Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Apple iPad

Posted by decoy on January 27, 2010 2 comments

Let me preface this by saying I’m not an Apple fan.  I own exactly one Apple device — an old iPod Photo — that I rarely use.  I tend to skip Apple products altogether mainly because of their DRM and the infamous Apple tax… higher prices for prestige.

However, I was excited when I first heard about their new upcoming event.  Many thought Apple would be cutting the iPhone loose from the ailing AT&T network and opening the door for Verizon.  Many others speculated the time was right for Apple to release a tablet PC… especially after seeing domains like iSlate.com being bought by shell companies to Apple’s name.  And the people who guessed tablet PC were right… but how right were they?

Is it fair to call the iPad a tablet PC?  It is certainly a touch screen device, but out of the box it’s a single user, single program machine.  Apple boasts that the iPad can get up to 10 hours of battery life, but that should not be difficult to accomplish if only one program can be run at a time.

The iPad should be great for watching video on the go.  Does it have an HDMI output?  No.  Does it have a DVI output?  No.  It can use an adapter to output VGA/D-SUB so you can connect it to a projector though.  You have to use an adapter?  What happened to simplicity and ease of use?

Does the iPad screen have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10 so movies will look great?  No, the iPad’s screen has an aspect ratio of 4:3… just like owning an old fullscreen TV.

But how much storage does it have?  For $499 you can get a 16 GB version and for $699 you can get a version that tops out at 64 GB.  Only 64 GB?  It’s a portable device, so that’s probably OK.  I can hook up an external drive to it when I need more storage.  Wrong.  The iPad has no USB ports, FireWire ports, or eSATA ports… not even any card readers.

Apple’s video iChat works great to connect people around the globe.  At least the iPad will have that.  Sorry, the iPad doesn’t have a camera on the front.  Or back.

So what’s the up-side to this device?  Does it do 3G?  It will in fact do 3G, but you’ll have to throw in another $130 for the 3G capability.  The capability… not the service.  If you want an iPad with a 64 GB SSD with 3G capability, you’re looking at coughing up $829.  Indeed a hefty price tag for features that netbooks at half the price can do better.

In all fairness, the iPad could work well as an e-reader, but reading from a bright, glossy screen isn’t likely to be easy on the eyes compared to the competition’s electronic ink.

It seems like the iPad could be good at so many things, but the it makes concessions on every front and does nothing well.  Is this all part of Apple’s plan?  It’s easier to make a better device when the device can be improved upon easily.  Has Apple set it up so the 2nd and 3rd generation iPads will rock our socks?  I sure hope so, because the 1st generation iPad is clearly an oversized iPod Touch (or  a limited iPhone if you have $130 to burn on data only 3G capability) that suffers from very obvious ailments.

Review: HP Mini 1010NR

Posted by Tom Schultz on January 25, 2010 None comments

About a month ago I picked up an HP Mini 1010NR.  This netbook has been serving me pretty well over the last month.

The Specs:

1.6 Ghz N270 Intel Atom
512MB of Ram
8gb SSD drive

This is a pretty standard setup and I’ll get more into some of the other hardware in a second.

The laptop is pretty powerful, the only thing lacking in my case is the RAM but that’s fairly easy to upgrade.

It’s keyboard is a little cramped but not nearly as bad as some that I’ve played with at the local Buy More ;)

As soon as I got it I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it and that was a really good decision. The 1010NR runs it fast even with only 512MB of RAM and it detected all the hardware flawlessly. The webcam worked out of the box, the sound, even my USB headset was detected correctly by the Pulse audio server.

There is a strange button by the tack pad that disabled it when you press the button. I think this is because HP assumed the the Mini’s layout is so cramped that you might accidentally hit the mouse when you’re typing but I leave the track pad enabled all the time and I haven’t run into this issue yet.

Ubuntu Remix also seems to work ok with the sleep and hibernate functions but sometimes when you open the lid from a suspend it will shut off or resuspend for some reason. Not a huge deal, as you just resume it with the power button and things are normal again. This happens about 20% of the time.

My biggest gripe at the moment is the wifi card.  The card is a Broadcom BCM4312b/g now most people won’t care about this but this card does not seem to support monitor mode. So if you expect to use the HP Mini 1010NR for wifi network diagnostics or war driving you’re probably out of luck for a little bit.

Some people might be able to get it working. I’ve read that it might be possible. I believe there are two versions of the BCM4312, one that is a/b/g and one that is b/g. My HP Mini 1010NR came with the b/g version so I think it has limited support for some features. If you can get Monitor mode working with this card let me know how you did it!

The battery life is par with other laptops and netbooks. I get about 2-3 hours depending on usage.  The screen can be very bright which is nice to look at but it drains the battery fast if it’s all the way up.

Over all this is a pretty decent netbook if you can get it for super cheap. There are some things I would like to see like an illuminated keyboard and bluetooth(option mine doesn’t have).

Linux commands that make me happy

Posted by Tom Schultz on January 21, 2010 4 comments

Ok, so at work I started writing a “Linux command of the day” on a whiteboard that was vacant. Some of them are pretty cool so I thought I would show them here.

Some of them are pretty elementary to linux gurus but I’ve been using linux almost exclusively for 2 years and some of these were new to me. This is probably because I’ve been using mostly gnome and am not fully dependant on the CLI.

1. $ sudo !!
What this does is run whatever the last command you typed with sudo in front of it. Very cool, I know I’ve typed some long command before and forgot to add sudo to it. This makes those mistakes a lot easier to deal with. (I got this from hak5.org…good web show).

2. $ route -n
I felt ashamed for not knowing this one but it will help you find what your gateway ip is.

3. $ nmap -v -O ipaddress
Ok this isn’t really a build in command but if you have nmap installed this gives you a port scan and OS information from an IP address.

Advantages of 1 week sprints

Posted by Tom Schultz on January 12, 2010 None comments

Where I work there has been a lot of movement towards creating an agile development environment. I believe that the process of transitioning into agile is unique for each company or group that makes that commitment.  Something that I noticed, which isn’t really unique in the agile world, is that short sprints have a lot of advantages. I realize that there are a lot of projects/bugs/features that may require sprints longer than one week, but I think a push to shorten sprints could be advantageous in developing quality.

Iterate!

(Not to be confused with irritate…)

In software development there is a lot of emphasis on iteration. Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!

Iterating on a project is one of the aspects that allows agile to work so well. So in the beginning we tried 4 week iterations, thinking that longer sprints would ease the transition from our previous development process, which was a scrum hybrid environment, and already in a 4 week cycle. What we discovered after about two iterations(two months) was that these longer iterations didn’t seem to be working as well as we had hoped. They seemed to help with the transition somewhat, but as time went on a lot of us wanted to switch to the shorter sprint. One reason was that we realized that a lot can happen in four weeks when it comes to requirements, direction guided by business needs and critical defects. So in our particular case the biggest advantage to one week sprints was the tremendous increase in…

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