed Parallels Tools and Kaspersky Internet Security. I had a lot of updates to do (all of Service Pack 2, all of Service Pack 3, and IE 8 and so on).

At the end of the day, though, I took a legit copy of Windows and repurposed it in (what I believe to be, anyways) a legal way. That was quite handy.

It may be possible to make a copy of the /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib library, do their software install, and then copy it back. It's dangerous. I ended up finding a friend with a Mac and booting into Target Disk mode, and then I could replace the file. People who don't know what that means will have to find a Mac service center, Apple store, or a tech-savvy friend. But that's not what this blog post is about.

Suckiest App Evar

The crappy app that you get with the USB stick is clearly slapped together using a template, demo app that came with XCode or something.

MyApp

• The menu has a "Preferences" item that is greyed out (but there is a settings button in the window. Why isn't that hooked up to the Preferences menu?).
• The File menu has a bunch of options: New, Open, Open Recent, Save As, Print. etc. None of these make sense. Perhaps they didn't realize they had a menu? Perhaps they didn't realize they could eliminate the entire menu?
• The Edit menu does what you'd expect. Lucky them.
• The Window menu has a Hide/Show toolbar (also grayed out) and a Customize Toolbar (also grayed out).
• And my favorite: The "Help" menu has one item: "MyApp Help." They forgot to do a search and replace on "MyApp" throughout their project. Though it does bring up the right PDF file for documentation.

SMS

And then there's the SMS feature. I'm not sure I understand why I want my mobile broadband adapter to send and receive SMS. but it's there.

CPU Usage

There's the fact that I have this dumb program running the whole time that I am using teh interwebs. It uses a visible amount of CPU, ranging from 0.6% to 1% when just sitting idle. Since it is adding zero value to my Internet experience, this just takes up space in my dock, desktop, and RAM. And it's burning a little CPU as well.

Engrish

Lastly, there's Engrish. If you don't know what Engrish is, go take a look at Engrish.com. They have error messages in the software (from reading /Applications/T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/LanguageTokenList_TMO.txt) that look like this:

• The request has been time out!\nTry to terminate the communication!
• If disable, you will not be able to install the SW of T-Mobile Internet Manager to other computer until enable it again.
• SIM card capacity is not enough!

In fact, of the 232 strings in that file (which correspond to messages you might see in a dialog box or error), 75 (about one third) have an exclamation point in them. One error message even has 3 exclamation points in it.

Conclusion

It turns out that the device works. But what a pain. I lost half a day to trying to recover without a second mac. When I got the second Mac to fix my own Mac, all was well in about 5 minutes. After that, it works flawlessly.

The TimeLine

Thursday 5/14: I call Dell and report the problem. They made me find a wired connection, do a whole lot of apt-get updates and so on to get the latest version of Linux. Downloading hundreds of megs of feces (like gnome, evolution, thunderbird, firefox, gcc, libstdc++) that is totally unrelated to my problem makes me mad. Knowing that the only way out is through, I do it. After 2 hours of back and forth we decide I need to ship the unit back.

Friday 5/15: A box arrives to ship it back. Wow. Very fast.

Monday 5/18: I ship the unit out through my office's regular 7pm daily pickup.

Thursday 5/21: I get a call from "Saikumar," my case worker, asking if I have shipped the unit yet. I tell him yes. He has no info for me, he's just wondering where the laptop is. Why can't he go to FedEx.com?

Friday 5/22: I get a voice message at 7:00pm from an authorized repair service in Houston saying that he wants to reinstall the operating system on the unit, but that will delete all my data. I leave him voice mail saying that's fine. In my voice mail I tell him I want him to be sure to check that the unit can connect to a Wi-Fi network. I specifically ask him to call me so we can talk about this. I also send email (by replying to Dell's automated messages) describing this exchange of voice mails.

Monday 5/25: I get a call at 10:30pm from Saikumar asking if I have received my laptop yet. He had no information for me, just wanted to know if I had received the laptop. Given that a technician was working on it on Friday, receiving it on Monday seems pretty improbable. What's the point of this support guy calling me?

Wednesday 5/27: I get a phone call and an email saying that my laptop has shipped. That's handy, but the laptop shows up on my doorstep about 2 hours later, so it's a little superfluous. There is a note in the box with the laptop. It says they "tested its hardware extensively" and then they reinstalled the OS. Guess what? It is still broken! So I call them back and I am irate. They want me to update Linux. It says it will take 2 hours, so I go back to work and let that run a while.

Wi-Fi kernel panic on Dell Mini 9

So: let me get this straight: it is not unusual that Dell's service technician will install an operating system that doesn't work and that exhibits my problem? OK. So back to the reinstall thing. Meanwhile, I blow them off and learn how to use the wpa_supplicant command to bring up the WiFi from the command line. Instead of using the X-based GUI, I go to the console (Ctrl-Alt-Fn-A, which is essentially Ctrl-Alt-F1) and fire up the WiFi. Sure enough, kernel panic. The sequence of steps, though, is specific and completely reproducible.

• It will associate with my access point just fine (i.e., wpa_supplicant works fine and gives me good messages)
• It will get an IP address from DHCP just fine (dhclient runs fine)
• As soon as I start doing traffic over it, blam!

I sent the screenshots of the kernel panic to Dell. Right. Like they know what a kernel panic is.

Criticisms of Dell Tech Support

1. Saikumar, my case worker, is not giving me information. He is asking me for information. He is not helping me, I am helping him. He doesn't know where my laptop is, who is working on it, or what they're doing to it. He should begin conversations by giving me information that I don't have. Otherwise, he should not call me. Furthermore, I sent email, but he seemed unaware of that email when he called 2 days later. What is his purpose in this transaction?
2. I specifically asked the Dell authorized technician to call me to be sure that my issue was tested correctly. I got no response or acknowledgement. I called the number I was given many times, but no one ever answered. The next contact I got from Dell was a phone call and email saying my laptop was shipped back to me. At that point it was too late to address my concerns.
3. I don't think Dell has correctly understood my issue. My laptop does not "freeze" randomly. It only freezes (and ALWAYS freezes) when connecting to WiFi networks. So the service technician calls and mentions my "freezing problem" and how he's going to reinstall the operating system. That tells me he doesn't know or isn't paying attention to my specific symptom. I updated the operating system when Saikumar and I were troubleshooting. If an OS update were going to fix the problem, I think it already would have.
4. Dell sent me an operating system installed that still exhibited my problem. Despite that, they STILL want to update and upgrade and so on.
5. At what point will they admit that it is a hardware issue?

First, go to Tools → Rules. In my case I'm attached to an Exchange server, so I have to make a new Exchange rule. Note that! If you POP your email, you have to create a POP rule. If you use IMAP, you have to create an IMAP rule. This is dumb. You can create the rule in the wrong category and it will never fire, and you'll be left wondering why. If you have more than one account, you have to create more than one copy of this rule. Sigh.

Here's the kind of message I'm trying to block. In Entourage, it looks like this:

If you go to Message → View Source, you'll see the actual source, which shows why it's kinda hard to write a rule for this:

The Subject, From, and other fields use the koi8-r character set (A Russian character set), but they do it in-line. That is, rather than having some top-level header that says "Hey, we're all in Russian," they do it at each place they need it. Standards-compliant, sneaky, and effective.

What I do is the following:

1. Open one of the messages and copy a small, presumably common word, like на. You have to do this by copying (possibly from my blog post right here) because there's nothing you can enter by hand that will actually match.
2. Open your rules (Tools → Rules) and create a new rule.
3. In the criterion section, choose "Subject" and "Contains" and then paste your small Russian word in the box.
4. Add some actions. I use:
   • Change Status: Junk E-mail
   • Move Message: Junk E-mail
   • Remove Attachments
5. Go ahead and save the rule

If you want to add another small word (I also filter on это), you can copy and paste it the same way. In my case, I didn't have this blog post to copy from. I had to copy from the message in Entourage, and that was a pain. Entourage wouldn't let me copy from the message while I was in the rules editor.

Here's my finished rule:

Complete Entourage Rule that Deletes Russian Spam