I'm posting this from my new PowerBook G4. I've finally made good on my promise to myself to switch back to a Mac after five years on PC's.

A brief chronology of my principal personal computer:

1978 - 1982 Apple II
1982 - 1987 IBM PC, XT, AT
1987 - 1997 Macintoshes, lots of them
1998 - 2003 IBM ThinkPads, lots of them
2003 - Back to Mac

It's been harder and more traumatic than I thought, but I think I see my way out of the woods. The problem is I'm VERY particular about my computing environment, and getting all of the little nuances just the way I like them takes time. It was a huge triumph today when Chao Lam (Chandler Product Manager) sent me a link to a utility called DoubleCommand http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/ on SourceForge which lets me execute my Word macros with one finger function keys – without having to press the function key modifier on the keyboard. In OS X, the default behavior if you just press a particular function key is to do something like raise or lower the speaker volume, not pass the key through to the app which registered the event. In OS 9 you could reverse this in a control panel. DoubleCommand also lets you disable the Caps Lock Key and map Shift-Delete to a forward delete, which is otherwise absent from the Mac keyboard. Strike three more nuisances off the list, about two dozen more to go.

Why?

1. I think it’s good to use different platforms. Gives you perspective.
2. Lots and lots of fun, interesting new software on the Mac.
3. I’m tired of Windows.
4. Hoping some of the elegance of the Mac and the iApps rubs off on this old software designer when he works on chandler.

Biggest problem?

Shared calendar requirements has had me tied to Outlook/Exchange. Temporary solution: My extraordinarily gracious assistant Esther Sun is keeping iCal and Outlook in synch manually for the time being. I can use iCal and the others who refer need to refer to my calendar and are on PC’s can still use Outlook. Can you spot the flaw in this arrangement?

Surprises?

How good the spam filter is on Eudora 6. It’s beta software though and has many other annoying minor problems like the drawer opening and closing seemingly with a mind of its own. One can only assume the bugs will be fixed in time. Eudora doesn’t seem to be using anti-aliased fonts. I’m tempted to try to move to Mail.app[, especially as the next release (in Panther) is rumored to be a big improvement.

Tricks I learned along the way:

For $10 I bought OutlooktoMac to convert my calendar and contacts.
www.littlemachines.com/redir/o2mfeatures.php

I used the freeware “Linebreak” to convert PC Eudora mailboxes to have Mac-style line endings. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13491

I bought a copy of File Buddy to set the proper file type and creator for my converted Eudora mailboxes. I later found but did not use a free utility to do this.

My Key applications:

Eudora
Microsoft Word
Safari (going to try Camino though)
iCal
Address Book
Snak (IRC client) – OSAF does a lot of its community work via IRC

This weekend I will work on moving all my photos to iPhoto and getting my music organized (it’s been in iTunes for quite some time now sitting on a separate hard drive).

Total Microsoft dependence significantly reduced, though not eliminated.

A footnote: Apparently, the Moveable Type button to insert a URL into an blog entry being created doesn’t work properly in Safari. It's late, I'm bad at typing HTML so forgive the formatting.

An actual email with proper nouns genericized to protect the guilty. OK, so what does this tell us? Are blogs now media outlets really worth pitching? Interesting idea. I wonder how many of these were sent out.

From: xxxxxxx xxxxxx
To: "'mitch@osafoundation.org'"
Subject: Open to guest perspective?
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 14:53:56 -0400

Hi Mitch,

V.P. FROM VERY WELL-KNOWN VALLEY FIRM asked me to
contact you. He reads your blog regularly and is wondering if you'd be open to him to posting an opinion? He has XX+ years of industry experience and his work at WELL-KNOWN VALLEY FIRM, involvement in the tech community and focus on customers
makes him an interesting candidate to share a guest perspective.

At WELL-KNOWN VALLEY FIRM, V.P. is responsible for the company's business, strategy, technology and products focused on providing customers with disruptive competitive advantage through the COMPANY'S TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM.

He can offer a technical and high-level perspective on the following topics:

- The state of the XXX market/customer perspective on challenges
and opportunities in adopting XXX technology
- The significance of ZZZ standards and the role of standards
bodies (AAA, BBB, CCC, DDD)
- Benefits of current standards and specifications
- Open standards-based technologies like QQQ and the value they provide to organizations
- How XXX can help businesses extend the reach of their
current applications,

Please let me know if you're interested.

Best,
PR PERSON
WELL-KNOWN TECH PR FIRM

Our colleague and collaborator, Oren Sreenby, from the University of Washington writes:

"Rereading your blog comments on your nokia, I'd actually be interested in your opinions on imap clients (where you said "Please don't tell me I should use IMAP to retrieve mail or I will be forced to explain why I don't use IMAP and won't until I find (or design) an IMAP client that
works properly.")

Oren,

First, here is some context to make my reply understandable. I've always been a POP user, never IMAP, thought I've fiddled with it on many occasions. I have the biases of someone who has a long, successful experience with POP, and no such corresponding experience with IMAP. Since I've already unconsciously adapted around the limitations imposed by POP, I'm not really aware of them. When I have tried to use IMAP, I've been put off by what I experienced as extra burdens without experiencing compensatory benefits. I never stuck with IMAP long enough to get over the learning curve and get used to it, much less enjoy it. In addition, various of the IMAP clients I've used haven't implemented the protocol in the nicest way, which further colors my experience negatively. So what follows is very intentionally not trying to be objective or claiming it is anything other than my own experience (which is certainly a driver of what I think of as good design, but at 52 I'm no longer so egocentric to think one size fits all or that my personal needs are the trump card in what gets into the spec.).

I've had a strong predisposition to operate in a PC-centric fashion for 25 years now. That is, I like having the data right next to me at all times. I don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg, but I do know I personally prefer the decentralized solution 99% of the time (while recognizing that institutionally and for other individuals and groups my preferences are irrelevant and their needs may be entirely different. As they say, your mileage may vary.)

Now, this is not an absolute virtue by any means, but it does mean that I can operate with my data without being connected to the network. This has always been important to me. In the pre-commercial Internet era, I didn't have routinely good access to high-speed networks at home and at the office. Therefore, I couldn't depend on network access to my data. Therefore I'd want it on my machine. For much of the time I'd carry my entire world with me on a laptop. At other times, I'd keep separate machines and manually initiate a synchronization process before changing location. There was overhead in this, but it enabled me to keep me usage model going. In this context, the POP protocol worked well, as what I wanted was to move mail off the server and onto my PC. POP does this in a nice simple fashion.

IMAP, of course, is a client-server protocol, and makes sense in a world in which there is connectivity on demand. In the university environment, where this was more the case earlier than almost anywhere else, this requirement was manageable, and permitted the affordance that, as long as there was connectivity, you could see your mail from any machine, something POP doesn't permit. Many of the virtues of IMAP make less sense in a world in which disks are large, memory is cheap, and processors are fast.

The first thing I always want to do with IMAP is to set it up to automatically download complete copies of all mail and attachments to the local machine. With some clients this is impossible, with others possible or partially possible, but a nuisance. Anything less than creating full local copies transparently to any designated machine I found to be burdensome, creating a combination of more work for me and less functionality.

IMAP with its multiple Inboxes and multiple sets of mailboxes adds cognitively complexity to the user model. Maybe it can be hidden. Maybe well-designed clients only expose more complexity incrementally. Maybe there are ways to bring people, self included, gently up the learning curve. But none of that has been my experience yet.

IMAP with strange new error messages and all this business about dealing with headers vs. the full message also adds additional cognitive overhead which may not be justified.

Hope this fills in the picture.

Regards,
Mitch

I'm running Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1, IBM OEM edition, on two different IBM Thinkpad laptops. On one of the them, the first item from the bottom on the Start menu says "Turn Off Computer...". On the other, the first item says "Log Off...". There are numerous other small differences, such as the dialog which comes up when the "Turn Off.." or "Log Off..." menu item is picked. I've been unable to find any user-controlled setting which affects this or any difference between the two OS's.

I will donate $US10 to a charity selected by the first person who posts a comment which can explain this issue.

After a number of comments to my previous post, some a bit acid-etched, questioning why I was using Exchange at all instead of a Lotus/IBM product for calendaring, I checked and realized I had never posted an explanation about my product choice, though it's been a staple of my informal talks and speeches for a long time.

One of the top requirements in a PIM for me is to have a shared calendar. My assistant Esther Sun schedules appointments and keeps my calendar, so we both need access to it. My wife Freada and I co-ordinate our professional and personal lives, so we need to see and update each other's calendars. Freada has an office staff for her consulting work and her non-profit activities and they need access. And so on.

Lotus Notes with a Domino server does a good job with calendars, but because of the high administrative overhead it doesn't make sense in a small office. In fact, Ray Ozzie, the product's creator freely acknowledges it's not a sensible option for an installation under 500 seats. It's not a lack of loyalty to my old company but pure pragmatism which steered me away. (The Groove calendar, by the way, is unfortunately underpowered for our needs.) Outlook/Exchange was the least bad of all the existing alternatives.

The constraints of the Exchange-based solution have been, of course, a major motivation, for the development of Chandler.

As of Tuesday, I could no longer access the office Microsoft Exchange server from home, so I could not send or receive updates to my calendar. Very bad news. Can't schedule meetings or see what I'm supposed to be doing. Because the office recently moved, I thought at first we were having more firewall adjustment problems. In fact we were, but even when that was resolved, I still couldn't connect and neither could Freada (my wife and partner). Inside the office, from within the firewall, the same laptops had no trouble connecting. From outside, packets sent by Outlook weren't even reaching the firewall.

The clue on which the puzzle turned was that I had no trouble connecting from outside the firewall when I used my Sprint wireless broadband card. The finger was pointing at Pacbell, my home DSL provider. Sure enough, their tech support confirmed they were filtering traffic aimed at port 135 in order to control the Blaster worm. But Exchange needs to receive traffic on this port. Mystery solved, but Pacbell has one unhappy customer. The phone rep was unwilling to give me the name of a senior executive to complain to. Brilliant customer relations tactics.

My rant in brief: I'm not paying Pacbell to deliver my IP traffic on a subset of ports. I'm paying them to deliver full IP connectivity, which they are not doing. This is outrageous. As workaround, Jurgen (OSAF IT guy) is looking into buying a pair of VPN boxes to tunnel the traffic. But obviously I shouldn't have to pay for this.

Falling dominos: Microsoft insecurity, big bureaucracy disregard for customers, and voila, customer screwage. Motivation to make Chandler happen faster.

I'm sitting here with Dave Sifry, showing me some of hte finer points of Technorati.

Technorati is a weblog search engine that allows you to instantly track conversations. Check it out. If all goes well, you will shortly see a picture of me in your Technorati link cosmos when I link to you.

My day job, as it were, is managing the Open Source Applications Foundation. From time to time I'm going to post a manager's journal reflecting the kinds of issues I am thinking about. This is not meant to give detailed information about what is going on at OSAF. Mitchell Baker does a fine job of that with her periodic status reports. It is meant to make more transparent what my OSAF priorities are and how I'm approaching addressing them.

Hiring

Hiring has become a major priority. Our head count has been fairly flat for some months at about 12. (How we count is an interesting issue in itself, given the many variations of status we have here: full-time paid staff being only one of half a dozen categories that also include part-time and full-time volunteers, part-time employees, full-time employees on part-time loan to other projects, contractors, etc.) Our plans call for a maximum size of over 30 in order to complete Canoga and Westwood in the next two and a half years.

We can only absorb, on average, two or perhaps occasionally, three new people per month without creating more chaos and disruption than I deem advisable.

For a while we were having problems filling the pipeline with highly qualified candidates, but that is no longer the case. There are lots of qualified folks. Our web page continues to list specific positions we need filled, but the reality is that we're also looking for superbly qualified developers (with experience, maturity, high productivity, high code quality) of any stripe believing that we will find a place for them. In a sports metaphor, this is sometimes called the "draft the athlete" approach, as opposed to drafting for specific positions.

Michael Toy, our development manager, has been focusing intensely on hiring, and Bart Decrem has been acting as a hiring evangelist, surfacing promising candidates (as he did at Eazel). We need to, and are in the process of getting more organized about our internal screening and interviewing process.

Now that we are located in San Francisco, as opposed to down the Peninsula, it's likely our new folks will live in or near S.F. Right now only about one third of us live in or near S.F. In general, most of our Peninsula-based employees are commuting to work in S.F. three days per week, currently Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and work at home the other days. My hypothesis is that this would give us the face-to-face time we need. We're starting here and will make individual adjustments in the face of experience. So far, people seem to be adjusting, but a regular commute is a major stress point and I will be monitoring how it's going.

Some people have questioned having a requirement that full-time folks live in the Bay area. I've come to the view we want to break this barrier soon, but that we will have to have a different set of criteria for hiring and working with people who have a base elsewhere. For one thing, I think their responsibilities will have to be more clearly delineated in advance and the boundary between their work and the project as a whole will have to be made clear because the difficulty of coordination increases with distance. For another, I think we will have to get better (more comfortable, more practiced) at using IM, IRC, and other tools to bridge the distance gap. Finally, it's also clear we will need a second development manager if we're going to do this, as Michael is already maxed out between managing the existing group and focusing on hiring.

We're also in the midst of recruiting for a senior Human Resources person who will work both with OSAF and also the related set of non-profits all housed at 543 Howard St (about which more at another time). The Silicon Valley mind set unfortunately, tends to discount the importance of HR, relegating it to a second class function. I think a strong HR person is an invaluable asset in helping create a healthy culture and structure (about which more at a later time as well).

Recently, I attended the Fortune magazine Brainstorm conference in Aspen, Colorado. As preparation, participants were asked to write a biref essay on an urgent problem of major scope. A few attendees specifically mentioned how much they liked what I had to say about business ethics, so I am reproducing it here, terrible formatting and all.

I've reset the style of the weblog to use a different one of the default styles offered by Moveable Type. I like the cleaner look. To do this, I had to edit the stylesheet used by Moveable Type which controls the appearance of the web pages generated by MT. First I had to locate and copy one of the default stylesheets (expressed in a language called CSS- Cascading Style Sheets) and then locate the template used to store the style sheet MT uses and paste the new CSS into it, replacing what was there previously. For someone used to modern desktop user interfaces, this method is a giant step backward and felt fraught with risk. Fortunately, the MT documentation is straight-forward. It appears to me as though everything worked. I'm sure readers will quickly let me know what doesn't look right.

Thanks to the many folks who offered their advice and favorite products in the PDA space. As time permits, I will be looking into them. The next-generation TREO phone looks extremely promising.

Today's S.J. Mercury carried the rumor that HP is about to buy RIM, the maker of the Blackberry.

I've now heard from a high-ranking manager at ATT Wireless with an offer of personal help and his cell phone number. Apparently, my entry about my frustrations with the Nokia 3650 caught someone's attention.

I've found myself taking snapshots of people at meetings all the time which is something I've always wanted to do. I must have 50 stored in the phone. My latest problem is that the phone refuses to upload an entire set of images to my Mac. It does fine sending them one at a time over Bluetooth, but when I mark a set, it just chokes. This is obviously inconvenient. It's easy to take a dozen photos, but sending them one at a time makes not sense. I'm going to fiddle with it further before trying to get some help with this, but if anyone just happens to have encountered this problem, let me know.

It's also unclear to me who's responsible for support on this problem - Nokia which makes the phone, or ATT, which is my service provider. Taking a photo and uploading it via Bluetooth to a PC doesn't involve any of ATT's network.