An Ode to Visual Voicemail
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 31. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.
I have long felt that voicemail was archaic. Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has no [...]
Microsoft Working to Improve Windows 7 Boot Times
Posted by Stephen in Terabyte home on 29. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
Confirming my observation of longish Windows boot times, Microsoft engineer Michael Fortin today blogged about the booting improvements scheduled for Windows 7.
He rightly points out that there are really three different “boot times” to consider:
Boot
Resume from sleep
Resume from hibernate
Note that the Microsoft definition of “boot (1)” only gets us through desktop launch and background task [...]
Grapples and Tangelos: Why it’s Impossible to Compare Fairly
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 28. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I get the same questions all the time: Should I buy X or Y? Is Z better than Q? But as much as it sounds like a cop-out, I always answer, “well, this sounds like a cop-out, but that depends on what you’re doing with it…”
Now EMC’s Chuck Hollis has (bravely) stuck his neck out [...]
Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 28. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of [...]
Custom Drive Icons in Mac OS X
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 27. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
Custom drive icons can help you to keep your removable and internal drives straight. It’s simple to do in Mac OS X, but illustrates an odd way in which Apple implemented their split resource/data fork filesystem idea in a GUI.
American Airlines Points Gun At Foot
Posted by Stephen in Personal on 26. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I once enthused about my favorite travel sites, and among these was Kayak.com, the AJAX-y Web 2.0 travel search engine that I use to find flights. The thing I love about Kayak is that I can literally slide the dials to look for just the right departure time, connections, and even planes to make sure [...]
Determine Your Outlook Web Access URL
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 25. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve been trying to work out how to sync my various data sources into a cohesive whole for a while now, and using the Mac has made it somewhat easier, since it supports a variety of data sources. For users of Microsoft Exchange, one of the most valuable sources for sync data is Outlook Web [...]
Trying To Get An Email Archiving Project Approved?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Personal on 20. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
Do you know that need email archiving but just can’t get the project off the ground? I’ll be presenting a one-hour webinar called “Getting Your (Email Archiving) Project Approved” next Wednesday, August 27 at 1 PM Eastern time.
The session is presented by Mimosa, but the content is independent, so you won’t hear me pitch log [...]
Apple Comes Clean on MagSafe Failures
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 20. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
Apple has finally fessed up to the terrifying failure (read smoke, sparks, fire) of their beautiful but fragile MagSafe power connectors. The combination of a slim, flexible cable, tiny but firm-gripping magnetic connector, and inadequate strain-relief causes the wires inside to burst their sheaths, short out, and burn. I suspect that Apple’s built-in winding “ears” [...]
MAC Addresses Are Bad Passwords
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 19. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
As I posted the other day, my new Cradlepoint PHS300 3G router is just awesome, and I would happily recommend it to anyone. If you do get one, however, be sure to change the default password immediately. The seemingly-strong password is worse than insecure – it’s available to anyone who asks whenever the router is [...]
