April’s topic will be “Using Linux to Access CBC Corporate Services: What Works and What Doesn’t”. They’ll review known methods by which Linux users can access GroupWise, Novell Netware shares, other Windows applications, Contivity VPN, etc. and what Linux distributions have been known to work well.

The meeting will be followed by an escorted tour of the National Data Centre for all those interested.

To do so, you’ll need either Groupwise Messenger installed on your PC.

If you’re on a Mac, you can connect to our instant messenger network from the outside world as well — just download Adium (it’s free), go the Adium/Preferences, and enter your Novell username, usually your last name and first initial (e.g., maffint).

You’ll need to know the server name and port — email me (Tod Maffin) from your Groupwise account and I’ll give you the deets.

And feel free to add me to your Groupwise Messenger contact list.

UPDATED:
Check the comments for some updated information about this.

Firefox is a free, open-source web browser which has gained a solid following in the past few years, notably for its stronger security and better ability to render web pages accurately. It also has “tabs” which make it easier to keep multiple web pages open.

CBC standardized on Internet Explorer 6 more than two years ago (it came pre-installed with Windows XP). Windows 2000 users were upgraded about a year ago. Still, says Dean Mannella, CBC’s senior manager of workstation services, “We still have a portion of the population using Netscape and a growing footprint for Firefox.”

“From a security perspective, Firefox has gained much support in the industry and offers great flexibility through extensions,” Dean told me. “As such we will be considering this a possible standard, but we will be reviewing IE 7 and Firefox 3 equally.”

But it won’t be an easy decision.

Microsoft’s web sites don’t play nice with Firefox (or any other non-Microsoft browser for that matter). Some Microsoft sites, like those for updating Windows, simply won’t work at all on Firefox. Also, the CBC has a number of web applications that would most likely have to be re-coded to reduce their reliance on ActiveX, an IE-only technology.

Which web browser do you prefer?

John Mang, operations manager for B.C. radio said: “It looks like was was a technical glitch. It was certainly unintentional. One phone call and it is being fixed.”

Ray Carnovale, head of CBC’s I.T. confirmed that and said the blockage “may be something going on external to us.”

All regions should have access to all those sites again.

What I think was interesting was just how fast news spread in the Corporation. I was on-air at the time and was getting dozens of CBC folks emailing me within the space of an hour. It spread quickly within the Vancouver radio newsroom and, presumably, others.

CBC archives staffer Paul Gorbould has written a great parody of a CBC memo (I actually thought it was the real thing for a moment):

Next GroupWise purge: Saturday, October 20th, 2007

On October 20th, 2007, we will purge all GroupWise accounts of non-archived mail dating from prior to October 19th, 2007.

We realize that the inability to store messages for more than 24 hours may cause some minor inconvenience to employees. To minimize the impact of this new policy, please follow these steps:

1. If you think you may need particular details at a later date, please commit them to memory, or write them down in a three-ring binder. But please purge the pages from your binder at least once a week, as binder space is expensive. NOTE: Information Technology is investigating an upgrade to 3″ binders, but these may not work with all applications and are not supported.
2. If you intend to be on vacation or sick for more than 24 hours, please set up an auto-delete rule on your GroupWise account. A simple automated reply message should be created, such as: “I’m sorry, I’m not around to receive your e-mail right now, and have deleted it. Please try again when you know I’m at my desk.”

You can read the rest of it on Paul’s blog.

Today, IT security firm Sophos said that 50 percent of workers are being blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers who are worried about the website’s impact on productivity and security, and have therefore put policies or access controls in place to ban its use in the workplace.

First, a bit of background.

Junk Mail Handling located in the Tools menu can help you decide what to do with unwanted mail from the Internet. This includes all e-mail, appointments, or tasks where the sender’s address is in the form or name@domain.com, name@domain.org, and so forth.

Junk Mail Handling does not apply to internal e-mail, appointments, or tasks. Internal items are e-mails, appointment, or tasks where the sender is part of your GroupWise system and the From field shows only the name or the sender, not an Internet address as explained above.

Let’s Get Started

First, pull down the Tools menu and select Junk Mail Handling



In Settings, under “Junk Mail”, select Enable Junk using personal address books.



Click OK to save any changes you make to the Junk Mail Handling settings.

All future items from e-mail addresses not in your Frequent Contacts address book and other personal address books will be delivered to the Junk Mail folder. You can specify that the items in this folder be deleted after 30 days. Be sure to check your Junk Mail folder on a regular basis to check for legitimate email messages from trusted external senders.

How to Add an External Email Address to the Trusted Sender List

When you check your Junk Mail folder and you receive a message from an external email address which is known you can add this address to a Trusted Sender List. To add it – highlight the message and right-click, move your mouse arrow over the Junk Mail option, and then select Trust sender… Any new mail from this sender will now appear in your INBOX not your Junk Mail Folder.

E-mail from addresses in your Trust List will always be delivered to your inbox.

You can also add an Internet domain to your Trust List.

We called it the Sanity Checker. It was like the program was concerned about us — “Are you okay?”  “Yes, thank you for checking in again. I’m ok.” Click. Then we could go back to work.

Seems DaletPlus has a funny little bug that’s similar. You probably won’t see it unless you’re an administrator, since it’s not in the regular users’

Pierre-Hugues Pelletier in Desktop Radio Support in Montreal noticed it this morning:

UPDATE: Turns out, CBC isn’t behind this at all. Someone is just scraping the CBC’s RSS feed and posting the content there. I thought it might be too good to be true.

Purely by happenstance, I stumbled onto CBC News’ Twitter page. (Right now, only 30 people are following the feed.)

• CNN’s had one for months, where they post only “breaking news” items
• I also use Twitter get updates on my local weather as soon as the forecast is updated.
• Popular American blogger Robert Scoble’s Twitter page has nearly 5,000 “followers”

If you haven’t used Twitter before, it’s sort of hard to describe, but imagine having CBC send news updates to your computer screen whenever there are updates. (You use a third-party app to have it send directly to your screen.) Here’s some more information about Twitter.

Lots of the digerati are using Twitter, sort of as a way of broadcasting short little messages about their day out. My Twitter page, for instance, has notes whenever I post a new blog entry, and sometimes I just ramble a bit on it.

It’s nice to see our news group playing with some of the new tools out there, though it would be easier to find these kinds of experiments if we had some kind of cbc.ca/beta web page that aggregates our sandbox-playing, like how Google does it or how Yahoo does it.

Vancouver operations manager John Mang sent out this directive today:

Do not, under any circumstances, install any applications / programs on DaletPlus workstations.  Installation of non-CBC software must be done by our radio maintenance team, and requires my express approval.

Why?

The operational parameters of DaletPlus are very specific and can be adversely affected by other applications.  These effects can be local to your computer, or spread to other computers and even infect the networks.

(Translation: There’s a chance, as with any software, that something you install could conflict with another app on your system.)

John goes on to warn that in “the very near future,” all DaletPlus workstations will be “locked to ensure the ongoing reliability of the system.” More than that, any “non-approved applications” are going to be removed — along with all related data.

Take that, you naughty iTunes installers! You know who you are!

Listen, John’s a good guy and I know he’s not doing this because he’s having a bad day today. Having spent a lot of my career in I.T. I get the logic at work here. Having a “clean-slate” computer is always easiest to support. And frankly, left to our own devices, many of us plebs would install all sorts of weird-ass software.

But.

A far bigger risk to CBC workstations is actually our web browser standard: IE6. Its “Active X” technology can install all sorts of crap on workstations. I’ve seen far too many people blindly click Yes on pop-ups that say “Do you want a fancy-pants toolbar for your browser?” and then wonder why their computer is slow, Dalet crashes, etc.

Applications aren’t our big problem. Our web browser standard is.

We need to move to Firefox, and fast.

As of Monday morning, the Vancouver plant is now running DaletPlus. [Here is a visual tour of it, and my review.]

In Vancouver, the old Dalet systems have been retired. (If the Corp would like to donate a Dalet box for us to smash, I will gleefully dutifully report on any smashing that occurs. Please?)

The new DaletPlus system really has been run through the paces and, in fact, has been airing Vancouver’s content from its master control since Saturday evening. I’ve taken a full-day tour of it, and I’m impressed.

Starting at 3:30 a.m., Monday morning, and throughout the day, DaletPlus support personnel will be on the floor to assist users as required. For immediate attention, please consult with the on-site trainers. (Please see the internal Groupwise from John Mang for phone numbers.)

Remember, the DaletPlus user guide is located on the desktop display of every DaletPlus station in the plant.  This is a superb user document, with table of content hyperlinks and detailed step-by-step processes for every task — please use it to your advantage.

And remember, folks, there are no stupid questions, only really bad cross-fades.

Here’s a look at the overall interface. Notice you can have up to eight tracks now, and you can even resize the tracks to focus on a particular track (a voicetrack, for instance).

Ripping a track from a CD requires a separate (and UGLY) application, but at least when it rips it in the right format and places it right in a Dalet category for you to drag into your work or show folder. Needs to be integrated into the application, but it’s not a huge deal. This is a big improvement over real-time acoustical dubbing.

This is the ClipBin — the replacement for the Clipboard. It has a few nice features, including the ability to see the waveform, and if you’ve pulled a region of an active SURFER into the ClipBin, you can see where in the waveform that region exists (that’s the grey blocks on the green bars). Very nice touch.

I love this. Converting to a new file format is as easy as dragging the file from any category into one of these special auto-convert icons. Note the blue icon in the file list on the right which indicates to anyone logged into DaletPlus that that file is currently being converted.

Yay! Making volume curves no longer makes me want to poke needles in my eyeballs.

There seems to be a hidden Instant Message application built within DaletPlus (similar to iNews). I expect IT wants you to use the Groupwise Messenger instead.

CBC says: “Not hidden – simply not used in CBC workflow. The app is called Chat. It’s under Windows menu, and can be on toolbar.”

Dear God, we actually have an application called “InterWeb”?! Did nobody tell the Tri-Medial Sub-Committee Task Force on Desktop Application Naming Conventions that “InterWeb” is actually a JOKE on the Internet?! When people online say “The InterWeb,” they mean it ironically. We mean it literally. *sigh*

You can save keywords as part of any audio title, but I wasn’t able to find those titles by searching for them. Too bad, because this would be a great way to put a show abbreviation, guest name, or other metadata into the file for easy later retrieval. This should be priority one to fix.

CBC says: “Keyword search does work. After entering the keyword, it may take a minute or so until the database updates.”

Tod’s reply: “Fair enough, I probably didn’t wait a full minute for a database update.”

Now you can tell if someone else is using a title or project because a lock icon appears beside it. Also, titles and projects can be saved in the same category.

Okay, I’m nitpicking, but it bugs me that DaletPlus uses totally non-standard User Interface fonts and label styles.

The desktop player (basically the new Navigator) can accept Groups. Yes, it always could, but making groups are a bit easier now. It’s still a little gimpy, though. I expect most on-air people will still drag elements to fire in manually.

CBC responds: “Desktop Player is not ‘basically the new Navigator’. The new OnAir Player replaces the old Navigator. Image in your review is in fact not the OnAir Player, it is of the DeskTop Player. Desktop Player is one channel. OnAir Player is two channel. OnAir Player can accept groups, just as Navigator always could. There are substantial functionality differences between the two apps.”

Tod responds: “Oops. Still, seems silly that there are two different players, depending on how many channels you want to use. Either way, it’s a huge improvement.”

Sure, it’s nice to have a list of regions you’ve defined, but you can’t dock this window (again, a non-standard UI problem), shortcut jump to the region, delete, or rename them from here. What’s the point of the window then? This needs improvement.

CBC responds: “Actually, [the] user can “shortcut jump” to the Locator by clicking on the Locator and clicking OK. Play Marker will jump to Locator.”

Tod responds: “Cool. Wasn’t taught that in the course. A little UI help might assist — like having a “Jump to Marker” button or something. I still stand by my comment that you can’t delete or rename the markers in this window, which seems like a minor thing, but can actually save a lot of time on a big project.”

Here’s how you save a group. You have to right-click on an area that’s pretty much invisible, and select Rundown Properties. Huh?! How about File/Save Group... ? The folks who write Dalet need to hire User Interface people.

CBC responds: “This is not how user saves a Group. Group is saved by simply closing the Rundown Editor. Save is automatic. The area clicked on is the Group Title – not an invisible area. This “New Group” field is right clicked on in order to change title, not to save.”

Tod responds: “What I described is how that procedure isn’t being taught, at least out here. You don’t click on the group title; you literally click on the blank space. But even so, closing the group with an Automatic Save breaks a number of UI conventions as well. I still think the Dalet folks need to simply add a File/Save Group… menu item.”

Finally, this is a look at a SURFER8 with volume curves in place. It would be helpful to visually show the effect the volume curve has on the waveform — e.g. when you fade out a clip, the waveform should shrink according to the curve.

I finally got my hands on the elusive iPhone… er, DaletPlus today. Did a full day of training in Vancouver and here’s what I think.

In Short

Wow. This is miles ahead of the prehistoric Dalet still in use in most of the country. I mean, you can import and export MP3 files. That in itself nearly made me weep. It’s still Dalet, so it still has a few quirky Daletesque weird things, but in short you are going to love the difference.

What I Like

In general, this is a huge improvement. I no longer feel like showering after touching Dalet. You’re going to work faster, be happier, and that nagging urge to kick small children in malls after work will decrease somewhat. Specifically, here’s what I liked:

1. It’s in stereo!
   This isn’t a big deal for CBC Radio One folk like me, but Radio 2 people haven’t been able to use Dalet for stereo music, until now.
2. Workspaces follow you from desk to desk.
   Create a workspace (a saved snapshot of how you like your screen laid out) and it saves it on the server, not on the workstation you’re at. So if you jump over to a new workstation, you can still load it up with your own preferred layout. Beautiful. (Works only within your plant, not country-wide.)
3. Site-wide licence.
   We now have a site-wide licence, meaning anyone who needs it can finally get DaletPlus on their computer. And it doesn’t need some obscure special sound card either any more. In the past, we had to pay Dalet for each install and buy that special card — the cost was hundreds and hundreds of dollars (over a thousand, I think, actually) per install. So many show units would have special Dalet computers that everyone had to share. It was as if only one chair at a hair salon had any sort of cutting utensils and the hairdressers all had to wait for them.
   
4. “Quick listen” audio preview function added.
   Ever wished you could listen to a bit of a clip without actually dragging it up into a surfer or navigator? Now you can. Click once on the clip, then click the quick-listen button. There’s even a button that will play you the first and last three seconds of the clip. A nice touch. (You have to select clip and click button each time. There’s no way to turn on Quick Listen mode and have it preview by just clicking on each clip. Maybe the next version.)
5. WAV format standard.
   Holy hannah, we’re saving in an actual semi-normal file format! No more SND files (which were actually weird-ass 48,000 mono MP2 files). When you save a title, it saves it as a 48k WAV format (compressed 4-to-1). It also secretly saves a low-res MP3 version so you can quickly preview clips from other regions before transferring them. Beautiful. No… sexy!
   CBC responds: “Incorrect – it is WMA format for low-res auditioning.”
   Tod responds: “Picky, picky. {grin} But really? WMA?! (sigh) Well, better than no preview I guess.”
6. Volume curves are smooth like buttah.
   Making nodes on a volume curve are so easy, it’s actually fun! (Okay, I’m a geek.) First of all, you can add curves right in the waveform view — no more obscure editing box. (Yes, this feature has been in most audio editing programs for years; it’s a huge step for Dalet.) And all it takes is a right-drag to drag a node out. It even will try to reduce over-noding by auto-deleting nodes that are within 1dB of a previous node. In a related note, you can finally raise the levels of a track! Again, this seems like “Duh!” to most outsiders, but in the current incarnation of Dalet, there is no way to do that. You have to actually duplicate a clip on another track directly below it, all McGyver style.
7. I’m in MP3 heaven.
   You can drag MP3 files right on top of Dalet and it’ll import it. You can drag AVI files. WAV files. MOV files. SND files. Pretty much anything (they’re still having trouble with, of all things, AIFF files for now, but a fix is on its way). Welcome to the late-1990s, Dalet! (Sorry.) And converting to MP3 is so easy — just drag it into the “Convert to MP3″ folder. Boom. Done. Now just drag it out of Dalet and onto your desktop or into an email or whatever.
8. BrazilWeb built into DaletPlus
   Well kinda. Actually, there’s a “Web” tab within easy reach, preloaded with BrazilWeb and access to other web-audio resources. Smooth.
9. Pull a clip while it’s still being recorded.
   This one made me so excited, I shrieked like a 12-year-old girl. Say your colleague in the newsroom is currently recording an interview live that’s coming in from the Legislature. You can actually pull up that clip — while it is being recorded — and can edit it, extract clips, re-save it, etc. You can even watch the waveform fill in as it’s being recorded. I have no idea how this is done, but I assume voodoo is involved.
10. The new clipboard follows you.
    The new clipboard is called ClipBin and it’s much smarter than the previous clipboard. The best part: You can keep your clips with you, no matter where you travel. Move to a new workstation, your ClipBin is there. It’s easy to put something in there — just select a region (the usual right-drag and all those things still work as per usual) and click the “Send to ClipBin” button. Within the ClipBin, you can give new names to the clips, drag them into a different order, and drop them back in at your pleasure.
11. St. John’s has bloopers in their system.
    Speaks for itself. Go have a listen. It’s easy as hell to poke around in other regions’ systems.

What Still Needs Improvement

1. No crossfades.
   This is a shame, for people doing multitrack work. You can load a SURFER8 now (eight-tracks) but you still can’t have two clips crossfade on the same track. You need a second track to put the increasing-level track. Seems like a braindead thing to add but Dalet has never been known for its multitrack prowess.
2. You’re still stuck into the SURFER model.
   Dalet’s multitrack comes in four flavours — SURFER1 (one-track… okay, it’s not multitrack at this point, I know), SURFER2 (two tracks), SURFER4 (four tracks) and now SURFER8. But let’s say you’re working with two tracks in SURFER2 and you want to add a new track. Nope, can’t do it. There’s no “Add Track” function. You have to save your work, close it, start up a SURFER4, reload your work, then put your new material on that new third track with the fourth track going empty. It’s not a huge deal, but seems silly to lock people into that. Hell, even the free Audacity lets you add and delete tracks at will.
3. Multiple title work is difficult.
   It’s hard to knock the advances this version has in its metadata. It finally follows the Windows standard of Right-Click/Properties. That in itself is awesome (again, eight years late to the party, but let’s be glad it’s here). But there’s no way to change multiple titles at the same time. For instance, if you want to change the Kill Date on a number of titles, you have to do it individually to each one. You can’t pull up a combined dialog box (like you can to change the metadata on, say, iTunes tracks).
   CBC responds: “Admin can change dates on multiple files easily.”
   Tod responds: “People ‘on the line’ should be able to do this without bugging a superuser.”
   Plus, adding a clip in a multitrack while having the rest of ALL tracks shift right is still gimpy. It’s a little easier, but you still need to do the stupid CTRL-B trick. Really, we need to be able to lasso clips to highlight them, then drag them wherever we want.
4. The User Interface still has some of the odd Dalet quirks.
   Don’t get me wrong — I’m ecstatic that the menu structure is File/Edit/View like every other Windows app, as opposed to the old Title/Cancel/Make Coffee/or whatever the hell it said up there. But still, the Dalet developers seem to have dropped the ball on a few UI things. ALT-F4, for instance, on every other Windows application on the planet, closes the application. Here, it opens a SURFER4. Weird. There are a few inconsistencies in workflow too. To save a Group, you don’t do what you’d think (something like File/Save Group). You have to right-click on the group title, and pick “Rundown Properties” to save it. Huh?! Would “Save” killed them?
   CBC responds: “This is not how user saves a Group. Group is saved by simply closing the Rundown Editor.”
   Tod responds: “This isn’t how we were taught in Vancouver. Plus, a File/Save Group makes more sense. Anyway. Not a big deal.”
   Also, in one place, a trash-bin icon means “clear” and a “New” icon really means “clear all.” It’s going to screw some people up.
5. There are keywords. They don’t work.
   I was really excited to see that there was a field for keywords. This kind of “tagging” system lets you add a keyword to a title, like, say “fishing” so you can search by the general topic of a piece. Indeed you can add a keyword. But if you search for files with that keyword, it doesn’t find it. Not even under Advanced Search. Seems like an odd bug to miss. Searching otherwise (item code, title name, etc.) work fine and is fast.
   CBC responds: “Keyword search does work. After entering keyword, it may be a minute or so until the database updates.”
6. There are no effects.
   I know, I know, it’s not meant to be a full multi-track editor. But would it have killed the developers to put simple Echo, Normalize, Noise Reduction, and EQ functions into it? Come on, this is 2007.
7. Ripping CDs is done outside of DaletPlus.
   I know I’m splitting hairs, because if you wanted to rip a CD track and put it into Dalet, you were pretty much on your own. (Most of us ended up patching a CD player into our mixing board and recording it via analog — acoustically — in real time.) Now, there is a “Add CD Track to Dalet” program. It even looks up the track names and drops it right into Dalet when it’s done. But, this function is not integrated into DaletPlus. It’s a separate program and it’s U-G-L-Y. DaletPlus developers are good at building stable programs, but they need a UI team like Donald Trump needs a toupee. Also, the levels “app” is now a separate app. If you want to monitor your levels (and why wouldn’t you?!) you have to run a separate application.

A visual tour through the new user-interface coming later today.