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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On to Community Server Beta 3

Posted on 2006/01/25 by richardykuo

After having just installed Community Server 2.0 beta 2, beta 3 comes out.  Since I was blocking on some bugs in beta 2, I was definitely going to be annoyed if I had had to wait much longer to continue setting up my site.  So I’m quite pleased by this turn of events.

The upgrade process, which involved running some sql scripts, completely did not work for me.  To be fair, I might have messed that up since I was learning a whole bunch of other things about the way my hosting provider does things.

However, it was all cool since I hadn’t overly tweaked the old site.  I ended up manually clearing out the database on my host and just reinstalling everything.

First thing I noticed.  Logging in via Internet Explorer for me *still* does not work.  I was suspicious as to how such a huge bug could make it through a beta, so I checked logging in from another machine.  That worked.  So it seems something about my specific configuration is causing the problem.  That is a little strange since, to my knowledge, I haven’t installed anything that would affect Internet Explorer.

Anonymous posting now works, although it’s somewhat broken in that enabling this feature at the per blog level appears to do nothing unless you allow it site wide.  Also, CAPTCHA filters to filter blog spam are still not included. Grr.

While we’re talking about tweaking various options, I would like to mention Community Server violates my own personal interface rule of not showing users options that don’t apply right now because you have some other option set a different way.  If the option doesn’t mean anything, then don’t show it, or disable it.  Programmers will frequently shortcut this because *they* know what settings need to be turned off or on and writing hiding code is tedious. But this ends up being hell on the user.

However, overall, things are working better with beta 3 and there have been some significant feature reworks.  I was very pleased to see the addition of an articles feature.  Articles are something quite different from a blog posting…it’s content you feel people might learn something from no matter what day they end up reading it.  Categorizing it by a date doesn’t really make that much sense.  So having this new feature is very welcome.

Since I only really intend to make heavy use of the blog and articles feature, with a dash of customized navigation and pages, I feel pretty comfortable going live with all this once I tweak the links up top a bit more.  I’m currently disabling the files and photos sections since I can’t imagine I’ll be adding much to those.  I disabled the forums since I don’t think I’ll be having a ton of people discussing much on this site just yet.  Basically, I’m just disabling links where there’s nothing useful to look at anyway.  I’ll be focusing on the blog for the moment.

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Community Server beta 2 woes

Posted on 2006/01/24 by richardykuo

So here I am, trying to set up my new personal website at http://www.rkuo.com. (Can you believe that domain wasn’t taken? Neither can I.) I had originally wanted to use dasBlog, primarily because several of the bloggers I read (Omar and Scott, for example) run the dasBlog project.

I set up dasBlog and all was good, except I realized that I didn’t want the home page of my site to be a blog.  Here’s where you run into issues…many software packages run well on their own, but try to build a cohesive site out of the parts and it’s almost impossible without writing your own code.  dasBlog is excellent, but I needed a little bit more.

Now another brief aside.  I could probably customize any of these packages to my liking with some effort.  But in general, I find that doing so causes more pain in the long run, because maintaining those customizations along side all the other improvements happening to some of these packages is a huge pain in the butt.

So next, after much searching, I settled on Community Server.  This does seem to be, on the surface, an excellent and highly integrated professional looking package with forum support, photo galleries, file uploads, blogging, and more.

I installed beta 2 of version 2.0.  Unfortunately, this required me to purchase an additional SQL Server package from my hosting provider.  Oh well, I’ll live if it gets the site working the way I want it.

I was pretty impressed, but I also ran into some huge issues while installing that haven’t been solved yet.  This is a beta so I suppose I can’t complain too much, but the site is sort of in limbo while I pray for beta 3 of Community Server 2.0 to release and solve my problems.

Here are the issues I ran into.

1. The site kept ripping the www off all the url’s.  So if you went to http://www.rkuo.com, you’d be shot to rkuo.com.  Apparenetly this is an option buried in a config file and by default, it rips the www off the url.  I changed it to put the www on all the url’s.  I guess this could be a personal preference thing, but I somehow think having the www on there is natural.

2. I can’t login to the site with Internet Explorer. I can with Firefox.  Wow, that’s a doozy. Big bug.

3. Anonymous comments to blogs can’t be enabled. Another big bug.  I don’t want visitors to have to sign up for an account on the site just to comment on a posting.

4. Blog spam CAPTCHA filters aren’t included. Obviously, I could do without blog spam and this is the only reliable way to do it in a somewhat user friendly manner.

5. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to edit the tab bar at the top to add my own custom links.  I eventually found out how (SiteUrls.config) but a UI for that would be nice.

6. I managed to hang Firefox a couple of times while tooling around the site.  To be fair, I think this is a Firefox bug. =)

7. Seems a bit slow.

What’s good about Community Server

1. Tons of options and features.

2. Very professional default look and feel.

3. Ability to edit the front page inline via some sort of AJAX control. Neat.

4. Several fully integrated modules and a good level of abstraction that mostly allows me to customize what I want to if I look hard enough.  Modifiying the tab bar, removing forums, galleries, and file uploads for now, moderation settings, etc.  There’s a nice amount of detail in the whole package that

5. A nice web installation wizard for those of us who don’t own the machines we’re hosting our sites on.

I have to say overall I’m pretty pleased with the packaged potential that Community Server  2.0 provides, but there are some big bugs in beta 2 that need to be resolved before I can go full steam ahead on this site.

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