What of course makes it worse is that I recently sent a note around the company with tips and strategies or making sure this didn’t happen. With all the time making sure everyone is leveraging both local and remote backups I still managed to duck and weave around those processes and lose a file.

Another lesson learned and a large slice of humble pie for the day. Now back to work.

After years of being spoiled with a TV in my office (a benefit when working with big media) I spent the last two years unable to keep up except for frequent scoreboard checks.

So it was nice to read that this year they will be streaming for free on iOS devices, of which I have several.  It looks like I will have an opportunity to run some realistic bandwidth tests on our internet connection.

CBS, Turner Will Stream March Madness to iPhone, iPad For Free | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

Here is the relevant selection from the Apple TOS:

(i) You may download and use an application from the Mac App Store (“Mac App Store Product”) for personal, non-commercial use on any Apple-branded products running Mac OS X (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control.

(ii) If you are a commercial enterprise or educational institution, you may download a Mac App Store Product for use either (a) by a single individual on each of the Mac Computer(s) that you own or control, or (b) by multiple individuals on a single shared Mac Computer that you own or control. For example, a single employee may use a Mac App Store Product on both the employee’s desktop Mac Computer and laptop Mac Computer, or multiple students may serially use the Product on a single Mac Computer located at a resource center or library.

(iii) Use may require sign-in with the Apple ID used to download the Mac App Store Product from the Mac App Store. Mac App Store Products can be updated through the Mac App Store only.

Apple requires you to have an iTunes account, which are personal, and their terms of service clearly state that a commercial property has to purchase a license when multiple individuals are using multiple devices.  Makes sense – I need a license for each iPad.  My problem is how to now manage those from a corporate perspective.  Each user has to purchase using their existing iTunes account in order to make it easy to manage (technically you can install an app under a different account, but then updates, etc. are complicated).  And this will get even more troublesome with the App Store.

Now the employees are purchasing the software and have the legal ownership rather than the company.  So we purchase iPad apps and Mac apps for an employee and they head home and can legally install on a home machine[s] – so far so good.  This adds value as now they can legally use the software on their home machines.

But what happens when someone leaves?  Now this company purchased software has left with the employee and there is no way to transfer to a new individual.  This isn’t a big deal with a few low price apps for an iPad, but what happens when you spend more for Apple software (and imagine if Adobe distributes via the App Store) or other third party software?  As a business I have no means to recover the licenses.

I really hope Apple is working on this – I would love to start using the new App Store to manage purchases and software, but I need a corporate account to centrally manage.  One that lets me purchase more than one copy of an app for each user or one umbrella account that can be linked to existing accounts and would track company purchases separately.

Let’s get to it Apple, make this work for businesses as well as you have for individuals.

So now Web Developers are stuck with maintaining WebM and H.264 for video players.  And of course don’t forget Flash which also uses H.264 for its video which is still available in Chrome.

So while Google and Apple take sides the web developers lose and have to keep working to hold it all together for the users.

The Gloves Are Off: Google Chrome Browser Will Drop Support For H.264 Video Codec.

When you attach some images to an email and send them there seems to be an issue with some and they won’t appear on the Apple iOS mail client. What was strange is that on the iPhone it would appear and of course on the iMac it was fine. So hopefully with the new version coming next month this will be fixed. The images were ordinary and GIF (not 89′s).

Another related issue is that when you attach a high quality image the act of rendering seems to reduce the quality and when you zoom in you can see the artifacts. You can see also by using Dropbox instead of attaching the file. On the iMac it looks great and on the iPad it doesn’t.

This can be frustrating when you want to review mockups while on the go.

Hoping that the new release fixes this so I can get a little more productivity out of the iPad.  I think what is most strange is that I can’t narrow it down to what causes the issues.  Some issues are fine, others are impacted.

Of course since this is just the WiFi iPad he wasn’t able to view the images.  While the email was downloaded, the attachments and inline images were not so they appeared as a broken image.  This is where it gets interesting.

Once back at home he connected to his home WiFi and started opening the email again to review the images.  They still appeared as broken images.  No amount of closing the Mail app or reloading the Inbox would seem to force the Mail client to reload the mail.  He gave up and just decided he would review them the next morning.

So as he recalled this behavior to me I did a few quick tests and could easily reproduce the behavior.  Once I had opened a message with inline images with no connection and then connected to WiFi I could not view them.  The only way I could find (and a trip to the local Genius bar confirmed) to have it reload was to restart the iPad.

This seems a bit aggressive to cache and not even check when a connection is activated and I am hoping that the upcoming iPad iOS 4 release will correct.  At least then we should be able to close out the Mail app and maybe force it to reload.

But I keep finding areas where this just isn’t easy for those that contribute to the social.  My case in point would be restaurant reviews.  I have a few sites/apps that I use – Yelp, UrbanSpoon and MenuPages – and they all encourage and support reviews.  As I travel and look for feedback on new places to eat I would like to give back and share my experiences.  But in doing so I wind up adding my opinions and content to three different sites, making it difficult for me to step back and learn from that data.  I have to manage three separate accounts and if I want to pull up my favorites I can’t easily do that since they are spread out across the sites.

I can recall Marc Cantor going on about Microformats years ago and they have been widely implemented but this hasn’t prevented what naturally happens in a competitive space, that communities aren’t necessarily connected.  Clearly the technology exists to make sharing possible, but the nature of running a business means that most communities aren’t open.

Now we have several efforts underway through popular sites to make it easier to use the same credentials across numerous sites but this doesn’t fully address that your online identity isn’t portable.  In my example with restaurant reviews and votes I can’t visit one destination and see my library of reviews.  I hope that as the new generation of social sites mature that we go beyond just portable login and get into easily collecting our complete identity’s and contributions.

From Andy Martone’s presentation:

• At the bottom of a page, inject JavaScript to:
  • Check for a cookie.
  • If absent, set a session cookie saying “compression NOT ok”.
  • Write out an iframe element to the page.
• The browser then makes a request for the iframe contents.
• The server responds with an HTML document that is always compressed.
• If the browser understands the compressed response, it executes the inlined JavaScript and sets the session cookie to “compression ok”.
• On subsequent requests, if the server sees the “compression ok” cookie it can send compressed responses.

The iframe test only runs once so the impact to performance is minimal (and to start the sample size of those getting the test is a small fraction of your traffic).  The upside is that you quickly gain a savings by delivering Gzip payloads to any client that can handle them.  From their testing you might improve the experience for ~15% of your users.

Of course there are still those using seriously old browsers and just can’t handle the compression, but I would say that burdening them with an extra iframe might give them that final reason to upgrade.

via High Performance Web Sites :: Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression.

It sets a great example and support for these new services and hopefully will be just the first of many cases.  They noted a savings of around $750,000 in the move so clearly a win for everyone that pays taxes too.

White House moves Recovery.gov to Amazon’s cloud – O’Reilly Radar.

CNN aided in the demise or print