Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Which Is Better Phone, Blackberry or Treo?

This question keeps popping up in our search for the right remote email PDA solutions. Which is better as a phone, the Blackberry (such as the 7100T) or the Palm Treo 600?

I've had direct contact with one person that said that the speakerphone functionality on the Treo was superior, but they didn't say that actual phone quality was different.

If you have knowledge on this subject, please share it and please quantify the differences (give me the why's and the how's) as much as possible.

Any input would be much appreciated.

Possible Effects Of Legal Dispute Between RIM And NTP On Existing Customers

We are currently in talks with T-Mobile to get Blackberries and the Blackberry Server deployed into our organization.

One possible sticking point might be the ongoing legal dispute between RIM and NTP over patent infringements.

Does anyone think that the worst case scenario of RIM no longer being able to sell Blackberries in the US will have an effect on existing customers?

Also, I really have to say that I find 1) the fact that someone can patent an idea as general as a device that can receive emails wirelessly ludicrous and 2) these sorts of patent cases ridiculous. Whoever thought it was a good idea to allow the patenting of general business practices and ideas (one click internet shopping is another egregious example) had no business being in control of the patent process in the first place.

These sorts of patents do NOTHING to foster innovation, in fact they put a chill over the whole process, and create an environment of incredible uncertainty in the US business environment. Uncertainty is anathema to business growth in my humble opinion.

Ghosting To SATA Drives With Ghost 7.5

I'm trying to load an image onto a newer PC using Ghost 7.5. This PC has a 120GB SATA drive.

When I started the image load, it was going very slow. 8mb per minute vs 300+. Also, the drive light was almost constant on. Checked on Symantec's website and found out that if you have 7.5 and a mixture of IDA and SATA devices to run ghost with the -FNI command switch (you can also set it in the GUI if you wish).

Tried it and it solved the issue. The system is blasting down at 300+ mb/sec now.

Positive Dell Support Experience

I think that a lot of times I blog about negative stuff that's happened here. Mostly because that's the sort of thing that gets me energized to write, whereas the good things that happen get me energized to do more work.

Here's a more positive experience that I had with Dell's tech support (you can use this as a counterbalance to a previous bad experience with Dell's tech support on a similar issue).

One of the attorneys has a Dell Latitude D600. Sometime last week she called me up to complain that her hard drive was making a lot of noise. I looked at it and sure enough it was making very loud spiking noises as it was reading and writing. Similar to normal drive noise, but amplified. I couldn't see anything else wrong with it, so I told her that we'd monitor it and see if it got worse. Yesterday she called me up and said that she just had a bad crash and the the laptop was running real slow. So I looked at it again and sure enough the event viewer was now full of bad block errors.

Called Dell, got connected to a tech right away, told her the problem, she had me try to run the built in diagnostic (Ctrl-Alt-D) but that didn't work at all for some reason, so she said no problem and wrote up a problem ticket, connected me to dispatch and had them send a hard drive. Dispatch reported that the drive would be here on Thursday, to which I thought "no problem, the drive isn't completely dead yet".

After that, I used Ghost to take a backup of the drive, which took a long time due to the condition of the drive.

Was surprised when the receptionist called me and told me I had a small package from Dell today. Inserted it into the laptop, ghosted down the image I had recorded yesterday and the system is working fine.

So unlike the previous experience where the hard drive died completely in another D600, I was able to avoid that and the user only lost a couple of hours of worktime on the PC as opposed to a whole day or more if the hard drive had failed completely. Luckily these things tend to fail "gracefully" instead of all at once.

So that's my positive blog on Dell's tech support for the week.

Wireless PDAs for Email Access

It looks like we are definitely getting some sort of PDAs that allow for remote access of email next year (which is coming up soon).

Looks like the three most viable options in this category are the PalmOne Treo (hopefully the 650 will be out by then), the RIM Blackberry (not sure which version is most stable) and the Danger HipTop2.

Out of all the available PDAs, why these 3? They all have keyboards which is essential for remote emailing. Yeah, you could use an iPaq with wireless or a smart-phone, but sending emails with those devices is a chore at best and these are for lawyers.

The most likely candidate is the Blackberry simply because that seems to be what most law firms are using. Only problem with the Blackberry is that in an enterprise situation (basically more than 5 users) it requires an expensive add on server software component for access to Exchange.

Not sure how the other PDAs I've listed access Exchange, but I know that Microsoft has added Outlook Mobile Access for these types of devices, although, I have yet to play with it, even though I now have the service installed.

So where to get started? First off, I need to figure out what vendors I can work with to get the devices. From what I can tell, they are mostly sold through cellular providers like AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc. Which brings up the question of which provider do I choose? I have often heard that Verizon has the best coverage, but since their phone system is CDMA and not GSM, anyone who travels overseas would be unable to use their PDA. Most likely choice is between AT&T and T-Mobile.

Looks like T-Mobile is a good choice since they offer all three PDAs. Would probably talk to them to see if I could get some in for testing.

Whatever option we chose should have good phone quality, ease of use, good ergonomics (I think the Blackberry is best here) and be able to of course connect to the Exchange server through the cellular network/internet.

Any information that is out there would be much appreciated.

Dead UPS

Had an older APC rackmount UPS die on me this weekend. First time I've seen a UPS fail like that in my 8 years of doing IT work.

The only items connected to this particular UPS are the Dell 3348 48 port 10/100 switches (we have 3, each with 2 gig links to the 5524 24 port gig switch).

The 2 gig links on each switch are trunked or teamed together.

Once the switches were turned back on, they had an older config running (guess I didn't copy running config to startup config when I set up the teams) so I had to do some reconfiguring and then made the mistake of turning off Spanning Tree Protocol on one of the 3348s (not a good idea when you have trunked ports) which of course hosed things until I rebooted the 5524 as well.

Not the way I had planned to spend my Sunday afternoon, but there it is.

Have a new TrippLite SmartPro 1500 2U rackmount UPS coming in from Dell. I've been using TrippLite's products more and more lately. They make good, reliable stuff that is relatively inexpensive when compared to other vendors. I have had problems with their version 12.x UPS monitoring software and the SmartPro 550 USB UPSes that we purchased for every desktop here, but that's a matter for another post.

Anyhow, from what I can tell, the initial UPS failure that spawned all of this was caused by a short from a failing battery pack. As far as I can tell it was recently installed as a replacement for the original packs, but I can't tell if the battery pack was from APC or someone else. Can't even get the packs out of the unit as the top of one of them is deformed from overheating.

This Industry Needs An Ene...Err I Mean Better Reviews

Currently looking at LCD panels to purchase for home use. Would actually like to get a good non-Trinitron 21" monitor, but those are becoming hard to come by.

Anyhow, the dilemma is this. What LCD panel out there is 19" or larger, not too expensive (within $550-750), is good at displaying blacks (the Dell 1901FP 19" panel that I'm working on right now for instance looks washed out when it's displaying mostly white backgrounds with black text) and is good at displaying motion.

Of course the problem is that LCD panels are not very good at displaying blacks and not typically good at displaying motion.

From the scant reviews that I've seen, it sounds like the Dell 2001FP is a good choice for motion, but I don't want to spend $800-900 for a monitor and the fact that it has a resolution of 1600x1200 means that it's not great for games either (most modern games (City of Heroes or Doom 3) are only playable with decent framerates of 30-60 at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 and that's if you have an ultra-fast PC). LCD panels do not downscale resolutions very well (try viewing 1024x768 on a 1280x1024 panel and you'll see what I mean, gets fuzzy in a hurry).

So that's my quandary. To make things worse, there are not a lot of good sources for reviews on the subject, at least that I have found. This is the type of search that just totally kills engines like Google as the top 100-200 items if you search for LCD reviews are bloated with sites selling LCD panels, which is totally NOT what I want when I search for LCD reviews.

The LCD makers totally are not helping the situation either as they all inflate their numbers or use irrelevant measurements when giving specs for their monitors or just leave out important specs altogether. For instance, brightness rating is meaningless as a brighter monitor is not better, the measurement they use for latency is meaningless as they don't tell you the worse transition latency (usually grey to grey) they give you what is typically the best measurement and doesn't have much to do with real world use (off to on to off) and they don't even tell you whether the pixels are full 256 bit color or if they are using lower bit color + dithering to try to fool you into thinking your monitor can display 16 million colors at once, when it can't.

Oh and then there's the problem of getting a monitor with dead pixels. This is one area where I can totally endorse the Dell 1901FP. I have 40 of them here at the office and so far only one of them had issues with a dead column of pixels, but that was replaced next day. Just about every review I've read for an NEC, Samsung or other LCD panel talks about how there are 1-4 dead pixels on arrival. And of course they don't replace for that few dead pixels, typically policy is 8 pixels is minimum to replace.

So you have all of these specs that you have to research while trying to figure out the other hidden reasons why one monitor is $100 more than another. It's enough to drive you a little nutsola.

Anyhow, as a customer looking to shell out money, I find the situation a bit unacceptable. So if you know of a good review site that covers all of the ground mentioned above (oh and I didn't even get into the subject of ergonomics, another area where the current crop of Dell panels excel) let me know.

PC Cooling

Among other things that I've been doing, I recently decided to make some upgrades to my PC with an emphasis on quieting things down.

I recently bought a Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu CPU cooler. Does an excellent job, has a nice looking design for case modders out there. Only one thing. Doesn't work with all motherboards (they have a list of supported boards on the site) and must be bolted to the motherboard if you have an AMD Athlon CPU (hardware included). Includes a little gizmo (FAN MATE 1) to set the speed of the fan. In fact you can actually get the gizmos separately to control the speed of all of your 3 pin fans.

At any rate, it works and it's quiet. Only about $35 too, which isn't too bad considering that some of the CPU coolers out there now are like $50 and require an add on fan.

For all of you upscale PC owners with a LGA775 Intel chip, you will have to wait. Not very many choices out there yet for cooling the new Intel (Socket T) chips, unfortunately. Yet one more reason to hold off on getting one as long as you can.

The other products that I got to help keep my PC cool were 3 x 80mm case fans from SilenX. How quiet are they? I did mention that I have 3 in my case, yet my system sounds the same with or without them. They are that quiet. Having said that, I need 3 of them to do the same amount of cooling as just the 1 Sunon fan that I previously had been using. Then again, with the Sunon, my system sounded like a hair dryer, now I can actually hear sounds in multimedia (OK, I mean games) that I couldn't before.

Will eventually replace my 120mm side fan with one of the SilenX units as they are nice and quiet.

BTW there has been some clashing going on between Ahanix and SilenX about the brand name, to which all I can say is that I got my fans direct from the SilenX website, so cannot comment on the Silenx fans (which are not made by SilenX) sold by Ahanix.

Oh, I should also mention that SilenX doesn't actually make the fans, they buy fans from another source and then modify them.

Can't say that they are particularly cheap either at $12 each (a cheap Sunon is about $4 and a Panaflo can be had for as little as $6) but they are quiet and do seem to live up to the promise of a 20db 20cfm fan.

Fire Suppression Systems Update

I had previously posted about this subject here: http://itmanager.blogs.com/notes/2004/03/fire_suppressio.html

Met with a rep of Ansul and a sales tech from the local Ansul authorized dealer in the area last week. They talked to us about the two systems that they install most, Inergen and Saphire.

Saphire was talked about in a comment in by Mark Koskela in the previous post. But here's some more tidbits about it. It's a liquid at room temperature that turns into a gas with very little energy added. It's stored in the same metal canisters as FM-200 or FE-25 but is pressurized with Nitrogen, whereas the other products are turned into a liquid by pressurizing them so they don't need the Nitrogen. It turns into a gas when it hits the nozzles (the energy of hitting the nozzles is enough to turn the liquid into a gas). Pretty neat stuff. The Ansul rep poured a bit of it on our wood table and just rubbed it around with his hand for a few seconds and it evaporated quickly leaving no residue. He poured it on paper and showed how it doesn't react with the paper or ink at all. Poured it directly onto his laptop. Great demo that can only be done with this product as all the other products are gas at room temperature and pressure. Saphire or Novec 1230 works the same way that FM-200 and FE-25 work but has much less environmental impact. It basically has the same global warming potential as CO2 whereas the other two chemicals have global warming potentials over 3500 times that of CO2. Also less toxic. It's used in concentrations 50% below what is known as the no observable adverse effects level (NOAEL). FM-200 is used at concentrations right around its NOAEL and FE-25 is used in concentrations actually above its NOAEL.

The other system, Inergen is a mixture of Argon, CO2 and Nitrogen. It works by pushing the concentration of Oxygen in a room below the point that can sustain a fire. It's more expensive to install an Inergen system because it takes more tanks per room, but unlike the other three agents I've talked about, Inergen can be piped over much longer distances, so you can have a room full of tanks in a central location that can be used to suppress a fire in many different locations in a building. Also, it's much cheaper to refill an Inergen system after a discharge as they basically give the gas away for free and just charge for the labor it takes to refill the tanks. The other agents cost about $30 per pound to refill and considering that a typical room needs more than 200 pounds of the other agents a discharge can be very expensive. According to the rep, an Inergen system costs about 10-15% more to install than the other three.

Some other plusses of Inergen: With the other systems, the chemicals used are heavier than air and tend to disperse out of a room fairly quickly. This means that work has to be done to a room to make sure that it is "air tight" enough to keep the agent in place for a specified amount of time. The gases in Inergen are similar in weight to air and do not tend to disperse from a room quickly, so less work needs to be done to make sure that the room is sealed well. Your local fire marshall might have issues if you use the chemical agents in a room with open plenum false ceiling for instance whereas with Inergen they will not have the same issues. This is because rooms where FM-200, FE-25 or Saphire are installed have to pass a test where they blow air into the room with a fan and measure the air pressure. The pressure has to get to a certain point in order for the room to pass. Rooms where Inergen are installed do not need to even have this test performed.

So basically if you want an agent that is entirely benign to the environment and have a room that fits the profile for an Inergen system, it's the system of choice. Apparently, most of the systems being installed in Europe these days are Inergen systems. Unlike in the states, Halon has been banned for use in any existing system as of last December.

This is unlikely to occur in the states anytime soon, however, as the largest user of Halon in the US is the government.

Anyhow, for companies that are environmentally conscious yet still need proven fire suppression systems, it seems like Saphire and Inergen are the two systems of choice.

As a side note, FM-200 and FE-25 were both initially developed by Dupont. Dupont didn't see a market for FM-200 and sold the licensing rights to Great Lakes Chemical. The Dupont chemical is actually called FE-227ea and FM-200 is a brand name owned by Great Lakes Chemical. Dupont now sells the same chemical under their name of FE-227ea. FE-25 is only made by Dupont and only sold in the US by Fike. Because of its apparent toxicity, it hasn't been adopted widely. Saphire or Novec 1230 was developed by 3M.

BTW the detection systems and delivery hardware are the same for all 3 systems. The difference in the delivery hardware is number of tanks needed and number of nozzles needed in a given room to discharge the gas evenly to all parts of a room in 10 seconds. Inergen uses more nozzles to soften the pressure of discharge at each nozzle to prevent damage to surrounding equipment and assets.

Fire Suppression Systems

Currently looking at waterless alternative fire suppression systems for the server room and our records room.

Currently looking at FM-200 systems (chemical agent made by Great Lakes Chemical that acts similarly to Halon but doesn't damage the ozone layer) and FE-25 (chemical agent similar to FM-200 and Halon made by Dupont and Fike).

These systems are pretty cool as they put out the fire much faster than the water based sprinkler systems do and require almost no cleanup. The sprinkler systems put in buildings are pretty much there just to protect the building and occupants. They take way too long to activate to protect against anything else and of course the water is destructive to any electrical equipment and paper files not to mention the cleanup takes a long time.

FM-200 and FE-25 are odorless, colorless gases that are nontoxic to humans so there's no problem if the system discharges while people are in the room, unlike a CO2 system. One condition that has to be met in order to use these chemicals is that the room must be relatively air tight. The agents only work if they are able to stay in the area of a fire. Interestingly enough, even if you put one of these systems in a room you cannot take out the existing sprinkler systems, however the fire detectors used by the replacement systems will discharge in case of a fire in about 1 minute 30 seconds after ignition, whereas it takes the sprinkler systems something like 8-10 minutes before the air surrounding the sprinkler is hot enough to burst the pellet which allows the water to flow out.

Not sure about cost yet, still waiting to get quotes back from vendors.