Politically incorrect moment

Posted on 2006/02/05 by richardykuo

After many entries into the Win a DocuPen RC800 contest, Rob Bushway has finally picked the winner of the contest.  Go ahead and read the winning entry.

I have to say that I’m a bit puzzled by his choice.  Keep in mind the form factor of the DocuPen RC800.  You have to run your hand carefully down the document for each page, and it’s a small, expensive, and easily stolen gadget.

I think this gesture is well intentioned, and it’s certainly his to make.  But it will clearly go to waste.  A 50 dollar flatbed scanner would help the winner of this contest more and cost less.  You cannot and should not scan the amount of documents this person dreams of scanning with a DocuPen.  I would have preferred to see the DocuPen go to an entrant that cares enough to know why they would benefit from one.  Reference the blog name, http://www.cutmeloose.com. I thought that was the point of a giveaway like this…to raise awareness of Tablet PC’s and the mobile lifestyle.

Now what I’ve said above is clearly not PC, but it is, in my opinion, completely correct.  I don’t get paid to be PC about usability.

The giveaway, however, is a tremendous gesture, and I do applaud Rob for his generosity and the buzz he’s helped to generate around the Tablet PC and Planon’s DocuPen with it.

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Do we need network drivers any more?

Posted on 2006/02/03 by richardykuo

On our way back from Fry’s, I was musing upon the installation I was going to have to do with this new networking equipment.   So I had to ask the million dollar question…why do we need special drivers for network adapters any more?  Isn’t the whole concept of a network adapter pretty much cut and dried at this point?  Don’t we pretty much know everything an adapter needs to do?

How about I plug the card in and it just starts working?  Wouldn’t that be swell?

Of course, I’m probably oversimplifying things somewhere, somehow, and I’m not aware of just how complicated things really are.  But you know what…I bet it’s doable.  I don’t think the status quo is acceptable here.  Remember when wireless wasn’t built into the operating system and network vendors were all making their own control panels and other crapware?  That sucked.  And installing their drivers sucks too.

There is no reason why I should have to install drivers to get a network adapter up and running in this day and age.  We need a standard around this that makes installing a network adapter as easy as plugging in a USB flash drive.  From a usability standpoint, it should have happened a long time ago.

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More wireless networking fun

Posted on 2006/02/03 by richardykuo

I recently got a Roomba, on account of the fact that…well, let’s just say I don’t clean up as often as I should.  I’ll write up a full posting later on that, but in the mean time, I’ll simply mention that part of getting a space “Roomba ready” is getting your assorted junk off the ground.

My house isn’t wired…and I don’t think we’re going to be wiring it up any time soon.  So at the moment, we have a mishmash of wires localized to the computer room and a wireless router which my laptop and the downstairs HTPC connect to.  It’s those wires running on the ground for Ethernet that are causing problems…plus they’ve always looked messy.

Today, Fry’s ran an ad for Airlink branded MIMO 802.11g router for 29.99 and adapters for 19.99.  No rebates attached.  Seemed like a good opportunity to go ahead and unwire the whole house, so we headed over to Fry’s and picked up two wireless PCI adapters and a router.

The Airlink 101 router hasn’t gotten great reviews.  But I don’t need it to perform that well…just good enough.  I’m replacing a Microsoft router, which has been excellent, but it’s still old technology.  We’ll see how it goes.

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Obscenities are still words

Posted on 2006/02/02 by richardykuo

Interestingly, there’s a blog post from Frank La Vigne describing how a list of approximately 3000 words known as obscenities won’t be shown as potential choices to the user.

I wonder if this applies to the actual handwriting recognition.  I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with folks in their mid-20’s to 30’s, but it’s quite frequent for someone, trying out my tablet and the handwriting recognition for the first time, to sit down and write some obscenities down in OneNote to see if this thing really knows how to translate words or not.  The recognition on actually doesn’t go off that well…and after several runs, we all suspect now that the Tablet is “censoring” us.

So here’s a tip for the handwriting recognition folks…obscenity recognition is key when targeting the young male demographic.  The MTV generation will write them on your Tablets, and to make a good impression, you should translate them correctly.

Hey, nobody ever said life made sense.

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Linksys SRX400 – So far, so good

Posted on 2006/01/30 by richardykuo

Last Friday, I took my M200 over to the lounge to watch the Sci-Fi Channel while I did some work.  It turned out to be a most unpleasant experience.

In the past, our wireless configuration in our office has been rather….shall we say, less than desirable.  Consisting of two Linksys WRT54G routers, any computer connected to the wireless network would have its connection inexplicably reset by the access points at inopportune times.  I know this because I’ve had two computers next to each other reset at exactly the same time…so it’s not the individual computers causing problems.  Not only does that bomb out any unreliable file transfers, it also pops you off and on IM, announcing to all your friends on a regular basis just how crappy your wireless setup is.

Friday was the last straw.  I was trying to offload some files from my notebook in preparation for the drive swap and I literally could not keep a connection for more than 15 seconds.  Then…it just stopped working altogether.  Not even unplugging the routers worked.

I just wired in with a really long Ethernet cable lying around the lounge and gave up.

So Sunday, having had enough of this crap, I did a little research on wireless technologies, referred regularly to an excellent MIMO roundup from Tom’s Networking, and concluded that buying something based on Airgo’s third generation True MIMO chipset was the way to go.  Getting a MIMO router would probably allow me to cover the entire office with one router, plus eliminate dead spots and significantly improve the reception for existing clients.

The third generation True MIMO chipset, when paired on both ends, literally reaches about 240 mbps of throughput…which, when translated down to real world throughput, still exceeds the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet.  Impressive!

I chose the WRT54GX4 from Linksys over the RangeMax 240 from Netgear because the Linksys appears to cooperate better with foreign networks.  Yes, even though Linksys was the company that made the crappy wireless access points we were using in the first place.  Give me ten lashes, I’m a glutton for punishment.  Even though many of these products seem to have some various issues (I note that the WRT54GX4 with SRX400 has some complaints about VOIP support), I use these things strictly as an access point anyway, so I bypass a lot of these issues.

Long story short, we get in the office, unplug all the other access points, plug it in, configure the security, and let ‘er rip.  To summarize, the range really is quite good and it does cover our entire building.  On top of that, I haven’t had any wireless dropouts today.  So yeah, it looks like it’s working pretty well.

So now that this is working so nicely, I’d like to get a compatible True MIMO card for my notebook.  Not one of the cards that sticks a dongle out of the PC Card slot…a real Mini-PCI replacement card.  Unfortunately, I don’t see where to get one…maybe they’re not out yet?

Oh well…I’ll have to be happy with stable wireless access for the moment.

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Toshiba M200 now at 60GB

Posted on 2006/01/29 by richardykuo

Not exactly a banner day for the Internet, but not a bad day over here at rkuo.com.  The 60GB Hitachi Travelstar now in my Tablet PC is, in fact, close to as quiet as the old 40GB Travelstar and way more quiet than the Toshiba 80GB drive that I briefly tried in my last post.

As a completely unexpected bonus, battery life appears to have increased with this drive installed to about 20 extra minutes past where it used to be.  From a full charge and screen brightness dimmed somewhat, I’m at 3:51 minutes of battery life.  Not bad…not bad at all.

I’m probably still going to be getting the M400, but I think this M200 is quite ready to be handed off to someone else at SnapStream whenever that happens.

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Noisy notebook drives

Posted on 2006/01/29 by richardykuo

Since I’m not using the Inspiron 9100 much any more and eventually plan on selling it, I decided to swap one of the hard drives from the Inspiron into the Toshiba M200.  The drive in the M200 is only 40GB at the moment, and when completely stripped to the essentials, I’m getting by with about 10GB free space on that drive.  I have a 60GB and an 80GB in the Inspiron, so getting either drive into the M200 would be a nice improvement.

I went ahead and chose the 80GB for the swap since it’s bigger.  I spent a good chunk of time just cleaning off the contents of the 80GB to my file server in preparation for the swap.  While that was going on, I cast about looking for drive imaging software so that I could make a proper seamless drive swap in the M200.  Eventually I settled on Acronis True Image.  Norton Ghost is the well known incumbent in this area of software, but as I suspected, various user reviews confirm that it’s turned into difficult to use bloatware over the years.

Acronis True Image pretty much works as advertised.  I have to say it’s a good solid and intuitive piece of software.  Recommended.

Anyway, after all the file moving antics, I eventually got the M200’s 40GB image onto the 80GB drive.  So I physically swapped it into my M200 and turned it on, expecting everything to be over and to now just be able to enjoy a good chunk of extra drive space.

The tablet turns on.  And, oh dear, the drive is making noise. A lot more noise than my other drive was making.

Now you have to understand, the drive while inside the Inspiron wasn’t ever as loud.  I guess the different surrounding materials and mounting helped keep the noise away, but in the M200 I could now hear every click and whirr coming from the drive. Lord, why didn’t I consider this before I went to all that trouble?

It took me approximately 15 minutes of using the M200 to decide this wasn’t going to work for me.  Drats.

So now I’m swapping the 80GB drive with the 60GB drive.  We’ll see if it fares any better in my M200 than the Toshiba MK8025GAS did.  Unlike the Toshiba drive, I believe the Hitachi Travelstar 60GB has acoustic management built in, so there is a good chance it will be able to stay quiet in the M200.  I’m cloning the 60GB to the 80GB and I will make the 80GB drive the primary Inspiron drive.  Then the 60GB will get imaged for the M200 and swapped in to see how it fares.  The first clone is going on overnight and I’m tired, so I’m going to pass out now.  More to come…

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How to make downloading a pain in the butt

Posted on 2006/01/27 by richardykuo

I ran across some videos about Atlas, an AJAX framework for ASP.NET 2.0, that I wanted to watch since we’re planning on making some use of this stuff in future development at SnapStream.  I wanted to download these videos.

I’m now going to point out how the whole process made my life harder instead of simpler.

First of all, check out the download page for these videos.  The first thing that you want to do when you go to a download page is download.  Now, try to find the download links.  The primary download links are far below the fold, and in a section that looks equally important to all of the extra useless sections on the page.  There is a jump link that occurs very early in the page, but since it’s colored white inside a title bar, it doesn’t visually appear like a link…and if you scan for links using those visual cues, you’ll completely miss it.

Second, the links are all redirected through some page apparently designed to track downloads.  My downloading program can’t handle whatever they are doing with this wacko link, and my browser won’t show me the full url of the download when it asks me what I want to do with the link.  Failures on three fronts…the link itself, the downloader program, and the browser.  I don’t know about you, but downloading a 1GB file through this system (which I had to do the other way) is asking for trouble.  Browsers really need to build in reliable resuming if companies are going to post huge files like this.

Last, the videos are packaged up in .exe’s.  Good lord, WHY?  It’s just a WMV file.  You’re just wasting my time by packing them up and making me self-extract them.

Next time, put the download links at the top, don’t put misleading visual indicators highlighting unimportant information, and don’t repackage the file in an .exe that the file doesn’t need to be in. Signing out, thanks!

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On scanning and the DocuPen RC800

Posted on 2006/01/27 by richardykuo

The following is my humble entry to Rob Bushway’s “Win your own DocuPen RC800” contest.

I think the problem with most of the comments I’ve read so far is that they all focus on why scanning is good.  A lot of what has been mentioned already can be done with existing scanners.  This is the Docupen RC800 from Planon, folks! It is significantly different from every other scanner released to date!

So I’m going to be a little different here.  Rather than just talk about how living the portable paperless lifestyle is good, I’m going to comment more on why the DocuPen RC800 appears to be, in theory, the first nearly ideal scanner for this purpose.

I spent a couple of days digging into portable scanners about a month ago. None of them really met the bar for me. The DocuPen was closest, but lacking in some areas.

First of all, previous iterations of the DocuPen have been substandard in that the scans were in black and white (NOT greyscale) and were limited to 200dpi and tiny amounts of memory. 2MB? Come on. 300 dpi is also usually recommended for OCR scanning. You would have real trouble scanning for OCR or trying to get a high quality grab of anything with a picture in it with older versions of the DocuPen.

Now that the DocuPen RC800 is out, we have a whole new ballgame. It scans at 400dpi and in true color. In addition, it has the ability to accept a MicroSD card so that it can actually hold a decent amount of scans. Like its predecessors, it charges via USB so that you don’t have to lumber around with an extra AC adapter. Wow! As you can see, they knocked the ball out of the park spec wise, as you now really have, in theory, a portable high quality scanner that can fully accessorize your tablet with a minimal travel size and weight impact.

The pen form factor is extremely important as well, and one thing I haven’t seen mentioned. Folks, this is so very important. Most portable scanners nowadays are sheet fed. That means you can feed paper through, but if you want to scan a magazine or page from a book, you are up the creek without a paddle. This is why the release of the RC800 could be a watershed event for portable scanning. The hand scanner pen format allows you to scan virtually anything you want. Not just loose single sheet paper.

There is one area where the DocuPen RC800 falls short, mostly by practical limitations. And that is high volume scanning of magazines or books. If you have a need for both portable scanning and heavy duty scanning work, then you might need both the RC800 and a dedicated scanner at home for books and magazines. I don’t view this as a knock on the DocuPen RC800, since it has a specific purpose in life and it has the potential to do that job very well.

So in summary, yes, I want to live the paperless lifestyle just like everyone else. I would use the DocuPen RC800 to scan printed meeting notes from others, important mailings, brochures at conferences, and interesting pages from books and articles from magazines when I’m at the bookstore. I would use the power of the computer to organize, consolidate, and backup that information in a far better fashion than regular paper ever could. The trick is knowing why the RC800 fits the bill so much better than previous attempts at this vision.

Finally, if I had a DocuPen RC800, I’d write a full review on my blog examining whether the RC800 lives up to the potential it holds, or if it ultimately gets held back by other details that one often assumes should work, but don’t in a new product.

Written by rkuo[AT]snapstream.com.

Thanks for listening. I was planning on writing this anyway at some point, so it was a good reason to get my butt in gear. =)

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Preferred Display Resolutions

Posted on 2006/01/26 by richardykuo

Lora Heiny asks “What display resolution do you prefer?”  Well, it certainly depends on a number of things.  First of all, it’s not so much the resolution as it is the DPI (dots per inch) that people care about.   All other things being equal, I, and I suspect most people, would love as much screen space as possible and the appropriate DPI to match.

I used to have an Inspiron 9100, which had a resolution of 1900×1200 on a 15.4″ widescreen display.  I now use a Toshiba M200 with a resolution of 1400×1050 on a 12.1″ standard aspect ratio display.  For many people, at these resolutions the DPI (dots per inch) is too high and the text is uncomfortably tiny, but for my personal preferences, the DPI on these screens is close to ideal.

For a desktop, get me biggest display possible at the appropriate DPI.  This 30″ LCD from Dell looks nice.  It runs at 2560×1600.

If we’re talking about tablets, then I’d probably have to say that a 12.1″ screen at 1400×1050 is about right.  This balances practical issues of portability with resolution quite nicely for me.

Moving forward, there’s going to be a tricky transition where screens become very high resolution and the OS starts using those extra pixels to render fonts and images with more detail instead of packing more information into the same space. At that point, the answer to this question will change. =)

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