October 2004 Archives

JustBlogIt with a simple right-click.. Eureka, I love Firefox, but one announying thing is that tools like QuickPost for MovableType don't work well with it. In particular, the popup comes up behind the main windows instead of in front.

This fixes that (I hope). Also SharpMT doesn't seem to get along with my version of MovableType 3.0. It gets very confused.

Ok, so many things to look at right now...here's a list of what we're in the market for right now:

• iPod. Probably the 4G 20GB version. No VC can really invest in consumer products without having an ipod. They are their own universe right now. Man these these things are expensive. About 50% more expensive than non-Apple. For instance the 20GB 4G iPod is $287, but the 20GB Creative is $215. The differences are even more startling in the 40GB range. The Apple discounts are essentially zero, with the discounters selling for $13 off the list price, so you might as well get it from Apple.com directly.
• iPod Photo. Not quite out yet, these are a breathtaking $500 for 40GB and $600 for 60GB. So you pay a $100 premium for a 2.5" color screen. Wow. Apple folks seems to love it, but the Cnet folks think it is way expensive for a small screen. For instance the iRiver PMP-120 is a 3.5" screen but does weigh nearly 10 oz. and only has 20GB at $500.
• iPod accessories. The JBL speaker station, the Griffin iTrip FM transmitter, Altec-Lansing InMotion and the JBL Creature II 2.1 speakers for at home a bunch of other cool things noted at the iPod Lounge
• Etymotic ER6. These are in my humble opinion the great headphones I've ever used. Insanely expensive, but the sound quality is amazing. Headphone has them for just $107 right now.
• Audible. These guys do books on "tape" as it were. And, if you buy their service for a year, you get $100 off an iPod!
• iRiver iHP-120. If you want something that is not an iPod but that enthusiastist love. I have an IRiver CD Player and I can attest they are the nerds dream. Headroom has a good reveiw of non-iPod players.

In scary caveat, 4G iPods appear to have some sort of defect that iPodLounge is tracking. There is a strange whirring and noise at the start of each song. It is in over 40% of the iPods that iPodLounge users have bought, so it is no small deal.

Page Computer -- T140P/L NB PM1100 512MB 40GB CDRW/DVD 10.6IN WXPP. My dream laptop is nearly here.

It is the low-end Sony VGN-T140P/L, cost if $1905 and it is backordered. Can't wait to get it.

Daring Fireball: Markdown. We've been using Textile 2 for a while as the markup languages for all of our blogs. I see now that using Markdown, so it is an interesting language to try.

Textile is great and powerful, but hard to teach folks the more sophisticated stuff.

BTW, this is another amazing script that is 22KB!

Because tongfamily.com is literally beseiged with spammers (even with MT Blacklist, I get probably 50 spam comments a day), I'm turning on the registration required. In order to comment you'll need a free Typekey registration in order to logon.

Sorry about this, but I'm wasting too much time editing out spam. We will convert the other sites to this ASAP.

Learning Movable Type: TypeKey Authentication for Comments. I thought I was done, but it turns out there is a ton of work to be done. MT 2.661 blogs are not automatically converted to MT3.0. There is a boatload of work to do as covered in Elise.com and also in Anzi

You can see this because right now my comments are pretty broken across all the sites. Sorry, I'll try to fix this week.

Well its taken forever to figure out how to fix the various problems. There are lots of postings. I basically got the install problem to work with XP SP2, but I've been unable to synchronize because when I go to the Desktop Manager and choose Intellisync/Configure PIM/Address Book/Choose/Browse, I don't get an folder enumerated. Also, there is an error generated in the ptrace.log file in the Blackberry folder

(BTW, a quick thing to do is to move this magic folder out the Application Data area up to My Documents because you'll be looking at it a lot)

In the ptrace.log, I see a sea of errors that look like:

D:\Work\Mav1039513_301\dev\ilxolk2\olkapi\pumapist.cpp line 355 Sun Oct 24 22:49:41 2004: Error 0.30042 at D:\Work\Mav1039513_301\dev\ilxolk2\olkapi\pumaufs.cpp line 125
Sun Oct 24 22:49:41 2004: Error 30042.30042 at D:\Work\Mav1039513_301\core\sync_sdk\il_sdk\sdk_data.cpp line 2223
Sun Oct 24 22:49:41 2004: Error 30042.30042 at D:\Work\Mav1039513_301\core\sync_sdk\il_sdk\callback.cpp line 3111

These seem to say that somewhere inthe Pumasync that Blackberry has licensed, it is having a heart attack.

Well, it turns out that the problem is that you can corrupt some of the settings particularly when the profile you have for Exchange is in cached mode, so the fix is to create a new profile just for the Blackberry. Go to Control Panel/Switch to Classic View/Mail/Show Profiles/Copy and copy your current profile to a new one called say, "uncached for blackberry"

Then go to click on that profile and choose Properties/Email Accounts/View or Change Existing Email Accounts/Next/Change and unclick the Use Exchange Cache Mode button (yes, I know, what a user interface!).

Now start the Desktop Manager and Choose Configure PIM/Choose/Options and select the "uncached for blackberry" profile and press ENTER. Now choose Browse and you should be able to see the hierarchy and the bug is fixed.

You have to go to each entry Calender, Notes, Tasks and do the same Choose/Options and select the profile.

If this doesn't work, you can restart the whole process by deleting the Blackberry folder found in Desktop Manager/Options/Data Folder Settings and try again as above

Calvin wants to be a quantum string for Halloween (I know, the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree). So we need a picture of a quantum string for the front of his sweatshirt (black of course) and the equations on the back.

Here are the places to look for photos of strings:

• Cosmic Strings. A good discussion of cosmic or quantum strings that are part of the larger M-theory which unifies everything we know about the various particles and waves in the universe (heady stuff).
• Cosmic String Interaction. Another photo from Cambridge of two strings (particles) interacting.
• Super String. There is a whole web site just on super strings (yet another name). Amazing.

Need one of these portable speakers for presentations. Got an el cheapo Radio Shack thing for $40, but it is incredibly heavy and you have to bring two speakers. That's because it uses 4C batteries each and is very bulky.

The reviews for portable speakers absolutely stink from the mainstream sites, but Ipod lounge seems to really care. The main frustration is that they aren't reviewed scientifically for audio quality which is what a high end person would want. So what to do, most of the speakers are really bad in quality and most interestingly are designed now for the ipod. Here are some options:

• Tivoli Audio -- Home of the Henry Kloss Model One Radio - Home. Kind of a neat idea, it is a traditional mono system that just sounds really great. Kind of like the Bose soundwave, but smaller. They make a 2lb single speaker called the iPAL. Ironically, it doesn't actually integrate, but has the same colors and is smaller. It is kind of fat at 6×4x4 and expensive at $129. OTOH, if this actually does sound nice, it would be cool to have in a hotel room and it is a famous name. Because it also has an FM receiver, you could use it with the iTrip FM transmitter and the iPod. Mono only though. You can get via ABT Electronics
• Radio Shack. They sell that portable speaker. I may just cut off on of the speakers and then use it. It is about the same dimensions. I'd estimate that it is about 5 pounds for the two speakers.
• Altec-Lansing iM3. Its expensive at around $149 street from Amazon. They have new newer one called the IM3 that is a little smaller and has a remote control. The older InMotions are less at $107. The best thing about it is that it is 8×1x6, so it is flat enough to fit into a bag. It is also about one pound. It is smaller and sleeker and has a remote control too. The sound is pleasant enough, but nothing to write home about.
• Altec-Lansing iMMini. This is the Ipod mini version of the above, it only has two speakers though, but you can get it for $40 street ($129 list). At least iPod lounge think it sounds better (less boomy than the im3).
• Altec-Lansing IM2. Less sexy in appearance than the IM3, but it is only $40 and it has the same speakers, etc.
• JBL Creature Active 2.1. Just $68 at Amazon, it has a subwoofer and isn't portable, but sounds pretty good so is great if you don't need it to be portable. Its a best buy
• JBL On Stage. These are expensive at $200, but sound much better than Altec Lansing, but still don't sound as good as the Creatures.
• Monster iSpeaker. These sound like crud and cost $60, but they are flat planels, so are the size of two CD cases.

Since we are getting all kinds of new phone stuff, might as well try Bluetooth headsets. I've never liked them because they are so gigantic, but a little trolling shows this Bluespoon to be pretty amazing. Just 10 grams and not expensive.

There is a big brother that has a DSP in it that costs $300. Can't get that. I'll lose it.

At Impact Wireless, they are now taking preorders with fulfillment in November hopefully. Just in time for Christmas. If you order before tomorrow, they'll include a free USB dongle that lets the headset connet to your PC for VOIP calls. Cool.

NextLink's New BlueSpoon "AX" Headset is Here! : Accessories : Sony Ericsson @ Esato. Pre-order your Bluespoon AX at Impact Wireless for $109.95 CAD. If you live within North America, call 1-877-578-7355 or place your order online at www.impactwireless.ca. For those you live outside North America please send an email to bsn@impactwireless.ca with your contact information, which to include country, time zone, and what time is best to reach you. Simply redeem coupon HOFO5 during checkout to receive a five (5) dollar discount. Coupon expires October 15, 2004. They are accepting referrals, to find out more please contact them and mention bluespoon.ca

MMC vs. SD and Flashcards.co.nz. We are getting Nokia 6620 for various demonstrations and need a big memory card. It takes MMC, but I've never understood the difference with SD until now.

Basically SD is newer and has a higher transfer rate, but has some mysterious copy protection scheme. They are the same shape, so you should be able to use either. Unfortunately, the Nokia has a MMC reader so the newer SD won't read right. (SD readers can handle MMC, but MMC readers can't handle SD). Symbian Forums has a thread on what MMC cards work in 6600 and 6620 Nokias.

Justin Castle has a good pricing overview as well. Shows that the current pricing as of October is a sweet spot of 512MB and that with volumes, the SD cards are actually cheaper now than MMC because they are used by more devices, but I don't know if the slightly bigger SD will actually fit in a Nokia 6620 (btw the prices below are in UK pounds). The main issue is that the case is slightly thicker at 2.1mm vs. 1.4mm.

The other change is that the SD cards have a bunch of different variants. The first SD cards read at 10Mbps vs. 2.5Mbps for MMC. But there is now the Ultra II SD whic writes at 9Mbps (45x) and the XS SD that writes at 10Mpbs (66x). So judging by this, it probably makes sense to get a 512MB XS given the low price different (only about 6 pounds more). So if you have a phone with SD, get SD, otherwise, jam for a good MMC.

Hey if you are thinking of getting a blog, go hang out with Mark over at tqbloghosting. I've been working with him for two years now and he's great. We have about a dozen blogs all running on his servers.

David Diamond wrote me pointing out that the 5900s from 2000-2003 had a problem where the headset was not loctited down so they are sticky. Its a little complicated to fix, but he has the procedure. Trek will fix under warranty too apparently. Here are his fix-it notes or maybe take it to your local bike shop and print this out since I'm sure they won't have heard of this problem

Best to use a workstand for this operation. Obviously you have the fork out of the headtube. Clean the inside of the lower cup with acetone. Careful not to get any on finished surfaces (it will remove paint, etc.). Clean the outer surface of the lower bearing also. The outer surface meaning the flat metal area that is parallel to the headtube and steerer. Place Loctite 680 on the outer bearing surface and the same area inside the lower cup the Loctite on the bearing will come in contact with. Just apply to a Q-tip so you can get it just where you want it.

Carefully insert the fork up into the headtube and make sure it is seated all the way in. You have about 10 minutes to assemble the top
headset/compression ring and stem. Adjust it real snug at first to make sue that you're completely seated and the bottom and top bearings are parallel.

Now back off the adjustment a little so that you can smoothly turn the handlebars all the way to the left and right without any areas of
resistance.

Don't touch the bike for 24 hours as this is how long it takes the Loctite to completely cure. You should be good to go at this point.

Let me know how this works for you.

More on the delayed write problem from Erik who is struglling like me to get the thing to work

I bugged tech support at Linksys and they suggested turning off write caching on the local disc of the machine doing the writing to the NSLU2, disable all software firewalls, and if that doesnt work try replacing ethernet and USB cables. None of those seem like great suggestions, but I intend to try them anyway next chance I get. And failing that Ill see if I cant isolate the problem to the USB enclosure.

Great questions from my buddy Dan about how to get formats back and forth

Say Rich, what's the best way to:

1. Burn .WMV files onto a DVD in DVD format?
2. Produce a photo slide show video?

Well, there is the best way and there is the easiest way. So, easiest way answers are below that I've gathered from a ton of sites

1. WMV to DVD. Well, this is an easy question to answer conceptual, but hard as heck to actually do. WMV is a special Windows Media format, so you have to uncompress it and then recompress it in the native MPEG-2 that a standard DVD uses. The tools that exists are really primitive, but assuming you have enough hard disk
2. Photo Slide Show. I'm glad you asked this since I'm about to do one for Jon Roberts. Reportedly the absolutely best way to do this is with iDVD on the Macintosh. I have a Mac, but haven't figure this out yet. The simplest way to do it is with the built in tool that Windows XP has (it is actually a licensed version of Roxie as I understand it). It lets you drag JPEGs and then you can set it to music. Then you have to convert it into MPEG-2

Hey for those of you who don't know, our book, the Marketing Playbook was officially released. Hit #199 on the Amazon list and in the top 25 for business books on Amazon, so it is in the top 1% of all Amazon books! Wow.

Kind of neat. Some good reviews at Marketing Playbook and also at Amazon

Great ways to get low cost hotels:

Airfares

Use Fare Chase, this is a meta search engine. As an example, tomorrow I'm flying back to Seattle. Rack rate on Alaska is $451, it is $251 on Jet Blue and $165 on Delta. That's quite a spread!

There are a couple of tricks. First, always check the website of the airline after Fare Chase recommends something. For instance in planning a flight for next week, it said that onetravel.com had Delta flights for as little Jet Blue at $278 and then had American flights from priceline.com. I found that in both cases, going directly to Delta and American, they had the same price and it you could select seats, etc. I ended up booking directly with American and even got to choose seats.

Hotels

Go to Expedia to a location and find a decent 3-star hotel that you could stay in. This gives you the bid you should have on Priceline. Add $10 to the room rate, go to Priceline for a 4-star hotel and bid that and see what you get. If you get one, you've basically paid a 3-star rate for a 4-star hotel. I saved on a room at the Marriott Marquis that is $299 for $200 tonight, so it seems to work :-)

Go to Trip Advisor, have it search the major sites for a low priced room. It will do a search against Orbitz, Hotels.com, Travelocity in addition to Expedia which you just did. If the price is lower, then go for it. I just did this and saved $200 from a hotel where the expedia rate was high as was the hotels own site, but hotels.com had it for less. Nice thing is hotels.com doesn't require a complete prepayment. Just a $5 service fee that is non-refundable.

The big tip is that if you fail in the bid, make sure you try the hotel website. Many times, they will make the meet the expedia price without requiring you pay in advance. In trying again for next week, it didn't take my bid for a 3.5 star hotel (the Algonquin is at $229 and I big $239), so Priceline didn't take it. Rather than booking with Expedia, I tried the Algonquin site directly where they had the same room for $244. That give you a tradeoff, pay $229 now or $244 with the option to cancel. In that case, I took the Expedia price.

Well, not exactly music, but the kids and I love to listen to books on tape or CD these days. They are really in an inconvenient format since a typical book takes 5 CDs because the encoding used on regular CDs is tuned for music. Even with MP3 or OGG encoding, a book takes 700MBs or so even at 44Kpbs.

The fact is that voice encoders (vocoders) can be much more efficient. So that a typical wireless carriers uses 8Kpbs speech encoding (5x the efficiency), but these kind of encoders are not mainstream or available.

So what's the answer? Speex is an open source speech-oriented encoder. With this, I've gotten my books on tape from 700MB on a CD to 40MB on an MP3 to 20MB for Ogg Vorbis to about 10MB with Ogg Speex with no noticible reduction in quality. That means that you can put 50 books onto a single CD.

The main problem is that only a PC has codecs that are replaceable codecs, so you'll need to have a real PC to use these tools:

• Speex.org. They have Windows binaries available. This is just the encoder library and a command line file, so not very useful for the average user.
• Rarewares. Rarewares has a tool called Speexdrop which lets you drag and drop a WAV file onto it and then an SPX file is created
• Illumniable. These folks have DirectShow fileters for all the open Ogg formats (Vorbis for music, Speex for speech, Theora for video). This means that any player that uses DirectShow can playback, so that include basically everyone from Windows Media Player to Winamp to my favorite Musicmatch.

Give it a try if you love books on tape. Now if only I could find a digital music player with a plugable architecture for adding different codecs. The search continues...

RareWares

Well, time once again to get a great phone. The prices are pretty reasonable right now. You can get a Symbian phone that has full stereo plumbing for $100 with a 2-year plan from AT&T. This is an EDGE phone, so it is incredibly fast.

Letstalk.com is about $50 more expensive than Amazon.com for this phone, but they let you take a number from an existing phone and they have a family plan. So for us, this is great. I can get a phone for Adrian and me to do demos for Mfoundry, Melodeo and Mobilelime for about $100 per phone on a $60 shared rate plan with $25 for unlimited data.

Since I'm doing that, I might as well try Bluetooth headsets. If you google, you'll find that Ask Engadget folks have some good reviews of them.

Opinions vary, but the Motorola headset gets good reviews. The most intriguing is the Nextlink ones, but lots of folks are raving. They don't distribute in the US, but you can get them from Pilcon.

Here's one opinion:

I own a Nextlink Digital Bluespoon Gold and it's great!

1) Currently, it's the smallest of the BT headsets out there.

2) It's the only one out there that's Digital. It has noise cancellation (2 microphones built in) features and great sound quality.

3) It's the only one that will allow you to wear sunglasses/glasses while you're using the headset, because it doesn't wrap around your ear. That's an important thing to consider.

4) It's the smallest and lightest of all the BT headsets out there.

5) It has the best battery life of all the BT headsets out there.

6) It's also one of the best looking headsets out there, IMO, because it's very small and doesn't cover up your whole ear or run down the side of your face like some of the dorky, ugly, huge and heavy headsets you see out there.

7) Now the hard part: it's the most expensive headset out there. But for the smallest, lightest, highest sound quality unit out there with the best battery life, along with it being one of nicest looking headsets, you're going to pay more.

8) But yet another great part, is that the guys at Nextlink are FANTASTIC. If you ever need any help with one of their products, they're there to help. Really great service. And THAT can make such a big difference. One of the best ways to get in touch with them is at Howard Forums. Just do a search for Nextlink and you'll see their (Lars's, Jan's, and Jon's) posts.

The newest model is just US$85 and is analog but incredibly small. It is just 9 grams and has a USB connector for recharging. How cool is that. Called the AX. The Digital is expensive at $200 (so more than a phone!) and the AX is about $85.

Other ones folks like include the Bluetrek G2 which is about $65 from mobileplanet.com.

AVIcodec. Al that money and Windows doesn't come with an MPEG_2 (e.g., DVD decoder) as part of it, so you are reduced to buying various codecs that may or maynot work with Windows.

Right now I've found lots of problems with CyberDVD's codec and lots of oddnesses with the Ligos codec.

Here's a good site that at least tells you what is the file format exactly you are trying to decode. Its called AVICodec and the output is undecypherable, but detailed.

In terms of free-codecs is a great easy to read list of what codecs are out there as freeware and good explanation of what they do. They also have a bundle of all the free codecs so you can download and them slam onto any machine. This includes an MPEG-2 decoder for instance.

VideoHelp.com Forum Archive - DVD-Lab won't create .IFO files!! (Yes, I've searched....)

I've been battling the same problem as this guy. There is a problem with this very nice tool called DVD-lab. Appears to have to do with demultiplexing files and something called a GOP size and whether it is closed or not...whew, now I know how newbies feel when I talk techie.

Read it a weep:

The error appears to be related to GOP settings. Make sure you've encoded the file for DVD with CLOSED GOP's and a MAX FRAMES IN GOP value of 18 (for NTSC) or 15 (for PAL).

18 (NTSC) or 15 (PAL) Frames in GOP are standard DVD limits. If a GOP has more frames than the standard allows, authoring programs will usually reject the file or return an error.

Some authoring programs will also return an error unless GOP's are closed. Closed GOP's are the DVD standard, however, many individuals use OPEN GOP's in order to edit the MPG or improve compression.

Well that was opaque :-) What I did was to use Tmpgenc 3.0 and have it produce an MPEG2 file with GOP closed whatever that means, then DVD-labs, demultiplexes it and it seems to work. What did not seem to work was to have tmpgenc create separate audio and video tracks by itself.

:"http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2242"

Anandtech just reviewed the new Winchester chips, this is a 90nm Athlon in socket 939, with a MSI Neo2 Platinum, OCZ Platinum Rev 2 DDR3200 memory, its a screamer with a huge overclock. Newegg.com has them for about $170 in the OEM version. Of course, to be really cook, you have to wait for the new nForce4 chipset that will bring PCI Express to Athlon. That announced October 19.

They will love the new 90nm chips because they can buy a 3000 running at 1.8GHz for less than $200 and still have a good chance of reaching 2.6GHz with very little effort with the same chip. 2.6GHz is faster than any current Athlon 64, and it is, in fact, the speed that we expect from the upcoming FX55 - the new Athlon 64 top-of-the-line. It's been a while since we've seen this kind of headroom on an AMD chip, and those who were waiting for 90nm to get a magic overclocker will get in line to buy the new 90nm 3000 .

A Sack of Seattle. Andy is working on Judy's Book and doing a great job helping parents everywhere.

He also started a blog that I think is great. I think Ludwig had a big hand. His posts on the election are great too.

FPSCentral - File Downloads. Ok just about done with Call of Duty United Offensive. Not nearly as exciting as the first Call of Duty.

Maybe this is serial fatigue, but this one didn't surprise me as much. it is harder in that there are way more people in each battlefield, but really nothing new.

I still love the first Stalingrad scene in the original COD.

That being said, the modder community is active and there are some fun things to try. Merciless is pretty cool and I'll have to give the others a try on this page.

Well I've been struggling for days to figure out how to get PowerPoint to show a DVD fragment in slideshow mode. I just couldn't get it to work. The movie would embed properly, but would not playback in place. You would have to launch a standalone viewer.

This is one case where google was absolutely no help. Here's the answer.

To playback a DVD movie, you need an MPEG-2 decoder and this is typically not free because of licensing costs. Normally CyberDVD or WinDVD has a decoder and Windows Media Player then uses this decoder to to playback video. Problem is that these codecs don't seem to play right in place.

Only way to make that work is by the magic of finding the Ligos decoder that is bundled in Video Explosion Deluxe seems to work for some reason.

There may be other mpeg-2 codecs that function well, but I haven't had time to experiemnt well enough to know which ones work.

Ken Kelley, an old buddy from business school dropped me a line. What did we do in the days before the Internet, I don't know. Anyway, he's got his virtual shingle out and is helping bio-tech firms make it.

Another example of the cyber world that we live in, you can have a web presence that looks like a real company (particularly if you got a blog, Ken), but why is it so hard to get the phone and other systems working?

A comment Jeff wanted to post, but my site wasn't quite configured right

I have been following your posts on color management, and I wanted to offer you a few thoughts. I have been implementing a color managed workflow since April of this year, and I have climbed the same learning curve that you are.

I accelerated it a bit by taking a 3 day seminar from Chromaticity in Michigan, and this really pushed us over into the "almost know what we are doing" category. Here are a few thoughts:

Brett has started an Art School in Seattle (Ravenna) and is opening a new location in Madison in September. Check out the Drawing School

The new Sony T-series is finally here. Its an ultra portable with a smaller screen so you have some chance of fitting in when you are on the airplane.

Weighs 3 pounds and it has a CD/DVD drive, so you can watch movies and things. A nice form factor since the keyboard is reasonably big.

Also uses the new Dothan ULV chip so has a 2MB cache. And finally has Intel's wireless LAN chipset. The base model is the VGN-T150 with 512MB memory, 40GB drive and DVD writer listing for $2200. They have a DVD-drive only for $2049 list price called the VGN-140P/L

It is a follow on to the Sony VAIO PCG-TR3A which has a slower processor (1GHz vs. 1.1GHz) and camera as well.

I just love all these add-ons that are being done in the browser world by Opera, Firefox and Maxthon. Also, there are an amazing number of add-ons that you can add to Outlook and can anyone have enough IE toolbars.

All this leave me wondering what the new "Office" is for the average business user now. I've noticed that I've really changed my work habits and that if I were to create a next generation suite, it would be very different from what is currently available. So here is Rich's dream suite in order of importance. In the same way that Word and Excel were the core applications of the 20th century, what are the core applications of this century?

Web Browsing.

I don't think web browsing is done as a category. There are a tremendous number of innovations that are left to make it easier for people to now just find things, but to organize how they look at things. That is really what tab browsing in all the new products is all about. For instance, it is incredibly difficult to not just search for things and then read a page (this is the current default task that everyone seems to tune for. For me, it is more like, find information about going to Hawaii or find information about the Marketing or buying a new car. What you end up with is a bunch of sites you want to look at simultaneously. Also there is a multi-tasking component where you want to put some searches away and look at others.

Another trend given that displays are so cheap is also twin-headed monitors. I'm seeing more and more of those (and am using one right now, two $300 LCD screens give one heck of a big view like a 25" diagonal). So a product improvement that makes this kind of activity based browsing is very important. Firefox extensions are the closest to this. For instance Lookahead opens up the top five hits from google. They have another extension called Google search that sticks a mini-view of every page that google finds. Finally, having tabs really means that you should easily be able to organize your multiple searches, so you can task flip from finding out about cars to finding out about financings as an example. Underneath this BTW is IMHO a switch to computers integrating your work and home lives. Folks don't have time to divide the two anymore.

Email, Contacts and Calendaring

This is the old PIM category, but it is amazing to me how hard it is without an enterprise level Exchange server. How can it be that a small and medium sized business or two working folks at home can't interchange contacts and share calendars. Not to mention easily sync to PDAs. Here is one place where Thunderbird is nearly great. Its back to the roots of Outlook Express where it is extremely fast and it is also extensible. To be most controversial, I also have never been quite sure why one user interface integrates all these functions. In the day of the web, do we really need that. IMHO doing a really good mail application means that you don't have to also include calendaring. They should work together, but do they have to work in the same UI. There is lots of complexity from doing things in one user interface. For instance look at the dialog box you get when you click on New in Outlook. You want a new message, contact, journal entry, task, note, blah, blah, blah.

The main thing that is lacking is some sort of peer level or web service that can really do calendaring across the internet well. And don't get me started on how LDAP servers don't work as a way to share contacts. It is one area where Exchange still has a huge advantage and ironically in an area where MAPI is the default. I've tried to use this with MacOffice and web services and can report it doesn't work super well quite yet, but you'd think someone would build a MovableType for PIMs so that you would really have a nice underlying web services model for the smaller customers and departments vs. enterprises.

Presentations

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think most business users are 65% in Outlook, 30% PowerPoint and less than 5% in Word and Excel. Most of what Word was used for is now in Outlook. That is the quick equivalent of a memo that is now email. It is amazing to me how little the world of presentations has really advanced since PowerPoint 4.0. The presentations are basically the same. There are products like Keynote on the Mac, but you can't find anyone really doing a keystroke compatible presentations product that pushes the limits. Yet, when you think about Office the first time around, it was all about "Set your laser [printer] on stun" I think beautiful presentations are todays moral equivalent.

This by the way crosses in the coming era of Video and truly video oriented presentations.

Music

Call me dumb but I think personalization and music are really core applications for today's machine. Who doesn't watch a DVD on the plane on their laptop now. And who wouldn't want to listen to music while typing. Some applications are great at it, but it is very complicated. Music players have become full blown applications in their own right and I sometimes wonder if that is a good thing.

I thought it was my NSLU2 that was the problem, but now when I try to use my USB 2.0 Hard Drive against Windows XP, I get delayed write failed. Here's the diagnostic from viaarena

I tried the same thing with a Maxtor complete system and it didn't fail, so this probably means the el cheapo enclosure I bought really isn't compatible. Sigh. Sorry to blame it all on the NSLU2. It is really that the NSLU2 just has lousy diagnostics and just fails, but the problem seems to be the drive

The problem concerns copying files to or from a Sarotech Hard Box FHD-353 using the original USB 2.0 cable provided (_note this happens to me and seems to be non-USB enclosure specific). The Hard Box has a 120GB Maxtor hard disk inside. I can open any video file on the hard disk with no problems in Windows Media Player 9. I can also copy relatively small files, even lots of files, say, below 400 MB in size.

However, as soon as try to I copy large video files (about 600MB) from it to an internal hard disk, a message appears telling me that the file cannot be read. After that files can neither be opened nor read from it and the red light on the box is on continuously. The same error occurs when I try to use the disk defragmenter on it. sounds familiar and I have the same problem

Now when I connect the USB cable from the Hard Box to a USB 1.1 hub and then connect this hub to the PC, copying proceeds smoothly, although the speed is extremely slow.

After I have set the USB drive to Logical instead of Primary (you can use Partition Magic 8.0 to do this), copying is error-free using the USB 2.0 cable. Now the only problem I have is defrag. I still get the "Windows delayed write failed" error whenever I try to defrag it. I need help/advice to fix this.

The other thing is that in System - Hardware - Device Manager - Policies, Optimize for quick removal has to be selected. This disables write caching so that the drive can be disconnected without having to use the Safe Removal icon.

I was advised to purchase a NEC PCI USB 2.0 Enhanced Controller card. There appears to be some compatibility issues with enhanced USB 2.0 that is not based on the Intel or NEC chipset.

I was advised to purchase a NEC PCI USB 2.0 Enhanced Controller card. There appears to be some compatibility issues with enhanced USB 2.0 that is not based on the Intel or NEC chipset.

Someone was asking me how they can edit DVDs that are already created. As Jeff said, if you have a TIVO you can now make DVDs of the stuff you create there, but what happens if you want to edit it down. There are actually two ways.

One way is to edit a little with ChopperXP, the other is to use a full fledged video editor to chop things up

Brad asked me the other day what browser do I use. Got me thingking quite a bit.

I actually like Maxthon an awful lot mainly because it is built on Internet Explorer, so it is very compatible (even Microsoft pages like hotmail, outlook web access) render correctly with it. I've had to drop the latest release though because it is buggy. It will often times not exit and then won't restart. Also about everyone other time, it boots and then runs at 100% CPU utilization spinning along. So it would be Maxthon except the current build 1.1.039 seems to have some terrible bugs.

If i were to choose right now, I'd pick Firefox as my current choice. Its got most of the features of Maxthon and Opera, but its got one huge benefit. Because its an open platform there are all kinds of amazing Extensions.

The 1.0PR release seems very stable and most importantly, very fast.

Here are some of the ones that I love:

• Sage. Wow, this is a very cool blog/Rss reader. Kind of like Bloglines, but because it loads in a sidebar way better. Also, it discovers RSS feeds automatically and it has a really nice layout for looking at lots of RSS entries quickly.
• Lookahead. This is hard to setup and needs a google api key, but basically when you use it, if you do a search, it opens up the top 5 hits in separate tabs, so you can quickly get to them.
• Google Images. A very nice idea, takes the google results and sticks a mini image of the actual web page on the google results page. I'm amazsed at how I can just glance and tell if I'm in the right place.
• Foxytunes. This thing controls installed media players with a set of little icons at the bottom of every window, so you don't need a separate control application.
• Mouse Gestures. A very cool package that lets you hold the right mouse down and scribble. So that a move to the right holding the right mouse button automatically gives you forward. A great power user feature.
• Tabs. Part of the build in system, the main issue is that unlike Opera, the grouping of tabs doesn't work super well. I love Opera for this, you have a whole set of web pages open for a say a project studying VOIP, then put all those pages away as a group and go to a page studying the ecommerce market for ebay sellers. I'm amazed at how much time that saves. You can sort of do this with Firefox with the Add to Favorites and save a bunch of tabs, but every save doesn't update a group, it just creates a new one. Not convenient.

Overall, this shows just how much innovation there is left in the new "core" applications that are personal productivity for most users.

mozdev.org - enigmail: index. One of the amazing things about both Firefox and Thunderbird is how open they are. They leave lots of room for developers to add features. Enigmail is a great example. For once there is a usable secure mail system using PGP.

I have a theory that our Ignition travel agency called Navigent doesn't give us the best fares.

So, I'm going to see what fare are around for some of the trips I'm doing.

So let's start with USATODAY.com - A guide to booking air tickets online which is also the top google hit for google:"fare comparison"

Says to try Qixo and Farechaser.

OK, this can be pretty complicated, but two freeware utilities have made it much easier:

• DVD Decrypter. You need to set this in Mode/IFO and make sure to copy everything onto the hard disk. For performance reasons having two hard drives is very beneficial otherwise you thrash like crazy.
• DVD Shrink. You use this utility to shrink things so that a 9GB DVD-9 will fit onto a single layer DVD Writeable with 4.7GB available. The main trick here is that you can lots of the extras and keep the menu structure but replace the actual extra with just a single image. You can also take off the various audio sound tracks. It also burns the DVD backup for you.

Here's a more general overview from Doom9.net - The Definitive DVD Backup Resource

Sefy's Complete DVD Backup Guide v2.6. Sefy is incredible.

For once an easy to read step-by-step series of directions for DVD manipulation. Its great!

GamePC - Clawhammer To Go : AMD Athlon64 3700 DTR Processor. A good overall review of the AMD Mobile Athlon and the Intel Pentium-M line. Also AMDNotebooks seems like a great source of data on actual shipping hardware like the new Sharp and ASUS.

These are raw performance numbers of course, but interesting to see how they do. The Pentium-M (Dothans) are very fast, but they are incredibly expensive, so the idea is can you get a roughly good notebook for the much less money.

AMD has a series of mobile processors and are converting from 130nm to 90nm, but the basic ones are the

Here are some raw numbers (Sandra higher is better, Photoshop and WM9, lower is better):

The Mobile Athlons are essentially desktop Athlons without the thermal cover on top so they require a special heatsink and they run at lower voltages sometimes. Interesting benchmarks though.

These are done with Clawhammer CG revision cores (130nm, 1MB cache, 1.4V) and the new Winchesters are coming (90nm, 512MB cache), so things may shift slightly, but interesting data. Makes them quite competitive at least performance-wise and certainly cost-wise. Of course power is the big issue that isn't tested here.

I haven't seen benchmarks for their true lower power Mobile Athlon 2700+ that runs at 1.1V, but some folks think that you can also just undervolt the 1.4V versions and get to the same point. Interesting.

AnandTech BenQ DW-1620 Review. Anand's review of the drive shows that it is a decent performance, but you have to have the very latest beta firmware called B7J9 to really have decent compatibility and performance.

Likesd the drive thoug.

AnandTech says there news on a couple of fronts that are going to change recommendations quite a bit for this month, so if you haven't bought wait a small tick

AMD is announcing Winchester 90nm socket-939 low-end Athlon 64s! That is pretty amazing. According to the board newegg.com has them for $170 for the 3000+ (running at 1.8GHz, 9x multiplier) and $220 respectively (2.0GHz, 10x multiplier). That's not expensive at all compared with the older 754. Main issue is that according to AMDZone the new Winchester 3000+ at 1.8GHz is about the same speed as the older Newcastle 2800+ also running at 1.8GHz. So what a conumdrum, which one to go with. The pricings are now essentially identical. The main problem is the the Winchester 3000+ overclocks to 2.0 GHz while the Newcastle 2800+ overclocks to 2.2GHz so will be faster and is cheaper for right now.

Second news is that enquirer reports that the new nForce4 motherboards will ship October 19. If you can't wait then its the MSI Neo2 Platinum for socket 939 and DFI LANParty UT Nf3 250 (if you can get it) for socket 754.

That being said, the other recommendations remain pretty much the same except for the power supply:

• Power Supply. Also, in their overclocking tests, they found that going from a 460 watt to a monster 520 watt power supply made a big difference, so more power is in order. Why? Well, it means more stability in the actual voltage as you move up. They had a good experience with OCZ 520. I'll have to see how loud these things are. I have a True Power 540 for our server and it is pretty quiet but not ultra.
• Memory. They found the OCZ 3200 Platinum Rev. 2 was fastest at both DDR400 and it also achieved the highest 1T speed that we found in our tests. This also means the highest performance possible.
• Optical. Finally, they did a review of the BenQ DW-1620 and liked it as long as it had the latest firmware build.
• What shouldn't change, well the case and the hard disk looks about the same recommending the Coolcases Chenbro 610 and the Western Digital WD740GD drive for speed or the Samsung Spinpoint 1612N for quiet and big.