Technology

Missing Sync

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I just bought Mark / Space’s the missing sync for the pocket PC. I am now using it to sync my HP iPaq 1945 with my iMac. It works as advertised. I like that I can sync avantgo now without having my work laptop at home. It also does bluetooth syncing. I love that. It was kind of pricey at $40 something, but it is really cool.

I also have their palm sync product. It is good, but I am having problems with the avantgo sync with my Treo and the iMac. I need to find time to work on that issue.

So far high marks for Mark / Space and their products. Makes owning a Mac less stressful knowing you can use more hardware with it, (i.e. my pocket pc and palm) without less features than I would on a PC.

Hot Chocolate Or A Frapachino

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My throat hurts today so I am debating if I want hot chocolate or a starbucks frapichino? The frap will wake me up from my drug induced sleep from last night, but the hot chocolate will ease my throat a bit. I will have to hit starbucks and find out.

Its funny, I hit the starbucks in Union Square. There are two of them, but I always goto the same one. That place is like a starbucks commercial. There is always one or two people with the laptops (one always a big powerbook) on the T-Mobile Wifi, sipping some concoction of coffee. I always find it amusing. I can’t believe that the majority of starbucks across the country people do that, but they are making there money back at the one by my office.

I will admit I have never done the coffee house wifi experience. Actually don’t think I have ever used a hot spot anywhere. I have used high speed internet at hotels, and at Laptop Lane in airports but never a wifi hotspot. Maybe I am not as big a geek as everyone thinks I am:)

RT

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I am still crawling into the linux world. The more I try to get into it, the more I realize how much there is to learn about it.

My latest project I want to get into is RT (Request Tracker). It is a ticketing or request system that is open source. Idealab uses it and many others. It is supposed to be really good. I am trying to install it on my Suse 9.0 desktop at work. If I can get it to work, maybe we will deploy it and replace Mailflow for our support tracking system. Mailflow is good, but I don’t like the fact that it requires you to use IE. That locks me into using windows. I cannot even use IE on my mac, the pages don’t load right.

I still have to see if/how RT’s reporting functions look. Mailflow has nice features that tells me when I get requests, how many and other historical information that is very cool so I can do proper planning.

Powerbook Update

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I have to say my original assessment is correct. it does run cooler than the older models. It is not uncomfortable to use after a while like the old one was. I only have 256megs of ram and so far it has been fine. I haven’t needed to bump it up to 512 or a Gig of memory. It could use a bigger hard drive, but that would have been a special order and I didn’t want to buy the laptop direct from apple or wait 3 weeks for it. Battery life is ok, but I am comparing it with my Thinkpad with a Pentium M that sips the power and lasts hours.

I am on the hunt for a bluetooth mouse for the powerbook. I cannot find a good one. I don’t like the apple 1 button mouse so that is out. the only other one that works for the mac, a belkin one I believe had a bad review. I would really like one that I can use between a PC and a Mac. Oh to dream

If I haven’t mentioned it before (I have) my Powerbook using Kung-Log is my Blogging system of choice. I do allot on the train (doing that right now). The keyboard is just great on this thing.

Auto Configuration Of Mozilla

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For the past year I have been pushing people at my company to use Mozilla 1.x. The free version of the Netscape Gecko browser engine. I have come full circle with this browser since I originally liked and used netscape 1.x and 2.x but dropped it by version 4.x for IE.

Our customer service reps have been complaining of slow computers for as long as I can remember. At first we thought it was all sorts of issues. We realized it was the reps after we bought brand new Compaq computers early last year.

It turns out that these reps have 10-20 windows open at any time. 80-90% of them are IE windows. A desktop with 256megs or ram ends up needing 300-500 megs of memory. For what these people are doing it is not cost effective to buy more memory, and don’t even think of asking them to close some windows. I won’t go on and on about that, but I am a power user and only have 5-8 windows open at a time. How hard is it to close something you are not using and open it again several hours later when you need it again for 5 minutes??? Answer is people are lazy.

The solution we have is use Mozilla. I found that mozilla with tabbed browsing only costs 18-25 megs of memory for the first browser instance, and 1-2 megs per tabbed window. IE on the other hand uses 18-25 megs per IE window. By using mozilla you could save hundreds of megs of memory on a computer.

The problem we have had with adopting Mozilla is administrative. We needed a way to push out the bookmarks file to every user when we make changes. My company controls our Rep’s bookmarks so they have the most up to date list of sites to use while searching for stuff. I finally found how to create a users.js file in everyone’s mozilla profile that points to a bookmark file outside of the mozilla profile directory. Now we can add a line to our login script that will refresh the bookmarks every time a user logs in. With the users.js file we can also customize any other mozilla security or UI feature, but we have to manually copy the file every time we need to make an update so that becomes problematic. The issue is that mozilla creates a GUID for each profile and uses that as the profile directory name. We cannot script an update to copy files if the directory is different for each user.

The bookmark issue thankfully was the major problem with mozilla. We are now waiting to finish up other profile and desktop changes to begin rolling it out to everyone sometime in April or May

With adoption of Mozilla as our browser my company moves closer to the open source community. We still use Windows XP on the desktop. We have to. Our call center software requires it and that probably wont’ change in the foreseeable future. But we use Open office.org 1.1 for our reps. It saves us almost $400 per computer. We also use Jabber as our chat system. Granted the jabber system we use was purchased and it is a shrink wrapped windows application, but it is based off of the open source jabber standard. The desktop clients are all free.

Because of the reliance on the free open source software, besides the OS (comes with the new computers we get anyway) our call center software, and MSFT CAL’s to access the file server, we have virtually no desktop licenses to buy when we add new computers. Norton AV and Ghost are the only other things that I can think of we purchase and that is only $20-30 per computer. Someone explain to me why a phone rep needs a $400 version of office for email and typing quick text and spread sheets? The new math can’t even explain away that kind of costs.

The Cell Phone

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I have mentioned that I began using T-Mobile exclusively as my Mobile Phone service back in the end of November. Since then I canceled my old AT&T account. I still have a phone and account with Verizon sitting in a drawer. I used verizon before I went back to T-Mobile and I still have several months left on my contract. I have lowered the price plan I have but I have been slow to cancel the account. I wanted to be sure T-Mobile worked everywhere I went. It seems like it does, but now that I waited 2-3 months to cancel the Verizon account I am not sure if canceling is worth it.

In December I added up how much it would cost to keep the phone until the contract ran out, vs paying the $175 early cancelation fee. Back then it was cheaper to cancel the account, but I wasn’t ready to get rid of it at the time. I am known for changing cell phones allot, but I have never ever paid the cancelation fee. I don’t want to start now. Now it is March, I think it is cost effective to just keep the phone until the contract is up and then cancel it.

I bring all this up because I am trying to figure out what service I can use to solve a problem I have. I love my Treo 600, but it doesn’t have bluetooth. I want a bluetooth phone with internet access so I can use it to connect my laptop to check email and browse the web when out of the office or home. Right now I am on amtrak and am able to get my mail off the Treo, but it would be much better to download it right into my mail app (outlook 2003 for the PC, or Mail on the Mac). That way I could write real response to messages and not just the 1 line comments I can eak out on the Treo.

My options are to get another phone and service, or get another phone with bluetooth and swap the SIM card when I want to use it. I do not want to spend money on a new service. I can’t wait to get rid of my Verizon account as it is. FYI, verizon does not offer bluetooth phones and they have a really expensive data plan. The other option of swapping the SIM card can work, but it can get messy with all those small parts of the phone lying around while I am making the change.

The dilemma continues…

Work Computers

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I have several computers at my desk at work. Scary as it may seem, I need them all. Ever few weeks I try to get rid of one or more, but only end up cleaning up wires.

Currently I have a computer for running VMWare sessions. It needs to have allot of ram and hard drive space, and I like to keep very little on the OS besides the VMWare.

I then have a machine that has 2 CD-ROM’s in it so I can burn disks. That machine also doubles as a box on a special V-LAN so I can test our softphone and other voice applications. That network is the only one where I can do that.

Then I have an old desktop that I run Linux on. Currently I have Suse 9.0 on that machine.

I have a spot for my powerbook. I have a 4 port KVM and all 3 other machines are on it, so I put the powerbook on the last port. I am finding recently that I am using it as my primary machine for email and office application work. Go Apple.

On another monitor setup I have my company Thinkpad T-40. This is my primary machine. It has all the day to day programs I use, and all my files on it.

At last count that was 5 machines. I have also been known to put a server or other desktops by my desk and hook them up to a kvn so I can build them or work on them. It gets really load in my office when I do that. Add to that Keith’s 2-3 machines and we have allot of heat also during the summer.

The crazy thing is we probably need space for more computers, not less. We are always tinkering with something new. And that is why I like what I do!!!

The New Treo 600

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I finally got my new Treo 600 Tuesday night. It is really cool. I installed most of my programs onto it. My first complaints are as follows: Polyphonic ring tones, can’t they make a regular phone ringer sound also? I have 20 ring tones, and they all suck. I want a normal ring. You can’t find that on the internet, but you can find anything on the top 40. What is going on? Until I find a normal ringer sound, I am going to use really annoying rings as a statement of my dissatisfaction. Hey, I suffer through everyone else’s crappy ring tones.

The second and I think last problem with the phone is the lack of a good case. Palmone doesn’t have one, and no third party company has one either. I have a $400 phone with a crappy case. Give me a belt clip or something!!!

On the plus side, I think the internet connects faster on this Treo vs my 270 using T-Mobile. The screen is much nicer. The speakerphone is great, and of course it is SMALLER than my 270.

I just bought The Missing Sync 2.0 for the Mac. It allows me to use the internet connection on my mac to sync avantgo. It also allows me to mount my SD card on my mac and move files. It is a nice piece of software.

Now I await the IMAP version of snapper mail. Other software wish lists is the distinctive ring tone software that I had on my 270. They don’t make a 600 version of it yet.

The screen protector for the Treo is on order and I have to find a docking cradle. I am buying accessories. This device is a keeper. Until something better comes along anyway!

The Treo 600 Shipped

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I got an email a few hours ago saying my long awaited Treo 600 finally shipped out today. Fedex says that it will arrive tomorrow (Tuesday). Hopefully they are right. I hope I actually get good use of it. From what I saw when I had the AT&T Treo 600 for two days in november I think I will be happy. I will know tomorrow.

Gadget Update

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My PalmOne Treo 600 is on preorder. I hope to get it by mid march. Right around my birthday. Sooner would be nice, but I don’t have any faith in PalmOne since I have been waiting since October for this device.

Palm also announced they will not support OS X in the new version of the Palm OS. That pisses me off since they are compeeting with microsoft but only make software that works on Windows. Me having 2 Mac’s now doesn’t help matters either. I finally started using iCal & Address book. They are not so bad. I like that I can change the font and color of notes in outlook, but that is the only difference between the software that I don’t like. Thankfully a third party company says they will make sync software that will work with isync. I am going to try them out when I get the Treo 600. The software is supposed to sync with avantgo, a function Palm’s current software does not do. Unfortunatly the software from Mark / Space does not work with my current Treo 270, so I will wait a few weeks.

I am about to cancel my Verizon Wireless phone. I haven’t needed to use since December, except once. That constitutes a reason to cancel a $40 a month charge. I will take the hit on early termination fee. This will be the first time I have ever paid that fee, but I don’t want to wait until augist to cancel the phone. That will cost too much. Once done, I will have just my T-Mobile phone. Now I have to figure out how to use the Treo 600 with T-Mobile while connecting to my Powerbook so I have a dial up connection for it. No Bluetooth yet for the Treo so I will need a USB cable to do this. I am not sure if software exists to do what I want, but I will look.