Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » March 2008

March 25, 2008

iPhone to Meeting Maker GoBetween

TAGS: Testing notes, Toys and tools

The folks at PocketMac have created a niche made up of software shims to connect mobile devices like the iPhone to enterprise organizer systems. In this case I shanghaied a buddy of mine at the University of Hawaii Information and Technology Services (ITS) group to help me wring out their link between his shiny new iPhone and MeetingMaker. With a stable that includes links between Lotus Notes and Blackberry/iPhone/Windows Mobile 5&6, this PocketMac has been catering to the mobile user that has been feeling left out when on the road.

The key issue here is that no two mobile phones are completely identical and due to marketing sparkle, new features are driving extremely short mobile phone life cycles. The pain point here is just how to migrate to the new platform and just how far out over the bleeding edge you can go without giving up connectivity to the enterprise. These questions really are the basis of why we see two basic product ladders. Consumers are driving demand for the latest sparkly, but the enterprise wants some sort of consistency for connectivity and road warrior support. This model, though, went all to pieces when the iPhone exploded into the market ... and has left IT support scratching its head on just how to provide consistency for such a new platform. The answer has been with the folks at PocketMac in the form of a series of niche market "shims" that provide the data manipulation necessary to connect these disparate platforms. What these shims do under the hood is create a maze of code to mashup the database on the mobile device to match the expectations on the enterprise application (like MeetingMaker or Lotus Notes) and make a best guess as to what the user was attempting to do with field customization. In this case, the UH ITS group and Chris have made some changes that required a bit of tech support time to labels in the calendar. From reading the e-mail thread between Chris and the PocketMac folks, it seems like they're responsive and genuinely willing to jump through some hoops for the users. In fact this story got delayed a bit while Chris and I were put under NDA for a beta version that fixed Chris' need for an SSL connection to his MeetingMaker server. I'm glad to say that my NDA is now lifted and the SSL connector is now part of the normal code for this product.

Here are some testing notes from Chris Zane with a few clarifications added as we got answers back from PocketMac Tech Support:

MeetingMaker GoBetweenconsists to a two-part solution, the SyncManager and GoBetween. Chris Zane of the UH ITS group describes the installation as easy with no annoying reboot required. Once installed he found himself navigating to the "advanced" tab to tweak the connection to his MeetingMaker server.

Notice that he seems to have an option for several different mobile devices, in his case he chose specifically to sync only his calendar.

Chris mentions: For calendar, click on Appointments and then choose what categories to sync. This is where it got a bit confusing. We had a very difficult time syncing specific MeetingMaker calendars and iCal calendars together. Tech Support provided a method that sometimes worked. Perhaps it was our setup on MeetingMaker and the fact that some of our labels were already changed from the MeetingMaker defaults. In the end, we resorted to trial and error and finally got something working reliably.

Answer from PocketMac Tech Support:
1. MeetingMaker Label and iCal calendar syncing:
We're looking into a pop-up window to allow one to move the iCal calendars and MeetingMaker Labels to align them with one another. Right now we have it set, so, users need to review and configure three different areas (iCal,MeetingMaker Advanced Preferences and MeetingMaker Labels). This process can be confusing and steer beginner users away from configuring their synchronization preferences. This would be a version 2 update.

Chris Zane: Once we got past the calendar name/label syncing, it worked as advertised. New iCal events in specific calendars showed up on MeetingMaker with the appropriate label and viceversa. We could then sync these calendars to our iPhone correctly.

Chris Zane: When events are deleted, the GoBetween application pops up a window to ask what to do - either restore the event from the other system (i.e. you delete on iCal, it'll restore the event from the MeetingMaker system), or sync the deletion. This probably occurred since we were using two way sync - if we had selected overwrite iCal, changes on MeetingMaker would be automatically synced to iCal. There is also an option to overwrite MeetingMaker. For those who use both (i.e. an iPhone and MeetingMaker) an automatic sync, regardless of deletions, etc, would be ideal.

Chris Zane: All in all it works as advertised, there are a few rough edges on matching calendars. Credit goes to the PocketMac tech support who were more than willing to assist in getting things working.

Brian Chee: So while Chris had a few rough edges, I should point out that the PocketMac tech support was very responsive and were able to get almost everything in Chris' punch list either fixed or confirmed that it will be fixed in the next release.

So thank you very much to Chris Zane of the UH ITS group for letting us experiment on his shiny new iPhone. All in all this looks like a pretty good solution for those using MeetingMaker to provide services to their remote user PDA's/SmartPhones.

Chris Zane is an IT Specialist for the University of Hawaii Information Technology Services, Technology Infrastructure Group; and as such provides support to the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the Main University of Hawaii campus.

Posted by Brian Chee on March 25, 2008 03:56 AM

March 05, 2008

T-Punkt'ed in Germany

TAGS: Lab Freaks, Testing notes

So I'm having fun, T-Punkt is one of the German versions of a regular T-Mobile shop, but wait...not quite...because Deutschland's citizens can purchase DSL, home telephones, combo DSL+Wifi+Cellular routers all under one roof. My experience started as I started my quest to stretch the proverbial penny (or Euro in this case). With Hotel wireless hovering in the 20 euro per hour range, I just had to find something cheaper to satisfy my cheap nature. I had gotten lots of help from T-Mobile USA with a list of hotspots I could use my T-Mobile USA hotspot account on, but they just didn't work time and time again. So out of frustration, I blew 20 Euro on a 24hour card at the T-Punkt store in Celle.

Punkt {m} [Satzzeichen]

ling. period [Am.]
ling. full stop [Br.]
Shamelessly borrowed from http://www.dict.cc/

So I happily started bragging about my new hotspot card to the rest of the American Journalist contingent....and found that it didn't work at the Hotel...or the Hannover Hauptbahnhof (aka train central), nor the convention center...feeling more than just a bit cheated...I was confronted by the biggest T-Mobile booth I had ever seen. Unique to the Hannover Fairegrounds are permanent booths/buildings for carriers like T-Mobile/Vodaphone and a few others.

After a short wait in the tech support queue/line, I found myself showing off my new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet to a 20 year old deutchlander who tried and tried but couldn't figure out what was going on...and as I got ready to just toss the 20 Euro card into the trash can, he tugged on my sleeve and asked me to follow him to the tier 2 tech support. Huh?! (This UberBang is actually called an interabang which is an emphatic query) Seems T-Mobile/T-Com has a permanent tech support facility just off to the side in a glassed in corner of the hall. We were seated at a diner style table (bench seats on both sides with a computer at the end) where a the tier 2 tech oohed and aahed over the Nokia and mentioned that perhaps here husband might buy one for her this Christmas. Well while she too couldn't figure out what was wrong with the account on the card, she was bright enough to realize that the purpose of the card had passed, and that an immediate refund was in order. However she didn't stop there, she pulled up a knowledgebase article and told me that to use the T-Mobile hotspots in Germany, I should append .US to the end instead of .COM for the account name. Voila...hotspot heaven....

Keep firmly in mind that your US T-Mobile phone will ONLY work here IF you signup for the service AND are willing to pay some roaming fees. The same goes for both mobile service as well as the hotspot service...but it's a lot better than ending up paying the ridiculous hotel fees.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on March 5, 2008 06:10 AM

March 05, 2008

Supermicro Water cooled blades

TAGS: Lab Freaks

It's already late in the afternoon and the snow has long melted from the ground of the Hannover Faire Grounds where the CeBIT 2008 technology conference is being held. This government sponsored super conference is trying to convince Americans to come across the pond to see what Europe has to offer. Those that do find folks trying very hard to make you feel welcome, but with a convention center the size of a small city I found myself in the gamers section when I thought I was heading into the Green Pavilion. Surprisingly, even with themed halls at CeBIT, I found myself wondering just how human computer interface software qualified for Green Tech?

A total of approx. 498,000 square meters of indoor display space are divided between 27 halls, each one measuring between 6,850 sqm and 69,890 sqm in size (one sqm equals around 10.7 sq. feet).

The Hannover Fairegrounds are reachable by direct trains from the surrounding areas during large trade shows, with our group of American Journalists staying in the picturesque town of Celle. With even the trade unions playing ball, the strikers limited their train slow downs to 3am to 7am each day in order to limit their impact upon the bread and butter trade shows at the Hannover Messe (faireground).

While quite a few of the vendors will be familiar to Americans, there are also a HUGE number of vendors that I've never heard of. My trek across both the Pacific and the Atlantic was to find out how the rest of the world views our complex industry. Here in Hannover I've found that while there were certainly alot of copycats, there were also a majority rolling out some truly unique solutions.

So while no one in the Supermicro booth was able to tell me whether this water cool solution was European in origin or not, I do know that this water cool solution is new enough that only the engineering folks could get me details. (Soon to come) So what I could get from the folks there, was that this is their answer to how to cool high density blade solutions without putting a huge strain on existing computer room cooling systems. Exactly like the water cooling systems commonly used by gamers and other overclockers; the unique portion of this solution is a water manifold system that can distribute the cold water to each blade through PEX hoses and then back to a Mini-tower sized heat exchanger.

Some of the questions I really need an engineer for:

1. Can I take a feed off of building chillwater?
2. Just how far can I pump the water?
1. They were showing a Rittal unit, but will it work with any cold water system?
3. Just what kind of heat can this system shed?
1. I'm assuming I can go colder or to glycol to get colder, but what are the limits?
4. Just how far can I take this system and how crazy can I get on overclocking my blades?
1. At what point do I start voiding my warranty?
2. At what point do I risk the China Syndrome?

 

*NOTE: The guy in the booth made me promise to tell you that this temporary installation was only to keep the unit out of the aisles so that folks wouldn't trip over it.

Keep tuned, we're negotiating with the SuperMicro folks to do a hands on review by one of the InfoWorld Editors.

/brian chee

Please note: I have been corrected on how Supermicro would like their name used...here's the correction from them:

Pls note our company should be referred to in any one of two ways;
1. Super Micro Computer Inc (our formal business name)
2. Supermicro (our trade name, one word, NO capital "M" in the middle)
The phrase “Supermicro Computer Inc” is also an incorrect reference.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on March 5, 2008 05:20 AM