Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Why can't digital cameras come with a useful memory card?

Over the last year, I have purchased two Canon digital cameras. Both are excellent, and I would recommend them to anyone. But each came with a worthless 32 MB SD flash card. So did the (now broken) HP point-and-shoot I picked up last year. And the Nikon that preceded the Canon. In fact, it appears that just about every digital camera comes with a tiny, mostly-useless “starter” memory card.

I understand the reasoning of including a memory card - the camera won’t function without one, and people like to be able to play with their new electronics right out of the box.

But who thought it was a good idea to include such a tiny card? Continue Reading »

Another Storage Decisions has come and gone, and 2008’s New York show did not disappoint. TechTarget always recruits an excellent set of conferencegoers, and not even the Wall Street crisis could dampen attendance. Even Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Dian Lane, Keira Knightley, John McCain, and Sarah Palin made appearances at this year’s show! (No, seriously, they were really there!)

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

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.

For IT-centric workers, being productive from the road requires more than just exceptional personal skills: A killer laptop is needed to replace an entire office full of equipment. Let’s consider what a modern digital nomad’s laptop should include.

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Sprint USB EV-DO + Cradlepoint personal hotspot = sweet!

I was traveling this morning, and was shocked to not be able to check on my flight status with my iPhone. It just sat there churning when I arrived in Chicago. I couldn’t figure it out, but quickly booted up the Cradlepoint router and Sprint EV-DO card and was online. Since I also had critical work-related email to respond to, I would have been seriously upset if I didn’t have backup connectivity.

It turns out that AT&T’s network was out in quite a few locations. Although I didn’t see Chicago on he lists at first, it was definitely down this morning at 7 local time!

I guess my iPhone’s camera wasn’t the only thing on the fritz in Chicago!

You've got voicemail!

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 idea if their attempt at communication has been successful.  In fact, I was long loath to trust voice mail systems at all, instead just asking people to call my other numbers or email me.

With this in mind, I was impressed by Apple’s reinvention of voice mail with the iPhone.  Although the Visual Voicemail feature is widely recognized as referring to the interactive table of voice messages shown in the phone, their implementation goes well beyond that, offering all I wanted in a voice mail system.  Indeed, although I was considering other systems prior to getting the iPhone, I have since settled on Apple’s simple but effective system.

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Translation: American Airlines does not want my business anymore

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 things work out.

But American Airlines recently decided that it didn’t like paying Kayak for referrals, and has apparently pulled its listings, even through third parties like Orbitz. Now, Southwest never included listings on Kayak, but that was no great loss to me. But I’m an American elite (Gold) and they were my strong number two airline choice. I was even thinking of shifting more business their way! But thanks to their spat over a few dollars of commission, they’re unlikely to get much more business from me.

The ironic thing is, I never used Kayak for bookings anyway! I always shifted over to my page at aa.com to buy the tickets, since it ensured that I got the right flight, codes, and instructions. So they never lost a dollar of my business to Kayak.

US Airways is becoming the Ryanair of the US!

Air travel really is getting rapidly worse. The other day I was forced to fly cross country on US Airways, and it was just depressing. The flight attendants had to pitch credit card applications over the PA and in the aisles, they charged $2 for a bottle of water or cup of coffee, and there were ads on the tray tables. Oh, and US Airways doesn’t do planeside check - they require you to check your bags through (and pay a hefty charge) if they don’t fit.

Something has to change here. The airlines are almost bankrupt, yet there is a huge volume of travelers who must get from place to place. Service is dropping, passengers are unhappy, and no one is doing anything about it. Virgin America and JetBlue seem to be eating everyone’s lunch right now, but it won’t be long before they’re in trouble, too. And I can’t fly them anyway, since neither comes to Ohio. Something’s gotta give…

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 shipping or trashing other vendors. Instead, I’ll focus on the benefits and beneficiaries of email archiving and how to make this critical technology a priority for the business, not just IT.

If you would like to attend, please register for the session at On24.

Sprint USB EV-DO + Cradlepoint personal hotspot = sweet!

Goodbye, AT&T 3G! After a year of hoping coverage would improve, I finally jumped ship from AT&T’s 3G network and moved my mobile wireless broadband service to Sprint. I grabbed a refurbished USB EV-DO device and signed up through a no-contract reseller and couldn’t be happier with the service so far. And I picked up a Cradlepoint router at the same time, giving me a portable Wi-Fi hotspot so any device I have (or a friend has) can get online at broadband speed from anywhere. Awesome!

So, yeah, my headline is a little misleading. But it’s true - rather than buy a 3G iPhone in my 3G-starved hometown, I decided to kill all of my mobile connectivity woes at once, including stepping up to 3G speeds on the iPhone. Read on for details about what was wrong with AT&T Laptop Connect, why I selected Sprint, the Cradlepoint PHS300 router, and how to get all of this with no contract.

Continue Reading »

I recently mentioned how impressed I was with the speed of my MacBook, even when running Windows in Boot Camp. Of course, this was a subjective feeling, so I decided to try timing some events to see if the clock agreed with my brain. Sure enough, the Mac is faster than my Dell XPS M1330 by a good margin. But I was surprised to learn that Vista, even in Ultimate guise, wasn’t half bad, either. The root of my performance gripes seems to be what happens after Vista is booted - after the desktop appears, all OSes spend time doing something in the background, but Vista spends much more time.

My test was simple: I used the iPhone’s stopwatch to time the following key events after startup:

1. The Mac Gong or disappearance of the PC or VMware BIOS screen
2. The appearance of the login box (I paused the timer at this point to give me time to enter my password)
3. The appearance of the desktop
4. I then clicked on the icons to launch my mail and web browser apps, assuming this would be the first thing most people would do on startup, and timed how long it took for each to load and present content
5. Finally, I stopped the clock when the system appeared usable - hourglasses disappeared, the disk stopped chugging like crazy, and all background apps had loaded and were running
6. I also timed how long it took for the system to power down after ordering a shutdown

Not surprisingly, the MacBook with OS X was fastest, though it took a surprisingly longish time to get Mail and Safari launched compared to Firefox and Outlook in Windows. OS X also excels at knocking off the backup tasks and giving a stable, ready-to-use system.

Booting Windows Vista Ultimate in Boot Camp was surprisingly speedy, too, and this was the core of my test. The Mac gave me a working Windows environment in just 2:15, compared to 1:40 for OS X and 3:10 for my Dell XPS M1330. I’m not sure exactly what the Dell is doing, but it churns and chugs for quite a while on bootup, even after I stopped the clock, and it’s got a nice clean install with few apps running.

Finally, I timed my Boot Camp volume in VMware Fusion (1.1.3) and found that, although it was speedy enough when it was running, it took 30 seconds longer to get started than booting natively. But even Fusion was quicker than the Dell.

My feeling is that Microsoft has spent some time optimizing the startup experience in Vista, trimming the time it takes to get a login window and desktop by shifting some work to background tasks that interfere with usability once the system appears to be running. A clever trick, that, but one that frustrates me on a daily basis as I stare at a desktop full of icons that I can’t use quite yet.

Once again, this is not the most scientific test ever, but it helps to show what I feel about the Mac:

• It’s quicker when I want to sit down and start working
• Windows is much quicker on the Mac than the Dell, despite only slightly better specs (2.2/4 GB vs. 2.0/2 GB)

I ran each test a few times, and although they varied by a few seconds they were fairly consistent.

The glorious Victorinox Swiss Army CyberTool 34: Geek's best friend or security's worst nightmare?

Aah, security. It seems that, in the last decade, the balance between liberty and security in the United States has tilted rather strongly, to the point that we expect to be scanned and have our possessions confiscated before entering buildings. Such was the case when my family and I made our pilgrimage to the Empire State Building in New York, separating me from my beloved Victorinox CyberTool after 10 years of loyal service. It’s a good thing they took it away, too!

I had planned on using the built-in pozidrive, Torx, and Phillips (#0 and #1) bits to dismantle the building and take it home with me. The pliers and scissors might have helped there, too. And since they didn’t confiscate (or really even thoroughly check) my bag, the corkscrew, bottle opener, and can opener might have allowed me to get wild with the Chardonnay and Vienna sausages while I was working! Good thing it packs a toothpick and tweezers, too, since those things can be dangerous. And if anyone tried to stop me, I would have had my choice of 1.5″ or 2.5″ blades to “defend” myself!

Or perhaps I could have used the tiny screwdriver to fix my glasses and the scissors to snip the end off of my kids’ drinking straws to make it easier for them to enjoy lunch. Either way, we’re all safer now that my CyberTool is forever in the hands of the professionals on 34th street. Just don’t let them know that Amazon delivered a new Onyx CyberTool 34 last week!