Custom GelaSkins

I recently found out that you can make custom GelaSkins, the process is a little tedious but I got my three customs GelaSkins last week and they look great. The colors are well reproduced, crisp and clean. Be sure to upload high resolution pictures because a laptop lid is quite large, and bear in mind that you will probably have to crop the top and bottom of the image because of differences in the the aspect ratios between the it and the laptop lid.

VC Website Organization

I have been spending a lot of time this weekend looking at VC portfolios on their website for a client. My sense is that VCs would want these portfolios to be well structured and easy to navigate, after all the idea is to have a favorable exit. Turns out that there is a lot of variability in the way these portfolios are presented making navigation sometimes very difficult.

So here are some suggestions on how to improve this:

• Show the company logo, web site and a short description together in a simple list. Do not force the user to click a link to see the company description.
• If there are lots of companies be sure to give a way to narrow the list down quickly either through a faceted search or via tagging, so Networking, Social, Music, etc… And there is no harm in having multiple tags for each company.
• Separate prior investments from current investments, or provide a way to do so easily.
• Make sure the company descriptions are accurate and skip the marketing/hype adjectives, if I don’t see descriptions such as “Delivers revolutionary software solutions” or “Discover breakthrough improvement opportunities”, it will be too soon. This tells me nothing about what the company does and my time is limited.

The idea behind listing a portfolio is to communicate, the less I have to futz with the website the better the communication.

Danger Danger

Plenty has been written about the Danger data loss over the weekend (TechCrunch). For me the most interesting commentary came from John C. Dvorak, he got some things right but he also got some things wrong:

Over the past week, users of the T-Mobile Sidekick platform found that all their contacts and other important information was permanently lost, because of server mishaps. If Microsoft had wanted to throw a monkey wrench into cloud computing, it could not have done a better job.

Huh, don’t think so, this was a data loss screw-up, nothing to do with the cloud. If what we are reading is to be believed, a SAN upgrade went wrong and the data was lost, with no backup.

Insert Ellen Feiss ad here…

Seriously though backups are essential because things will go wrong. Note that I use ‘will’ and not ‘may’, and these may or may not be under our control.

The other things I used to tell clients is to do a fire drill on a regular basis, by that I mean taking the backups and making sure they can be restored properly and completely. I had one client who discovered that all their backups were useless when they checked.

Light Peak

I came across Light Peak this morning on Engadget and MacRumors.

To me the really interesting thing is that this has the potential to replace all the connections on the computer, connections to external (and internal) drives, mouse, displays, whatever with a single cable and connector type, which would be really neat. No reason why you should not be able to replace network connections either.

I think this has real potential, can’t wait to see how this develops.

Recovering Deleted Photos from a Memory Card

Yesterday I was asked if I could recover deleted photos from a memory card, some searching turned up Lexar Image Rescue 3 which works on both Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

I also came across this TidBITS review titled “Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card“.

Sitting with AT&T

A few weeks ago I was on a plane playing some games on my iPhone and when we landed the person next to me asked how I liked my iPhone. I said that I loved it but that I did not like AT&T. He asked why and I trotted out the usual things, lack of MMS, lack of tethering, poor 3G speeds, dropped calls, poor coverage, calls and voice mail coming in late (up to 12 hours late for me). He sniffed and told me that he worked for AT&T and ask if I had any idea how much they were subsidizing the iPhone. I guessed a number which I suspect was not far off the truth. I got the impression that he felt AT&T was doing us iPhone owners a favor with that and that criticism was not warranted. The conversation pretty much died there because it was time to get off the plane.

But there were a few other things that I should have said. I bought the original iPhone for $600 so I was not that subsidized, and I am now out of contract which means that my monthly payment includes whatever payback on the subsidy as a free money for AT&T. AT&T is in business to make money, if did not feel it could not make money from the iPhone then it should not carry it, I am sure other carriers would love to get their hands on the iPhone. AT&T had its best sales day ever when the iPhone 3GS was launched and will get payments for those phones for the duration of the contract.

Cutting the Cord

According to the Economist more and more people are cutting the cord in the United States:

IF YOU want to save money, cut the cord. In these difficult times ever more Americans are heeding this advice and dropping their telephone landlines in favour of mobile phones (see article). Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only. At current rates the last landline in America will be disconnected sometime in 2025.

I cut the cord about a year ago. I had kept a landline to make international calls (everything else went over the cell phone), but Skype, the AT&T cell phone international calling plan, and the incessant public information messages from the city tipped me over the edge.

Two things popped out at me from the above paragraph, the first is that 25% of households are mobile only, a much higher number than I expected, and that the trend will be complete in 2025, which is only 16 years away.

Given that DSL/ADSL speeds have not kept up with those provided by cable and fiber, there would seem to be little point in investing in copper phone lines anymore.

WebInno 22

I was at the Web Innovators Group last night. Overall an interesting batch of presentations. The two that caught my eye were BuySellAds which allows advertisers to control which sites their ads are displayed on (presumably these sites need to be part of the BuySellAds network,) and Fluent Mobile which allows users to get news content on their iPhone.

Would You Buy A Car Without An Engine?

There is are many days when I am really glad I left the old country and settled here in the USA, and this is one of them.

I just finished reading this post by Paul Thurrott entitled “Microsoft documents how Windows 7 E customers can get a browser” where he excepts the steps users need to take to install a browser because the main release of Windows 7 in Europe won’t include a browser.

We have known this for a while but I still think this is in-sane!

Selling an consumer operating system without a browser is like selling a car without an engine.

Imagine for a moment a trip to the car showroom where you can pick whatever car you want only it doesn’t have an engine. You need to make arrangements to procure your own engine and install it in the car yourself.

Unix Toolbox

A friend pointed me to this very useful list of Unix/Linux/BSD commands, worth taking a look at and bookmarking.