Laptop Reviews

I will be having nightmares about faulty laptop hardware for years to come

So for all of June and half of July this year I was in Canada for a really big contract. It was a very intense and taxing (though rewarding!) project that basically tied me up 24/7 for the whole duration, minus the little sleep I could afford, and acquiring food. Unfortunately, during this time, during a very hectic and somewhat dangerous part of the job, my Dell XPS M1730 laptop took a grand fall and cracked open. To its credit, it lasted for 10 more days, which completely saved my butt. During that time it only had minor touchpad problems which required a reboot when they started happening, but then it completely bit the dust on the final day of the project (I coped) due to, I believe, an electrical short somewhere on the motherboard.

The previous laptop I had the pleasure of using for 3 years was a Dell XPS M1710, which I absolutely loved in every way, besides the constant hardware failures and having to get replacement parts sent out each time they occurred. It conveniently bit the dust just before its warranty was up, so I was sent the previously mentioned M1730 by Dell as a replacement, which was unfortunately a refurb[ished], and never worked very well. Because of this it had no warranty, and coupled with the sub-par performance, I decided it was time to consider it totaled when it stopped working, retire it, and get a new laptop.

The new laptop process however ended up taking about 6 weeks to complete due to horrible hardware failures and service. My requirements for a laptop were very specific and there were only about 5 laptops on the market I could find that even fit my specs, which was very disappointing. Within those 6 weeks, I have had the chance to use and review 3 separate laptops, each from different companies, and will be including my positive and negative points about them below (in regard to the many other laptops I’ve used over the years). It can be assumed that anything that is not mentioned is as expected.

• Supplier: Bought from Amazon for ~$1,600. A full refund was issued upon confirmed hardware failure by Amazon (otherwise a restocking fee is applied). It was sent out immediately and received within 1 day.
• Pros:
  • Huge 18.4” monitor
• Cons:
  • The reason I was forced to return it was the monitor went bad in less than a week. The monitor would sometimes turn on after boot or a resolution change, but would always turn back off within 5 seconds. During the short spurts it was on, the colors were way off on half the screen. I did a lot of tests using an external monitor to try and fix the problem, but determined it was an unfixable hardware issue.
  • Media/control buttons were located on the left side of the keyboard. They were touch sensitive buttons that were way too easy to trigger accidentally. Simply relaxing my left hand usually caused it to brush and trigger one of the pseudo-buttons. I had been planning on writing a little utility that required either a double tap, or a prolonged hold, to trigger the keys, but ended up not needing to due to having to return the laptop.
  • The power cord disconnected way too easily. It probably averaged coming out of the power slot about 3 times an hour with little movement of the laptop.
  • It had very bad overheating problems consistently, but especially when playing games. I believe this might have caused the failure of the monitor.
  • The speakers would cause the volume to fluctuate very randomly so music was always distorted as it increased and decreased in volume every few second or so.

• Supplier: Bought from Dell for ~$1,800 including extended 3 year mid-tier warranty and a few hardware upgrades. A full refund was issued upon return. Dell originally lied to me about the amount of time it would take to arrive and I almost canceled the order before it was sent out because of this.
• Pros:
  • The media buttons were in a very unobtrusive place (the best of any laptop I’ve ever had).
  • The laptop was probably half the weight of any other laptop I’ve had of its size, and the power supply was probably about a sixteenth the size of any power supply for same said previous laptops.
• Cons:
  • It’s Dell...
    • Dell has absolutely ABYSMAL phone support. It’s outsourced to India and the “representatives” are completely unknowledgeable and virtually unintelligible. The representatives and managers have absolutely no power to get anything done, and even the managers are now Indian so you can’t even escalate to a comprehensible conversation. The representatives do virtually nothing but read prompts from screens, and for knowledgeable computer users, it’s painful to explain to them you don’t need them to try and diagnose the problem as you already have, but they want to guide you through their script via the phone anyways. During the calls for this laptop I was even told at one point I would have a 2 hour wait time to talk to a manager, and I experienced so many dropped calls I stopped counting. Dell support was the worst in the industry 2 years ago. Since then, it’s gotten twice as bad. I will never use or recommend Dell again to anyone for this reason.
    • Before I gave Dell my credit card number and committed my order, I had been told by the website the laptop would ship immediately and I would have it within 2 days. Immediately after I committed to buying it, the website suddenly told me it would instead take OVER 3 WEEKS for me to receive it. I was flabbergasted, and this was the reason I spent hours with phone support over many days trying to get this fixed. I finally decided to cancel the order and get another laptop on the 6th day, but I guess due to my demands, they actually shipped it right before I was about to call, aborting my attempt. It arrived 8 days after I made the order, which still caused me major problems.
  • The hard drive had major freezing problems, which is what eventually made me return the laptop, as I did not want to have them send me a completely new Chinese assembled one, as it would take forever and most definitely be a refurb. The freezing even occurred during BIOS, and it often took up to 4 minutes to resume from hibernation.
  • The ATI video card was less than optimal compared to the nVidia cards on my other recent laptops. It just wasn’t performing in games.
  • The power cord was ridiculously short, was prone to falling out (not nearly as much as the Toshiba), and had a power led on it that was much too bright (it actually kept me up at night if left on).
  • The speakers were in a horrible spot on the palm rests. Having my wrists in the proper and comfortable position for the keyboard covered them up causing bad distortion and dampening.
  • The touchpad was far too big and had no dead zones in the touchpad driver properties. Because of this and the horrible over sensitivity of the pad, it was very hard to use as it often stopped working when it detected “multiple touches”. Even an apple charger cord barely touching it made it stop working.
  • There was no property key or pause break key (Even via a “Fn” key combo).
  • There was no indicator light for the caps and num locks.
  • Many of the keys started squeaking after a few days.

• Tired of horrible hardware from other companies, I decided to give in and get a MacBook Pro against my better judgment. It has turned out to be the keeper simply because I’m tired of dealing with finding a laptop and I hear they have spectacular technical support including (supposedly) often receiving your laptop back within 3 days of sending it in for hardware replacement!
• Supplier: Bought from Apple for ~$3,100 including extended warranty and a few hardware upgrades whole sale (RIDICULOUSLY expensive). However, I had a 15% friends and family discount through a friend who is an employee of Apple bringing the total down to ~$2,600. There is no way I would have gotten it without the discount, but even with, it was still hideously expensive for what you actually get. I received it within 7 days as I was told.
• Pros:
  • It actually has a 1920x1200 (WUXGA) resolution! Both of my previous Dell’s had this, but the only 2 computers I could find on the market currently with this that fit my specs were the MacBook Pro and an Alienware (which is Dell and also ludicrously expensive). The next step down I was forced to accept on other computers was 1920x1080 (Full HD/FHD/1080p).
  • The magnetic power connector is WONDERFUL. It never falls out!
  • The visible battery meter on the side of the computer is kind of nice, but I doubt I’ll ever use it.
  • I was able to get a matte screen for an extra $50. I HATE (but have always had to deal with) glossy screens because you often can’t see them if the sun is shining on your screen, and they are fingerprint magnets.
  • The time the computer can run off of battery seems pretty amazing. Windows is reporting almost double the amount of battery time as normal laptops, which seems to be accurate, though I have not fully tested this.
• Cons:
  (Most all regarding running in Windows on the MacBook Pro, which is what I pretty much only use it for)
  • The touchpad has virtually no settings and works absolutely horribly in Windows.
    • Some example settings most all other touchpads have, some of which are available for this touchpad in OSX include: sensitivity, dead zones, and scroll zones.
    • The available settings in Windows are: Tap to click, dragging, drag lock, which bottom corner is considered a secondary click, two fingers resemble a secondary tap.
    • The multi-touch nature mixed with the absolute farce that is the Windows drivers for the device is what causes the main problem. There are no separate mouse buttons, and it’s basically unusable to utilize the bottom left and right sides as buttons with all the glitches. I think I might end up trying to write my own drivers for it for Windows soon, and if that doesn’t work, I will attempt finding a mouse buttons peripheral I can plug into via USB.
    • The touchpad will not allow a right (secondary) click while another finger is also touching it, and the secondary click via 2 tapped fingers is very unstable. It also seems right clicking sends a left mouse down event (but not a left mouse up event), which often cancels context menus.
    • For the touchpad to be usable I have to make sure to keep only one finger on it at a time or it gets buggy.
    • I did research on the Apple multitouch touchpad a few nights ago and apparently Apple didn’t really support using the touchpad at all in windows until like 2009, and that was only a token gesture as they just don’t give a shit about the drivers, only making them barely usable to allow advertising Windows compatibility.
  • The keyboard key set is only a subset of a normal keyboard and missing a ton of keys:
    • No number pad (though many laptops do not have one)
    • A few of the missing keys are: Page up, page down, home, end, print screen, insert, delete (only has a backspace labeled as delete). Missing keys are mostly all replaced by “FN” key combos via Boot Camp, though not all of them are listed in the Boot Camp help file.
    • Due to the missing keys and the non standard layout of the Mac keyboard, I used KeyTweak to remap a good number of keys for my purposes. There is also a program available in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools that accomplishes the same task, though with a worse GUI, called Remapkey.exe. Both of these programs just modify a registry value that has windows natively remap the keys. I also had to use a modification of my HalfKey Project for some other key remappings.
    • The “Fn” and “Eject CD” keys are hard wired and can’t be remapped through the above method. This has caused me a lot of annoyance so far as “Fn” and the left “Control” keys are swapped from standard layouts.
  • There is no way in Windows to disable/mute the startup sound when the laptop is turned on (which I find incredibly annoying and embarrassing in public venues). Fortunately, this can be fixed by running the 3rd party StartupSound.prefPane configuration dialog in OSX just once.
  • EFI adds another layer that can be used as a security weak point, invalidating my last security scheme. It didn’t work off the bat anyways as the EFI wouldn’t boot to the USB running GRUB, as I believe GRUB for EFI is required.
  • The keyboard backlight doesn’t work until the OS has loaded making the keyboard unviewable in dark situations. The monitor brightness is also unadjustable until Windows loads, and uses the last brightness set by OSX.
  • There are no drivers for the light sensor in Windows (though I personally don’t care about that).

Microsoft deserves to die to its competition

How can incompetence of this magnitude be thriving so well? Stop supporting Microsoft!

So Microsoft sold us [company I am currently working for] a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Professional with lies about what it supported (Windows Mobile Legacy Versions [including CE]). When we complained, they spouted how VS2010 supports the newest version of Windows Mobile (Windows Phone 7), which doesn’t even exist yet (they promise a release in “Holiday of 2010”, I’ll believe it when I see it, as this is not the first missed expected deadline). Now they refuse to give us a refund on VS2010, or even let us buy VS2008 from them instead, as it’s “a legacy product”, even though we need it because it DOES support windows mobile legacy versions.

Microsoft has done this kind of thing to me, people I know, and pretty much everyone in the world too many times to count. They will never be receiving my business or money again. It feels great to see Google beating them hands down in every market Google decides to compete with them on.

Time to see if we can’t switch over to Linux or Android on these handheld systems as an alternative... (though unfortunately they seem to be locked in to running Windows CE *sigh*).

---

[Addition on 6/17/2010]

And Microsoft lied to me once again, though at least this time I was expecting it. I later found out I also had an MSDN subscription that came with VS2010, and called in to activate it, as online activation wasn’t working (don’t even want to mention all the mistakes they made during THAT process). I was told on the phone during this proceeding that the MSDN subscription license I had was compatible with the “VS Pro MSDN (Retail)” license, and was pointed to a list of products I could download from the MSDN Subscriptions page as soon as my subscription was activated (which took 3 days...). Low and behold, this was not true and I can not download many of the things I am needing and was planning on getting when the subscription came through (including VS 2005 or 2008), as the license is not compatible at all with what they told me.

Microsoft thrives on lying to their consumers and knowing they can get away with it. Microsoft specifically targets CEOs and tells them how important it is that they make their shop 100% Microsoft, giving completely falsified numbers and arguments to support this mockery. Microsoft jams their advertising so much into the heads of these non-tech-savvy individuals that when their IT staff tells them anything against the loud spoutings of Microsoft, the truth is lost in the wind, and even sometimes loses jobs. I have seen this happen at multiple companies, and have seen Microsoft’s lies and falsified reports more times than I can remember.

This somehow needs to be stopped.

Android is not as open as is advertised

Giving the impression of complete freedom

One of the main selling points for me for the Android platform was that, as I understood it, the system was supposed to be very “open” in nature. It would allow a programmer to create virtually any application imaginable that they wanted to for users, as long as the user’s security is maintained. This is, of course, the antithesis of Apple’s philosophy with the iPhone/iPod Touch. However, I find this much spouted openness to not be the case at all. Security permissions are way too tight across the board, especially regarding interfacing with the hardware, making many things next to impossible to accomplish. This is especially true when interfacing with the phone functionality. While a programmer is free to do what they want within the scope of their own application(s) and their GUIs, working with the rest of the system can be a major PITA, or even impossible.

Some of this functionality can be gained back with rooted (jail broken) phones, but it is not always easy (or completely safe) to get one’s phone to such a state. It was simple with the Android 2.0 platform, which I originally had on my Motorola Droid, but not so much with the v2.1 software. Version 2.1 is (currently) a major PITA to root, as it entails having to restore the phone to its original state first, losing everything on it (which can, of course, be restored manually). I also, at this point, do not consider it worth it putting in the time to build things for rooted-only phones as the market is much smaller, and I myself haven’t even bothered rooting my phone on the current Android version.

Anyone can also compile their own version of the Android platform as it is open source. This would be worth it, for example, if an organization wanted to distribute their own compilation with modifications internally. However, it doesn’t much help application programmers like myself that want to reach a wide audience. I am also under the impression that putting your own flavor of the Android platform on your phone would lose certain functionalities/things included by the image provided by the provider of the phone (usually cell phone network carriers).

I really like how they did one section of the security system, which is, allowing an application to request special permissions from the operating system. A user is informed of the requested permissions before they install an application from the market place. The main problem is, though, that so many permissions are unavailable that should be possible. Another major downside is that way too many applications request permissions that they shouldn’t be requesting. This leaves users high and dry with applications they consider critical only available if they accept things they don’t want to. For example, many programs request full internet access with no need for it. It would be great to be able to selectively turn off these permissions, but I doubt the option for this is going to happen. I’m going to do more research myself on if an application can be written to do this, but I am not going to get even the slightest hope up on this possibility.

There are even examples of listed permissions that cannot be accessed by user submitted applications! For example, the INJECT_EVENTS permission can only be used by applications signed with the same signature as the system. I was unable to find this tidbit of information anywhere in the Android documentation and references (or the Internet). This all goes back to the problem of the documentation being less than optimal, as it leaves out a lot of important information.

There are at least 3 applications ATM I wanted to create but could not due to permissions:

• Call recording: I have written on this previously, but this functionality is unavailable, and Google is not commenting as to why. There are also countless other applications that could use the ability to access a call’s audio. This functionality was available on some older versions of the Android platform (and there are applications out there that take advantage of this), but it seems unavailable on newer versions for 1 of 3 reasons:
  • Legal reasons: It’s illegal to record calls in some areas (which would be dumb to revoke accessing call audio because of this because it’s legal in so many other places, including where I live in Texas).
  • Technological reasons: Some phone manufacturers might have it so the audio never even makes it to the operating system (it’s kept on the phone’s radio stack).
  • Google reasons: They decided it was a feature they no longer wanted to support. The fact of the matter is the interface is provided by the platform to do this, but bugs have been introduced into it and it no longer seems to work.
• Automated call menu: I would love to make an application that created an automated call menu on the phone, which could include leaving messages. I would personally use this so I could keep my phone on when sleeping, allowing the phone to direct the caller to either my [local or remote] voice mail or to wake me up if it’s an emergency. This is not possible due to the inability to access a call’s audio, as is explained in the above unimplementable application, but I am betting that there would be many more permissions that would make this not possible.
• Global Key interception: I have somewhat solved this problem, as I will be explaining in a post most likely coming tomorrow.

Droid Impressions and Custom Ringtones

Yay, new Google phone

I finally gave in and got myself a Motorola Droid phone, as I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time, but was reluctant to do so due to some known problems with it. I have been incredibly happy with it, and find it leaps and bounds better than the iPhone platform (and many other smart phones).

Pros (when compared to other phones/platforms on the market):

• It’s on the Verizon network, which, from my experience, has by far the best coverage and quality
• The Android platform keeps things running in the background so you can go in and out of applications freely, as opposed to only being able to run 1 application at a time on the iPhone. This multitasking approach is much better because...
  • This means that applications can continue to run/process in the background for necessary tasks, like periodically talking and receiving data from servers (without push notifications, which aren’t as powerful)
  • Applications, since they remain open, take no extra time to start back up every time you want to go to them
  • Keeping applications open has (as I understand it) next to zero, if not zero, drain on system resources if they are not doing anything in the background
  • If the phone is running out of memory, it will kill an application that is not in use
• I find the touchscreen much more responsive and accurate than the iPhone
• The voice recognition is spectacular (especially useful when combined with GPS/mapping programs)
• It’s not Apple :-) (and it’s Google!)
• It has a physical qwerty keyboard (see Cons)
• The lock screen protection is pretty neat and quick (gesture-like unlocking)
• The platform is open source, which has many powerful advantages for programmers
• Music/books/etc are directly loaded from an SD Card with no need to go through something like iTunes. This can, however, be slow when indexing from the SD card after changes
• Music sorts first by folder and then by album. While this would have been great for me a year or so ago when I got my iTouch, it no longer is as useful as I have already gone through my whole music folder and properly re-tagged everything (and it has actually caused a few bugs in my music organization)
• Free tethering to a computer through PDANet (1 month trial that blocks HTTPS sites afterwards, but I SSL tunnel my connections anyways :-) ). [Edit on 5/25/2010]: Google has just announced Android 2.2 has a new added feature “a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that can be shared with up to 8 devices.”
• Great [5.0 megapixel] camera/video recorder
• Applications can use self signed certificates for distribution. Signed applications prevent tampering (which has both advantages and disadvantages :-) ), and self signing means you can develop for the platform for free

Cons:

• It cannot be on the Internet and a phone call at the same time (Verizon [CDMA] problem). This is especially problematic when tethering
• Even though the system is Linux based, working with the terminal emulator leaves a lot to be desired
  • Most of my standard bash commands [coreutils] are not there
  • Permissions are so tight you can barely do anything without rooting
  • The shell itself is missing a lot of functionality (problems with finding files even though they are in the “path”, bash-type arrow shortcuts [autofill, history], etc)
  • Motorola has seemingly [possibly?] even removed some of the utilities that should have come with the Android platform (they are on the Android emulator at least) like the command line SQLite program
• The physical keyboard is a lot harder to use than my last phone (VX9800, I’ve been using one since 2004), and also leaves a lot to be desired. It’s better than having no keyboard though!
  • Since there is no spacing between the keys, it is very easy to make a mistake
  • The number of keys is very small and not always in typical qwerty layout (for numbers and symbols), so it’s hard to find some characters
  • Some characters (like the pipe | ) are not even listed, and you just have to know how to get to them (alt+shift+comma for the pipe)
• The phone does not let you record call conversations. This seems to be a hardware issue specific to the Droid (and possibly the Nexus One) and not necessarily because of the Android platform. I cannot find any official or confirmable information on the reason. [Edited this bullet on 3/1/2010]
• It’s made to interface with Java when programming, and you don’t have much of a choice with this :-( . However, C/C++ modules can be made that directly interface easily with the Java base.

Anywho, the original intent of this post was not to talk about the Droid itself, but I figured I might as well get that out of the way while I was on the topic :-). The real point was to talk about a problem I ran into and the solution.

I had a lot of trouble finding a way to quickly set a ringtone to many people. As I have many hundreds of contacts in my phone, and I need groups of people set to different ringtones (and sometimes just one individual), it would have taken many hours to accomplish the task of assigning ringtones to these contacts. I found the perfect solution though in an application, not on the market, called JUSTones (also called “Just Tones”). Not only does it allow you to set ringtones for many people at once, but it also lets you set SMS tones for contacts (Yay!), which is not native to the platform.

Unfortunately, it was made for a depreciated version of the Android platform, and did not work on my phone. I have been in communication with the author, and after sending him the solution to my main problem, he has sent me a new working version (with many more fixes for bugs I mentioned too) ^_^. He even refunded my original purchase and told me to not worry about paying for it, which was pretty cool of him. It’s nice to find other software authors as nice and willing to work with you as this :-).

The problem was that the ringtones being set through the program were not actually being set to the contacts. The reason was that ringtone values are now set in 2 separate places in the OS, and only 1 of them was actually being used. I presume the old location of the value was still being set so legacy applications could still read the ringtone for the contact, but not necessarily set it.

The following is the code I sent to him that copies over the values from the old value location to the new one.

//Prepare to read from the old contacts database
Cursor cur=managedQuery(People.CONTENT_URI, new String[] { People.NAME, People.CUSTOM_RINGTONE }, null, null, People.NAME + " ASC"); //Query the old contacts database
cur.moveToFirst(); //Move to the first record of the old contacts database

//Prepare queries to run on new contacts database
ArrayList<ContentProviderOperation> ops = new ArrayList(); //This holds the queries to run
do //Loop over each [old] record of the database
{
	String TheName=String.valueOf(cur.getString(cur.getColumnIndex(People.NAME))); //Get the name from the old record
	String TheRingtone=cur.getString(cur.getColumnIndex(People.CUSTOM_RINGTONE)); //Get the ringtone from the old record
	ops.add(ContentProviderOperation.newUpdate(ContactsContract.Contacts.CONTENT_URI) //Prepare a query on the new contacts database
		.withSelection(ContactsContract.Contacts.DISPLAY_NAME + "=?", new String[]{TheName}) //On any record where the Name = OLD_NAME
		.withValue(ContactsContract.Contacts.CUSTOM_RINGTONE, TheRingtone) //Set Ringtone = OLD_RINGTONE
		.build());
} while (cur.moveToNext());

//Execute the queries on the new contacts database
try
{
	getContentResolver().applyBatch(ContactsContract.AUTHORITY, ops);
} catch(Exception e) { }

Switching To Pidgin

When upgrading takes way too much time (which is always)

I recently (like a week ago) decided to finally upgrade my ancient Trillian install because it had many problems that needed addressing (OTR problems, no plugins for some networks, etc).

I decided to test out the new Trillian (Astra), which I had been waiting to be released for over 3 years. While I was very impressed with it as it is much cleaner, better designed, has a better assortment of options, and seems much more stable than either the previous Trillian or the current version of Pidgin, I still decided not to go with it. I was very unhappy with the fact that it forced you to create an account with them and sign in to it on startup, connecting to their servers for the full time you are using their product. This makes me not want to trust their product, as doing stuff like this can show a trend that generally leads to worse things. They even openly admit to bouncing your IM messages off their servers for different [legitimate] reasons.

So I went with Pidgin instead, and am generally pleased with it. It does most everything I want, and well enough. I was able to configure it and find plugins to do most everything I needed, but there was one major thing missing. Trillian had a script host plugin that allowed executing actions triggered from events. I was very surprised that Pidgin did not have a similar plugin. I contemplated making my own fully fledged one, as it would be a great and useful project to many, but I just don’t think I have the time right now :-\.

This is why I went ahead and made my Status Hot Keys plugin; as it isn’t quite as full fledged and useful as a full scripting host for the community, but it does what I want well enough to fill in my remaining requirements from Pidgin.

Facebook

Finally gave in and signed up

So I recently finally went ahead and got onto the Facebook bandwagon because people kept bugging me about it ;-) (among other reasons), of which I had been trying to stay away from since 2003 when Facebook didn’t allow me to register after I lost my college email due to dropping out.

While it is a nice open system with lots of things to do and some fine grained control, it has a lot to be left desired. While the privacy controls is kind of OK, it could be much much more fine tuned (and the most recent privacy update barely helped that out, if not making things worse).

The thing that has frustrated me the most though is trying to make my own Facebook applications. The documentation and its organization is TERRIBLE (often outdated), and there are so many functions the API just won’t let you do (a lot of stuff with photos, for example). The FQL (Facebook Query Language, like SQL) language doesn’t even let you do updates/inserts of information, just gathering of information (SELECT statements). One part that really pushed me over the edge on the decision to not work with it however is that it looks like it’s constantly being updated and “refined”, with aspects being added or depreciated so often, that it’s just not worth dealing with (though I have to admit I haven’t worked with it long at all, so don’t really have a good sampling ^_^; ). It’s no fun making an application and then having to reprogram it months later just because Facebook can’t get their act together. While reprogramming wouldn’t be a big deal, most likely, I have a thing about going back to old code and updating it unless I did something wrong or want to add a new feature.

While I would still recommend the site to people on general principal (not that everyone isn’t already on it), as it is nicely laid out with most things people need to stay in touch, it’s still not nearly as refined as it should be for the sheer user-base size and scope of the website.

Sony eBook Readers

Why can you never find a product that has all the features you want!

To start off, Merry XMas ya’ll! (And Happy Holidays, of course! [I’m actually Jewish by heritage for those who don’t know me personally ^_^; ] )

I decided to get an eBook reader as a present for someone for the holidays, so I tried out both the Sony PRS-505 and Sony PRS-700. I decided on the Sony readers for now as they can handle most, if not all, of the main eBook formats. Here are the important things I discovered out about both.

Sony PRS-505

This is a minor upgrade to the first eBook reader that Sony released in September of 2006 (the PRS-500), and costs $300. It works as it should and is advertised, and does everything I’d really want from a basic eBook reader.

Sony PRS-700

This is a major update to Sony’s eBook line, released in September of 2008, and costs $400. The most important new feature to this is the touch screen, which has some major pros and cons.

The main comparison points that I found between the 505 and 700 are as follows.

• I immediately noticed upon comparing the two how much lighter and more reflective the screen is on the 700, making it much harder to read. After some quick research, I found the following here:

  Sony added a touch layer on top of the e-ink display and embedded LED side-lights into the frame that surrounds the display. Clever. But this comes at the expense of contrast and glare, and the Sony Reader PRS-700 looks more like a grayscale notebook screen than an eBook reader. The glare isn’t nearly as bad as the average PDA or gloss notebook display-- it’s on par with matte finish notebook displays.

  As far as I’m concerned, very unfortunately, this makes the product completely worthless as far as an eBook reader. You might as well just use an LCD display instead of an eInk display for the quality and price!
• The touch screen (that comes with a pointer pen too) itself is a spectacular design, and would make the device far better than the 505 if it didn’t ruin the readability of the device. The ability to navigate the device is much easier, quicker, and more intuitive due to the touch screen interface, which also allows for a lot of additional functionality including a virtual keyboard and selecting text.
• The 700 “turns pages” about twice as fast, due to the processor being about twice as powerful.
• The 700 also has many more zoom levels by default, which is a big plus for people who need the eBook devices specifically for bad eyesight. The “Large” zoom level on the 500 just doesn’t always satisfy what is needed in some eBooks, but the XL and XXL on the 700 definitely go that extra step. I was told by a rep at the Sony Style store that there is a way to download larger fonts to the system (possibly through the eBook files themselves), but I have not fully researched into this yet.
• The 700 allows for searching for text now because of the virtual keyboard. I find this to be an incredibly useful feature for a book reader.
• The 700 also allows you to takes notes and make annotations on pages due to the virtual keyboard.
• The 700 has side lights that can be turned on, which is kind of neat, but this is really just an extra luxury.

One unfortunate annoyance of both devices is that you cannot use them while they are plugged into the computer (for charging via the USB interface or uploading new books).

After playing with both, I’d definitely recommend the 505 for now. If they could fix the contrast problem with the 700, it would be perfect and well worth the price.

I’d like to try the Amazon Kindle too, but their stock of it is so far backordered, I don’t feel like dealing with it for the time being. When I checked around the 23^rd of this month, they had a 13 week wait to have the product shipped to you! The Kindle is also, unfortunately, more DRM laden with proprietary formats. This can be bypassed though.

The IPod Touch

And IPhones

So I decided to go over to the evil side recently and get an IPod Touch. I originally wanted to just try it out in The Apple Store, but I just couldn’t find out all I wanted to about it there, and was getting highly annoyed by the completely ignorant sale reps, who couldn’t answer any of my questions anyways, hovering over my shoulder. And, yes, I asked them a few questions and neither they nor their managers had a clue. >:-(

However, all the sales reps I’ve been talking to lately at different stores about the IPod Touch and other electronic products I’ve been interested in buying have been pushing me to just buy them, and return them if I’m not satisfied. This sales tactic is a bit new to me, and I don’t like buying something and returning it needlessly, but they suggest it, so I decided what the heck! I guess it’s assumed most people will buy it and either decide they like it, forget to return it, or are too lazy to return it! So I decided to go to Fry’s to grab one (IPod Touch 2G v2.2) for testing and possibly keeping if I liked it because The Apple Store were really uncool about a lot of things, and also charged a hefty restocking fee on return... jerks. The jury is still out on if I’ll be keeping it or not, but I decided to share some of my findings.

When I talk about the IPod Touch here, I am also talking about the IPhone, because they are basically the exact same product. The IPhone just has the camera and the phone features, but the rest of the software is all the same (they run on the same OS). I also have a few IPhone specific comments below, as a good friend of mine got one for XMas and I helped him out with setting it up and found out a few things about it at the same time. Whenever I refer to the IPod Touch from here on out, I am referring to both IPod Touches and IPhones.

First of all, as is advertised and highly touted, The IPod Touch has style. The design is wonderful, it has a lot of nifty features, and has lots of useful applications in the App Store, many of them free. The product itself is by far better than anything else I’ve tried on the market for music playing and general PDA (personal digital assistant) purposes.

The Blackberrys I’ve tried out at a Verizon store (the Storm and Curve IIRC) weren’t even in the same league as the IPod Touch. I also tried out a G1 (Google phone) at a TMobile store, and initial impressions were not spectacular. However, I can’t make a solid judgment on the G1 because I didn’t spend as much time with it as I could have, as I knew I couldn’t use it anyways. This is because I refuse to switch from the Verizon network because the signal quality and customer support I have received from them are worlds better than what I had ever received from Cingular (now AT&T), AT&T, and Sprint.

Now that I’ve gotten the initial information out of the way including why the IPod Touch is nice; on to all of the problems I’ve found with it.

• Apple has horrible draconian policies regarding what can be put on an IPod Touch. Applications can only (legally) be put on the IPod Touch from the App Store, and Apple specifically regulates what is in the store, only allowing in it what is “best for their interests”. This, of course, includes denying any application in the App Store that “duplicates functionality” of an Apple product. This is bad for many reasons.
  • First and foremost, it’s not Apple’s place (though they argue that it is) to say who can develop and what can be developed for the IPod Touch, as long as it is not malicious in any way.
  • Apply very specifically blocks, quite often, products that would be excellent with great functionality because it “competes” with their generally inferior applications. Of course, one can unlock older IPod Touches, and I’m sure newer ones will be unlockable soon enough, so this problem can be bypassed. When a phone is unlocked, it can be theoretically used on a compatible network (not AT&T), and you can install any application you want to on it for free (as long as you can find it). The legality of this is questionable, but it’s not really risky.
  • This can force developers who have spent their time and effort to build a good product to not be accessible to the market, thereby completely screwing them after the fact. Apple is not specific on what can be put on the store, and is very subjective about the whole matter. Unfortunately, many developers have found themselves in this position after submitting their application to Apple for inclusion in the store.
  • Apple can decide to block a product after it has been released and people have bought it, deleting it from their phones without refund. I believe (but have no proof) that this has already happened when a product “duplicated the functionality” of a new application or feature in an application of theirs that was added after the fact.
• The SMS (texting) interface on the IPhone is horrible. It only allows you to see part of the message that you are typing at any time (40 characters as a hazy guess). This could easily be fixed through a third party application, but Apple blocks any application that has SMS as it is “duplicating” the functionality of something they built. See the above bullet for more information.
• The keyboard correction on the IPod touches leaves much to be desired, and there is no text prediction (suggesting words you are typing).
• The virtual keyboard itself, while far ahead of any other virtual keyboard on a cell phone I have tried as far as usability goes, also leaves a lot to be desired, and can be quite annoying. I did get used to it pretty fast, but mistakes were very often and easily made, and I do not believe one could ever type as fast on a virtual keyboard, like the IPod Touch’s, as a physical keyboard, though I haven’t spent near enough time practicing on it to confirm this. The Google phones (at least the G1) solves this problem with its flip-out keyboard interface.
• No multitasking. Period. The IPod Touch can do a few things at the same time (mainly play music), but 2 applications cannot run at the same time, and trying is against their developer agreement. Apple did this to control the user experience, so that a user doesn’t try running too many things at once, creating a bad user experience on the product from lag, which they would blame on Apple. Granted, the IPod Touch isn’t that powerful and it would be easy to bog down the system if too many things were running, but some things need to continue running in the background, with minimal processor time, to create a good experience.
  One of many examples of this is AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). When you start the application, it signs you on, and it keeps you online AIM until you specifically sign off (or perhaps if you turn off the phone, but I doubt it). This means that if you exit the AIM application after signing on, it shows other people that you are still online and receiving messages, even if you aren’t getting them. When you open the application back up, it retrieves all of the queued messages that were sent to you while the application was not opened. How hard and taxing would it be on the system to pop up a message informing the user a new message has come in while they are in other applications? Apparently too much, as Apple has to be black and white about the multitasking issue instead of allowing developers to petition for the right. Further, this queued AIM message system also tips one off to the fact that ALL AIM messages are sent through their servers to get to your IPod Touch, instead of your system directly connecting to the AIM servers, which is essentially an invasion on your private conversations.
• Crashing. The IPod Touch itself has crashed on me twice within the first 2 hours I used it. When this occurred, I could not even start most all of the applications, even after turning the IPod Touch on and off (all the way, not standby mode). The only way I found to fix this was installing a new application from the App Store, or updating an application that had a new version ready. Go figure.
• The IPhone can only take pictures, and not video. While there are products that allow taking video on the IPhone, they can only be installed by unlocking the phone, as Apple will not allow them on the App Store (see the top bullet for more information).
• No searching for text on the current page in the web browser (Safari). This really bugs me as it is an essential feature I need in my web browser :-(.
• I don’t trust installing Apple applications on my computers. I actually ended up using VMWare to use ITunes for this reason >:-(. ITunes likes embedding itself in your system in lots of places it shouldn’t, much like AOL since version 5.0. I do not believe it uninstalls itself completely either if you try. Also, when I tried uninstalling bonjour (an Apple communication protocol, which the program that runs it is also named, It used to be called Rendezvous) it didn’t even TRY to uninstall itself from my system. It just took the program off of a few lists and left all the files there. Even worse, I noticed that Bonjour was hooking a bunch of other processes it shouldn’t have been *sighs*.
• I’ve saved my biggest complaint for last. All music on the IPod Touches (all IPods actually, and Zunes and Zens too) organize music by the MP3’s ID3 tags into genre/album/artist/etc, and do not allow organizing the music in folder based structures. While for most people this is not a problem, it is a big one for me. This is not a problem for people “new” to the MP3 player scene that buy their music straight from the ITunes Store, as that music is already organized for them with proper tags how they want it. My, and many other peoples collections, that have been being built for well over a decade (from CDs myself or friends have ripped ourselves for the most part), are not all tagged very well, as it never mattered. While I could go through my whole directory and tag everything properly, this would take upwards of hundreds of hours to do, and would be a waste of my time. Even so, I feel being able to organize by directory can be easier to navigate and organize then straight up genre/album/artist listings. This is a very basic functionality of all MP3 players I have had up until this point.
• The above problem is actually solvable by playlist folder structures. Unfortunately, these are only available on some of the IPod types (for example, the Classic and Nano, IIRC) but not on IPod Touches or IPhones :-(. Further, building these nested folder playlist structures is also a minor pain. I started writing a script to do it for my music collection until I realized it didn’t work on my IPod Touch. ITunes transfers each folder to the IPod Touch as a flat playlist of all the songs in the playlists under it, but again, this is not a problem on some of the other IPod Systems. Unfortunately, if I was to spend the money on an IPod, I would like it to be a PDA too with much more functionality, which the IPod Touch satisfies, and the others do not.

As previously mentioned, I might not be keeping the IPod Touch, as I cannot justify the cost of it mainly as an MP3 player while I’ve already had other solutions that are almost as good for a number of years. I was one of the first adopters of MP3 players (of the MP3s on CD variety) back in 1998, I believe, and they still work great. However, I would probably get an IPhone were I able to use it on the Verizon network because it combines all the features I like on the IPod Touch with a phone. I would love to be able to use its excellent web browser (as far as cell phone browsers go) anywhere, not just when an accessible WiFi network was handy. The cost of an IPhone is more proportionate to what I’d like to spend since I’d be getting a phone and a music player out of it. Unfortunately, when unlocked, IPhones (and G1s) cannot work on Verizon, like it can the other networks, because Verizon uses a different kind of technology for its carrier signals (CDMA instead of GSM). Alas :-\.

Oh, yes, one more thing I wanted to mention. Apple was originally turning a blind eye to the unlocking IPhone market because most of them were going oversees to markets untapped by Apple, which is good for business for them. However, when Apple started expanding into other countries and this practice no longer served their needs, they added on a section to the AT&T contract you are forced to sign up for when buying the phone. It basically stipulates that if you cancel the AT&T contract (which incurs a fee after the first 30 days anyways) that you have to return the IPhone too. This way Apple is guaranteeing people can’t use the phone outside of AT&T.

WikiMedia is Pretty Nifty

When software projects are done right

I don’t have any in depth information or interesting anecdotes in today’s post, but I really wanted to talk a little about MediaWiki. MediaWiki is the wiki software, written in PHP, used by Wikipedia which has also been released by the WikiMedia foundation (who runs Wikipedia and her sister projects) as free and open source software.

MediaWiki is an incredibly powerful and robust system from a programming perspective; and spectacular in writing, editing, and organizing information from an editor’s perspective. The tagging/mark-up system is very well designed, easy to use, and easy to read when properly formatted.

The part that really caught my attention, however, is the documentation. I can say that, hands down, MediaWiki has the best documentation for a software package that I have ever seen in my life. They thoroughly document (link 2) everything in the software from all needed perspectives; including using the software as a reader, writer, editor, programmer, moderator, and administrator.

I was particularly happy with the template system, all of the available extensions out there, and the functions that allow dynamic content and manipulation of the software (Tag Extensions, Parser Functions, Hooks, Special Pages, Skins, Magic Words).

Client Side Security Fallacies

Never rely solely on information you receive from untrusted sources

One of the most laughable aspects of client/server* systems is client side based security access restrictions. What I mean by this is when credentials and actions are not checked and restricted on the server side of the equation, only on the client side, which can ALWAYS be bypassed.

To briefly explain why it is basically insane to trust a client computer; ANY multimedia, software, data, etc that has touched a person’s computer is essentially now their property. Once something has been on or through a person’s computer, the user can make copies, modify it, and do whatever the heck they want with it. This is how the digital world works. There are ways to help stop copying and modification, like hashes and encryption, but most of the ways in which things are implemented nowadays are quite fallible. There may be, for example, safeguards in place to only allow a user to use a piece of software on one certain computer or for a certain amount of time (DRM [Digital Rights Management]), but these methods are ALWAYS bypassable. The only true security comes by not letting information which people aren’t supposed to have access to cross through their computer, and keeping track of all verifiable factual information on secure servers. A long time ago at an IGDA [International Game Developers Association] meeting (I only ever went to the one unfortunately :-\), I learned an interesting truth that hadn’t occurred to me before from the lecturer. That is, that companies that make games and other software [usually] know it will sooner or later be pirated/cracked**. The true intention of software DRM is to make it hard enough to crack to discourage the crackers into giving up, and to make it take long enough so that hopefully people stop waiting for a free copy and go ahead and buy it. By the time a piece of software is cracked (if it takes as long as they hope), the companies know the majority of the remainder of the people usually wouldn’t have bought it anyways. Now I’m done with the basic explanation of client side insecurities, back to the real reason for this post.

While it is actually proper to program safeguards into client side software, you can never rely on it for true security. Security measures should always be duplicated in both client and server software. There are two reasons off the top of my head for implementing security access restrictions into the client side of software. The first is to help remove strain on servers. There is no point in asking a server if something is valid when the client can immediately confirm that it isn’t. The second reason is for speed. It’s MUCH quicker if a client can detect a problem and instantly inform the user than having to wait for a server to answer, though this time is usually imperceptible to the user, it can really add up.

So I thought I’d give a couple of examples of this to help you understand more where I’m coming from. This is a very big problem in the software industry. I find exploitable instances of this kind of thing on a very regular basis. However, I generally don’t take advantage of such holes, and try to inform the companies/programmers if they’ll listen. The term for this is white hat hacking, as opposed to black hat.

First, a very basic example. Let’s say you have a folder on your website “/PersonalPictures” that you wanted to restrict access to with a password. The proper way to do it would be to restrict access to the whole folder and all files in it on the server side, requiring a password be sent to the server to view the contents of each file. This is normally done through Apache httpd (the most utilized web server software) with an “.htaccess” file and the mod_auth (authentication) module. The improper way to do it would be a page that forwarded to the “hidden” section with a JavaScript script like the following.

if(prompt('Please enter the password')=='SecretPassword')
	document.location.href='/PersonalPictures';

The problem with this code is two fold (besides the fact it pops up a request window :-) ). First, the password is exposed in plain text to the user. Fortunately, passwords are usually not as easy to find as this, but I have found passwords in web pages and Flash code before with some digging (yes, Flash files (and Java!) are 100% decompilable to their original source code, sans comments). The second problem is that once the person goes to the URL “/PersonalPictures”, they can get back there and to all files inside it without the password, and also give it freely to others (no need to mention the fact that the URL is written in plain text here, as it’s the same as with the password). This specific problem with JavaScript was much more prevalent in the old day when people ran their web pages through free hosting sites like Geocities (now owned and operated by Yahoo) which didn’t allow for proper password protection.

This kind of problem is still around on the web, though it morphed with the times into a new form. Many server side scripts I have found across the Internet assume their client side web pages can take care of security and ignore the necessary checks in the server scripts. For example, very recently I was on a website that only allowed me to add a few items to a list. The way it was done is that there was a form with a textbox that you submitted every time you wanted to add an entry to the list. After submitting, the page was reloaded with the updated list. After you added the maximum allowed number of items to the list, when the page refreshed, the form to add more was gone. This is incredibly easy to bypass however. The normal way to do this would be to just send the modified packets directly to the server with whatever information you want in it. The easier method would be to make your own form submission page and just submit to the proper URL all you want. The Firebug extension for Firefox however makes this kind of thing INCREDIBLY easy. All that needs to be done is to add an attribute to the form to send the requests to a new window “<form action=... method=... target=_blank>”, so the form is never erased/overwritten and you can keep sending requests all you want. Using Firebug, you can also edit the values of hidden input boxes for this kind of thing.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - A tool used in web programming to send and receive data from a server without having to refresh a page) has often been lampooned as insecure for this kind of reason. In reality, the medium itself is not insecure at all; it’s just how people use it.

As a matter of fact, the majority of my best and most fun Ragnarok hacking was done with these methods. I just monitored the packets that came in and out of the system, reverse engineered how they were all structured, then made modifications and resent them myself to see what I could do. With this, I was able to do things like (These should be most of the exploits; listed in descending order of usefulness & severity):

• Duplicate items
• Crash the server (It was never fixed AFAIK, but I stopped playing 5+ years ago. I just put that it was fixed on my site so people wouldn’t look for it ^_^; )
• Warp to any map from any warp location (warp locations are only supposed to link to 1 other map)
• Spoof your name during chats (so you could pretend someone else was saying something - Ender’s game, anyone? ^_^)
• Use certain skills of other classes (I have up pictures of my swordsman using merchant skills to house a selling shop)
• Add skills points to an item on your skill tree that is not yet available (and use it immediately)
• Warp back to save point without dying
• Talk to NPCs on a map from any location on that map, and sometimes from other maps (great for selling items when in a dungeon)
• Attack with weapons much quicker than was supposed to be allowed
• Use certain skills on creatures from any location on a map no matter how far they are
• Equip any item in any spot (so you could equip body armor on your head slot and get much more free armor defense points)
• Run commands on your party/guild and in chat rooms as if you were the leader/admin
• Rollback a characters stat’s to when you logged on that session (part of the dupe hack)
• Bypass text repetition, length, and curse filters
• Find out user account names

The original list is here; it should contain most of what I found. I took it down very soon after putting it up (replacement here) because I didn’t want to explicitly screw the game over with people finding out about these hacks (I had a lot of bad encounters with the company that ran the game, they refused to acknowledge or fix existing bugs when I reported them). There were so many things the server didn’t check just because the client wasn’t allowed to do them naturally.

Here are some very old news stories I saved up for when I wrote about this subject:

• [School board] “Google hacked our website”. I can’t find the original CNN article though.
• informit.com has another good example. Read the 2 paragraphs under restaurants.com under the table. The sheer stupidity never ceases to amaze me.

Just because you don’t give someone a way to do something doesn’t mean they won’t find a way.

*A server is a computer you connect to and a client is the connecting computer. So all you people connecting to this website are clients connecting to my web server.
**“Cracked” usually means to make a piece of software usable when it is not supposed to be, bypassing the DRM

Computers are Evil

Setting up new computers can be quite the hassle

The new home server for the new entertainment center I recently set up has made itself out to be quite a nuisance. I am unsure as to whether I will keep using it or not, but fortunately, I have not yet taken down my old home server, as I wanted to do some break in testing on the new one first.

Setting up new computers is almost always a pain in the ass, what with installing and configuring all the software from scratch (which always includes a format and new OS), and making sure all the hardware works properly and finding drivers for it (sometimes when you don’t even have the proper information on what that hardware is). But sometimes, computers can go above and beyond the normal setup nuances and annoyances and be downright evil. I have long proclaimed to people that computers have personalities and minds of their own and they decide when and where they want to be accommodating or uncooperative. Besides all the normal computer setup problems (including not knowing what the hardware was and having to figure that out), this one also had a few more doozies.

The first big problem started with the fact that I wanted to use this computer for video output, and it does not have an AGP slot. As I contemplated in the previous post on this topic, I went ahead and bought a PCI Geforce 5200 for $27.79 including shipping. The card did not fit properly in the new case, so I had to unscrew a few things, which were fortunately designed for just that reason. Then the big problem came up in that video outputted from the s-video port on the card showed up on the TV at a 50% over zoom, so I couldn’t see half the screen. I couldn’t test the monitor output port either because it is DVI, and I have no DVI monitors, alas. After 2 or 3 hours of tinkering with it and throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at the problem, including trying a different s-video cable, I finally stumbled on the solution and got it working, yay. That is... until after I rebooted and it wasn’t working again x.x;. Another 20 or so more minutes of tinkering got it fixed again, and I was able to quickly hone down on a procedure to fix the problem on the next reboot, optimizing it with each successive reboot over the next few days. The procedure is as follows: (The TV over s-video starts as the primary monitor, and I have a second monitor connected to the VGA port to the onboard graphics card)

• Open “Display Properties” [Right click Desktop > Properties] > Settings
• Attach second monitor so I can see what I’m doing
• Open NVidia Control Panel
• Rotate screen to 90 degrees. It only wants to rotate the screen at 1024x768, which is too high a resolution for the TV, so it kicks the resolution down to 640x480 while rotating
• Keep setting the screen to no rotation (0 degrees) until the scaling is correct [usually twice]. The NVidia control panel doesn’t want to allow going back to normal rotation now due to the 1024x768 required resolution thing, and will keep the setting set as 90 degrees, so the process can easily be repeated until it works.
• Now that the screen is at the correct scale (at 640x480), all that’s left is to get the rotation back to normal. To do this, immediately after accepting the rotation process in the NVidia Control Panel, it has to be closed out (alt+f4) so that it saves the rotation setting at 0 degrees but doesn’t try to set it back after all the resolution changes.
• Raise the resolution back to 800x600
• Detach secondary monitor now that it is no longer needed

The screen still unfortunately has about 100-200 “pixels” (monitors don’t have pixels, technically) on the top and bottom of the screen that are unused, but eh, NBD. At least this graphics card lets me properly pan and scan (zoom/scale and move) the s-video output around unlike my Geforce4 Ti 4600! The next problem with the video card is that some video outputted from it is just too slow. Though most content is watchable, the choppiness makes it unbearable. The problem with this might just be that the PCI bus doesn’t have the required throughput, which is why most video cards are used over AGP (or nowadays PCI express).

There are even two more final problems with it, one a possible deal killer, the other rather insignificant. The unimportant problem is that XP refuses to install updates. I believe this to be a problem with SP3. The final problem is that the computer seems to randomly compltely freeze up every now and then for no particular reason, requiring a reboot. This has happened 2 or 3 times so far, so I’m waiting to see how often it happens, if anymore. I know it’s not overheating as I currently have the case open; and I see no blown capacitors... hmmmm...

<frustration>Computers!</frustration>

When your electronics know more than you

Sometimes technology knows best

I really love my GPS (Magellan Maestro 3100) system that I received last Christmas as a present from my mother. I use it whenever navigating to new places I have never been before and it is always pretty darn accurate.

So it worked as usual without a hitch, calculating the best route flawlessly, on my way to Angel Sword last Saturday. On the way back, however, it sent me back on a different route which ended up making the 50 minutes trip take 10-20 minutes longer due to sticking me on backwater highway roads with only 1 lane, and getting stuck behind old geezers going below the speed limit. This had made me really mad at the time, and rather confused as to why it chose a different "fastest" route back; that is until I got to my destination and found out there was heavy construction on the highway going northbound (my way back) that had delayed one of my friends for 4 hours on his trip into Austin :-O. Glad I ended up following its directions after all and not going with my gut and taking the same route I took down there!

My fatal mistake was assuming the GPS calculated the routes itself instead of asking a central server elsewhere with traffic information. Now I know better!

Truecrypt 6.0 fixes

I was too quick to judge

TrueCrypt 6.0 [latest version] came out today, and I was looking at the version history. I mention this because I wrote a post about TrueCrypt 5.0 (3 days after it was released, on February the 5th of this year) and the problems I was having with it. I was not aware that after I submitted the bugs to them, they fixed the 2 important ones I reported (See 5.0a history) 4 days after I wrote the post, which were:

• On computers equipped with certain brands of audio cards, when performing the system encryption pretest or when the system partition/drive is encrypted, the sound card drivers failed to load. This will no longer occur. (Windows Vista/XP/2003)
• It is possible to access mounted TrueCrypt volumes over a network. (Windows)

I am quite impressed that they did this so quickly, and am sad I did not find out until now. They also fixed the other missing feature I reported to them within a month of that [version 5.1]

• Support for hibernation on computers where the system partition is encrypted (previous versions of TrueCrypt prevented the system from hibernating when the system partition was encrypted). (Windows Vista/XP/2008/2003)

Also in the version history [5.1a], this little paragraph made me smile

• [Update 2008-04-02: Although we have not filed any complaint with Microsoft yet, we were contacted (on March 27) by Scott Field, a lead Architect in the Windows Client Operating System Division at Microsoft, who stated that he would like to investigate our requirements and look at possible solutions. We responded on March 31 providing details of the issues and suggested solutions.]

Other very important features they have added for version 6.0 that I am super happy about:

• Hidden operating systems, which is done in a really well way.
• Embedded backup header (located at the end of the volume)
• Up to 20% faster resuming from hibernation when the system partition/drive is encrypted. (As I have always been super frustrated by super slow hibernation resume support on my now abandoned partition encryption software suite, BestCrypt.)
• Multithreading support (Faster parallel processing, yay)

I did some speed tests of hibernation support in XP and got the following numbers: (Results are averages of at least 5 tests, in seconds)

Test Setup	Hibernation	Wakeup
VMWare* w/ no encryption	~5.0	~6.1
VMWare* w/ TrueCrypt 6.0 full drive encryption	~7.5	~11
VMWare* w/ TrueCrypt 6.0 decoy & dummy encryption	~7.3	~13.2
Laptop** w/ no encryption	~12.8	4.8
Laptop** w/ BestCrypt Volume Encryption	~92.1	~16.6
Laptop** w/ TrueCrypt 6.0 full drive encryption	~12.5	~13.9
Laptop** w/ TrueCrypt 6.0 decoy & dummy encryption	-	-

*VMWare was running with 256MB of RAM and 1 virtual CPU on Laptop**. VMWare results were not always stable due to other processes on the host machine, so I terminated the worst offenders
**Laptop is a 2.4ghz Pentium Core Duo with 2GB RAM and 60GB hard drive running at 7200RPM

ANYWAYS... The hidden operating system feature really excited me. Unfortunately, the documentation on it is quite cryptic itself, so I thought I’d try explaining it myself.
TrueCrypt hidden OS diagram taken from http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/hidden-operating-system.php on 7/5/2008 and belongs to TrueCrypt

The decoy (first) partition holds a decoy OS and is accessible from the password prompt (password #3) at bootup. You should not have any sensitive data in it, and can give out the password if need be. TrueCrypt recommends using this decoy OS at least as much as the hidden OS so if someone checks out the decoy they are not suspicious of it. If the perpetrator is suspicious of the decoy due to non use, the size of the partition, or just the fact that you have TrueCrypt installed, you may need to fall back onto the second stage of the security in the below paragraph.

The outer (second) partition holds some decoy files and a hidden volume inside of it. It is accessible by either the decoy or hidden OS by opening the partition through a normal TrueCrypt device mounting (password #1). It is recommended to give out its password only if you have already been forced to mount your decoy OS and the perpetrator suspects a secure partition as is explained in the above paragraph. If any data is written to it after creation, it can destroy information at random within the Hidden OS (see “Partition Sizes” at the bottom).

The hidden partition holds its own OS and is hidden within the outer (second) partition. It is accessible from the password prompt (password #2) at bootup or by mounting the partition from TrueCrypt as a device when the decoy OS is open. The decoy partition/OS is NOT accessible while the hidden OS is open.

Basic installation procedure:

• Create a computer with 2 partitions. The second (outer) partition must be 5% larger than the first (decoy) for a FAT file system, or 110% (2.1x) larger for a NTFS file system (see “Partition Sizes” at the bottom). You might as well make the outer partition FAT since it won’t be used much, if at all, and this won’t affect the hidden partition.
• Install your operating system on the first (decoy) partition with all of your applications and data that are not sensitive.
• Run the TrueCrypt hidden install, this does the following:
  • Asks for outer volume password (Password #1). Creates and formats the second (outer) partition/volume.
  • Lets you copy some “sensitive looking” files to the outer partition. Nothing should ever be changed or added to the outer partition after this, see “Partition Sizes” at the bottom.
  • Asks for hidden volume password (Password #2). The hidden partition is created within the outer partition.
  • Asks for decoy volume password (Password #3).
  • Rescue disk is created
  • All data from the first (decoy) partition is copied to the hidden partition, and then all data from the first (decoy) partition is encrypted.

And finally, things that bugged me, because I like to vent :-) :

• Forced creation of rescue disk on full volume encryption. Having the file is more than enough since it can be copied to other hard drives, but it wanted proof of the rescue disc creation, so I just mounted the ISO to a virtual drive.
• No customized pre-boot screens. This isn’t important really, but I loved my hokie ASCII art ^_^;.
• Partition sizes: The hidden OS partition will be the exact same size as the decoy and the outer partition must be at least 5% larger for FAT and 110% larger for NTFS than the decoy.

Partition sizes:

The hidden OS partition will be the exact size as the decoy partition because they are originally duplicates of each other, including their original partition tables, which include the size of the partition.

The outer (second) partition that holds the hidden partition must be at least 5% larger for FAT and 110% larger for NTFS than the decoy. The reason for this is the file contents tables. NTFS, unfortunately in this case, stores its file table in the middle of the partition. The outer partition’s file table does not, however, affect the hidden partition in any way.

So, for example (these numbers are theoretical, I am not entirely sure if these are correct), if we have a 2GB decoy partition, the outer NTFS partition must be at least 4.2GB and the hidden partition will be 2GB. If we made the outer partition 6GB, then 0-3GB would be writable, 3.0GB-3.6GB would be used for the file table, 3.6GB-4.0GB would be writable, and 4.0GB-6.0GB would be used by the hidden operating system. So, theoretically, you could write 3.4GB to the outer volume before problems started occurring, but I wouldn’t trust NTFS to only write to the beginning of the drive.

Online credit card misinformation

Check your gut suspicions before acting

I was just doing my accounting and I noticed I had 3 double-charges on my Capital One credit card that all happened within a 2 day period. I found this to be very odd since I have never been double-charged on any of my credit cards since I started using them 10 years ago when I was 14.

So I went ahead and submitted 2 charge disputes with Capital One, and a third with the other company I saw double-charged. I then finished my accounting, and noticed that the balance showing up on my Capital One did not include those 3 charges. I validated my suspicions by calling up their customer relations department (getting a lady in India) and confirming that the charges only show up once in my account.

I then did my emails to rescind my previous queries into having the double-charges refunded, and also included in the email to Capital One that their web system (or possibly statement system) has an error and needs to be fixed. The double-charges actually weren’t showing up on the same statements. They showed up once (for May 16th and 17th) on my last month’s statement, and then again (May 17th and 19th) on my current month’s statement. Go Figure.

[Edit on 6/13/08] A few days ago, after an annoying downtime on the Capitol One credit card site, I noticed they added a new feature that now shows your latest charges within a certain period of days (15, 30, etc) instead of just the current billing cycle. So I’m pretty sure the above problem was due to them implementing this new system without warning the user or having any indication of the system change in the interface. I do know how annoying change control is, and the problems that come along with implementing new features on websites which may temporarily confuse users, but I’d expect better from a multinational corporation like this. Then again, this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened on their website, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

Text Message Storage Limits

We need open source cell phones

So I’ve been rather perturbed for a very long time at the 50/50 inbox/outbox limit of stored SMS text messages in all LG cell phones.  Other phones have similar limits, like a Samsung I have is limited to 100/50, and it just erases messages when an overflow occurs, as opposed to the nice prompts on my LG VX9800, with its QWERTY keyboard, which I love.

I have done some minor hacking on cell phones and tinkered with the firmware, but without a proper emulator, I would never be able to find out where the 50 cap is set and be able to make a hack for phones could store more.

So today, I was at a Verizon store [unimportant ordeal here] because I got a little bit of water on my LG phone and it was having issues.  Immediately after the spill, it had a bunch of problems including the battery thinking it was always charging, buttons on the front side sending two different buttons when pressed, and some other buttons not working.  I immediately set to shaking it out at all angles to get most of the water out (which there wasn’t much to begin with...), and then I thoroughly blow dried every opening into the inside circuitry.  This fixed everything but the worst problem, signal dropping.  Basically, the phone would lose any connection it made after about 5 seconds, so I couldn’t really answer or makes calls.  Fortunately I was still able to send and receive SMS messages, but received ones didn’t signal the server they were received, and I kept receiving them over and over and over until a connection finally stayed open long enough to tell the server I got it.
So I took it back to the store to see if they could fix it, and all they tried was updating the firmware... but they said I could trade it in for another phone for $50, which I figured from the beginning is what I would have to do, and was a good idea anyways because of this [temporarily down].
So they realized they had no replacements in stock... or at the warehouse... for the VX9800 OR the VX9900, which they said they’d upgrade me too if they couldn’t find and VX9800, and I wanted (yay).  So I was told to call back tomorrow and try again.  Bleh. Anyways, I was at the store where I found out why this was.  Apparently, cell phones start slowing down considerably with too many stored SMSs.  I was told of a lady that had come in the previous week with 600+ stored messages and the phone took very long intervals to do anything, and clearing it fixed it.

I know that, on my phone at least, each SMS message is stored as a separate file, so my best guess as to the reason for this problem is that this creates too many entries in the file system for the phone to handle.  This seems like a rather silly and trivial problem to work around, but the cell phone manufactures can get away with it, as they have no good competitors that fix problems like this.

This is why we really need open source cell phones.  There have been word of open source phones in the works for years... but nothing too solid yet :-\.

So ANYWAYS, I had already started taking a different approach in early January to fix the problem of backing up SMS messages without having to sync them to your computer, which is a rather obnoxious work around.  I had been researching and planning to write a BREW application that extracts all SMS messages into a text file on your phone so that you don’t have to worry about the limits, and could download them to your computer whenever you wanted, with theoretically thousands of SMS messages archived on your phone.  Unfortunately, as usual, other things took over my time and the project was halted, but I will probably be getting back to it soon.

Video driver woes

TV output issues

So I’ve recently switched over to an old Geforce4 Ti 4600 for TV output on my home server/TV station. Unfortunately, my TV needs output resizing (underscan) due to being dropped a long ways back during transport from a Halo game, and the CRT output is misaligned.

If I recall, old Nvidia drivers allowed output resizing, but the latest available ones (which are rather old themselves, as NVidia stops supporting old cards with newer driver sets that have more options) that work for my card only allow repositioning of the output signal, so part of the screen is cut off.

The final solution was to tell VLC media player to output videos at 400:318 aspect ratio when in full screen to force a smaller width that I could then reposition to properly fit the screen. A rather inelegant solution, but it works. One of these days I’ll get myself a new TV :-).

Truecrypt 5.0 tribulations

Adopting programs at release is often a bad idea

Just as is the case with windows, where you never install before at least the first service pack is released, so is the case with TrueCrypt, it seems.

TrueCrypt is open source, which is a major plus, and in my opinion, the best solution for encrypting data.  In a nutshell, TrueCrypt allows the creation of encrypted “container files” that when mounted act as a hard drive partition, accessible through a password and/or a key file.  The encryption, security, and speed are all top notch and the program runs completely transparent to the user after volume mounting, so I would highly recommend the program to anyone that has anything at all to hide :-).

It also has some other useful options like the ability to encrypt USB flash cards for opening at other locations without having TrueCrypt installed, and “hidden container files” in which a second hidden volume is contained within the same container, unlockable by a separate password/key file, which is great for plausible deniability.  I have been always been a fan of TrueCrypt since I first found and adopted it years ago, and would highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, TrueCrypt 5.0, which was just released a few days ago, does not yet meet quality standards.  It does all the old stuff it used to of course, and adds some great new features, but the multiple bugs I have found are forcing me to revert to an older version of it, and back to other 3rd party applications I have been using for other types of encryption.

The new feature, which I’ve been looking forward too for ages is pre-boot authentication volume encryption, which basically means encrypting 100% of your hard drive (partition) that contains Windows (or another OS) on it so you only have to put in your password during boot, and EVERYTHING is encrypted and safe, and impossible (by today’s standards) to access before the password is put in.  This is especially important for laptops due to the increased likelihood of it falling into others’ hands through loss or theft.  Unfortunately, full volume encryption has broken 2 things; the ability to put my laptop into hibernation (which was also a problem with other volume encryption programs I’ve tried in the past), and oddly enough, it broke my audio drivers so I have no sound XD.  So, I’m reverting back to BestCrypt Volume Encryption [v1.95.1], which I’ve also been using for quite a while, that does the same thing, but allows hibernation.  My only beefs with it are that it’s closed source, something that isn’t usually a problem in my book, but is for this case [security], and that hibernation is SLOW, probably due to the fact that it can no longer use DMA, due to needing to pass data through the CPU for encryption.  Another, technically not so important, feature TrueCrypt doesn’t include yet that most other volume encryption pre-boot authentication packages include is customized boot password prompt screens.  I’ve included my incredibly dorky screens (for BestCrypt Volume Encryption) below :-D.

The other thing that is broken, oddly enough, forcing me to revert to TrueCrypt 4.3a, is I can’t mount containers over a network anymore through Windows File and Print Sharing :-\.  Ah well, hopefully they’ll get these things fixed soon enough.

My boot password prompt, and no, I will not explain it, except that DarkSide was my previous computer handle a very good number of years ago.


A boot prompt I made for a female friend, weeee, ASCII art ^_^;.


And for reference, the ASCII chart.

Note that when creating a screen for BestCrypt Volume Encryption, the characters 0x08 0x09 0x0A 0x0D are all invalid. The “&” is used to place the password prompt.

One other Volume Encryption I tried, which was just about as good, though I do not recall if it allowed hibernation, was DriveCrypt Plus Pack [v3.90G]. It also allowed bitmaps [pictures] for the boot password prompt screen.

Eragon

How to destroy movie from novel adaptations

I read through Eragon and Eldest, the first two books of the Inheritance Cycle, by Christopher Paolini, a while back, and was very happy with the novels, mainly for the relationship between the two protagonists, Eragon and his dragon Saphira.  The fantasy novels brought in a bunch of new possibilities of fun with dragon lore and their abilities, a topic which has, to my knowledge, never really been elaborated or expanded on in the past to this kind of extent, though I have heard the lores in these books bears a large resemblance to a novel called Dragonriders of Pern.  I would recommend the Inheritance Cycle to anyone looking for a fun, though not necessarily quick, fantasy read.  The series was originally supposed to be three novels, but as of a few months ago it was announced that it would be four.  The third book should be coming out in September of next year, which I am waiting in anticipation for, though nowhere near the level of excitement as any of the Harry Potter books brought me.

The reason for this post though is to actually rant about the movie adaptation.  One pet peeve of mine is people that say movies or TV shows are horrible without ever having given them a viewing, let alone a chance.  I am the kind of person that will usually sit through anything, no matter how bad I feel it is, just so I can talk to people about it afterwards and be able to validly say why I did or did not enjoy it.  This, however, did not apply to the Eragon movie.  I was retching after about three minutes and think I got through five to ten minutes before I was so thoroughly disgusted I had to stop and just fast forward through the rest to see different parts I was curious about.  Which was a mistake as the rest was even worse than the beginning.  It was that bad.  The movie was very obviously a ploy by the studios to milk in some money by throwing out a half baked fantasy movie trying to parallel Lord of the Rings in style.  I honestly don’t know how it got as far as it did.

I went to do some research and found out the director, Stefen Fangmeier, who had mainly been a visual effects guy in the industry, had no prior experience as a primary director, and only one as a secondary director, and was about as suited to the job as Bush Jr. would be to playing Jeopardy.  What’s even worse is who wrote the screenplay, Peter Buchman, who’s only previous screenplay work had been... get this... Jurassic Park 3.  I’m not even going to go there.

I really have to wonder how the hell those 2 got ahold of the license to make the movie.  The book was, after all, a New York Times #1 seller.  The publishers must have really dropped the ball on this one, or maybe Paolini, being pretty much still a kid by the time he finished the first novel (19), somehow got taken advantage of.  I just find the situation to be horribly sad.

It probably didn’t help that I didn’t expect much at all from the movie as I had heard about its huge flop after opening, with many dedicated fans of the novels walking out of the theater in tears of disappointment.

On another slightly-related note, it has been rumored as of today that it is now official that Peter Jackson will be producing 2 Hobbit movies.  We shall see, but I would be very happy if it was true.  I thought Jackson did the best possible job that could have been done on the movies.  I only had one major complaint, in that Gimli was really given a short end of the stick throughout them, though at least they picked John-Rhys who was perfect for the part.  Gimli was one of my favorite characters in the novels, and they substituted any of his glory to his pretty-boy counterpart elf, Legolas.  I also had a few minor quibbles with it, including some scenes I had wished to have seen (ie Bombadil), but were left out for obvious reasons, and that they changed around bits of the story so some actors would get more screen time and they wouldn’t have to introduce others, like Arwen stealing roles of multiple other elves.  Alas.  The thing I liked most about them was how well the CG was integrated with the live action shooting.  I still consider it the best job done integrating CG into a movie I’ve seen; so well that you can no longer tell that it’s clearly computer generated.

Seagate dropped the bomb

When a long trusted company fails you

I’ve been a long time fan and user of Seagate hard drives, as they are the only brand that have consistently not failed me, like Maxtor, Western Digital, and others.  The first Seagate drive that I ever had die on me was almost 10 years after its first use.  This trend seems to however not follow to its FreeAgent external USB drive line.  I was a bit iffy on trying them out, as I had read online before buying that they had a seemingly high failure rate on arrival.  Low and behold, I ended up buying one from Office Depot around Thanksgiving, as $100 for 500 gigs seemed well worth it, and it was dead on arrival.  I think it ended up passing maybe 1 out of 5 trial formats.  So I swapped it out, tried another, and it was DOA too, passing its format and scandisk, but then failing out on multiple sectors when I tried to use it (I am super obsessive about data integrity).  So I gave up on those.  My fears since I had heard that Seagate bought out Maxtor, the probably lowest quality hard drives on market, had been confirmed, though probably for different reasons.  I did however recently buy a new SATA Seagate 500 gigger @ ~$100 and it seems to be working fine ^_^.

Random Trivia: Gigabyte is actually technically supposed to be pronounced “jigga-byte” as in jiggawatt from the Back to the Future movie(s).  The suffix has just been mispronounced for so long, no one seems to know that Back to the Future actually had it right :-).  I found this out after watching a video from the early 80s on hard drives, and then confirming from multiple dictionaries and sources.