Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Reports are filtering in today that Western Digital has reached an agreement to purchase Fujitsu’s hard disk drive development and manufacturing assets. Already the world’s second-biggest drive manufacturer, Western Digital would edge closer to market-leader, Seagate, with the acquisition. The move would give WD even greater manufacturing capacity in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand, and would potentially open up greater access to the laptop OEM market, where Fujitsu has performed well over the last few years.

Let’s take a look at the two company’s product lines and market positions as we determine the impact of this deal.

Update: Fujitsu is denying the deal, even though the market loves it, but it still makes sense for WDC to pick up either Fujitsu or Hitachi’s disk drive business to better compete with Seagate.
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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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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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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:

1. Boot
2. Resume from sleep
3. Resume from hibernate

Note that the Microsoft definition of “boot (1)” only gets us through desktop launch and background task execution. It does not include my number one boot annoyance, namely “what the heck is Windows doing for two minutes after booting that makes it still totally unusable?!?”

According to Microsoft’s analysis, my “boot (1)” time of 80 seconds is longish, but within the standard deviation from the mean of 30-40 seconds. I’m glad, though, that Microsoft is working on this, and doubly glad that they recognize the “other perceptions that users deem as reflecting boot time, such as when the disk stops, when their apps are fully responsive, or when the start menu and desktop can be used.”

And I’m glad they’re considering resume time, too - this morning it took my PC 16 minutes to be usable after I woke it up! Seriously - there’s the desktop, now let’s listen to the disk chug and get nothing done for over a quarter of an hour at the start of my day! While waiting, I turned on the Mac and read my mail in Entourage - not exactly the outcome Microsoft would have wanted, I bet. Here’s hoping Windows 7 brings the improvements that Mr. Fortin is clearly working on!

This makes it much easier to see which drive is which!

I previously wrote about the benefits of custom drive icons, which can help you to keep your removable and internal drives straight, and how to create them on Windows Vista. Well, Mac OS X surprised me by using the same generic icon for every drive, so I set about figuring out how to customize them here, too.

It turns out it’s not only simple to do, but illustrates an odd way in which Apple implemented their split resource/data fork filesystem idea in a GUI. This exercise taught me a lot - what an ICNS file is, how Apple stores drive icons, what a droplet is, and how to use GIMP on a Mac.

This is part 1 - where I’ll go over the basics. Part 2 covers custom Boot Camp drive icons and other troubles.

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

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 powered on!

Let’s back up, though. When I first set up the router, I was impressed by how simple it was. Turn it on and its Wi-Fi LAN appears almost immediately. Connect to the LAN and your browser is redirected to the router’s management interface (at 192.168.0.1).

I was happy to see that, unlike nearly all router manufacturers, Cradlepoint does not use a default password. Rather, each router has its own unique password - the last six hexadecimal characters of the MAC address, which is printed on a sticker on the bottom of the unit. At the time, this seemed much better than the big manufacturers, which tend to use the easily-guessable “admin” or another short, simple-to-crack word.

But the Cradlepoint also uses the last three characters of the MAC address as its default Wi-Fi SSID. So three of the password’s six characters are broadcast constantly to anyone who cares to see, regardless of whether they are even connected to the LAN! This literally makes the password 4,096 times easier to guess. My router’s SSID was “PHS-28a”, and the password was “02828a” - see the problem?  Amazingly enough, though, this isn’t the worst problem!

Most people know that DNS servers translate domain names (like “blog.fosketts.net”) into IP addresses (like “208.113.206.204″). But Ethernet networks (including Wi-Fi) use a different addressing scheme, and IP addresses themselves must be translated into a MAC address (like “00:30:44:02:82:8a”) before it can transmit data. Any connected client can use a command line program called arp to look up a MAC address, which means they can simply ask the router for the MAC thus discover the password. See my password in that example? But wait, it gets worse still!

Cradlepoint suggests setting a connection password, which will keep people from using its 3G connection but will do nothing to prevent them from using arp to find out the router’s password. Smarter people will turn off the SSID broadcast or use a WEP password, which will keep them from connecting to the router’s Wi-Fi network. Although this will stop the arp attack, the password is still vulnerable. See, the address is included as part of every Wi-Fi packet in plaintext, and as any wardriver will tell you, it’s simple to snoop on Wi-Fi packets. So the router is continually transmitting its password, whether one is connected or not. One would need to figure out the WEP password in order to connect, but there are techniques that allow this, and the attacker would then be able to use the administrator password to reconfigure the router.

The Cradlepoint also supports WPA/WPA2, which is much more secure than WEP and would dramatically improve the situation, but not all devices support it. But the real solution is much simpler - change the administrator password to something much more secure. Sadly, most people won’t do any of this - they’ll leave the password as it is and thus leave their router totally open to attack.

But let me just take a moment to beg those who read this post: Don’t ever use a MAC address as a password!

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.

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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.

I’ve now been a Mac user for two months. Since I switched primarily to get access to Apple’s excellent hardware, I thought I would issue an update on my observations about it at this point. I should note that I’m limiting this post to the hardware (maybe I’ll cover OS X some other time), and that I’m using a maxed-out Late-2007 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro.

Although some shortcomings have appeared, I’m pleased with the Mac overall. It definitely met my expectations and continues to meet my needs, mixing portability and performance in an excellent package.  I am impressed by Apple’s hardware design and component choices, especially when compared to other computers with similar specifications that I have used.  And, as noted by Tom’s Hardware, the specification of the machine was reasonably priced, especially since I purchased it at a substantial discount and upgraded it myself.

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It’s Olympics time, but despite high tech elements, it’s still tough to watch what you want.  NBC has scheduled more coverage than ever, but much is delayed and none is properly listed in guide services.  And TiVo’s Olympics Guru Guide is worse than useless in so many ways.

Here’s the rundown about what you have to do and why:

1. If you have an HD TiVo, don’t use the Guru Guide.  It’ll only record in SD, even if you removed those channels from your lineup!  Oh, and that Guru Guide doesn’t show up on the TiVo web site anyway!
2. Consider getting a DVR Expander hard drive for your Series 3 or HD TiVo (if you don’t already have one) because NBC is scheduling their Olympic coverage in massive 5- to 7-hour blocks and cutting between sports.  So if you want to watch anything, you’ll be recording multiple blocks at 35 GB to 49 GB a pop!
3. Olympics coverage is showing up on NBC, Universal, USA, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, and Oxygen, as well as two new special HD channels that you probably don’t receive.  Good luck keeping it all straight!
4. TiVo has the coverage on NBC HD, Universal HD, and USA HD listed as “XXIX Summer Olympics“, but with conflicting episode numbers.  So there’s an episode 1 of this “show” listed on each of the three channels and all are different!  This will break your season pass.
5. How about a wishlist?  TiVo is including individual sports events in the “show” descriptions, so you could set a wishlist for “Olympics Swimming”, but again, it’ll record a massive 8-hour chunk of programming on Saturday, taking up 56 GB of disk space for a single event.
6. I decided to set a max-priority season pass for the main NBC HD channel for “XXIX Summer Olympics”, keeping 5 episodes and recording only first-run, which will get the main popular/USA-dominated sports and the opening ceremony.  I also set lowest-priority “record all” season passes on UHD and USAHD keeping 2 to catch some more.  This ought to slurp down the space on my Series 3’s 500 GB Western Digital expander drive in no time!
7. If you want to get really tricky you could consult NBC’s online schedule and set manual recordings for events.  But don’t count on NBC actually showing things when they’re scheduled…

What are your ideas?  Or will you just give up and watch the games on YouTube, Bittorrent, or follow on the official site?