Congratulations if you didn’t even notice; you’re either thinking too hard about the weekend or you’ve abandoned paper already. But most businesses are still pushing the post around.

Small businesses are the worst offenders: 88% of small businesses send physical post every day, according to the Federation of Small Businesses. But 87% percent of the 84 million collections and deliveries the Royal Mail handles every day are business mail, so all sizes of business are still paying for stamps and waiting for delivery.

Assuming the letters even get there. Royal Mail owns up to losing 75,000 pieces of mail a year and your postman is scratching his head about 500,000 letters where the address is wrong or the addressee has moved.

David Smith, the marketing director of Canon UK, claims the post strike of 1988 gave the fax machine a huge boost and predicts this one will push us even further towards email. I’m not sure we need much of a push - and presumably hoping that businesses will still use printers for internal consumption and photocopiers for scanning. It’s not a bad idea.  I can email or email-fax the vast majority of things far more quickly and using a tablet PC means I can still sign them. I don’t use paper post unless I absolutely have to - that’s the cost of paper, envelope, toner, electricity to run the printer, stamp and my time to walk to the post box, plus your time to open it and file or recycle it. And if you send me a cheque rather than paying by bank transfer, I put it right back in an envelope to post to my bank which seems downright perverse now I come to think of it.

For companies like HP and Kellogg’s that adds up to a lot of money. They use the OB10 e-invoicing network, which claims to have saved 12 million sheets of paper last year (which translates to 1,440 trees, 120 barrels of oil or 246,000 kilowatts of electricity depending on what you want to measure).

Putting the strike at the end of the month might hold up VAT returns and company accounts; but you can do those online much more conveniently too. Folding paper, stuffing it into more paper, gluing on a decoration and putting it in a big box; how retro.

What do you still have to send by post - apart from postcards, birthday cards and junk mail?
-Mary

I have a shiny new tablet PC to try out; the Portégé R400, which I’ve been excited about since the launch at CES in January. I may become a bit of a bore about the widescreen, lightweight, tablet goodness (unless the new ultraportable HP Tablet turns out to be a return to the glory days of the TC1000).

I love the light-touch Portégé keyboard and the way the slightest touch on the touchpad sends my cursor flying across the screen to where I want it and the Page Up, Page Down and Delete keys are all in the right place. Plus Toshiba has listened to reason (or at least to Microsoft) and there’s a Windows key where there ought to be. Even the biometric swipe actually works; on some models I start to feel like a criminal when my fingerprints don’t match three times in four.

I’m less excited about setting up a new laptop; Outlook doesn’t save enough settings so I have to type my signatures in my hand again (or copy from an outgoing message). I have to export AutoCorrect options(the macro at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/ExportAutocorrect.htm saves a lot of retyping) and my custom spelling dictionry (easy to find at C:\Users\Mary\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Uproof
plus the 2007 Office Quick Access Toolbars (the QAT files lurk over at C:\Users\Mary\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office), install SpeedFiler and ClipMate, install my blogging software and the Flickr uploader, install the Foxit PDF preview for Outlook and the certificate for getting mail on the road, map my network drives, pin my favourite apps and documents to the Start menu - and take off the shovelware that comes with almost every new PC.

I’m all in favour of new PCs coming with security software; you need protection straight off the bat, in case you’re a junk mail opener, button clicker, file downloader or just plain unlucky. But I’m not a fan of Norton. For anti-virus I like AVG or Sophos, for spyware I’m happy with Windows Defender and for a firewall I’m happy with Windows Firewall (because I’m either behind a NAT or telling Vista I’m on a public suspect-everything network). My experience of Norton is that it’s intrusive and that it slows the system down dramatically.

It’s also a pig to get off your system. Like a fool I start by running the uninstaller. Silly me; of course I should have closed Outlook first - this is for a copy of Norton that has been pre-installed but never configured so of course it has its hooks in my mail client. I close Outlook - and everything else as Norton will insist on rebooting. I run the uninstaller; as this takes quite some time I go away and eventually I go to bed.

In the morning I find my PC has crashed rather than rebooted. Norton is still there and now it’s complaining that it’s out of date. But now when I close all my apps and run the uninstaller - it crashes, tells me it’s crashed and will collect some information about the problem and sits there engaging me in a staring match.

After my howls of frustration get too annoying, Simon takes the tablet away from me and tracks down the Remove Everything And Nuke From Orbit utility on the Symantec site (aka the Norton Removal Tool at http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039) which scrubs away all traces, leaving a shiny and -subjectively at least - faster machine.  This beats hours of deleting registry keys and drivers by hand in between repeated reboots so I’m grateful it exists.

But why isn’t it built right into the uninstaller? Making it hard to get your software off my system does not make me more likely to keep it around; it just makes me associate you with pain and view your next release with suspicion.
-Mary

Trying to check in for our flight back from Florida after TechEd, I got halfway through the usually reliable Virgin Atlantic site before the browser started throwing up errors. Instead of just saying it couldn’t load the site though, IE took me to the landing page for the hotel’s wireless network; not the public landing page that tells you how nice the hotel is to give you free wireless though. This was the landing page for the wireless access point, asking me if I wanted to run some diagnostics.

It’s not that I wanted to start fixing the hotel network (or hacking it); but I wanted to get checked in for the flight. And a naïve user, confronted with a broken network and a button saying Run Diagnostics is going to click the button (a naïve user confronted with a button that says almost anything is going to click it).

Clicking Run Diagnostics ran through the tests and produced a message that the DSL was down. At this point I phoned reception and told them 1) the wireless network was down 2) the DSL connection had probably been pulled out by the cleaner and 3) they might want to talk to their network provider about security.

Finding out if the connection had come back meant trying to get back to the Virgin Atlantic site; which meant reloading the access point setup page a few more times. Depending on where I accidentally clicked, this would show me the IP address on the local network, the remote gateway address it was connecting through, the user name at the ISP and when the warranty on the router would run out (distinguishing infomation removed here to protect the guilty party).

Another click got me to a Quick Start page with the password to go with the user name.

Another took me to the IP passthrough settings.

According to the company that makes the router, “IP Passthrough is a useful feature if a host computer or server on the Local Area Network needs to have access into it from the internet with a real public IP address. With IP Passthrough configured, all IP traffic, not just TCP/UDP, is forwarded back to the host computer. This can be necessary with certain types of software that do not function reliably through Network Address Translation.”

By this time I had enough information to mount a pretty good social engineering attack, or to give myself an IP address that would be tricky to trace back to me (but would look very like the hotel) for sending spam or downloading questionable content. Lucky I’m one of the good guys…

-Mary

p.s. The Virgin Atlantic site? Down for maintenance; we checked in at the airport the old-fashioned way.

Software that just works. It’s not going to need many controls or options because it won’t need tweaking or troubleshooting. Nice idea, but back here on the planet where the sky is blue, you need easy access to some key things - like a what’s wrong button for connections. The new Mobile Device Center for Vista looks very pretty but if you plug in your phone and the friendly label carries on saying Not Connected, you want that pretty faced marred by a big Fix My Connection button. Instead you have to trawl through the Help for the instructions to turn on USB in the control panel (which turns out to be the Mobile Device Center again) and ActiveSync on the device. There’s no retry connection option the way there used to be in ActiveSync - just a blank, friendly smile.
Similarly, while I love SyncToy and use it to get hundreds of files from one place to another, if something goes wrong and Tired User Error occurs so I click Close instead of asking to see the error log, I can never find it again. There are no extra options on the menu, no settings to look at. And to select or deselect all the files in a list you don’t Shift click - you right-click on one file and choose from the context menu. It’s pretty - but it’s not intuitive.
What’s your favourite - or most hated - software oversimplification?
-Mary

When I first started writing, back in 1989 before I even had my technical degree, my very first commission was to write about women in technology in education. A couple of years after I went freelance a magazine asked me to do a short series on women in technology and my first thought was half-way between ‘how patronising to women’ and ‘that will be boring because it’s a done deal’. Turned out that while things had improved in some ways , they had got worse in others. There were women in what I think of as the soft side of technology; Q&A, support, training - but not that many in development, programming, architecture and consultancy.
Why does that even matter? If only 10% of the people on a computing studies degree course and half of them drop out before the end of the course, doesn’t it just mean women aren’t interested in hard-core technology and we should leave them to it? The women who do want to work in those areas can just get used to being the only female in the team, right? Do we need to do any work just to give them some company? Is equality for its own sake or to make things easier for what’s a minority today important? Depends on your viewpoint but actually there’s a better question to ask.
Do you care if all the problems we try to solve with technology are defined and shaped by only 50% of the population? You should.
Not only will the solutions work the way the defining group thinks which may make them unnatural and difficult for the other 50% to use, but we’re not going to even see all of the problems. This isn’t just a gender thing; the issues and solutions are different between cultures. The wireless coverage you need for a typical US home will cover half an apartment block in New York or Asia; a building in downtown Hong Kong might need three cell towers to give it mobile coverage.
Intel has been looking at cultural diversity, with the non-fluffy, business-like aim of finding new markets and selling them the products they want; Genevieve Bell is an ethnographer there and if you get the chance to hear her talk about the studies her team has done looking at how people in different cultures use PCs and mobile phones, it’s fascinating. She talks about technology development going from being ‘all about megahertz’ to being ‘all about experience’.
At Future in Review (two conferences before TechEd on our trip) Intel sociologist Eric Dishman talked about using technology at home to make it easier to care for elderly parents. He mentioned that when he found it hard to get backing for the project initially, he asked two managers to phone their wives and ask if this was technology they’d pay for. Male managers said it didn’t look like a market; women wanted it installed right away (and I think the phrase ‘looking after your mother’ probably came up at some point).
It’s not that women are smarter or better; it’s that we’re different. The more different viewpoints there are defining and solving problems, the more and more useful definitions and solutions we’ll get. Intel expects digital health to be a multi-billion dollar IT market (so the two wives in question are probably due a bonus).
The women in technology lunch at TechEd last week was a mix of networking and Q&A with a panel of women who work in technology as everything from consultants to researchers to architects to journalists discussing less why we want women in IT and more how we get more of them and how we make life better for the ones that are there.
Eileen Brown of the Developer Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft UK has been trying to fill two positions for what she calls ‘techies who can talk’ for six months and she hasn’t had a single woman apply. She’s looking more for people with a personality who she can teach technology to (because that’s much easier than trying to give a technical expert a personality transplant). Another colleague has 25 vacant posts in the Information Worker group. Brown ran a survey to find out why she wasn’t getting female applicants and found that women of 40-plus “are leaving IT in droves”.  Replies included complaints about long hours, stereotypes, having to work harder as a woman to prove yourself - and other women letting the side down. The discussion was equal parts ‘how do I fit in with male colleagues’ and ‘why do I have to worry about fitting in with male colleagues’.
So I’m wondering… Do you work with women in IT? Do you want more women in IT? Are you a woman in IT? Are you staying or leaving? Are you as surprised as me that it’s even still an issue?  Do you want any of those jobs at Microsoft?
-Mary

The future of IT may have been described as “legoisation”, but I’m sure that’s not what Ironport had in mind when they gave out Lego kits of their latest email security appliances at Microsoft’s TechEd in Orlando…

–Simon

The latest leg of our US tour of technology conferences has taken us to Orlando, and Microsoft’s TechEd.

Fed up with grand Microsoft technology visions? Microsoft has noticed. The opening to an otherwise lacklustre keynote at the massive TechEd event in Orlando starred Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown taking senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business Bob Muglia ‘back to the future’ to see how those visions have fared – and failed. At one point Muglia was confronted by a horrific dystopian vision, a world with nothing but immense versions of both Clippy and Bob. Returned to the stage in a DeLorean, Muglia promised to deliver a keynote without any vision at all.

As Microsoft was launching so many products Muglia claimed “there was no time for any future vision speak” and instead he summed up news from recent Microsoft events, adding a handful of IT professional specific announcements. These included the final names for Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (and its 2008 release date), along with a Novell-style patent deal with another Linux distribution, Xandros, where Muglia took the opportunity to “welcome Xandros to the community”. The most significant announcement was that the Server Core release of Windows Server 2008 would support Internet Information Server 7.0, making it possible to deploy Windows web servers without a graphical user interface. Muglia also noted that Microsoft had acquired business intelligence visualisation tools from Dundas Data Visualisation and system management tools from Engyro.

I’m looking forward to Server Core. The NT kernel is a solid piece of code now, and the GUI detracts from what you want to do with an OS. Just give me a terminal and keyboard, and I’ll get that server singing!

The keynote focused on IT agility, a theme Microsoft has only recently adopted. Muglia resorted to vision speak to describe it as “Unified and virtualised, process-led and model-driven, service enabled, user-focused”. Muglia also described a set of optimisation models that Microsoft expected to use to help businesses become more dynamic, focussing on infrastructure, business productivity and the application platform. “We are putting into place foundations to allow us to meet your needs for today certainly - there’s a lot of great technology - but also in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years time.” Tom Bittman, VP at Gartner, describe IT agility as what businesses need for “the ability to truly differentiate” because “relationships are online and short-lived; making windows of opportunity short but more frequent.”

So what does Dynamic IT mean. To be honest, it’s a new name for more of the same. The brand Dynamic IT brings together Microsoft’s management tools and its development platform. The keynote demonstrations showed how System Center management tools could work with virtualised infrastructures, handling quick migration and addition of virtual machines, as well as focusing attention down to specific failures in an application. XML based models will help deliver information to management tools, as well as providing ways of ensuring compliance during application development and operations. It’s nice that it’s finally here, and it will make life easier for developers and system administrators - especially at the point they try to put new line of business applications on line.

The resulting non-vision vision of Dynamic IT puts together the pieces that Microsoft has been announcing over the first half of 2007. Now it has to deliver, and with the flagship 2007 Professional Developer Conference postponed, TechEd needs to be the place where it shows how it intends to go forward.

– Simon

A quick search on MapQuest had sent us not to Dayton International, but to Dayton Wright Brothers, a small facility for private planes. The road atlas shows two airports on the Dayton city map - and a third on the state map, which is the one Google Maps on the BlackBerry guides us to after we check the airline Web site again. It’s a small airport and we’d checked in online and our hosts had dug us out of bed at dark o’clock, so I’m writing this from the plane rather than fretting at the airport trying to find another flight. But as Multimap’s Sean Phelan said at Where 2.0 this week, finding places isn’t like a standard Web search; “at most one match is correct and the others are not just not as good, they’re actually wrong.”
Unless you have a unique identifier - like the airport code or a postal code from one of the four countries that go to the front door rather than the general area - your system needs to have the implicit knowledge that locals use without thinking. Do house numbers run in sequence or jump at every major intersection? Does CH mean church, Charles (as in Ch de Gaulle) or chateau (as in Ch de Versailles)? 
Discovering and documenting what’s where and how to get there isn’t new; doing it as an ad hoc, collaborative, amateur project is. At the high end,TeleAtlas and Navteq and ESRI and Microsoft and Google and the US Geographic Service and the Ordnance Survey spend a lot of money sending experts or expensive surveying devices or both around every country. The TeleAtlas car parked at Where 2.0 was festooned with cameras and lidar laser measuring systems and a hefty GPS aerial, with a PC, router and battery filling the rear seats. The Ordnance Survey makes over 5,000 changes a day to its master maps. Microsoft went out and bought Vexcel to get cameras with such a high dynamic range that you can automatically generate 3D models from the still images they capture (from a plane or a car).  The new 3D New York on Local Live Search includes 50,000 buildings. Erik Jorgensen, the General Manager of Live Search jokes that “Rome wasn’t built in a  day but we’ve gottten it down to about three weeks to generate a city”.
At the other end of the scale is Open Street Map, which holds mapping parties where volunteers walk around a district with notebooks and GPS receivers, making an open source map. Quakr (http://loc.alize.us is an open source project to build a 3D world from geotagged photos on Flickr and to get the altitude, compass heading, rotation, tilt and x,y,z co-ordinates the researchers taped a protractor and a home-made plumb bob to a digital camera and walked around Oxford in pairs; one person taking the photo and the other recording the readings.
That’s more effort than most photographers will make; personally I’m waiting for the Eye-Fi SD card which will use Skyhook’s Loki service to work out where you are based on what Wi-Fi hotspots are in range and stamp the location on every photo you take.  Local residents will know which roads are being dug up and what new shops and services have opened, but will someone have found time to put in the details of what you need to know? And will the information be in a useful form? Open Street Map includes tags like bogus_footpath_going_nowhere=”no” and wrong=”oh yes”. As Peter from Quakr put it, “it looks like an emerging taxonomy at 10,000 feet but if you look down deeper it’s ontological chaos.”
Sometimes a simpler map is all you need. And “grassroots remapping” can bring down the cost of commercial geographical information; the Free Your Post Code campaign might mean the Royal Mail can’t charge an arm and both the postman’s legs for post code information any more. Or you can get a UK post code for free using the MultiMap API. All the major mapping services have APIs and mashup tools and ways to add your own information or information from another site; with Microsoft’s new Popfly tool you don’t even need to write any code. Standards like KML and GeoRSS mean you can annotate Google Earth with everything from the bakery where you turn left to take a shortcut out of town to alleged human rights abuses in Darfur.
Michael Jones, the Chief technologist for Google Earth, started his session at Where 2.0 by claiming that one of his motivations for the service was the Star Trek tricorder because it told you more about where you were (and is it just me, or is Google’s mission to organise the world’s information starting to sound more and more like the Enterprise’s mission to boldly go?).
The ideal mapping service would have offered both the airports and the air base in Dayton, with a list of airlines, flight numbers, schedules, driving times factoring in the time of day, the traffic on the roads and any delays to upcoming flights, plus a review saying whether to grab coffee downstairs at the Cinnabon or upstairs at the café right next to our gate. It won’t be long before someone builds it - or I can mash it up myself.
 (in flight from DAY to MCO)