Prior to using CrashPlan, I have to admit that my backup strategy for home computers left much to be desired.  Over the years I had tried various combinations of home-grown scripts and syncing tools that broke too easily or didn’t offer enough flexibility in recovery, crusty third-party software that seemed to take hours to configure and then never quite did what I expected or didn’t work with all the different devices I used, and even elegant tools like Apple’s Time Machine backup system that still didn’t offer me the off-site redundancy I wanted in case of physical catastrophe.

The end result was that my backups were happening infrequently, and in ways that did not necessarily guarantee the ability to restore what I would need in the event of a system failure or worse.  For someone who preaches the importance of backups to my friends, family and clients all day long, this was an embarrassing state of affairs. Then, one day a friend’s laptop was stolen from his house, and as I listened to the stories of what was lost because of an incomplete backup and imagined what I would possibly lose if the same happened to me, I knew I needed to look for a better system.

That’s when I found CrashPlan.

Minneapolis-based Code 42 Software has really hit the ball out of the park with this tool, which I’ve been using the “Plus” version of.  They can do a better job of selling you on their features than I can (and I’m not affiliated with them or receiving any remuneration from them for this review), but let me list out a few of the things I love about CrashPlan:

• It works seamlessly with Linux, Mac and Windows systems.  This may seem like a simple thing, but it’s something many backup tools could not offer until recently.  Thanks, Java!
• Multi-destination backup.  I can (and do) backup simultaneously to a combination of attached external hard drives, other systems on my home network, and the CrashPlan Central data center. This gives me maximum survivability for any number of disaster scenarios – theft, natural disaster, accidental file deletion, upgrading to new hardware, etc.
• Easy setup with finely tunable settings.  I had the first backup running on CrashPlan within 20 minutes of deciding to use the tool – it was very easy to get setup.  I’ve since added other systems with the same level of ease, made possible in part by the fact that CrashPlan ties your systems together with a single user account.  But I have also since tweaked settings related to when CrashPlan backs up, how much processing power and bandwidth it takes up, when it notifies me about failed or past-due backups, etc.
• Strong pre-copy encryption.  I resisted using online backup services for a long time because I didn’t like the idea that a third-party would have so much access to my personal files.  CrashPlan addresses this as well as anyone can, I think, by encrypting your data while it’s still on your machine and then sends it off to their data centers.  What’s more, they use an encryption protocol called Blowfish, which because of its open-source, unpatented and royalty-free nature, has been analyzed and accepted by industry experts as very strong.
• Great tools, great interface, regular innovation.  Another thing that may seem trivial, but the CrashPlan folks clearly took the time to think through what a great user interface for managing backups should look like.  From their website to their desktop tools even to their mobile device apps, they care about the user experience in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere in this category.  They also seem to listen to their growing user base to find new features and updates they can implement to make the product even better.

There are a lot of other features to consider, but I won’t try to go into all of them here.  The bottom line is that, at least at the moment, there’s nothing I would change or improve about CrashPlan.

Let’s not forget about price.  I’m paying $120/year for backing up up to 10 devices with unlimited disk usage in the CrashPlan Central data center.  If you want to get started with CrashPlan for FREE, you can, and this allows you to setup a backup configuration using unlimited devices on your own network; the fees (starting at $25/year) kick in when you want to use their online storage CrashPlan Central or to get direct support from their staff for any questions you might have.

I’ve had computers fail on me before, I’ve been a part of trying to handle stolen laptops, and I know that the hassle, stress and potential lost productivity can quickly add up to more than $120 no matter how you measure it.  For the enterprise backup systems we use at Summersault, the hardware and personnel costs we incur to keep them running are measured in thousands and tens of thousands of dollars over time.  CrashPlan has already helped me restore some lost files and was invaluable in recovering from a laptop crash a few months ago.  Paying CrashPlan $120/year for reliable backups is now a no-brainer.

Are you just hoping nothing bad happens to your computer and its data?  Are you still struggling with backup solutions?  Please consider CrashPlan as a backup tool that could save you a lot of pain.

First of all, kudos to Google for “going for it” in the Facebook era.  They’re one of few players who actually has the resources and skill to make a serious go at a viable alternative to Facebook, and you’ve got to admire the effort.  If the success of the movie The Social Network tells us anything, it’s that Facebook has become mainstream and popular, and as generations of younger people look for ways to establish their identity in the digital age, they’ll be looking for alternatives to the place where their parents and now grandparents also hang out online.  By the same token, people of all ages and professions are trying to figure out just how to effectively and safely use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media tools in a world where we’re being encouraged to blend our personal and professional lives together more publicly.

Is Google+ just the right thing at just the right time?

People are already writing about the high bar that Google+ will have to jump in order to see any significant migration of Facebook users, not the least of which is all the time people have invested in curating their lists of “friends” there.  Facebook is going to make it as difficult as possible for its users to do any kind of exporting of account information from their system, and I don’t think Google is devious enough to launch an unauthorized workaround.  So people will be left to recreate their online identity on Google+, where the number of people you are connected to still largely drives your user experience.

On the other hand, despite Facebook’s 750 million users, I suspect Google actually knows about at least as many people, if not more.  Between its large and growing population of GMail users, the information they have about web users through tracking searches and Google Analytics data, and their ability to gather and index huge amounts of data from other sources, Google is perhaps positioned better than any other digital media organization to say “hey, we already know so much about you, why don’t you make yourself at home here!?“

One of the main selling points of Google+ is the ability to organize your list of contacts into Circles, containers (or, for those who want a more widely used descriptor, “tags”) that help you figure out who to share what with and how you want to slice and dice the information being shared with you.  I’ve heard a number of people clamoring for this kind of thing on Twitter for a while now, and though Facebook lets you do a version of it, it’s clumsy to use.

But as Joel Spolsky suggests, this might be asking a lot of us to exert the mental energy to determine which circle(s) each person belongs in, and to keep up with that over time.  Life is messier than “Friends”, “Family” and “Co-workers” (especially if you live in a smaller city like I do), and many people have adapted to the “Friend label fits all” approach on Facebook, limiting as it might be.  We may not know for sure anyway until a lot more people are using the system.

From an interface design perspective, Google+ has all the hallmarks of a well thought out, well-engineered web application by a company that’s been doing this for a while now.   I think Google+ has a ways to go to reach the level of simplicity that Facebook has enjoyed when it comes to its primary transaction, the display of a status update from a connection and subsequent comments/likes/etc.   On a single post by a connection on Google+, I counted no less than 9 different actions I could take in response (compared to 7 for a comparable post on Facebook, presented with fewer links/clickable widgets).

From a nit picky technical perspective, let me just say that the use of a “+” character as a prominent part of an online service’s name is pretty cringe-worthy.  The character isn’t allowed in a domain name, so they had to use “plus.google.com” for the actual web address. “+” is often used as a joining character in URL query strings or a special modifier in web searches, making its use here conflict a bit now that they’re using it in a site name. Google’s own search engine is confused by it – try searching for “Google” and “+” as search terms and their new offering doesn’t even come up on page one of the results (at least for me).  I even feel slightly uncomfortable using the “+” in the title of this blog post.

Until Google makes available an API that will allow other applications to integrate with Google+, there will be a lot of finger drumming going on in the world of web app developers.  Basic things like “let me post to Google+ from an app on my desktop or from Twitter” aren’t possible yet, and won’t be until that kind of access is allowed.  Google says it’s coming soon.

That’s my initial take on Google+.  Surely they’ll making a number of refinements to the system in the coming weeks and months, and it will be a different ballgame when it’s open for anyone to sign up.  Until then, I don’t think I’ll be spending much time there as a user, but it will be very interesting to watch the evolution of what could be a significant milestone in the very short history of social media.

What do you think about Google+?

If you don’t already know about push notifications, a brief primer: they’re basically just like text messages, except they can be routed/categorized in ways that make them useful to individual applications on your phone.  Instead of getting a generic SMS text message when someone DMs you on Twitter, you can instead use push notifications to have the Twitter app on your phone realize a new DM has come in and alert you according to your personal settings.   When you “view” a push notification, you can be taken to a web page or app that’s relevant to its content.  Best part: the messages don’t count against any text messaging limit (for now).

I started using Prowl about 9 months ago.  My three main uses were:

• Notifying me when certain types of e-mail messages are received (using a combination of Procmail and prowl.pl)
• Notifying me when I’m addressed or mentioned in certain IRC channels (using the prowlnotify.pl script with irssi)
• Notifying me when I’m mentioned on Twitter (using Preyfetcher)

Prowl worked great, and I was very happy with it for these uses.

Recently, I had an itch to scratch with push notifications, and when I looked for someone else who might have already scratched that itch, I noticed that Prowl was last updated in August 2009.  Some of the things I wanted to be able to do with Prowl would need to be custom built.

But wait! There was this hot new app/service called Notifo that seemed to have a much more active user community developing cool new uses for its platform (including a solution for the itch I wanted to scratch).  With plans to launch an Android and Blackberry app soon, releasing their iPhone app (last updated in September 2010) for free, and a well thought out API infrastructure, Notifo is clearly positioning themselves to be THE realtime mobile notifications service.

And it turned out to be a drop-in replacement for Prowl.  The most recent version of the Twitter app for iPhone now includes push notifications, so I’m down to two uses for Notifo:

• Notifying me when certain types of e-mail messages are received (using a combination of Procmail and a custom notifo.pl script using WWW::Notifo)
• Notifying me when I’m addressed or mentioned in certain IRC channels (using the notifonotify script with irssi)

I’m also playing with some other uses:

• Notifications when new items appear in certain RSS feeds
• Notifications from our Nagios-based server monitoring infrastructure
• Notifications when certain activities happen on blogs that I maintain
• Re-routing my real SMS notifications through Notifo so I don’t need to pay for an SMS messaging add-on to my phone plan

Prowl remains a usable and time-tested solution, but the app isn’t free and the community around it seems stagnant.  Notifo is newer and shinier and will probably have some growing pains, but they’re doing it right as far as I can tell, their app is free, and their interface is more flexible.

If you’ve tried one or both out, what do you think?

Regardless of what you think of it, the “realtime web” is here, and I’m enjoying playing around with what it has to offer.  (Beyond the scope of this blog post is addressing the fundamental question about whether or not it’s a good thing to be increasing the number of disruptive, “look at me now” events I have in my daily life, but your smug comments on this matter are still welcome.)

I was only scheduled to give one presentation (“How to talk, or not talk, to your clients about Perl”) but after hearing some of the opening remarks at the conference that spent too much time and energy, IMHO, declaring that “Perl is not dead!” I signed up to give a new talk about possibilities for re-framing that sentiment.

You can view a video of the talk, or you can view my slides [PDF].

Ever since I upgraded my iPhone to IOS4 (the latest version of the phone’s operating system), the Mail application has been flaky when it comes to syncing mail messages via IMAP. Duplicate messages, empty/blank messages, messages dated 12/31/1969, messages that are deleted and then re-appear, and so on.

At first I thought it might be my phone hardware, which had been cursed from the beginning (a story for another time), but after that phone died and Apple replaced it with a brand new one with fresh firmware and settings, and it STILL happened, I was convinced it’s the software on the phone.  Other people are having the same issue all over the place.  But it can be hard to make Apple believe this – said the Apple Genius Bar worker at the Apple Store in Chicago, “they’re probably all just using the phone wrong.”  Wha?

So I decided to look at the source code of the iPhone mail program to see if I could find the problem, but Apple doesn’t make that source code available.

So I decided to turn on the Mail program’s debugging options to have it output the results of the IMAP sync sessions, but it turns out the Mail program doesn’t have any debugging options.

So I decided to look at the log files on the phone’s operating system to see if they reported any software issues I could address, but actually I can’t look at those log files even if they exist because Apple doesn’t let you look behind the scenes.

So I decided to report the issue on the project mailing list that all of the iOS4 developers monitor, and it turns out that no such mailing list exists.

So I decided to go report the issue to Apple to see if they can help.

After submitting a case online, I was called back in 27 seconds (FAST!) and talked to Chris from Apple, who works in iPhone support.  He was very good at gauging my level of tech savvy and talking to me at an appropriate level, so he quickly confirmed that I’d already done all of the normal troubleshooting steps they recommend.  I asked him if this was a known bug, and he said not as far as he could tell.

Chris then connected me with Shawn who is a senior adviser on the iPhone tech support team.  Shawn told me that in fact I had identified a known bug with the iOS4 firmware.  VINDICATION!  He said that they’ve mostly been seeing it in gMail syncing issues, but that they’re aware of it as a wider IMAP issue.

I asked Shawn for the unique identifier number for the bug so that I could go follow the progress of a fix on their public bug tracking system, but it turns out that Apple doesn’t publish information about known bugs until they’re fixed.

I asked Shawn how I could learn more information about when this would be addressed or other recommended fixes in the meantime, and he said I would just have to wait and see.

(Chris and Shawn at Apple were excellent tech support reps within the confines of what they’re allowed to do and say.)

Bottom line: these are the horrors of using a closed-source, proprietary product for a key piece of tech functionality in my life.

What Apple can do better:

• Test its Mail software’s IMAP syncing functionality more thoroughly before releasing it to production.
• Publish information about known software/hardware issues BEFORE they’re resolved so that people having those issues can see what’s up and possibly even contribute to the resolution.
• Train its store Genius Bar workers so that they don’t dismiss a legitimate complaint about functionality problems with smiling condescension.
• I’m pushing it here, but hey, it’s my blog: release the source code for iOS and related applications.

If you’ve had this issue with your iPhone, or similar software/hardware troubleshooting experiences with other vendors, feel free to share in the comments.

Update 9/17/2010: After installing iOS 4.1 a week or so ago, all of the IMAP syncing issues seem to have gone away.  I’ve seen a few reports that problems remain for others, but it’s clear that this release included some fixes for the mail application that weren’t described in the release notes.

Unfortunately, most of the responses (and the ones favored by the Obama administration) are focused on paying insanely large amounts of money to private contractors to create and deploy complex technological solutions in hopes of addressing the threat.

What advocates of this approach fail to appreciate is that (A) most of the actual threat comes from uneducated human operators of the technology in question, and (B) deploying homogeneous, technologically complex solutions often makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Once you get past the flashy headlines and attention-grabbing introductory stories in these articles, meant to scare us into believing how real the threat is (basically, bloodthirsty hacker terrorists are trying to kill us all), each of them seems to come back to one of two recurring themes behind these threats.   Either a human being messed something up, or a piece of technology wasn’t secure enough and is now being exploited.

For the first case, it’s usually things like “so and so unknowingly downloaded a virus onto their USB flash drive and then plugged into a secure government network – things exploded!” or “an e-mail user clicked on a phishing scam link and had their password stolen.”  For the second case, it’s usually “Windows machines are insecure, and so they get taken over and absorbed into botnets, which can then wreak havoc through denial of service attacks” or “a security hole is found in a product made by a brand that everyone was supposed to trust, and so it’s running EVERYWHERE and OMG we’re all going to die.”

But in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at cyberwarfare defense we will most likely see only minimal resources devoted to end-user education and training to defend against social engineering, poor personal security practices, and the related actual vulnerabilities.  The funding will also not include programs to hold hardware and software vendors more accountable for selling more secure products and services to end users.  Instead, it will go toward funding secret surveillance and the further shifting control of the Internet into military hands.

With this approach, in the end we’ll be back to where we are right now.  End-users will continue the insecure personal practices that lead to security breaches, and the continued homogenization of hardware and software will amplify the potential impact of every security hole discovered.   This is not helpful.

But now it’s time to explore the darker side of RSS feeds (or, for those of you stuck in the 1990s, web browser bookmarks): despite making your continued content consumption more efficient, it’s still too tempting to subscribe to too many of them, and once again have too much “clutter” in your electronic life.

My own feed reading list ranges between 100-200 feeds at any given time (thanks NetNewsWire for making this easy!), and I’ve had to be very intentional about keeping the list that “small.”  So, in hopes of helping you prevent RSS feed frenzy, and perhaps to learn about some of your techniques for the same, I present “5 reasons to ditch an RSS feed”:

1. The feed duplicates content you’re getting elsewhere. If a website’s feed is presenting information that you will also find out about via e-mail, printed memos, casual web browsing, water cooler chat or otherwise, choose one and get rid of the others.  Even if the feed presents the information slightly differently (e.g. a Slashdot summary with inane commentary), you may still just be extracting the same key information from it as you will from other sources, and you can always find additional perspectives/presentations on the information later.
2. You always find yourself skipping over the feed’s contents, marking it as read. It’s tempting to feel like having a feed in our RSS reader is the same as keeping up with the activity on that information source, but if you just gloss over it every time to get it out of the way, you’re not saving yourself any time and you’re not gaining much.  (This often happens when you find one interesting post on a blog, subscribe, and then find that the author was a one hit wonder.)  If this phenomenon goes on for weeks or months, unsubscribe from the feed and just move on.
3. The feed is a distraction from how you really want to spend your time. We all need to have some variety in our day, and including a few sources of humor, distraction or whimsy in your web browsing doesn’t hurt anything.  But if you have a significant number of feeds that you know are taking up your time with frivolous things that keep you from doing the things you really want to in life, it’s time to get rid of them.
4. The feed is a dinosaur. Most feed readers know how to tell you when a given subscription hasn’t had any new content for a long time.  For some site content, this is okay – if a software project only announces new releases every couple of months, why not have a feed that precise in its utility and is otherwise dormant?  But if the content creators have clearly dropped off the face of the Earth and you’re not invested in knowing if/when they return, unsubscribe and move on.  It saves a little bit of computing and network resources, and it keeps your subscription list focused on content you’re actually engaged with.
5. The feed makes you angry. Or depressed.  Or stressed out.  It’s one thing to challenge yourself with interesting and thought-provoking content, but it’s another thing entirely to expose yourself to information on a regular basis that you know is going to have a soul-destroying effect on you, just because you think you want to feel in the loop or know what latest injustices are out there.  Our time online (and on the planet, for that matter) is limited and will hopefully be spent doing things that allow us to grow, learn, contribute useful things to our communities, connect with others, find joy and beauty, and so on. The negative stuff will find you just fine, no need to invite it onto your screen any sooner than that.

I hope those criteria are helpful if you find yourself a little overwhelmed by an unruly RSS subscription list; I welcome comments.  And if you have other criteria that you use for subscribing to or unsubscribing from a feed, I’d love to hear them.

But I’m not here to indulge in gadget lust, I’m here to tell you how Sonos, the company, is making great use of Twitter for its public relations and customer service efforts (and, by extension, how Twitter is turning out to be pretty useful for that stuff.)

Thomas Meyer (who is hopefully a real person) is the voice of Sonos on Twitter, and here’s all the stuff he does right:

1. Having a presence at all. By being available on Twitter, the company can engage its customers and users directly and immediately about their experiences, requests, and concerns.
2. Having a real person as your Sonos personality. A lot of companies set up their Twitter accounts and post anonymously as “The Company.”  That can work, but it’s even better when the voice is that of a real human being.  Thomas uses “I” statements, and has some personality in what he posts (as much as is possible in 140 characters).
3. Looking for customers to engage. Thomas seems to regularly scan the public Twitter timeline to find mentions of Sonos and related keywords, responds to their tweets if appropriate, and then “follows” those users.  This happened to me when I posted about my system a few weeks ago – it hadn’t occured to me to look for Sonos on Twitter before that.  Again, this creates an instant, direct connection that is pretty hard to find with many product-oriented companies these days.
4. Looking for potential customers to engage. In addition to scanning for direct mentions of Sonos, Thomas also looks for folks who are out there talking about gadgets, audio, music, and related topics, and knows when to gently respond with “hey, have you thought about Sonos?”  It’s not pushy and I don’t think it qualifies as spam (since, in one sense, everything on Twitter is spam), it just creates some awareness.
5. Suggesting value-added ways to get more from the product. Thomas regularly posts about ways you can get more out of your Sonos system without spending money – free music that’s available for download, cool tips and tricks from other users, etc.  It’s clever, friendly, and useful all at the same time.
6. Responding effectively to questions and concerns. If someone mentions any sort of feature request, concern or question about Sonos on Twitter, Thomas is right there with either an answer, or with his e-mail address so that the conversation can continue directly outside of Twitter.

This is probably the best corporate use of Twitter that I’ve seen in my limited time participating in ITS limited existence.

If you’re thinking about using Twitter for corporate/institutional communications, a few related things to note:

1. You HAVE to make time for it. Engaging the Twitterverse seems like it must be a major component of Thomas’s job description, and I can’t imagine he could do what he does just “here and there” on top of other responsibilities.  If you want to use Twitter at this level, make sure you allocate the people time to do it right.
2. Is Twitter reaching the right target audience for you? It’s no coincidence that there’s overlap between people who have time and Internet connectivity to mess around on Twitter and people who buy ridiculously luxurious audio gadgets.  If you sell animal feed to rural farmers, you are probably not going to have the same level of engagement on Twitter.
3. Don’t get too close to your users. I think it’s possible to over-do the directness of the company-consumer relationship, such that the expectations will be set unreasonably high for the kind of response any one person can get from you via Twitter, possibly resulting in a backlash if something does go wrong.

I remain skeptical of Twitter, now more out of curious fascination in the context of many other cultural trends that worry me, rather than cynicism about this particular tool.  But within the scope of what it means to offer good customer service to a base of product users, I can appreciate that there’s a way to do it right with Twitter, and Sonos has that nailed.

1) The Pal-Item reports on a meeting happening today about technology in schools:

The Richmond Community Schools Board of School Trustees has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday to learn more about the school corporation’s technology needs…Technology coordinator Rob Tidrow has reported to the board that the school corporation is operating with outdated technology, and in some cases, technology that is obsolete…School officials have asked the board to consider paying for the upgrades with dollars available in a rainy day fund or the school corporation’s savings account.

I support our schools having current technology so that students can be engaged with and knowledgeable about how to get the most out of these tools. In the past that may have inevitably meant running the latest version of Microsoft Windows on the latest desktops from Dell (although there are plenty who would have said there were alternatives then too).

But in an age where many technology tools and services are online, and aren’t tied to a particular operating system or hardware vendor, it shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion that a school has to spend large amounts of money on proprietary software licenses and cutting edge hardware, when low-cost or free software and older but perfectly usable hardware can do the same job. In a time where school budgets are being cut, it’s worth looking at other options before reinvesting in more hardware and software that may also become obsolete as quickly as what they are replacing.

I pointed Mark to this issue, and in response he wrote up one particular technical approach that RCS could take. There are others, too.

2) Jason Truitt writes in his blog at the Pal-Item:

Expensive new technology requirements for 911 offices have brought six area counties together in a search for solutions. Fayette, Franklin, Randolph, Rush, Union and Wayne counties all use the same [911 emergency] system now, but it will be obsolete next year and no longer supported by Microsoft.

There may not be any off-the-shelf open source offerings that will meet this need, but for crying out loud, don’t just sign up for the next Microsoft contract only to find yourselves back in the same position a few years from now. While they’re teaming up, I hope they explore what other communities are doing to get more value out of their emergency systems, whether it’s creating systems themselves that use more open standards, finding new uses for old equipment, or even challenging the expensive requirements that might not be serving community interests as much as they are guaranteeing income for influential vendors.

These two particular cases may be decided as they always tend to be. I hope that in general, local decision-makers will realize that there are other ways to go that save money and make better use of existing resources.

I’m using a 1.5GHz Powerbook G4, which uses the PowerPC (PPC) architecture. I downloaded version 2.2 of the iPhoneOS SDK, build 9m2621-final.

After the regular installation of the iPhoneOS SDK (which is really just the regular Xcode install with some additional packages thrown in) was complete, the Xcode new project menu was notably missing the option to choose the iPhone platform. On the advice of this 3by9 article, I took these steps:

1. Mount the SDK installer disk image
2. Open the packages folder
3. One at a time, install all of the .pkg files that begin with “iPhone”, using the default install destination
4. When done, you’ll have a “Platforms” directory in the root level of your Mac’s hard drive. Move the contents of that directory into the /Developer/Platforms/ directory. If you’re like me, when you’re done, you’ll have three directories in /Developer/Platforms: “iPhoneOS.platform”, “iPhoneSimulator.platform” and “MacOSX.platform”.

Once that step is done, you’ll be able to launch Xcode and create new projects that use the iPhoneOS platform and application types. But, you still won’t be able to build or run those applications, because Apple has hardcoded the “i386″ (Intel) architecture as the only valid one to compile for. Thanks to a variety of comments on the above 3by9 post and comments 23-25 on this TUAW article, here are the remaining steps to address that:

• Close Xcode and edit this file (perhaps after making a backup): /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Library/Xcode/Specifications/iPhone Simulator Architectures.xcspec
• Change line 12 to read Name = "Standard (iPhone Simulator: i386 ppc)";
• Change line 16 to read RealArchitectures = ( i386, ppc );
• Add this chunk before the last closing parentheses:

       // PowerPC
       {
            Type = Architecture;
            Identifier = ppc;
            Name = "PowerPC";
            Description = "32-bit PowerPC";
            PerArchBuildSettingName = "PowerPC";
            ByteOrder = big;
            ListInEnum = NO;
            SortNumber = 106;
       },

• Save the file and close it. Now relaunch Xcode.
• With Xcode open and your project loaded, right click on the project name under the “Groups & Files”, and select “Get Info”
• Under the “Build” tab and in the “Architectures” menu, change these options:
  Set Architectures to “Native Architecture of Build Machine”
  Set Base SDK to “Simulator – iPhoneOS 2.2″
  Leave Build Active Architecture Only checked
  Edit Valid Architectures to be not only include armv6, but also “ppc” and “i386″.
  (I think some of these may be redundant, but it’s the combination that’s working for me.)

When you next build your project, you shouldn’t get any errors about VALID_ARCHS.

I hope that’s helpful. Since this is only one particular combination of build hardware/architecture and SDK software version, I’m sure there are other combinations out there where the above may not work, your mileage may vary.

Now, back to working on building an actual application…