Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » May 2007

May 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Windows Mobile 6: Not going to kill the blackberry, yet...

TAGS: Lab Freaks, Testing notes, Toys and tools

So I've been on a journey that started with a Blackberry 7100t from T-Mobile, had a false start on their new Dash (actually the HTC S620) that originally came with Windows Mobile 5, and just a little while ago T-Mobile offered up a software update that bumped it to Windows Mobile 6.

The Microsoft folks tried very hard to convince me that I was going to love the Dash, and I have to admit it sure felt good in my hand...however, I ended up with a list of complaints and features missing in my migration from the Blackberry to the Dash.

1. No password vault! I ended up spending a few bucks on SplashID to replace the free version on the Blackberry
2. No text editor
3. No bare metal backup and restore
4. Incomplete support for SSH
5. Slow to switch applications
6. 4-5 times daily crashing and forcing a battery'ektomy to get it to play nice again
7. I actually had to do a registry edit (not the XP machine, but the phone itself) in order to get it to start the voice command stuff correctly for my Plantronics 510 bluetooth headset. It also required a phone reboot to get everything to take effect. See Randy's Rants for documentation on how to get the Voice Command stuff working over your bluetooth headset.

In it's favor, WM5 did have support for One-Note (as long as you have a full copy on your desktop) which I found to be FAR superior to a simple text editor.

So while I'm still not sure I'd concede to eBay'ing my Blackberry yet, the update to Windows Mobile 6 is actually making me consider never going back. Here's a list of new features that are doing their insidious work at making me feel good about this move...

1. Voice commands, NOT just dialing...it actually does a pretty good job of reading my appointments and finding just about anything in my contact list. Though I should point out that if you mumble, your contacts may get waken up by misdialed numbers.
2. Voice dialing: not just contact list stuff, but you can also voice dial individual digits for numbers not in your contact list.
3. Office Mobile: MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint came with this upgrade. So now I have both one-note AND my most used MS Office applications.
4. Live Search: You REALLY want an unlimited data plan if you configure this, cause it's pretty habit forming to have a search bar on the phone desktop. (hmm...maybe it's a brainwashing attempt by T-Mobile to get everyone to move to an unlimited data plan)
5. Updated Windows Media Player 10 mobile: while it still doesn't support .ogg sound files natively (yeah, who cares except Oceanagraphers) it feels like a pretty hefty subset of the full desktop version. Though this version seems to have worked out some of the bugs in playing media streams from internet radio sites.
6. It feels like it has a better power manager. I sure get much better battery life when using the WiFi features, but nothing quantifiable this time.

Most importantly to me is that I've now gone 3 days without a crash. One of the other folks that I chatted with at Interop mentioned that he never had a crash, but then again he didn't have ANY 3rd party software on it. I should point out that T-Mobile does seem to have an allergy to 3rd party apps, but get real. If companies like T-Mobile/Cingular/Verizon want to get better penetration into the corporate world, they'd better get used to it.

One thing that still bugs me is that I still can't cut-paste simple things like LONG ENCRYPTION KEYS!!!! Guys, this typing in AES 256bit encryption keys is going to get VERY old VERY fast. Someone PLEASE put the cut-paste into the menus, though if you take the time to setup a certificate authority, you can do an enroll once you've logged into the cert server. In fact, if your corporate wireless supports LEAP, WM6 also has a LEAP configuration utility in the expanded wireless configuration menu.

My last bitch only really applies if you're like me and administer a collection of Unix/Linux machines. I'd love it if something like Putty actually worked with the native keyboard (the native keyboard won't come out of numeric keypad mode) but if you use the Elekson Fabric Keyboard you have a mini SSH terminal perfect for command line changes to your Linux machine.

So while I'm not willing to call it a win...I am willing to say that this has finally become a horse race and that I'm willing to stick it out on Windows Mobile 6 for a while to see how it evolves.

/brian chee

 

 

Posted by Brian Chee on May 29, 2007 11:19 PM

May 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Apatar Data Integration Tool

TAGS: Open Source

You MUST check this tool out. Simply put, this is not just a one time data migration tool! You can literally have your high power sales folks on SalesForce.com and then your calling center on something like SugarCRM do a join and send an RSS feed to the mobile sales force. This startup with offices outside of Boston and also Belarus is creating a shift in the way we look at data. Tools like this should go a long way towards commoditizing metadata in your company.

Apatar, Inc.
195 Meadow St., FL2
Chicopee, MA 01013
www.apatar.com

This open source java product can be downloaded from their web site (beta version) lives on sourceforge and already has a small but growing community of supporters. Through a cooperative effort, the Apatar developers have worked with their community to release connectors for data sources like: AmazonS3, MySQL, MS-SQL, Postgres, SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, Oracle and many more.

 
Included in the Windows download, this JAVA application also has a scheduler so that data transforms don't have to be a one time solution. You could for instance, run a script once an hour that synchronize two normally incompatible databases based upon filter rules. Literally a poor man's federation.

So in this sample (off their website) data from Salesforce.com and an inhouse Oracle database are joined and then output to both Microsoft's SQL and MySQL at the same time. Simply dropping the data connector on the screen and then double clicking on the icon will bring up a screen prompting you for access credentials to the datasource.

 

So in this example, you can drag data items onto the screen from both sides of the data transformation and do operations like lookups, appends or simply migrate data to the correct fields on the other side. Notice that these data connectors have dots on BOTH sides, since the data transformation isn't just a one way affair.

Just think, I've paid LOTS of money for custom programming to do all of the above and have really felt the pinch of my wallet. Not only that, I've had projects that would have been a terrific help to my customers, but the return on investment was so small that I just couldn't justify it. Now I can give folks readonly access to my company database and let them pull data out and push it into their desktop contact tool. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Their CEO Renat Khasanshyn and I visited with each other while at the Interop trade show in Las Vegas and soon drew a small crowd of the other Interop Team Members (ITM's) oohing and awwwing over this super cool tool. One of the ITM's figured he could pull data from all his legacy applications in the courts and be able to do test migrations while he works out the bugs. Another gent told a story about how he has a customer on an AS/400 that would so love to migrate some of their DB2 data into SugarCRM. I could smell the burning rubber as the gang brainstormed over how they would use this tool when they got home.

Renat and I had a great conversation, and we had a chance to polish the crystal ball on where he thinks the open source world is moving. Give me a little time and I hope to post an audio file withthe highlights.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on May 20, 2007 03:55 PM

May 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Farstone's RestoreIT

TAGS: Testing notes, Toys and tools

In my long search for a backup/restore utility for my Windows machines, I've tried just about everything I could get my hands on. Norton's Ghost was pretty good, but only for a full backup and bare metal restore. The rub is that everything else would leave open files since it was running on top of the host operating system. (YEAH, I know, for Linux I use DD for full volume backups and Amanda or a simple tar for file backups...in this case I'm talking about Windows) Ghost worked well because you're booting your machine into a DOS based session where you can get exclusive use of the partition. No more open files since Windows is no longer running so no more open swap files, no more open temp files, no more stuff running in the background. What I had been wanting was a cross between the two, boot into a non-Windows system to do a full backup, but still be able to use that same backup to restore just the file I accidently dumped in a mad disk cleaning frenzy.

*NOTE: I will point out that RestoreIT is available in the Linspire Linux distribution, but not at this time for Mac OSx.

Farstone

Address
6 Morgan
Suite 160
Irvine, CA 92618

Phone
949 458-3666

Fax
949 458-3633

E-mail
information@farstone.com

Restore IT version 7
System Requirements
CPU: Intel Pentium 133 or higher
RAM: 64MB or more
Hard Drive: 150MB free space
Operating System: Windows 2000 and XP 32-bit operating systems (RAID Support)

Single user download cost: $29.99, Upgrades: $14.99 with Multiuser downloads also available.

Quick start initial menu once you've restarted into the DOS session and Windows is no longer running.

So why am I so excited about something as mundane as a backup/restore utility? The answer is simple, I travel a lot and have had a disk drive die out from under me. I want to be able to let a backup run over night and dump it to either optical or a USB hard disk. I don't want to have to make multiple passes on the restore, I don't want to have to dig around for my Windows License key, I don't want to be forced into a single vendor solution, and most importantly I'd like a restore utility that gives me back a machine ready to go without forcing me into repairing various applications.

I like this program...I should be able to roll back from incremental backups on my USB external drive, and I should be able to do a full restore. Heck, I should be able to boot from either an optical backup or if your machine supports it, boot from a USB external disk. According to the Far Stone FAQ, they hide an incremental backup partition on your machine if you choose that option.

So this is a case of having my cake and eating it to. Up until this point I'm flirting with the capabilities that have been available from Ghost forever. The difference is in being able to do file level backups and restores in addition to the entire partition/volume or the entire disk. All with very few hardware demands, so while not blazing fast on an old Celeron 550, it also wasn't painfully slow either.

So even if you're system can't boot from an external USB disk, you can boot from a restore CD/DVD and then get the rest off the USB disk. Heck, when I did a backup to the Optical Drive in white box clone Celeron machine, I didn't even have to format the CD-RW first. I just used it and went to town.

This is a sample screen that you get when trying to do a restore...interestingly enough, RestoreIT seems to have recognized just about every optical drive I had in the lab, and any of my USB external disks. Once I can wheedle a full compatible hardware list out of them, I'll post it as a comment.

So here and now, I'm making a strong buy recomendation. I'm really looking forward to the enterprise server version that claims to work nicelly with SQL and Exchange. Download the free demo and see for yourself. Heck, if you really like it they even have multi-user downloads available for purchase and download.

*Addendum from Far Stone Regarding questions posed by readers:

RestoreIT as a stand-alone software title is based on FarStone’s trademarked and patented RestoreIT ™ technology. The product features available in FarStone’s RestoreIT 7 Pro are now being offered in FarStone’s DriveClone 3 Pro. With this spring’s general market availability of the Vista Operating System and upon extensive customer surveys, FarStone decided to make their Vista-compatible product release available under the name DriveClone instead of RestoreIT. DriveClone is also an existing product title from FarStone and customer surveys indicated that DriveClone, as a software name, received a more universal appeal and more clearly describes what you can do with the product (i.e. disc imaging). Currently customers who have been using RestoreIT 7 or earlier version and wish to upgrade to a Vista-compatible version should evaluate/purchase DriveClone 3 Pro.

Posted by Brian Chee on May 18, 2007 06:35 PM