Bend in the Weather

I may be a slow adopter but I've finally jumped on the Netbook bandwagon.

I've been toying with the idea of getting hold of one of these beasties for a little while, and today a deal on Zazz! came up I couldn't resist.

They have the Asus Eee PC S101 for an amazing $444AUD. I'd seen them around the $999 price tag only as recent as March this year. (I think they are $599 RRP currently).



So in went my order.



Now -- what Netbook distro should I run on it (Windows XP Home is coming off immediately when it arrives).
I've looked at gOS and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Any ideas/thoughts on the preferred Linux OS to run on such a beastie are greatly welcomed!

Huawei, the Chinese company that ruffled a number of Cisco feathers have been pushing out a number of wireless 3G devices for wireless broadband for some years. You can find the Huawei devices like the E220 and E169 available from several Australian telcos for 'mobile Internet'.

I personally own a E169 on a Optus Pre-Paid Mobile broadband connection as a 'backup' for when my ADSL connection goes down.

This week at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona Spain, Huawei has announced the release of i-Mo; a combined 3G wireless modem and Wifi router unit. This means one connection can now support multiple people.

Many people are already dropping a dedicated telephone line and the cost of ongoing line rental, such a device is certainly only going to grow this market more, as it can now move from a single user device to a household device.

However, the biggest news from the Mobile gathering is that we're likely to finally see a universal power adapter for mobile devices (so no need for a new charger whenever you upgrade that mobile phone). They are also suggesting up to 50% power savings when charging your phone. Don't hold your breathe, it won't become active until 2012. If only they could do the same with damn data connectivity cables!

This week saw me head to the Victorian regional city of Ballarat for a few days to undertake some RHEL5 x86_64 builds for work.

Whilst it's not as exotic a destination as an unnamed colleague visited nor did it see me returning without my pants or shoes ( sorry Jon, I couldn't resist! ), it was a productive visit.

Traditionally we undertake builds remotely, however these servers are likely not to appear on our network or even administered by ourselves, so it made sense to go onsite to undertake the work.

I stayed in the Doherty Ballarat Hotel and Convention Centre which literally is on the opposite side of the road to Sovereign Hill (and no I didn't have time to go there!)

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Whilst I spent most of my time in the office battling with hardware that had been incorrectly ordered (ie: missing hardware and/or non-compatible hardware (ie: 3.5" SATA drives ordered instead of 2.5" SAS drives for the internal enclosure)), I did venture back to the hotel in the evenings for some R&R.

     

The hotel room was quite pleasant, and what something a corporate traveller expects. There was no surprises out of the ordinary (which you really don't need when travelling), though I did have two strange nights of sleep due to external factors:

1. 1^st night: Apparantly it's Koala mating season. Staying in a hotel room surrounded by forest is lovely to look at during the day, but it's also the playground for randy koalas of a night. So thumbs up to the 'big boy' who kept me up for several hours in the early hours whilst he ravaged the local female population. Koalas aren't dying out in this region whilst this bloke is still kicking! Seriously, I thought those types of noises I may have heard from other hotel rooms, not above my hotel room.


2. 2^nd night: Local Football season must have finished. Seems some of the local players didn't head over to Bali to celebrate but decided our hotel was a great place to party.
   
   In depth conversations at yelling level could be heard at around 3am. Answers to lifes biggest questions such as "Can you scull beer or bourbon faster?" were asked repeatedly. Finally after about an hour when it took that long for the gorillas to realise that they couldn't order a pizza to their room (and yes their was going to be surcharge for anything delivered to their room), the group of 6 decided that bundling into a car and heading down to the local McDonalds whilst tanked was the sensible thing to do.
   
   I passed out after that, though it appears they were successful (if not foolish) as their car was there in the morning without any visible signs of damage. It seems the drink and driving campaigns don't apply to footballers.
   
   I made sure I made enough noise as I passed their room at 7am heading off for breakfast, however in their drunken state the night previously, I doubt I would of woken them. It did bring me mild relief to my simmering frustration/anger from the previous nights interruption however.

The crazy and overpriced Internet costs in the room ($0.20/1MB with both uploads/downloads charged or $0.15/min) ensured I had a relatively Internet free week night. I really didn't miss being connected, though it did remind me how often I relied on just 'quickly looking up something'. Items like news, weather and even a TV guide via the Internet seems to have become the 'standard' method of information retrieval for me. It became more of an inconvenience than anything. I realised then that there was indeed a TV guide in the room. I gathered a quick round-up of news/weather using local radio. So this is what life was like prior to the Internet? (It seems so long ago now!)

Traditionally I use Google Reader to keep abreast of my feeds (as it allows me to bookmark, tag and share feeds easily), but being disconnected from the Internet was going to make that impossible.
I did however utilise a RSS reader, and was pleasantly surprised how easily it actually integrated into my Gnome desktop (particularly as it's a KDE app). The tray-icon and minimize/restore from tray all worked flawlessly (mostly due to the fact it's probably coded using FreeDesktop specs). I went with Akregator over Liferea after hearing reports that recent versions were prone to 100% CPU usage.

One thing I did notice, is that current RSS readers do allow for 'offline' mode - though it would be nice if it gave you the option of a 'full download' of certain feeds. Offline mode that only sucks down text is quite frustrating at times, as the associated image (being discussed in the article) isn't available. It feels like over-hearing a discussion you weren't meant to hear!

Whilst it's probably prudent allowing it to be set as a 'per feed' setting as I suspect many people may not want to download a full page for every article on every feed. (Particularly those feeds you only 'scan', and read a small amount of, or those that are overly heavy with graphics/flash, and embedded video.)

Since returning I did notice that Gnome also has the Straw Reader. Hopefully that comes along nicely as it appears to be in early development.
Ideally I would love to see an RSS reader that integrated WebKit with a good OPML import/export feature, as well as good support for RSS (0.91, 1.0 and 2.0), RDF as well as ATOM formats. Having a feature that allowed you to selectively do a full download of certain feeds for offline mode would be fantastic. I'll whack that down on my ever growing todo list (I think I'll need to live to 800 to ever complete it!)

One nice feature I discovered is the room had direct dial-in, and due to poor mobile reception in the room it was much more cost effective to have Pauline call me direct over VOIP. It also meant we could speak for much longer.

The staff I met at the Ballarat office were extremely friendly and actually quite enjoyable to be around. ( Sorry MrPointy, they were more cheery then you! ) They appreciated the effort I put in whilst down there (it's always nice to get some recognition) and appreciated the attention to detail. It was quite good timing as I will relocate offices to this one once I move into our new home (probably 4-6 weeks away). Heading into the Ballarat office is much closer than the Melbourne offices from Bannockburn. I've already made some good inroads into getting to know people there. I'll be the only member from my team at this office location, so it makes sense to build some bridges.

I did add two things to my 'travel-list' when travelling for work:

• A cheap mini 10/100 switch.
  This is invaluable when you're stuck in a room with one Ethernet port attempting multiple server builds, and also wishing to have your laptop online at the same time. I headed out the first day a picked up a cheapie TP-Link 5-port 10/100 Switch. Cost me $20 from a local computer store, but saved hours of frustration.


• A decent power board with surge protection
  In hindsight I should have also taken/purchased a decent power board. The room only had 4 power outlets which meant I could only have one server up at a time. It would have been nice that I could have multiple machines up at the same time, as these were identical builds (besides their hostnames), I could have used something like clusterssh to undertake the same tasks across all the machines at the same time -- ensuring I could have finished the job in a fraction of the time.

We live and learn.

It was time to upgrade my phone. Not that my old phone didn't work, in fact I actually loved my Sony Ericsson K750i, however the battery wasn't holding the charge and in this disposable world we live in it seemed crazy buying a new battery. It was purely a case of the plan I was on allowed for a new phone. So what the heck, it had served me well... but it was time to look at this 3G stuff. Sure, video calls didn't really impress me (and seemed more a gimmick then functional -- it's a call after all!)

I wanted a better camera on my phone. 2MP cut it a few years ago, but it just wasn't cutting it now. I really wanted a decent 5MP camera in my phone. It saves me lugging around another electronic device.

I own an iPod mini but find I am always forgetting it.. so a reasonable music player is also handy.
A decent browser and Email client is always handy.

We looked through all the available phones, and I was keen not to get an iPhone.

I finally settled on a Nokia N95 8GB. I was a little disappointed that the phone had no expandable memory, but hey, at 8GB I'm not filling that any time soon! (I really don't store that many songs in my phone!)

Man, how phones have progressed. To be honest, the complexity of the beast actually had me freak out a little. The K750i was pretty easy to work out, but this thing had buttons sprouting out all over the place. I guess what didn't help was that it was also my first 'slide phone'.

The first month I did the usual things, making calls, SMS and taking the odd photo or two on it.. I hadn't used a Symbian based phone for quite a while, so it took a bit of time getting used to. Over the last month I've experimented a bit more and found out it's not too bad at all. Even better is that Symbian will be released under OpenSource. Nokia also has an OpenSource website, as well as there is a bunch of OSS software you can install on your Symbian based phone.

I didn't have a GPS - and one thing I had also been toying with for a while. It is handy for long trips or somewhere you've never visited before, but I really couldn't justify it... it seemed more 'toy' then functional. Those people I had seen with a GPS seemed more frustrated then helped. Granted, these were early models but I'd seen too many people being send down non-existent roads or dead ends -- or told to do U-turns on freeways!

The Nokia N95 8GB comes with Nokia Maps. To be honest, I'd never used a GPS before so it was all greek to me. After playing around with it for a while I learnt that it wasn't too bad. Nokia kindly gave us 6-months free Navigation (basically the voice saying turn right/turn left, etc). It actually works quite well. The GPS in the Nokia N95 8GB is actually quite fast... I was surprised how quick it was able to re-route me once it realised I had missed it's 'chosen route'. I've seen dedicated GPS devises screw that up big time.

The one sticking point for me... is the cost of navigation after 6 months. Nokia want you to pay $124AUD/yr for the feature. They can shove that. I spend enough on the damn phone. Seriously, if you can give me the maps free.. .I can't see why I have to pay for the damn voice.

As a result I'm now looking around at other options (I'll continue using their Maps until I'm required to pay).
I've come across two reasonable candidates: Nav4All and amAze. I'll be testing them both out shortly to see how they stack up in Australia... and in rural parts of Victoria at that!

Ideally I would love to be able to use some thing like OpenStreetMap...which just makes sense and gives me the feeling of sharing and caring.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone that has used some of the free GPS phone software and how is rates.

Overall, I'm happy with my purchase. The built in SIP client and 802.11 b/g support is fantastic. The included web-browser is reasonable, though there are better ones around. (which have found their way to my phone). I see there is even an SSH client -- so that may also make it's way, handy when you need to do a quick 'fix' on a server and not near a computer.

Ideally I was hanging around for an OpenMoko phone, but the lack of 3G really soured that expectation. I needed a phone now and not somewhere in the distant future. Having said that.... I'll see what the future holds, I may just pickup one once the features I'm seeing in this phone make their way into the OpenMoko phone.

The IEEE's 802.11n standard is supposed to bring high speed wireless to the masses.
It's been in draft longer than most can remember, and from the schedule it appears that it won't be out of draft release and make it to a final specification until Dec 2009. This is from a working party that was setup in January 2004!

Sure there was a rival groups in the early days, but as of July 2005 these rivals (TGn Sync, WWiSE, and MITMOT) all agreed to merge their proposals into the TGn draft.

Last month we saw Draft 4 of the specification approved, and there is already talk of a Draft 5... how many before we get something into our hands?

Sure, there is a bunch of 'Draft 2.0' 802.11n devices on the market. It's risky business deploying one now. Why?

• Being at 'draft' status each manufacturer has a different interpretation of the standard. This can mean that different manufacturers equipment is unlikely to work well (if at all), in addition different releases from the same manufacturer has no guarantee of interoperbility
• There is no guarantee that these devices (wireless cards, embedded chips and Access Points) will be upgradeable to the final specification.
• Not all the details of the specification have been sorted out (thus the draft). You're likely to run into some 'interesting' issues.

Even before the release, 802.11n will be a failure. Harsh words yes... but let me explain.

Many believe it will be the silver bullet for networking, with the promise of delivering 600Mbps. Many read that as 'data throughput' - that's not the case, it's raw bit-rate.

How many people to you currently speak to that use an 802.11g network whinge that they aren't seeing 54Mbps transfers?

Expect anywhere between 30-70Mbps in real world data-transfer rates.

Many have moved their cordless phones from the overburdened 2.4Ghz spectrum up to the 5Ghz area. (Just look at any new cordless phone -- most are shipping in this space). 802.11n will operate in both the the crowded 2.4Ghz space and the 5Ghz range.

Expect to see the same issues we saw when 2.4Ghz wireless networks first came out with a range of devices interfering with the 802.11n network. (on either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz).

MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) does help somewhat, in extending the quality, range and provides multiple streams.

The draft allows for up to 4 antennas on either end, but you'll be lucky to see one of these. Expect dual antennas to be the norm.

In addition, high-throughput will require high performing CPUs (particularly if you have encryption enabled -- which should be unless you want to be wifi-jacked). Home wireless network routers are notorious for having underpowered CPUs... whilst they will get a little jump in grunt, expect them to falter if attempting several large data transfers at the same time.

It appears 802.11n routers will be a mine-field for some time for consumers, there are loads of options and those cheaper ones are likely to miss the bells and whistles... watch out for the cheapies that can't do both bands. Many are working solely in the 2.4Ghz range. Most of those on the market presently are only Draft-2.0 models, so they are quite a fair way from the 'final spec' (We know of 5 drafts at least prior to the final spec).

Ars Technica has a great review on current 802.11n routers. What they have to say doesn't suprise me. These are speeds all running in 802.11n mode and show the average of UDP/TCP throughput results at multiple locations:

Device	2 feet	25 feet	35 feet
Apple AirPort Extreme @ 2.4Ghz	22.75Mbps	25.15Mbps	17.80Mpbs
Apple AirPort Extreme @ 5.0Ghz	44.30Mbps	34.20Mbps	12.65Mpbs
Netgear RANGEMAX Next Wireless Router	28.48Mbps	24.83Mbps	5.39Mpbs
D-Link XtremeN Wireless N Gigabit Router	56.10Mbps	17.42Mbps	FAIL!
Linksys Wireless-N Gigabit Router with Storage Link	44.37Mbps	20.10Mbps	10.70Mbps

For those Aussies wonder what the feet is in metres (well it was a US review).
1 metre ~= 3.28 feet. On the flip side, 1 foot ~= 30.48cms

So these results were measured at: 60.96cms, 7.62 metres, and 10.67 metres. Nothing out of the ordinary and actually relatively close for at least the first two. If you were < 1 metre away, just plug in an Ethernet cable!

One thing 802.11n will deliver is supposedly better range. so those struggling with dropouts on a 802.11g network may like the upgrade... though it will come at a cost. Don't expect the devices to come cheap. A 'decent' 802.11n device currently costs upwards of $200USD.... plus adding in all the cards you'll need, you could be up for some serious dollars.
From all reports if you want the range and speed - get the 5.0Ghz models.. though if it doesn't support 2.4Ghz you won't have backwards compatibility with 802.11g devices.

You will also notice most currently advertise 270Mbps or 110Mbps..... it's no where near real-world results. I would love to see one of these manufacturers demonstrate their delivery of these speeds, to date -- we haven't seen anything near them. Advertising raw bit speed is also misleading and these makers know it... they are aware when people look at speeds they normally are looking at 'real world' speed performances. I expect more outrageous claims to be made and the infamous 600Mbps will soon start to be sprouted. Realistically on a '600Mbps device' -- don't expect anything beyond 80Mbps. See that Ethernet cable isn't looking that old at all.

Me, I'll stick with 802.11g for the time being.. . I only use it currently to get to the Wii and the MythTV box. Occassionally I might use it for our laptops or visitors (if I can't be bothered running an Ethernet cable from the switch).

I'm laying Gigabit Ethernet on Cat6 throughout my new house (48 ports baby! ), and expect that all bar the Wii will be on that.

For streaming High Definition Video, don't expect your sparkling new 802.11n device to handle it, or if it does, don't expect multiple streams.

For a specification that been in the thinking tank now for 4 years, the current speeds are pretty disappointing.