I leave Friday for a fun-filled weekend at SxSW. I grew up in Texas and love Austin, but this will be my first time at the conference, so I was glad to find (via BoingBoing) Austin geekster David Nunez' guide to getting over at the show. David doesn't pull any punches and has some great tips. If you're going it's worth reading the whole thing:

The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005

Here's how you can tell if you have not had the full SxSWi experience:
You find yourself back in your hotel room for the rest of the night right after the last panel of the day.

You haven't shaken hands with people who look and act nothing like you

You haven't had dinner with complete strangers.

You've stuck only to your clique of people that you see daily back at your hometown.

You haven't attended the EFF / EFF-Austin / Creative Commons Party on Monday night (free drinks! free food! live music! delicious food! (I should know, I'm responsible for getting it))

You left Austin without fifty business cards of new contacts you expect to email at somepoint soon.

You left Austin without the intention of calling 3 new contacts to meet up within 2 weeks of getting home

You haven't crashed every clique you see

You aren't smiling and smiling BIG

You are talking more than listening,

You haven't had a conversation or at least said "hi" to me, David Nunez.

You don't have an orange, happy face sticker on your badge.

David has a great section on 'disconnecting' - you know, stopping all that IM'ing, e-mailing, and generally annoying keyboarding all the time - and talking with 'right here, right now' people. That's really why I'm going - to meet new people, stretch out a bit, get a little outside my comfort zone. So if you plan to go let me know and we'll connect. Should be a blast.

Here's a helpful list of restaurants around Austin. I have some dietary restrictions so the site is geared toward that, but it looks like a really good listing of local restaurants with reviews by people who have been there.

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Terry Frazier at 7:39 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Collaboration, Productivity, Technology

Too Many Words?

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Here's a great idea for the graphics-challenged among us. I ran across it over on Creating Passionate Users (found via Innovation Weblog). It's simple but helpful - if you can't use graphics programs, or don't want to shell out a few hundred dollars for Adobe Illustrator, just brainstorm on a white board and capture the result with a digital camera.

I've written many times about the power of graphics and the need to include them in blog posts. And yet, I am woefully lacking in exactly that. Too many words sums up my approach to lots of things. As CPU contributor Kathy Sierra says, good graphics give you accuracy, speed, and access and are critical to reaching today's younger readers. She closes with this valuable advice:

Too Many Words
[...] before you write something, ask yourself "What could I do in a visual form (photo, illustration, cartoon, whatever) that would make this point?" and see if you can do it. If you don't know a graphics program, start learning. It's the 21st century, and I believe that skill with visual/graphic tools (you don't have to be a designer!) should be right up there with typing and writing. Just something everyone knows how to do. (Virtually all kids in US schools are getting some training in some form of computer graphics.) Not everyone who writes on a blog is expected to be Hemmingway, and not everyone who creates pictures is expected to be Picasso. Keep thinking back of the napkin sketch. If you're not used to thinking in pictures, it might take a little practice, but before long, you'll wonder how you got along with only words. : )

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Terry Frazier at 12:58 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Collaboration, Learning

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Trillian Upgraded to v3.0

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Matt Mower has been running the Trillian 3 betas. I've been a user of Trillian Pro v2 for the past year and find it an indespensible tool for managing my multiple IM accounts. I paid for the Pro version so I could use the Jabber plug-in, and have found it well worth the $25. I really like some of the new features in 3, especially support for Apple's Rendezvous protocol. Looks like a good upgrade.

Trillian 3 goes final
Much quicker than I anticipated Trillian 3 has been released and work on version 3.1 is already underway. Slated for that release are HTML profiles and UPnP support to improve filesharing behind firewalls. Neither feature sets my heart alight I have to say, but progress is progress. I just hope a little time may be found to continue work on the IRC plugin, at least enough to bring it up to the v2 level of functionality. Nevertheless I'm very happy with the new Trillian and didn't hesitate to fork over another $25 to get it. A fair price for an app I use every day.

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Terry Frazier at 10:11 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Collaboration, Productivity, Technology

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity

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Microsoft Outlook 2003 is the perfect spam client.

I've been having trouble getting e-mail messages to my weblog from Outlook 2003. I figured it was something stupid that Microsoft was doing, or not doing, that was causing the problem. Tonight I got Seth to look at a sample message. The reason my server keeps rejecting messages is it expects a Message-ID header and isn't finding one. Outlook 2003, it seems, isn't generating one.

I can't say this shocked me. Message-ID headers have been part of the IETF's e-mail specification forever. Every other e-mail client on the planet generates a Message-ID header. The Message-ID header is used by filters like SpamAssassin and others to calculate the likelihood of a message being spam. And lastly, many servers (like mine) will just outright refuse to accept messages without a message-ID in the header.

So there is no reason to think the snot-nosed idiots at Microsoft wouldn't just unilaterally stop producing message-IDs. After all, why should they care what the rest of the world does? No one but Microsoft wold have the juevos to unilaterally spurn a basic, functional piece of the e-mail spec like this. But I digress.

First, I checked the nominal Help file in Outlook and had the expected result - nothing. So I looked around the Microsoft development site and newsgroups for some lead on the problem. Again, nothing. Finally, I Googled outlook 2003 missing message-ID and right away saw that I wasn't the only one with this problem. A quick read of Peter Pentchev's rightful rant on this mess led me to this news bulletin, which states that Microsoft removed the Message-ID header in Outlook 2003 when it sends mail via a non-Exchange server (I use an SMTP server) because of some complaints that machine names were "leaked" onto the internet by the header. It further states that

...Microsoft's position [is] that they expect all mail servers to whitelist outgoing mail from Outlook 2003 users and add a Message-ID header to fill in the one that Outlook omits.

Really?! I should just call up all the ISP hosts whose SMTP servers I use and let them know they should just whitelist all Outlook and Outlook Express users. Right.

The RFC certainly allows a mail server to add the header, but most don't. More importantly, the RFC for message formatting says all messages should - not may, can, if you feel like, or think it's a good idea, but should - contain a Message-ID header. As Pentchev goes on to say:

I wonder how the rest of the Internet, including the users of previous versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, have managed to cope with this horrible invasion of privacy - encoding the hostname in the Message-Id header - for the past nigh on 20 years! Its use in the In-reply-to and/or References headers, its perfect suitablility for indexing/searching an archive for messages, and lots of other characteristics just leave me lost for words. And even if the actual hostname is not used in the header, there are many algorithms to generate a hash or something based on the hostname - which would still go a long way towards the purpose of the hopefully-globally-unique Message-Id value.

[snip]

To me, [expecting a server-generated ID] seems a bit much to ask. Why couldn't Outlook itself add its own Message-ID header that doesn't reveal personal or computer information?

I'd add that if they had even a modicum of rationality Microsoft would make it a preference, setting it to "none" for default and letting the user specify any value they want. They could do almost anything except what they did - eliminate it.

What a bunch of freakin' maroons. This is the Dept of Homeland Security approach to security -- do something simple, really visible, and very stupid so you can claim to be taking action on security while leaving all the real security holes wide open. Thanks Microsoft. Soon I'll be on every spam list in the country.

Posted by:

Terry Frazier at 9:18 PM | Permanent Link | Trackback URL |
Categories: Collaboration, Privacy, Productivity, Security, Technology

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Tuesday, March 8, 2005

An Austin Geek's Guide to Getting Over Yourself at SxSW

The unofficial geek guide to getting over yourself at SxSW Interactive 2005

Too Many Words?

Too Many Words

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Trillian Upgraded to v3.0

Trillian 3 goes final

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity

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