Does It Compute?

Mastering Google

“To Google” has become a verb. When you meet someone, the first thing they are likely to do is to “google you.” And you can be pretty sure that a lot of your online existence will be exposed.

On the other hand, simple searches on Google are likely to turn up millions of responses (although only the first thousand or two are exposed). So how do you refine your searches and make them more useful?

Most people know some simple tricks, like putting a name or term in quotation marks.

Another really useful trick is to use “define.”  Type in “define: second law of thermodynamics” and Google returns all the definitions for the term on the web.

Dennis Kennedy has recently published an article on the ABA Journal Magazine called “Become a Google Master.”  Well worth checking out for more tips.

Intel Rejects Vista

The New York Times reports today that Intel has decided NOT to upgrade its computers to Vista.  For a company whose fortunes have been so entwined with those of Microsoft, this is a significant step. Reportedly, Intel decided that there was no technological advantage to going to Vista.

If Intel doesn't see the point of Vista, ordinary users should also think twice. And yes, it is still possible to get XP (although in some cases with a surcharge).

Documents To Go for PDAs

Yesterday I talked about worldox/web mobile and its ability to search for documents in your Worldox system and email them.

Viewing them in native handheld formats is another question, however.  Enter Documents to Go, from DataViz.

This little add-in to your PDA makes viewing Word documents, PDFs, etc. entirely possible. So if you are not already using it, try the 30-day free trial. It will make a big difference in your ability to deal with documents on your PDA.

Keeping Track of LexisNexis

LexisNexis is a large international corporation. Therefore trying to predict what is going to happen to software such as TimeMatters or PCLaw based on events in just one country (the US) is a losing proposition. In the same way that you would want to hedge investments in the US market with international funds, you have to look at LexisNexis operations on a world scale.

Sean Hocking, the editor of the PracticeSource and House of Butter blogs recently wrote me with kind words about my recent blog posts on LexisNexis programs. Based in Australia, and with a focus on the Asia Pacific region, his two sites provide a wealth of information about LN purchases, promotions, reorganizations, etc., worldwide, including a sprinkling of supposition and speculation. Well worth taking a good look at on a regular basis.

Firefox 3 Officially Released

I've been using the Firefox 3 beta for a couple of months now and am constantly learning new tricks. Here's one that existed in Firefox 2 but has been refined in 3. With larger monitors and higher resolutions, some web sites display in really tiny type.  With Firefox, pressing Ctrl + (that’s Ctrl and the “plus” key) will increase the size of the text. Ctrl and the scroll button on a mouse will do the same thing. In Firefox 2, this setting is for all sites. In Firefox 3, it is site specific. Ctrl-0 returns to the default

By default, this zooms both text and images. If you just want to zoom text, select View | Zoom | Zoom Text Only. This gives you more space for the text.

There used to be a neat trick that works for both IE and Firefox: if you simply type in the name of the site (e.g., heckmanco) and then hit Ctrl-Enter, it fills out the rest of the address. Shift-Enter fills in the rest for .net sites and Ctrl-Shift-Enter for .org sites. With Firefox 3, you no longer have to do even this. Just hit Enter and the rest is filled out.

Another great addition to Firefox 3 is the change to the “remember this login” screen. It used to be you were asked to remember BEFORE the login was successful. How many times did you (as I did) click “remember” only to have it be the wrong password or whatever?  Now, Firefox only prompts to remember AFTER you have successfully logged in. One of those small changes that makes a big difference in useability.

Comcast Shafts Users, Unannounced

So I got back from vacation only to find that my outgoing email did not work (incoming was received fine).

This happened once before and a tech told me he had “reset the modem” which fixed the problem. At various times and with various technicians, I was told that Comcast did not support Outlook, in fact did not support any email systems but their own, and finally that my port 25 was blocked because my account was a suspect source of spam (“large amounts of email”). When was it blocked? Don’t know. How do I get it unblocked?  You can’t.  In short, one big screw you.

More calls elicited the “information” that Comcast was now globally blocking port 25 and that this information was on its FAQ page.  Well, the FAQ page wouldn’t load (“problem loading this page”). Searching help gave a page with “loading information” but nothing ever loaded.

However, it turns out that ISPs all have an alternate port address. So if you are trying to set up email and are using Comcast, you will have to find out what it is.  This would be a reasonable solution if (1) Comcast bothered to inform customers about it and (2) it did not require a number of different phone calls to get the information - after the 4th call or so you have no idea whether they are telling the truth or not.

Time Matters / PCLaw - Status after Acquisition

Last February (on Valentine’s Day as it happened and after sitting on it for nearly a year) I published an analysis of the situation of LexisNexis products after its acquisition of Time Matters, PCLaw, Juris and other companies, with a more generalized followup a few days later. How has this analysis held up and what is the current status of TM, PCLaw and the Certified Independent Consultant program?   

While I am no longer “in the loop” as a Certified Independent Consultant, the consultant world is a small one and word gets around, so I have continued to monitor the situation as best I can.

First, virtually all senior management with any in-depth knowledge of either product have been dismissed. New managers have been brought in. Since LexisNexis is essentially in the business of selling books and on-line research materials, it is fair to say that you now have software divisions within LexisNexis that are being run by book salesmen. This is not a recipe for success.

One of the fundamental differences between the books and software is that LexisNexis views its research services (books) as fungible. So if a user switches from Lexis to West, they can always drop the price or offer other perks next year to get the user to switch back. Software, however, does not work like this because firms have a huge investment in their historical data (which in many cases is convertible to another program only with great difficulty). Switching from one program to another is a major undertaking, and firms are not likely just to “switch back.”

In addition, while the PCLaw programming staff is intact, LN disbanded the entire second-level support team and forced only a few of them to reapply for employment individually.  Not a recipe for good employee morale!  At Time Matters, which had had a stable programming core for 8-10 years, half the programmers have quit, which may explain why the service releases for Version 9 have been introducing new bugs and TM 9 still  has some major bugs – in particular related records not updating correctly under certain circumstances. The loss of programmers at TM represents a tremendous loss of accumulated program knowledge and may indicate that Time Matters may actually not be capable of fixing the various bugs (even if it was motivated to), not to mention bringing out a new version.

After numerous consultants complained about the negative effects of yearly releases, LexisNexis apparently held some focus groups and got an earful about yearly releases as well as the cost of annual upgrades. So bingo, there will be no version 10 release of Time Matters or PCLaw this year. Marketing rules! Instead, they will focus (hopefully) on fixing bugs and improving the link between TM and PCLaw.

As far as consultants are concerned, Charlie Rogers, who was in charge of the consultant program, has been kicked upstairs into the position of product “champion” with in the Lexis Nexis Total Practice Advantage program. Many large companies have “champions” or “evangelists” for smaller divisions – Microsoft for one had a “legal evangelist” for many years. While I obviously can’t speak for LN, these are typically dead-end position with no real influence or decision-making powers. Such a position is probably alternatively preaching to the choir or preaching in the wilderness: either way it doesn’t amount to much.

Consultants meanwhile, have been assimilated to the LN sales process. They no longer get any real commissions on sales of products. Sales reps are “supposed” to use consultants to help them present the products. However, since sales reps get compensated ONLY for new sales and not for repeat sales or ongoing relationships, they have no incentive to do this and with perhaps a few exceptions this program has been a total bust. The very structure of the sales program ensures this – it is not a matter of good will. When I worked for a major consulting company there was a rule that the sales guys could not visit potential client without taking a techie (read: CIC) with him. Otherwise the sales guys would inevitably make promises that could not be kept/delivered. There are many reports of this happening with the LN reps.

My guess is that within 3 years the current CIC consultants program will no longer exist, at least not in a currently recognizable form. Already the CIC listserv has been forced to relax its censorship concerning problems with the program somewhat and Bob Fleming’s Elderlaw TM listserv has rebounded – Tom Rowe has even felt compelled to put in an appearance!

This is all very interesting, you may say, but what does it mean concretely?  Should I upgrade? Switch?  More on that to come.

Portable Printer - Followup

A couple of weeks ago I said I had purchased a new portable batter-powered printer - an HP 470. Well, I’ve been giving it a workout – printing photographs, from the web, documents, etc.

Overall I am extremely pleased. It is amazing that such a small, light, printer (13x5x3) does such a great job. It does, however, have two weaknesses. 

First, the feed mechanism is not particularly robust - you have to be very certain that paper is lined up just right or it can feed on a slant and jam. Not surprising, but still something you have to watch out for.

Second, if you plug in/turn on the printer after the laptop has been booted up, the carriage mechanism for the ink cartridges frequently does not  align correctly and you get a message “carriage feed jammed.” This may be related to the battery-power, since it seems to happen less if the printer is plugged in to a power source (thought it does happen then as well).  If you turn off the printer, log off, then turn the printer on and log in again, everything is fine.  Again, just something to watch out for.

But overall, a great investment if you need printing on the road.

Windows XP SP3 May Cause Problems

Apparently SP3 for Windows XP causes major problems in two known situations: if you are running Norton Anti-Virus and if you have an HP computer with an AMD chip.

Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets newsletter  documents the issues and provides workarounds. Apparently in some cases you have to uninstall Norton before applying SP3. 

This is yet another reason why turning off automatic updates in Windows is a good idea. You never know when a “fix” is going to break something.  At worst, download the patches and install them manually after verifying that they are ok. Of course, to do this, you have to follow newsletters like Brian Livingston’s.  I would urge readers to subscribe, at least to the free version.

Microsoft Word In Open Document Format?

Microsoft recently announced that the next service pack for Office – due sometime in 2009 – will give Office 2007 the ability to save documents to the OpenOffice’s Open Document Format. So this is a year away. It is a good thing, but it raises the problem with all kinds of conversions, whether from Word to WordPerfect, to Mac software, or to ODF.

If you are writing a simple letter, there is no problem. However, law firms typically make considerable use of heavily formatted documents using advanced styles and macros, from automatic page numbering schemes, to a variety of footnotes, caption boxes, automatically generated tables of contents and tables of authorities, and so on. In fact, many of these functions are so complex that a third party industry of macro packages and table of contents/authorities programs to do properly and more efficiently what Word has difficulty doing.

The issue is that these functions, typically based on VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), do not translate to the Open Document Format which has no equivalent programming language. Therefore the documents that are translated are static: if you change a paragraph in a converted document with automatic paragraph numbering, the numbers do NOT update.  The degree to which this is true varies with various functions and programs, but it is almost always an issue.

So while Word compatibility with Open Office is a good thing (but don’t hold your breath), the specifics need to be looked at carefully before proceeding full steam ahead.