Many complaints about the iPhone being unable to do what Android devices can do are often unwarranted. Flash doesn’t work on Safari, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t workarounds. There’s always a way. After reading about Flash’s poor performance on Android, I decided to give Flash a try on the iPhone using the free app “CloudBrowse,” (no jailbreaking required) easily the most interesting app I’ve seen on the iPhone since MicroSurface or JellyCar. Although it’s possible to view/play Flash content on an iPhone, is it worth the trouble? Read on to find out and see a video of its performance with CloudBrowse.

Alright, here’s the deal: avoid playing/consuming Flash content on your mobile device. If there is something you absolutely must watch and it cannot wait, then CloudBrowse will come to the rescue. CloudBrowse performs a number of services: (1) acts as an anonymous web surfing platform (uses Firefox on Linux), delivering a proxy’d Internet connection and custom UI enabling the easiest navigation of a browser-in-an-app possible; and (2) full streaming video & audio, so Flash games and video can be viewed through the app. The whole experience is similar to trying to navigate a browser over VNC, except with a number of custom GUI shortcuts making it smoother & more seamless. Below is a video of some Flash content being streamed over 3G to an iPhone 4.

Trying to play Flash games via the virtual keyboard and touch controls is where things really start to fall apart — it becomes evident that Flash truly is a desktop-era technology and not suitable for mobile phones. Many Flash games rely on hovering your mouse over things, a UI syntax that fails on smartphone touchscreens. Video and sound, however, play surprisingly well considering they are being processed by a third party app, going over a proxy, being sent over a 3G connection, then finally played backed on the iPhone. It seems to average 15-25 fps.

You can even use the Flash controls by zooming in close enough. It’s certainly not ideal, but it gets the job done.

I imagine Flash would run smoother if it were being processed directly by the iPhone. Regardless, Flash is clearly a problem across all mobile platforms and Adobe has proven themselves unable or unwilling to step up their platform to handle it despite having several years to do so. Hate to say it, but I think the mobile space is best left without Flash.

CloudBrowse isn’t perfect. There’s only so many spaces available for users to connect, and often their server is full. Other times, the connection will drop out with no explanation and then subsequently fail to restart itself. Even with all its flaws, it still works enough to keep around for a Flash emergency.

Back in the old days, the concept of “focus,” that is, which active window, button, text field or icon being active or selected was very clear. If a message box or dialogue box appeared on the screen or “took focus” from whatever you were doing, it was clear that you’d have the option to either press space bar, tab, alt+key, or any other combination thereof to make your desired selection quickly and move on.

This was the norm for many years going back as far as MS-DOS to Windows98 SE if my memory serves. After that, somehow the rules changed. Mind you, I’m not talking about Linux here, just Windows. From the limited distros I’ve tested, Linux seems to be pretty spot-on with handling focus consistently.

Now, it is relatively common for another window to appear on top of whatever we were working on yet the cursor can still be seen blinking in the background window that currently does not have the focus. Why is that? Or, the foreground window will have a darkened border around a button (indicating a default if Enter is pressed) yet will not respond if Enter is pressed until the mouse is clicked to re-affirm focus.

In Windows98, when the advent of the scroll-wheel mice and the middle click began to take popularity, it was quick and easy to switch focus rapidly between all windows and subwindows using a single middle click. Now, however, the rules seemed to have changed. Sometimes the foreground window will already appear to have the focus, yet when I try to add text — nothing happens until I actually click into the text field, despite the fact that the cursor was already blinking there.

In this example, the Acrobat icon is selected in the taskbar, yet the foreground notepad object has focus so that text can be selected, yet the CaseMap program in the background has the focus — at least visually.

One of the most important features in Windows has been the long standing ability to reliably operate it without a mouse, using exclusively the combination of advanced shortcuts such as Alt+Tab (“Windows Flip“), Alt+Space, alt+key, winkey+key, and various combinations of tab, spacebar, etc. With the focus rules having changed to where they now no longer operate in a homogenous way between all applications, more clicking is required to perform seemingly basic tasks that could previously be executed in an instant.

In this screenshot, the iPhone foreground dialog box and the background Gmail window both appear to have the focus, yet the taskbar only indicates that Gmail truly has the focus. I can type in the chat window in the background window, yet the foreground window has a darkened default OK button which should execute on Enter, but it won’t until I actually click to activate¬† the window.

This isn’t a big deal for day to day tasks and general use operation, of course, but let’s say I had to perform some tasks over VNC and didn’t have a mouse? It can be a big problem. It seems as though people are now more mouse reliant than ever — I suppose that’s not such a bad thing — it certainly is easier — but it sure is slower.

admin@variableghz.com

Recently, I’ve had to work on a number of machines that have had Outlook as their primary e-mail client for a number of years and in doing the requisite work on these systems that I’ve come to see a broad issue with locally stored e-mail and the way Outlook in particular makes it very difficult to get away from. What is surprising to me is just how many people are still falling for the locally stored e-mail trap. Don’t get me wrong, allow me to explain. Some people (such as those who heavily value privacy, manage their own e-mail servers, etc.) can benefit heavily from such a system, but an average user who doesn’t know the difference between Gmail and an Exchange Server should certainly not be using the latter.

At first, Outlook seems like a great tool. It’s got everything in one place, e-mail, tasks, calendars, notes and so on. As you continue using Outlook over the years, I imagine it becomes familiar as you begin to make folders and subfolders, add to your calendar and make reminders for your calendaring. I get that.

Now, here’s the thing. Outlook was created a long time ago when most people barely even had a single PC, let alone two or more that is commonplace now. So, Outlook starts to really show its issues when synchronization is attempted between multiple computers. Outlook was never originally intended for this — so every attempt at having smooth synchronization is a convoluted process. Not to mention incredibly expensive.

There are many other small issues that compound as well. Such as, let’s say you have a new domain and you have your e-mail currently downloading via POP to a desktop system. Alright, not a problem. However, let’s say we start downloading the mail onto a laptop as well. Now we have to check whether the e-mails are stored on the server after they are downloaded. If they are, for how long? Will Outlook double-download them if they stay on the server for too long?

There are many things that cloud-computing may be wrong for, but e-mail is not one of them. By leaving your e-mails in the cloud, you could be free to use Outlook with IMAP as a synchronized e-mail platform. However, what about calendars, contacts, tasks and notes? Ah, right. For that you might need another solution such as SYNCING.NET or an Exchange Server. Both solutions which I do not recommend.

In general, my advice would be to stay far far away from Outlook and use something with the strength and versatility of Gmail. I can understand many instances in which Gmail wouldn’t suffice (privacy concerns, for one); however there are hundreds of competitors to choose from and a great percentage of them will be far superior than any minor advantages you might get from using Outlook. However, if you’re just now trying to get away from Outlook — you can actually import your Outlook data into Gmail, which is a pretty good solution.

admin@variableghz.com

Well, there’s certainly quite a few Outlook sync competitors, but I chose Syncing.net due to price and the pitch. They have a nice little flash demo showing everything going perfectly. Now, Syncing.net doesn’t only sync Outlook PST’s between computers, they also have a Dropbox-like folder sharing capability which allows you to “invite” other people to your shared folder(s). I did not use this functionality.

Syncing.net, in theory, is pretty easy to set up. According to tech support, you simply install Syncing.net on the host/master computer, then “invite” your other computers as necessary.

Syncing.net manages its syncing capabilities by using a secure P2P (peer to peer) connection as well as a “store and forward” feature which allows Syncing.net to use its own servers to temporarily store up to 250MB of data temporarily if one of the computers is off — thereby preventing the possibility of a P2P connection from taking place.

I tested Syncing.net on a pretty zippy dual-core Athlon based system running Vista Ultimate x64. At all times I had plenty of available memory and since I built the system there was no additional bloat from any other trialware or anything else. I used Office 2007 with Syncing.net.

The Syncing.net software is curious in that whenever it is running and has an Internet connection, it has a circle and a green checkmark in the system tray. Fine, but it’s really not clear as to what it’s doing because of this; the only way to tell if it’s transferring data is to open the software and look at the lower right corner and see that it is in fact transferring data at a certain KB/s rate. Additionally, you can view transfer status via a menu option to see additional options. But it won’t give you any indication of when it’ll be finished. No percentage or anything. They say this is because sync is inherently never “done.” Fair enough, but some kind of progress bar would be appreciated.

Upon the initial sync with the second computer, Syncing.net managed to make a mess out of it. There were duplicate folders and e-mails, calendar entries, folders within folders that had no business being there, etc. I had to instruct my client to essentially delete whatever was necessary to restore it to normal. Tech support was dumbfounded and told me to send them an error report using their built in error reporting tool — which failed (on every system I tried it on, by the way; I had plenty of opportunity to test it out). I asked them why it failed, they told me the usual, anti-virus, firewall, etc. However, I disabled my local firewall and set the router to use a DMZ (Demiltarized Zone) to ensure that there were no conflicts and disabled any anti-virus/anti-spyware to ensure that they had no excuses — still no dice. So I had to send it to them manually via a convoluted process of digging around in my hidden application folder for a huge ZIP file. Fine for someone like me, but what if I didn’t know what Windows Explorer was, or what a zip file was? Or how to browse around hidden folders?

Anyway, tech support is in Germany so they take a pretty long time to get back to you. When they got back to me in this instance, they just told me to do the sync again. Okay.

So this second time around, I deleted everything on the second machine so that it would gracefully accept the data from the master system without any hitches. An unnecessary yet recommended step according to tech support. I performed the sync again which took many hours (due to the large amount of data, primarily). When it was done I was shocked to see, again, that somehow Syncing.net had messed it up. I had practically the same duplicate folders such as “Inbox_1″ which would contain partial e-mails from Inbox, and it wasn’t clear why some were in those folders but not others.

To make matters worse, once I had my client “clean” everything up, Syncing.net would always seem to be one step behind and throwing up little prompts saying that I had made a change on a different system, asking which change I wished to keep. That’s odd because there’s only one person using any given Outlook at any particular time, so, how can these magic “simultaneous syncs” be happening? Tech support certainly had no idea.

My final qualm with the software is that it consumes an enormous amount of resources, mostly in disk activity, which is the worst kind of resource to be hoarding. It causes the computer to slow down enormously with intense I/O sometimes for nearly 20 minutes at a time, even when no changes to Outlook have been made. It really locks the system up — all 3 I tested it on, Vista and XP.

So, my issues with the software and service are as follows:

- No progress bar or any indicator of completeness (or even that it is doing anything, without manually clicking and checking or seeing the intense disk I/O);
- Poor resource management (hogs the entire hard drive without waiting for idle time);
- Incessant prompts which are difficult to permanently solve (“conflicts” resulting from supposed simultaneous changes);
- Difficult and generally unhelpful tech support;
- Extremely time consuming;
- Inconsistent (sometimes it syncs files perfectly, other times it skips several e-mails, even with the “store and forward” feature enabled).

If the software fixed the resource and inconsistency issues, it would be a passable solution. However, because of the compounding issues I cannot recommend this software, just as I cannot recommend Outlook as an e-mail solution. Sorry.

Look elsewhere for your e-mail needs and try to detach yourself from Outlook as soon as you can!

admin@variableghz.com

From time to time, a lot of people wonder why their computer is running “so slowly.” The usual reasons for this are as follows: (1) using virtual memory resulting from a lack of physical RAM (Random Access Memory); (2) too many programs utilizing a lot of CPU threads; and/or (3) bottlenecks that can be in the form of a CPU bottleneck, a slow spinning hard drive (5,200 RPM and less, for example), or even a full hard drive. For instance, a 500GB hard drive with a fresh installation of Windows Vista will be more responsive than a similar fresh install on a 50GB hard drive of the same speed. The reason for this is because larger hard drives generally have: (1) more platters; (2) smaller magnetic flux reversals; and (3) greater aerial density. The smaller flux reversals are what allows the head of the hard drive actuator/arm to move shorter distances, and thus providing a noticeable speed difference.

My hard disk activity LED is going crazy, the actuator arm is thrashing back and forth crunching away for hours at a time. What is my computer doing? How can I find out what exact data is being retrieved and what program(s) are responsible? We need to identify just what, exactly, is running. For this purpose, look no further than Microsoft Sysinternals’ Process Monitor (procmon).

ProcMon is capable of quite a few things, but its key feature is identifying and listing in detail what each process is doing — in realtime.

To stop/start the auto-scroll feature, hit CTRL + A. You may need to do this frequently because your computer is doing a lot and very quickly, probably a lot faster than you can read.

With this software autoscrolling, you can see the individual processes that are racking your hard drive or occupying CPU threads.

It’s important to not only take note of what processes are running, but to identify if they are actually necessary or not. For example. qttask.exe starts every time you boot windows, but according to various process tracking websites, it is hardly necessary.

Using the Windows Defender Software Explorer feature, you can — and should — terminate this task from ever starting in the first place. To track and control startup processes, I also recommend Sysinternals’ Autoruns program, which essentially does the most comprehensive root-canal of your Windows startup programs ever. As I understand it, Windows 7 no longer contains the Software Explorer feature of Windows Defender, I am unclear as to why they would remove this useful feature, but you should use Autoruns in its place.

Of course, identifying what is loading and occupying RAM is only going to get you so far — if, for example, you are running an old Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM and are attempting to run Vista Ultimate with Firefox, Flash, anti-virus, and rendering an HD scene with 3d studio max — you can forget it. No amount of optimizing is going to help you.

I’m talking about bare-bones Internet and office work, this is where computers have really outpaced themselves. It’s very possible to run a Pentium III with a stripped down version of XP (and a lot of unnecessary services stopped), at blistering speeds for an average Internet user. These are the kinds of folks who do not need upgrading, but rather an optimized computer. Think of it as a 30,000 mile service — for your PC.

Here, I can track down anything that is unnecessarily sucking away at my PC’s performance and do something about it.

admin@variableghz.com

The Symantec Corporation, makers of the decades-old Norton Security/Productivity suite, has been around a long, long time. I happened across an advertisement for Norton 2009 in Time magazine.

What struck me about this ad, was that Symantec seems to have finally admitted that their Norton suites wreaks of bloat. By stating: “Norton Internet Security 2009 is the fastest security suite anywhere…delivering fewer, faster, shorter scans” tells me that maybe Symantec has learned from their mistakes.

I’d like to think so, in reading a review, I came across two quotes of interest:

NIS 2009 [Norton Internet Security] may be focused on being lighter weight than previous versions, but it is just as pervasive as ever. In addition to the main software, you will get both Norton IPS 1.0  plugin and Norton ToolBar 3.0 in Firefox, a persistent icon in the Windows taskbar, and a toolbar in IE7 as well.

That right there sounds like the Symantec I know. However, this sounds like promise:

…might win over some of the people who have learned to hate security software packages. …because it is so extensive, should win back some of the free antivirus crowd….this is the least annoying, lightest weight security package you‚Äôve probably ever used …

The Norton box is still rather uninspiring:

For me, my distaste for the Symantec corporation goes back a really long time. For example, Acronis TrueImage displays incredible programming ingenuity by creating full hard disk images while Microsoft Windows is actively running whereas Norton Ghost has to reboot into an oldschool DOS era screen rendering the computer unusable for the duration of the “ghosting” process. This, obviously, isn’t a big deal, but it’s just another example of how I feel that Symantec’s Norton is the Yahoo of security tools, and it would take a lot of work to convince me otherwise after so many years of fighting to get Norton off of systems just to get them fast enough to open a web browser at a reasonable speed.

See, Symantec products are very much in the same realm as Yahoo. (One could also argue this for older products like AOL, RealNetworks, etc.) They are the default security software for nearly every new PC manufactured, the majority of PC users do not know how to deal with security, and Symantec uses tactics like these to coerce people into subscribing to their software:

As a result, it’s no surprise that they are still in business. Only recently are they under renewed pressure to perform as a result of the integration of Microsoft’s Windows Defender in Vista, and the soon to be Anti-Virus solutions they’ve mentioned. Enough.

I could go on about Symantec products. I’ve had to restore MBR’s (Master Boot Record) of computers that have had failures due to people using the Norton GoBack (which is now Norton Ghost 14) utility which can cause serious low-level problems to a system. Fortunately, it’s a relatively simple task for an IT professional to restore an MBR, but for the average computer user? I don’t think so.

My hope is that Symantec finally gets it figured out, not for the sake of their business, but for the masses — the uninformed users they push their software on.

admin@variableghz.com

For as long as I can remember, every version of Windows has enabled me to see what processes are running, except maybe Windows 3.11. As I continued to use Windows over the years, Control + Alt + Delete evolved into a useful tool, executing taskmgr.exe, showing more than the simple “Close Program” dialog box of the Windows 98 era. It became easy to identify what services were necessary (by simply running services.msc and checking what was set to Automatic, Manual or Disabled) and what processes shipped with Windows and what were running as after-market installations.

Essentially, I memorized what processes are “supposed” to be running, what are necessary and what are not. For example, I usually terminate qttask.exe because it isn’t absolutely necessary and it just takes up CPU threads that could be doing something else. Identifying what processes are supposed to be running is of deep-rooted importance to me because it gives me a sense of security of the system I am running. Aside from rootkits using advanced virtualization-style hijacking (permenant archive) techniques, identifying the processes enables me to know whether the system is compromised at-a-glance.

Back in the Windows 3.11 days, I did not have an anti-virus solution of any kind, however I downloaded all sorts of executables and even programmed a few oldschool “proggies” of my own. Because I didn’t run any anti-virus software, I scanned executables manually using a hex editor — while this wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, most software was relatively simple back then so I could readily identify a password stealer or trojan horse by simply digging through the hex line by line. Using a hex editor to identify viruses and other malicious software worked fine back then, but would be an impossibility now.

Another interesting fact about older systems was that if you pressed Control + Alt + Delete on a Windows98 machine, and it didn’t respond, you could check if it was terminally crashed by pressing Control + Alt + End, if the system emitted a PC Speaker single “beep” at you, then you knew the system was still active and would eventually regain stability and if you heard no audible beep, then the system was most likely done and you’d have to force shut it down.

Anyhow, with 2000/NT and XP I was able to quickly and easily identify whats services and processes were supposed to be running; so when I came across a new computer to diagnose, I could see what foreign processes needed to be identified and look them up accordingly.

This ease-of-identification process has ended with Vista. Now, when I bring up the Task Manager or Services list, there is such an immense amount of processes running that I have mentally given up keeping track of what is “okay” to be running and what isn’t. I continue to use the Windows Defender software explorer feature to disable certain applications from starting up, but that is the extent of my process-checking for the most part with Vista.

In my experiences, the average (OEM) Vista installation seems to have well over 80 processes which is a frighteningly high number. Even as I remove programs and block startup processes, however, that number doesn’t dwindle all that much. Vista is a fantastic operating system and comes highly recommended over XP, however, if you intend to track processes you’ll have to use something like Process Explorer.

I don’t particularly mind not being able to look over every single process in Vista, because I know it is inherently much more secure than XP and more difficult to penetrate, thanks to the inclusion of Windows Defender, sandboxing, firewall improvements, etc., it’s easier to lock down and secure the system anyway. So, on the one hand it’s nice to not think about it all the time, and on the other hand I feel like I am relinquishing control over the OS.

What do you think?

admin@variableghz.com

Someone in my family, with good intentions I’m sure, decided to give my dear grandmother a free Yahoo Mail account to replace her digit-ridden CompuServe e-mail address. I felt compelled to write this because as I was over at her house, she informed me that she hadn’t touched the computer in two weeks and for me to “clean out the junk.” I went ahead and logged into her e-mail and was shocked to see that her inbox had well over 2,000 messages! I knew that my grandmother likely didn’t have more than 10 or 20 real messages in there, but thanks to Yahoo’s brilliant SPAM detecting algorithm, I’d never know. I began sifting through the messages, deleting 25 at a time. After the tenth or eleventh page, I grew weary of looking at all of the SPAM that Yahoo failed to capture and decided enough was enough. Grandma was gettin’ Gmail (spam chart).

Below is a screenshot of my Grandmother’s old computer, a Windows98 system running Internet Explorer 5. Click to see the full sized screenshot. Evidently, Yahoo thinks that only 75 out of the 2,000+ messages are SPAM.

(screenshot of Yahoo Mail, left untouched for two weeks, overrun with SPAM)

Back in the 90′s, I avoided Yahoo and used search engines that I felt delivered more relevant results, like MetaCrawler (1998 archive) and WebCrawler (1996 archive) (don’t laugh). It’s been five years now, and I can still remember the oh-so-generous 2MB mailbox limit of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. It was only until their hands were twisted by the extreme force of Google’s Gmail that they finally stepped up their game.

All throughout the 90′s, I remember avoiding Yahoo Mail because it was clear to me that Yahoo was far too fixated on intrusive advertising than their core search technologies. Moreover, the idea of having my domain be that of the most popular search engine at the time irk’d me. Yahoo was supposed to be a search engine, not an e-mail provider. Either way, their popularity snowballed as they ensnared users over the years. It became the easy choice, evidently.

Every now and again I’d give Yahoo a chance; somebody would invite me to a Yahoo Group or something and I’d register a Yahoo account to see how they’ve kept up with the likes of Google or Microsoft and I’d be disappointed every time. Their site always has something which takes me back in time to the mid 90′s, some archaic, primordial script limiting me to the number of images in a discussion thread (I think that was it, maybe a limit of size) or something else.

Say what you will about Microsoft. Yes, they made IE6 and IE7, destroying web standards and left a security nightmare for an untold number of computers with WindowsXP pre-SP2. However, from time to time, their innovation has held strong, a few things that come to mind are: Microsoft Surface, the XBOX, photosynth,  Live SkyDrive, Seadragon and Office 2007.

Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to have managed to do absolutely squat in the meantime. The fact that Yahoo is still trying to pedal their Yahoo Mail Plus in 2009 is really laughable. They offer $10 per signup if you partner up with them via Commission Junction. Who, exactly, would ever pay for Yahoo Mail Plus in 2009?

Let’s focus on what the free version lacks, since it’s what directly competes with the likes of Gmail now five years after its launch in 2004: (1) no POP3; (2) no IMAP; (3) no email forwarding; (4) no integrated chat; (5) none of the dozens of Gmail Labs features — it should also be noted that even their paid “Plus” version doesn’t include IMAP functionality. What the heck? Couldn’t afford any programmers in five years to get that done? Don’t the three people who do pay for Yahoo Mail Plus complain about that? Moreover, because Yahoo bifurcated their webmail to consist of the “Classic” and their newer version, many of their features fail and require the UI to revert to the “Classic” version in order to function, like the Yahoo calendar — which, by the way, doesn’t support any standards for calendar import/export formats. What year is this again?

Wait! But doesn’t Yahoo own Flickr? Sure, but they sure as heck didn’t invent it — they bought it. Sure, other companies buy one another all the time but it seems that Yahoo is the undisputed king of resting on their laurels and using inertia to propel their success from the 90′s. Yahoo, in many respects, reminds me of Symantec makers of Norton Anti-Virus.

Stop using Yahoo Mail, get Gmail or something, anything other than Yahoo Mail. Questions? I’ll be right here:

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