We haven’t even held STPCon Spring 2008 yet, but we’re ready for speaker proposals for the fall conference!

STPCon Fall 2008 will be Sept. 24-26 at the Marriott Boston Copley Hotel. That’s right: We’ve moved across the river from Cambridge, where we hosted the conference in 2006 and 2007. The Marriott Boston Copley is a lot larger, which is important since we’ve sold out the past several conferences.

Speaker proposals are due March 10.

By the way, the Super Early Bird discounts have been extended for STPCon Spring 2008, Apr. 15-17 in San Mateo. Be sure to sign up by Wednesday, Feb. 27, to get the best deal.

The Onion’s take on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is brilliant! They are indeed America’s finest news source.

We’re now accepting speaker proposals for EclipseWorld 2008 — the technical conference specially designed for enterprise IT staff and software developers using Eclipse-based tools and technologies.

There’s a lot of excitement in the Eclipse ecosystem, particularly around the forthcoming Ganymede release train this summer. That’s one of the reasons why we hold EclipseWorld in the fall, so that we can present classes that teach you how to use the latest bits.

This year, EclipseWorld is Oct. 28-30. We’re holding it again in Reston, Va. — a location that proved very popular last year!

Back to the Call for Speakers: The deadline for submissions of abstracts and bios is April 16. Speakers will be notified by April 28 if their class is accepted.

Check out the Call for Speakers, and we look forward to seeing you at EclipseWorld.

While I’m on the subject of air travel… it was really depressing, on a recent trip, to see the family ahead of me in the security line put a sealed six-pack of Gatorade into the recycle bin. What a waste.

I don’t know about you, but the ban on liquids does not make me feel safer. (And yes, the family should have known better.)

My way around the ban is to carry an empty half-liter water bottle through security, and then once through screening, fill it up from a water fountain. It’s free. Buying an overpriced water bottle at an airport concession is definitely not. While on the plane, the flight attendants are quite happy to refill the bottle as needed.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling adventurous, I dump in a little packet of Crystal Light’s Lemonade On The Go. Yum.

Symptom: Excel 2004 spreadsheets don’t appear correct under print preview, and print only blank pages.

Remediation: On some machines, there is a problem with the “high” print resolution. In order to get the spreadsheet to print properly, go to File -> Page Setup. The last drop down is for “Print Quality.” If it is set to “High,” pick another setting like 300dpi or 600dpi. Then try print preview again — it should work.

We had this issue on one machine running Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard and Excel 2004 11.3.7, and it took a while to run it down. It is unclear if this is an Excel bug or a Leopard bug.

One of the open secrets of the technology industry is that many — if not most — technology analyst firms are “pay for praise.”

Such analyst firms conduct research designed to flatter their clients who sponsor that research. Those clients then promote those “objective” research results as justification of their innovation leadership, and as proof of their marketing hyperbole.

Often, when technology journalists hear about a company being named to a research firm’s list of leaders, the question we ask ourselves is, “How much did that cost?”

Some analyst firms are more honest than others, of course. And some are much worse. Lee Gomes, in a Jan. 30 story in The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the practice in “Vendors Still Paying For IT Research That Flatters Them.” His story hits the nail on the head.

Lee focused on one notorious flatterer, Aberdeen Group, beginning with,

There were many excesses during the Internet bubble; one involved the Aberdeen Group, which passed itself off as a technology consulting and research operation, but which was for the most part a “pay-for-praise” operation. If you saw an Aberdeen report saying that Acme MicroMacro sold world-class solutions, you could be sure that Acme had written Aberdeen a world-class check.

He continues that under its new owners, Harte-Hanks, Aberdeen has a new business model that discloses the vendor relationship:

The current Aberdeen comes up with a research topic, typically involving some new technology trend, and then approaches tech companies selling products associated with the trend. For what customers say is roughly $30,000 a company can become a report sponsor. Aberdeen, which wouldn’t discuss its fee, then sends questionnaires to tech users, asking about their current activities and future plans for the area in question. The reports are meant to be a snapshot of the marketplace and don’t mention specific companies.

The result, reports Lee:

The potential conflict in this approach, though, is clear. The reports are big business — there were 212 last year — each typically with four or five sponsors. But if much of your top line is dependent on getting tech companies to sponsor your research reports, you’ve got quite an incentive to design questionnaires that will yield the kind of reports tech vendors will want to sponsor.

In that regard, Aberdeen delivers. The reports seem to invariably discover that “best in class” companies use, or are thinking about using, or somehow embody, whatever technology the report happens to be discussing.

While Aberdeen is noteworthy for participation in such non-objective research, it’s surely not the only one. Think about the biggest, more influential analyst firms in IT. I’m sure you can think of several household names. Nearly all of them play the same game: their reports are meant to flatter their sponsors, not offer honest advice to enterprise IT managers who are relying on those reports to help make difficult technology decisions.

It’s a shame that when it comes to analysts, you just can’t trust them, most of the time.

If you were an early adopter of mobile telephones – perhaps you have a car phone, a bag phone, or an expensive handset like the Motorola MicroTAC – you used the analog AMPS cellular phone system.

AMPS, or Advanced Mobile Phone Service, used FM signals in the 800MHz band. Range wasn’t great, but when you had a phone connection, the sound quality was generally good.

While AMPS got the U.S. mobile phone system off the ground in 1983, carriers hated it, because each tower could only handle a small number of connections.

That’s why carriers were quick to move toward multiplexed digital systems, such as GSM and TDMA, because they could support more callers per frequency (and therefore, at lower cost). Sure, digital signals sounded much worse than the analog AMPS calls, but too bad.

AMPS-based telephony also had other problems. If you had wide-spectrum UHF receiver or scanner, you could listen to the analog phone calls. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission swiftly required that new scanners and receivers omit the AMPS band, but older “gapless” radios (like the Yaesu FRG-9600) could handle such signals.

The AMPS cellular network was also the foundation of appliances, such as wireless security systems. Unlike landline-based security systems, whose phone lines could be cut, the transmitter of an AMPS-based security system could still call for help if needed.

For years, the FCC has mandated that some carriers continue to operate their AMPS networks, in order to support those security systems, and also serve customers with older handsets. However, that requirement ends on Feb. 18, 2008, when the FCC “Analog Sunset Order” goes into effect. At that time, we can expect to see AMPS turned off.

Goodbye, analog cellular. You did your job well.

Yesterday, both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 were released to manufacturing. Customers are set to receive the new bits in March.

Both are long-awaited updates.

Windows Server 2008 (aka “Longhorn Server”) is a significant revamping of Microsoft’s server platform line. The deeply embedded virtualization capabilities, if nothing else, warrant a lot of attention. There are also many improvements to Internet Information Services; IIS 7.0 should be a lot fast and more stable, as well as easier to develop for.

Windows Vista SP1… well, it’s hard to be enthusiastic. It’s been a full year since Windows Vista shipped, and the platform has totally failed to gain traction. It’s hard to find anyone, outside of Microsoft and its closest partners, who are enthusiastic about Vista. Sales of Windows XP remain brisk, and there are even petitions asking Microsoft to maintain XP as a parallel product line to Vista. SP1 promises to fix many of Vista’s most painful shortcomings. It’s about time.

It’s amazing how dirty a stereo can get after three decades, especially when it’s been sitting gathering dust for the past half-dozen years or so. Potentiometers get scratchy, switches get noisy. Analog circuity is more sensitive to dirt and dust than all-digital components.

Bothered by a noisy left channel, we cleaned the old Marantz 3200 preamp and 140 power amp. The tools? Liberal quantities of canned air on blow out the dust, and tuner cleaner to restore the mechanical switches and pots.

What a difference it made to the audio quality! Not only did the scratchiness and flakiness go away, but the sound quality is better across the board.

Accessibility is part of the joy of old audio equipment. As with old cars, it’s easy to work on them and keep them in fine fettle. The new digital stuff… not so much. What can you do with a bunch of chips? Nothing, really.