Dedicated Video Conferencing

You may have used or heard of Skype, and some of you may have used its video conferencing capabilities, particularly for keeping in touch with back home when you are away for a trip. This is an excellent piece of software and is a default install on every machine I have. In addition to the software solution, there is a number of devices that make this more that a PC based solution, including connected USB handsets and the excellent WiFi based units but these do no justice to the video capabilities.

Well it seems Asus have released the Asus AiGuru SV1 and it has been given positive reviews in several places including Loic Lemur of Seesmic/LeWeb fame. It indeed looks the business but I have spotted both its flaw and an alternative solution also from Asus (and others!). The biggest flaw is that it costs $299 (which even at the most positive exchange rate would put it at £200+), which leads into how an alternative can be simply produced for a little less than that. The alternative, a more flexible one at that, is to look towards the very nicely priced EeePC 4G or EeePC 900s which would provide you with everything you can find in the SV1 unit for Video Skype plus all of the features of a netbook – and these range from £150 to £230 – and if you want to go to the Acer Aspire One units, these can come in from £179 to £230 as well. These all have Skype with Video support, and these all do so much more. These units also look a whole lot more portable than the Asus AiGuru SV1.

It looks like I have found an excellent use for my older (and less old) netbooks around the house – as dedicated Video conferencing terminals.

Wanted: Long Distance Blogger

Are you enthused by all things tech? Do you travel for work and use tech? Can you write interesting prose? Are you interested in contributing to this blog? Are you rich beyond all your possible dreams and therefore happy that there would be no pay, only the platform on which to post? Is this your bag?

If so, then contact info@bldwtech.com with links to existing contributions to your own blog or other places where you have contributed, and tell me why you would ever want to do this thankless task? Sense of humour a must.

Microsoft Mesh – Having it all

Now I could do the big write up of Microsoft Mesh and how it can help you, but a whole lot better idea is to run VT after giving you a couple of notes.

It allows you to store your most important files on every PC you have login access to – they should always be available, and after running this through the bad times of August and September, I can safely say it now works beautifully.
It allows you to store 5GB (maybe more in the future) of those files on a web desktop.
You can access those files via web, PC, Mac (it has now become available) and Windows Mobile (in controlled Beta at the moment) – it means never having to say that you cannot give someone a document.
It scales much better than Foldershare, which is what I used before.

So, let us run VT (you need Silverlight).

Live Mesh: End to End User Demo

This is a very capable piece of software, which I have combined with others to create that great mobile worker workflow, as well as a great way of ensuring that when a machine goes bad – your files don’t. We will go into that backup solution later.

Openproj – Project Management software without the cost

We have all heard of Openoffice, as a replacement for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint but the replacements for other tools that people are really comfortable with has been a little more difficult – and in this I am mainly talking about MS Project. MS Project is a very costly product, particularly for the small business or independent contractor, costing upwards of £500 for the most basic version. If you do not have it, then it really impacts you when that client sends you a project plan to follow, or if you needed to create a project plan for a particular customer, so you used to have to just buy it. You could of course use the various software as a service free/low cost systems out there like Basecamp and a number of others and hope that no-one wanted to have all that information available in the MS Project file format.

Now though, there is an open-source piece of software available that offers the 80% features that people use out of MS Project including the ability to open the MS Project file format – this is Serena Software’s Openproj. It is pretty basic and, shall we say, a bit ugly in most eyes but it does the job and there is no outlay. Openproj has advanced significantly since the version 0.90 that I started using to what is now version 1.4. It has become more stable, and slightly prettier. It also has one other major advantage – it works on multiple platforms, so if you are not a Windows fiend then you can actually fire it up on Linux/Unix and on Apple systems. One weakness it has is in the filesaving capability as it saves in the MS Project 2003 XML format, which needs to be imported into Microsoft’s product rather than simply opened but that is relatively simple to do. It does also have its own file format for those who do not need to keep files always in a Microsoft compatible format.

I am sure this is going to continue to develop, and the recent purchase of the Projity company by Serena Software, shows that the product has some legs.

Redfly – a miss by a mile

CelioRedfly Celio is a company that has produced the Redfly Smartphone Terminal since earlier this year. They have just released new update hardware in terms of the C7 and C8N, where the differentials are purely in screen size, weight and ‘Media Port’ – all of this for between $229 and $299 (I would expect that to be £180 to £230 over here – around the same RRP as the EeePC 4G to EeePC 900 / Acer Aspire One devices). These are interesting and novel devices which require a Windows Mobile phone to actually provide the processing and software aspect, because they are nothing more than a glorified screen and keyboard. Interesting – yes, successful – no.

This device competes in the same realm as netbooks with none of their advantages of providing you with a similar/same environment to work in as a full desktop, with full client application functionality. What about web applications I hear you ask? well unfortunately this device requires a Windows Mobile Phone as its only host, which means it is hamstrung with the same application limitations – a shoddy browser that is circa 1998 in capability.

They do cling to the enterprise market and push for data security as one of its advantages but sorry, data leaves the company just as easily on a Windows Mobile Phone as for a laptop and is just as obtainable – without going anywhere near my own mantra about the silliness of enforced control measures on devices when the true knowledge in a company is in the employee’s head, and they leave the company every night and no-one requires people’s brains to be locked down. You can use good common sense security mechanisms on a netbook, with greater capability than you can with the Celio Redfly / Windows Mobile combination (can you encrypt the entire storage of a Windows Mobile Phone?).

No, I cannot recommend such a device for anyone. Get a good netbook and a decent mobile phone instead (I say this, and I have a Windows Mobile Phone but then I feel comfortable with its lack of features in the web and application side and I use Exchange for contacts/calendar – the iPhone is calling me right now).

Instant on boot systems

There has been some discussion in recent months about developments in making laptops and other computers start instantaneously. These developments seem to be based around fiddling the shut down mechanism so it part starts or by implementing a mini-Linux OS in flash like with Splashtop Linux, to give an option to the standard start mechanisms that are in the main OS (mostly Windows of course).

Somehow, I believe people have gotten things messed up. My last four laptops all made good use of Hibernation and Suspend modes, and I have had few difficulties with the startup aspects of these (well at least since Windows 2000 came on the scene). These mechanisms work really well. The focus on boot up time is a bit of a non-issue for me, particularly when mobile as I am not normally rushing to get started up with the machine, I am normally getting a coffee and talking with people on entry to an office and the machine can start up in pretty much whatever time it wants to (well a couple of minutes would be good).

The problem area for me is shutdown. This is what takes time and needs focus on by engineers. Shutdown speed is governed more by how long it takes poor applications to notice the OS wants to go bye-bye, and this can be a reaaalllllyyyyy long time. So come on, make sure apps shut down quickly as well as start-up and then I would be really happy. This is really important of course because leaving offices are when we are in a hurry, and the time really drags by waiting for the end of the hibernation or the shutdown – when it is then safe for your disk to move, or for the machine to be placed in your bag (without the dreaded machine was still on syndrome noticed when the bag is really hot).

So this is where the effort needs to be expended – shutdown/hibernate, not start-up. What do you think?

Netbooks Returns update

This is an update on a previous post about Netbook Returns. Well it seems that more information about Netbook returns has come available and this was actually based on machines that are not short of RAM or performance, as the quote from MSI’s Director of Sales, Andy Tung found on the Digital Home Thoughts site. Their MSI Wind is one of the leading devices and comes with 1GB of RAM as standard, and the Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processor. This does confirm that the ‘familiarity’ issue is prevalent amongst ordinary consumers and causing this returns problem.

Well the idea I pushed in the previous post could be a stopgap measure for those persons who feel uncomfortable with Linux after use, where a flash device with the install media of Windows XP could be used to step upgrade the Linux based device. However, it seems certain that a move to Windows XP is naturally going to happen for most new Netbooks, well at least until a new version of Windows is made available that solves Vista’s performance problems – whether that is Windows 7 or not.

Spambayes – Spam filtering

The news of the shutdown of a major spam source in the US gives you some warm feelings about the constant stream of poorly targeted rubbish in your inbox, but the rate at which you will see them will grow again soon enough. So as a small business or independent consultant/freelancer what do you do about it?

One thing you can do is use an email client with built-in Bayesian filters for spam such as Thunderbird, but what happens if you are using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail? Outlook has a basic tool for filtering spam but frankly it is just a simple blacklist mechanism and not worth actuating it for what it does and I recommend not activating it.

Well what you can do is use Spambayes, a slowly/quietly developing solution which is a simple Bayesian spam filter implementation primarily for Outlook, which is open source and therefore freely available. I have used this for going on four years and it is very effective even from the start without any learning. Once it has learned up on the steady stream that you highlight, it operates very well with few (if any) false positives and it comes to the point that you forget that you have it implemented for the amount of Spam that you actually see.

One thing though, periodically (about once a year), the constant anti-spam filter methods of the spammers does have an effect, so you do have to reset the rulebase but this is so easy that it is not a problem at all. Highly recommended, and you can download it here.

Netbooks Returns

There has been some noise floating out there about the return rate on Linux based netbooks. Now I would like to see some more detail about this, as I could expect a certain lack of familiarity causing some people to return machines, but not at the scale being reported.

What is interesting about the date from the latest news, is that there is focus on one specific type of netbook that is being sold via the Carphone Warehouse stores. This netbook is the Elonex Webbook, a machine that is notable for using the Via C7 processor. Although clocked at a healthy 1.6GHz, machines based on these processors are really not fit for purpose and I feel that this is more likely to be behind the high return rate, as well as the miserly 512MB of RAM.

Using Linux is no excuse for being miserly with processor or RAM, and this can be shown that the newest releases of netbooks are pretty much Intel Atom Processor only, and have at least 1GB of RAM.

My own experience has shown that the machines with lower processors (in my case Celeron 630MHz) and RAM (512MB), do not work regardless of the OS – the applications that ordinary people want to run (basic wordprocessing and Internet) quickly uses that up. I can see the same thing happening with Netbooks with Vista running on them, these things are proven not to be functional for lightweight machines.

Upgrade Packs

For those people who have purchased machines with Linux on them, and truly feel the need for running a Microsoft product, there should be upgrade packs sold which include Windows XP Home on an SD Card or Memory stick which would allow in-place upgrade of these units. This should not cost more that £50 as long as Microsoft got over its hang-up about XP. Of course this is only for those machines that have the realistic minimum of RAM – 1GB. This is all possible, after all my current main machine, the Advent 4211, has a recovery mechanism based on a 2GB SD Card.

Google Alerts: Tracking Reputation and Events

The Internet is a big place and there are times when you want to know about something as quickly as it has happened. This can be news about a specific company, a person or a technology. You want to know everything as it happens.

How can you do that? Well apart from scouring the Internet and/or tracking people via Friendfeed or Twitter or any other social sites/aggregators, there is some help out there. It is Google centric, but then Google is most of the Internet these days. The tool is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts offers you a mechanism to create a Google Search as you would via the standard dialogue box, but this search fires either once a day or continuously as Google indexes all those web sites, and sends you the information in either an email or via an RSS feed (a new feature by the way, which I have not got into yet).

The secret is in picking the right search phrase, exactly as the issue is with Google Search. This in fact points you into how to optimise your search, by setting the search to deliver the right information and then taking a copy of what is in the search bar and placing it in the alert as you set it up.

As I said, the search can fire once a day or as the index is made. I find that latter as being best for the sorts of information I track, which is mainly specific key individuals in my industry or specific companies. This also points to one of the best uses of this service – following your online reputation.

Set yourself up a Google Alert with keyphrases that match your name and/or normal handle. You will get some false positives (particularly if you have a more common name) but this is worth it to track if anyone is posting some old rubbish about you or your company, or both. This is an invaluable service.

The only downsides are the time taken to read the posts, the fact that there can be a lag between info being published and the notification getting to you, and also the degree of false positives that you have to deal with. I also use it for various members of my own family, and this has proven very worthwhile during a time when a relative was having false nasty posts being made in their name, and also when the local paper published some photos of my children – managed to get the photos notified to relatives before the newspaper had even officially published them

So get out there and use this valuable service to find what you need to know, and protect your reputation online.

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Monthly Archives: November 2008