Last Friday, I was due to fly back to San Francisco from New York City. FutureTest 2008 was over, I’d spent a day in BZ East (our Huntington, N.Y. headquarters), and it was time to go home.

My flight, United #5, was set to depart at 6:00am, and I arrived at JFK’s Terminal 7 around 4:30am. Since I wasn’t checking any luggage, the first stop was the EasyCheck-in kiosk.

It wasn’t working right. It would let me check in, but wouldn’t print the boarding pass. I tried another kiosk. Same problem.

So, along with a number of other passengers trying the kiosks, I got into the line for an agent, who gave me the boarding pass. When I told her that Easy Check-in wasn’t working, she said that someone was already working on it.

I thought nothing of it, until reading Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle. There I learned that it was a February 29 bug! The AP story’s headline: “Feb. 29 confuses United’s software.”

The “Y2K Effect” strikes again!

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.

Roy Scheider, who played Dr. Heywood Floyd in the movie “2010” and Capt. Nathan Bridger in “SeaQuest DSV,” passed away yesterday at age 75.

Oh, yeah, he did some other roles too, most notably Chief Martin Brody in Jaws. But for me, he’ll always be Doktor Floyd (said in Helen Mirren’s authentic Russian accent).

(If only Dr. Floyd had told Capt. Kirbuk, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat…”)

Apropos to my posting a couple of weeks ago about the dangers of lost flash drives, New York Times columnist Randy Cohen tackles that issue in today”s paper.

A reader asks Randy,

At the end of a long flight, I gathered my children’s scattered belongings and scooped up someone’s lost flash drive, planning to mail it to its owner. A quick check showed that the drive contains a company’s proprietary information.

This is a significant issue. As flash drives become larger and more pervasive, we’re going to see more and more data lost because of them.

How many of us take some simple steps to improve the odds that lost flash drives would be returned? Do you have a file called “owner.txt” with your name, address or e-mail address? Do you have an address sticker? Frankly, I don’t do a good job with this, not on my flash drives.

Perhaps I should, because such things work: Many years ago, I dropped my Day-Timer notebook at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Because my business card was stapled inside, the airport’s Lost & Found department returned it to me just a few days later.

Air travel is enough of a nuisance these days. Why do airlines have to keep finding ways to make things worse?

Take United Airlines, which is my default carrier because it has so many non-stops out of SFO. Here’s a notice they just sent me, rescinding the long-standing rule that travelers can check two bags for free:

As of February 4, 2008, United has a new checked baggage policy. Non-elite Mileage Plus® members and non-members traveling on non-refundable Economy tickets within the United States, Canada and U.S. territories, may check one bag for free and a second for a $25 fee. The new policy applies to tickets purchased beginning February 4, 2008 for travel on or after May 5, 2008.

Thank you for choosing United.

From snack boxes — inedible junk for $5 — to this. How long, do we think, before the “free” non-alcoholic beverages cost $5 as well?

Adobe sent out a notice that one of its services, Adobe Stock Photos, is going to be discontinued. The service will be turned off on April 1.

I have no idea how popular Adobe Stock Photos is, but the company offered up a helpful FAQ to explain a few things. From it, you can learn that:

Adobe Stock Photos is a royalty-free image service introduced with Adobe Creative Suite® 2 software in May 2005. Offering one-stop shopping from within Adobe Bridge in Creative Suite 2 and Creative Suite 3 as well as standalone CS2 and CS3 applications, Adobe Stock Photos provides a convenient way for creative professionals to search across multiple image libraries at once and purchase royalty-free images.

Sounds great, right?

In case you’re wondering what’s going on, and why Adobe Stock Photos is being put out to pasture, the FAQ has another question:

Q: Why is the service being discontinued?

A: Adobe has decided to concentrate its efforts in other areas.

How many staff meetings between product managers and customer-service executives did it take to develop that informative explanation?

Seemingly everyone this week is distracted by Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for Yahoo.

• Pundits wonder if other suitors will emerge, and how Google will respond.
• Microsoft-bashers want the company to fix its software, instead of screwing up Yahoo.
• Microsoft-boosters drool over the synergy between Yahoo and MSN.
• Analysts correctly note that there’s a lot of overlap in content and services.

Microsoft’s fervent desire, of course, is for more advertising revenue. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are tired of watching Google kick them from one end of the football field to the other. Since they can’t innovate their way out of this mess, they’ll try to spend $42 billion on a Hail Mary pass.

Even without competing suitors, it’s not certainly that the deal will succeed. Microsoft, after all, is a confirmed monopolist, accused of tying its dominant operating system closely to its Web offerings. Windows and Internet Explorer already “favor” MSN. If MSN merges with Yahoo, those bonds will only deepen.

Google’s current dominance of paid search notwithstanding, Microsoft’s going to have a challenge getting this transaction past an anti-trust review.

What’s the most popular part of the Eclipse ecosystem, beyond the framework itself? By a wide margin, it’s the Java Development Tools project.

BZ Research conducted its fourth annual Eclipse study late last year. We’re publishing some of the results in the Feb. 15 issue of SD Times, but this one’s worth sharing now. We asked Eclipse users, “Which Eclipse ‘bits’ are currently used by your organization?” Here were the top 10 responses:

57.7% Java Development Tools (JDT)
34.6% Web Tools Project – J2EE Standard Tools
34.6% Web Tools Project – Web Standard Tools
24.8% Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
21.1% Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP)
21.0% C/C++ IDE (CDT)
20.0% Web Tools Project – JavaServer Faces
19.0% Graphical Editor Framework (GEF)
19.0% Web Tools Project – AJAX Tools Framework
16.9% Visual Editor (VE)

The full study, which tracks trends from 2004-2007, along with many verbatim comments, is available for purchase from BZ Research.

USB ports, as any IT security expert can tell you, are trouble just waiting to happen. Sure, they’re fine for keyboards and mice. However, think about the other things that can be plugged into them, like portable storage devices ready to hoover your data.

I was fascinated by Andrew Binstock’s recent post regarding the internal USB ports on enterprise workstations. Those ports are designed for applications that use dongles. The problem with dongles is that they easily fit into a pocket. But if you lock the dongle inside the computer, it’s less likely to fall into the wrong hands, or the wrong pocket.

USB-based flash drives are potentially even more dangerous than stolen dongles, as shown by a new study from the Ponemon Institute. This study was commissioned by and paid for by RedCannon Security, whose PR agency sent me the results. RedCannon sells stuff to secure USB flash drives. They paid for this study in order to drum up business.

With that said..

According to the study, 87% of their study’s respondents say that their company’s policies forbid them copying unprotected sensitive information onto a USB flash drive. However, 51% say that they have copied confidential info onto a flash drive — and 57% believe that other employees routinely use flash drives to store and move confidential info.

What’s so bad about that? Even assuming that all the employees are behaving totally above-board… 28% of respondents say that a flash drive has been either lost or stolen. The study doesn’t ask, unfortunately, how many respondents have lost a flash drive that contains confidential, proprietary or sensitive info.

Even so, a challenge is that flash drives frequently are used to backup information, to bring information home (to work on it), and to share information with other people. That came up last week, in fact, when I was in my New York office… the fastest way for one of our staff to give me some files was to copy them onto a flash drive.

Those files are still on the flash drive, which is in my briefcase. But what if it fell out? What if someone stole my briefcase?

Now, had those files been confidential (they weren’t), and I were to lose the flash drive, that would be a bad thing. Or what if I then reused that flash drive to give different data to someone else… and that person also copied those “confidential” files? The potential for inadvertent data loss is obvious. And that’s assuming no malicious intent.

With malicious intent, every USB port (and Firewire port) is a potential hole that an attacker can exploit to steal data, corrupt files, or plant malware.

Do you have polities and measures in place to prevent the copying of confidential data onto portable storage devices, and for securing USB ports? If not, you should.

I’m sitting here in New York, using my 250GB external Western Digital Passport external hard drive, and a few moments ago, I received a press release touting the company’s newest product: “WD My Passport Essential.”

You may recall that I bought a 250GB Passport in early December, after giving up on waiting for the delayed 320GB internal drive. Both the 320GB internal and external drives are now shipping.

So, I’m wondering, “What’s the difference between a WD Passport and a WD My Passport Essential”? According to the release,

“Redesigned to complement WD’s popular My Book family of external drives, the drives introduce a sleek new form that feels good in your hand and fits neatly in a pocket or purse. Available now at select retailers and at WD’s online store (http://www.shopwd.com), the new My Passport Essential USB Drives feature a beautiful glossy black finish and put almost a third of a terabyte of digital storage in the palm of your hand.“

First off, the WD Passport that I have already has a glossy black finish. So, what else is different? Let’s check the specs for the 320GB versions of both.

WD Passport WDXMS3200 (the old one)

Performance Specifications
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
Capacity 320 GB
Interface USB 2.0

Physical Dimensions
English
Height 0.590 Inches (Max) • Length 5.110 Inches (Max) • Width 3.14 Inches • Weight 0.23 Pounds
Metric
Height 15 mm (Max) • Length 129.78 mm (Max) • Width 79.78 mm • Weight 0.1048 kg

WD My Passport Essential WDME3200 (the new one)

Performance Specifications
Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) 480 Mbits/s (Max)

Physical Specifications
Capacity 320 GB
Interface USB 2.0

Physical Dimensions
English
Height 0.590 Inches • Length 4.967 Inches • Width 3.130 Inches • Weight 0.231 Pounds
Metric
Height 15 mm • Length 126.15 mm • Width 79.5 mm • Weight 0.1048 kg

So, it’s the same hard drive, same interface specs, same bundled software, same shiny black plastic for the case, same thickness, and same weight. However, the case is now 3.6mm shorter and 0.3mm narrower. That, I suppose, is what makes it “essential.” Oooh. Aaaah.

Speaking of Microsoft TechEd — I was surprised to learn this morning that Microsoft has split it into two separate events.

That’s right, there’s a “Developers TechEd 2008” from June 3-6, and an “IT Professionals TechEd 2008” from June 10-13. Both are in Orlando. Bill Gates is keynoting the former, and Bob Muglia is kicking off the latter.

(Okay, this isn’t really news: Microsoft revealed this decision in November. Somehow, I missed it. My bad.)

That’s a real nuisance, of course, for anyone whose interests span both domains. Microsoft says that there will be some IT stuff at the developer event, and developer stuff at the IT event, to benefit such attendees. Doesn’t that make you think about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?

I had intended to attend TechEd to cover it for both SD Times and our new launch, Systems Management News. But which TechEd? Not both, that’s for sure. Two weeks in Orlando is overkill… not only for me, of course, but for companies that sell products and services into the Microsoft ecosystem. However, many in the industry are going to have to spend big $$$ to have a presence at both events.

This year, other must-attend Microsoft developer events include Mix (March 5-7 in Las Vegas) and the Professional Developers Conference (October 27-30 in Los Angeles).

That’s a lot for any developer to handle.

Magazines tend to pile up at my house, so that I can read them during my too-frequent business travel. Jettisoning a well-read magazine mid-trip is truly a pleasure.

It’s not a pleasure, though, when a feature story starts in the front of the magazine, and then you must jump to the back of the magazine to finish the story. You return to the front of the magazine to begin the next story, then jump to the back again to finish it, and so-on.

Jumps (where stories run non-linearly) are a “reader disservice” by a magazine’s editors and art directors.

As someone who has been in the magazine business for a long time — more than two decades — it’s always been my goal to minimize jumps in the publications I work on. Alas, Wired (and I took three recent issues with me to read) just loves jumps. Argh!

In “the old days,” jumps were sometimes necessary because only some parts of the magazine were printed with a four-color (4C) process, and other parts were printed in black-and-white (BW). It was common to start stories with opening artwork on 4C pages, and then jump them to the BW back-of-the-book.

Today, very few magazines, at least in the mainstream publishing world, are printed with BW pages. Nearly everything is 4C throughout. So, why still have the jumps?

They’re certainly not necessary. Nearly all of my favorite leisure-reading magazines, from The Economist to BusinessWeek to The New Yorker, eschew jumps entirely. BZ Media’s own Software Test & Performance also runs without jumps. Granted, ST&P isn’t Wired. But there’s no reason why Wired has to (continued page 149)

So, I’m sitting with a friend, and she’s showing off her brand-new digital camera. When the topic came around to my five-year-old Canon EOS 10D digital SLR, she said (not in so many words), “It’s time to upgrade that ancient, obsolete device.“

I bought the EOS 10D back in 2003, when it was the first Canon digital SLR that could properly replace my Canon EOS A2 film SLR. The 6.3-megapixel resolution was quite adequate, and of course, it used my extensive set of Canon EOS “L” lenses.

However, the EOS 10D was not quite perfect. In particular, there were two features that disappointed:

• It lacks the 2.5% spot meter which my EOS A2 film camera had — and that was a tool I used a lot when shooting events, like trade shows. A spot meter lets you accurately expose an image based on a very small area, like a brightly lit industry executive standing on a dimly lit stage in a darkened auditorium.

• It has a 22mm light sensor that was much smaller than the 35mm film inside a “real” camera. Because of the small sensor, the camera can only “see” what’s in the middle of the field of view, making all standard lenses appear more telephoto by a factor of 1.6x. Thus, a 20mm lens acts like a 36mm lens, a 50mm lens becomes an 80mm lens, and a 200mm lens becomes a 320mm lens. That’s bad, if you’re trying to do anything wide, work a crowd or do scenery.

Otherwise, the 10D is easy to use, offers the fine-grained control that I wanted, and takes great pictures. I’ve never had a complaint about it. (There was a third item that annoyed me five years ago, but I can’t remember what it was. Obviously, I got over it.)

So, do I want a new camera? Only if it’ll solve those problems at a reasonable price. Sadly, none of the affordable models from Canon address the shortcomings of a five-year-old model. Sure, the new SLRs have higher resolution, with most being 10 megapixels. There’s a new Canon Rebel XSi coming out in April that has 12 megapixels. But otherwise… nah.

• All the Canon Rebel models (which are much less expensive than the EOS series) use a 22mm image processor. Same old 1.6x multiplier. They also lack a real spot meter. What they offer are really low prices ($592 street for a 10-megapixel Canon Rebel XTi body), an automatic mirror cleaner, and a little better software. The forthcoming 12-megapixel Canon Rebel XSi doesn’t do any better; it just adds a few more pixels and more gadgets.

• In the higher-end EOS series, the current model, the 10-megapixel Canon EOS 40D, does have a spot meter. Alas, it still has the 22mm image sensor, so it solves only one of my problems. Sure, it has lots of bells-and-whistles, like a much bigger LCD screen you can use to preview pictures, and tons of custom settings, but it also costs $1,149 street.

• The lowest-cost Canon SLR that actually does what I want is the Canon EOS 5D (their numbering is really screwy). Not only does it have 12.8 megapixels, not only does it have a proper spot meter, but it also has a 35.8mm image sensor. Ahh, finally a digital SLR camera that’ll use the entire image from the lens! However, with a street sticker of $2,099… nope.

So, if you see people happily taking pictures at a scenic viewpoint or at a technology conference, I’ll be the guy with an obsolescent Canon EOS 10D… and a pocket full of money not spent.