“But Ian,” you say. “You run Linux, why not do it all there?”

Frankly, the recent fires around Los Angeles, and paranoid need to keep stuff backed up and immediately packable should we ever need to evacuate, plus the need to organize our digital life a little at home, all culminated in this purchase. The last time I changed anything on my home network, Samba broke (badly) and shared files and printing capability got kinda hosed.

For $320, the NAS unit has a wealth of features that ultimately came cheaper than buying a whole machine to manage:
- gigabit interface
- two USB ports on the back, one will be used for the printer so we’ll have proper print sharing on our machines
- eSATA port on the back which I’ll use in the near future for mirroring the data on the NAS in RAID fashion
- USB port on the front with a button above it that copies all files from whatever device you plug in (like our digital camera), and copies the files into a unique folder name on the enclosed drive
- runs embedded linux and formats the internal drive as ext3, so hard symlinks have become my new best friend for getting rid of duplicate files on the drive while giving Elizabeth and I the flexibility to store our music/photos how we each see fit.
- only runs at 14W at maximum usage — far cheaper to run this than a full system with a 300W or 400W power supply.
- no fan, so the only noise it makes is from the hard drive
- Samba functionality is very seamless on my wife’s Windows PC, and the Pro version has NFS capability for mounting somewhat more natively on my Linux workstation.

For another $129 ($99 after rebate), I picked up a duplicate Hitachi DeskStar 1TB drive that I’ve currently got in my workstation — once I get files moved to the NAS unit, I’ll ask Santa for an eSATA enclosure to plug into the TS-109 to set up RAID mirroring of the data.

It’ll be nice to have this unit available on the network (though all 4 ports on my wireless router are now completely full), which will also give me the flexibility to dual-boot my workstation into Windows from time to time, though I rarely have any free time to do any gaming whatsoever. But at least the headaches of configuring Samba for file/printer sharing are all taken care of with this box.

A really great, really long review of the unit is at this URL:
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1137&pageID=

The unit has plenty of other features like an iTunes server, a photo slideshow engine, a built-in web server with PHP, MySQL and SQLite, and opkg for package updates. Oh yeah, and a bittorrent client built in to download torrent files for you in case you want to shut off your computer.

Setup of the unit was pretty simple, though there’s no option to configure it for Linux, you need a Mac or Windows machine to install the initial setup software, though in retrospect, I probably could have accessed it via its web browser to configure everything.

The longest part of the setup was letting it format the 1TB drive as ext3 — it took about 20 minutes — then I mounted a few of the folders onto my wife’s PC:
Z:\ is the Public folder where we can share files with each other
Y:\ is the copied-from-USB folder where we’ll retrieve camera photos and anything from a USB key drive
X:\ is a ‘multimedia’ folder where we’ll put our music and photos.

As I mentioned, Elizabeth and I store our photos and music entirely differently. Elizabeth has stated several times, no joking intended, that she’d rather share a toothbrush than share a hard drive.

With hard symlinks, the underlying file system will only store one copy of a file, but make it accessible as many times as we need to. Soft symlinks don’t give the same functionality, and Windows doesn’t seem to handly soft symlinks well over the network.

So now I can simply move all of our music into /artist/album/song.mp3 folders, hard symlink the same structure to a music folder I created for her, and she can move the files via Windows into /year/genre/artist-song.mp3 or whatever format she wants. Though my suspicion is that she uses the Zune software to manage all of her files now so she probably doesn’t even care where the music lives. But the other nice thing is that we’ll have copies of all of the music on the NAS for ourselves, and we can delete whichever music files we don’t want to keep — for example, I’m not as big a fan of her swing music, and she hates most of my music, but there’s a lot of overlap like 80′s rock, the Wicked soundtrack, stress-relief music, etc.

Photos can be managed the same way, though since our Sony camera has reset the filename counter a few times, we’ll have several copies of files like DSC00001.JPG which I’ll need to figure out … I’ll probably work something out with MD5 checksums to determine which photos are duplicated, and sort them by content. Does anybody know if there’s an f-spot equivalent for Windows, or should we both start using Picassa or something to tag our photos?

As I use the drive more, I’ll write another review in a couple of weeks, but so far I’m extremely happy. The only drawback I’ve found so far is typical of any external hard drive — you’re limited by the connection. Even with a gigabit network, copying music and photos from my wife’s PC at the same time as copying about 15GB of files from my PC, plus testing the USB-device-copy to pull photos and video off our camera, slowed the little unit to a crawl. Then again, it’s only got a 500MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM, so I’m sure I taxed it pretty hard last night. Under typical usage, I’m sure it’ll perform just fine.

I’ll also share any scripts I write for detecting duplicates or symlinking files.

The highlight of “SCALE 6x” for me though was getting to meet Michael Shiloh of OpenMoko. Looking back through my blog, I can’t believe I haven’t blogged more about owning a Neo 1973 GAT01v4 since last fall, the world’s first fully open-source phone (hardware and software). Their latest phrase is “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it” … OpenMoko creates the hardware through FIC (the motherboard people), and also develops the underlying software stack (OS, drivers and firmware). Their marketing lingo from OpenMoko.org (the dot-org site is their community based site with wiki and mailing lists etc) says that OpenMoko is creating the “world’s first integrated open source mobile communications platform.” Then name comes from OPEN (source) MObile COmmunication, with the ‘C’ changed to a ‘K’ perhaps so the ‘co’ wouldn’t be pronounced ‘so’ by those who have never heard of the company.

In a nutshell, the OpenMoko software running on the device is essentially an embedded Linux environment. You should have seen the eyes light up on my fellow Linux geeks when pulling up a shell prompt on the phone. Well, okay, the younger geeks had their eyes light up — the ‘mature’ geeks in the crowd immediately squinted at the on-screen keyboard wondering how on earth they were going to type on a software keyboard where the letters were about 1/32″ big.

When I arrived at SCALE on Saturday, Michael’s booth was one of the first I saw, and quickly introduced myself. We had a handful of Emails back and forth about the GSM modem firmware upgrade and why my T-Mobile pre-paid SIM card would not work, and I had also contacted Michael shortly before SCALE to volunteer to help him out at the booth. After some debugging with Michael during quieter times at the booth, we determined there was something wrong with the T-Mobile SIM card. Michael uses a T-Mobile phone, so we put my SIM card in and it said it had a 0 balance on the card. Michael got a little swamped with answering questions, so I stuck around and shared my own experiences with passers-by and was able to relay information in true F.A.Q. style:

- When can I buy one? (openmoko.org, whenever it’s released — in Michael’s own words “we’re horrible at predicting when we’ll be releasing something”, but you don’t need the phone to start developing)
- How much is it? ($450-ish)
- Does it have Wifi? (the GTA02 model will, yes, 802.11 b/g)
- Can I do VoIP with it? (why not, port your favorite VoIP software using the cross compiler available at openmoko.org)
- What’s the battery life? (“Uh, Michael, you want to take this one?”)
- (while searching the edges of the phone) Where’s the stylus? (you want a stylus on the phone, make your own case, that’s open source now too!)
- Does it support (insert your favorite Linux app here)? (check the OpenMoko project tree)

Having been caught up in answering questions, I had missed the only session I had wanted to attend on Saturday. One overly-excited geek who attended that “mobile Linux” session from Motorola, in his words (not mine) Motorola told the crowd that a pure Linux environment did not exist yet on a phone. This same excited fellow geek wouldn’t believe the Neo ran Linux until I opened a shell prompt and ran “uname -a” and showed him “2.6.22.5-moko11″ … he immediately asked where he could buy one. I *almost* had a guy named Marc offer to straight up trade his Nokia N810 for my Neo. During the afternoon I also got to meet a guy named Matthew (sorry, I forget his last name) who is also on the community list. We all paired up and answered questions for people at the booth sometimes 3 deep crowding around wondering what an “open source” phone was all about.

I called T-Mobile this morning, had them fix the SIM card (they had never activated the minutes on the card), but my Neo still wouldn’t register with T-Mobile over the 25-mile trek down Imperial Hwy and down the full length of the 105 Freeway getting back to SCALE. I dropped the phone off with Michael, attended the MySQL talk, and came back to the booth about 4:30pm to find Michael packing up. After trying the SIM again in Michael’s own T-Mobile phone to see if it was still a SIM card issue, and being able to receive a call on his phone with my SIM, we put the SIM back into my Neo which *immediately* registered on the T-Mobile network, and I was able to both make and receive calls on the Neo with full audio !!! I’ve posted a question to the OpenMoko community list regarding the pre-paid SIM issue we tracked down by inserting the pre-paid SIM into an actual phone sold by the carrier (AT&T or T-Mobile) before it would work in the Neo, since my Neo wouldn’t register on the network for over 6 hours, yet immediately (within 10 seconds) once we successfully used the SIM card in the carrier’s phone.

The SCALE organizers had common interest group meetings after the show officially closed at 6pm, called “Birds of a Feather” and about 10 people including Michael and myself sat around a table discussing the features of the phone, and about 8 others wandered in and out. We talked about the wants and needs of people there who were just hearing about it for the first time, and passing around three GTA01′s including my own. Again, there were people there who are part of the OpenMoko community mailing lists and Michael shared his thoughts on the 500MHz CPU running at 400MHz, battery life, the GTA02 features, and so on.

Not that I was surprised by this, but Michael is a fountain of knowledge. He’s definitely passionate about the project and product, and it definitely showed when talking to people at the booth and the after-show meeting. It was great to meet him and help out as best I could. Next stop with the Neo is the Orange County Linux Users Group (OCLUG) who had a member at the “Birds of a Feather” session, who I told I’d attend a meeting of theirs at UC Fullerton in March to show off the Neo and a development environment, provided we’re not moving that weekend. Might have to wait until April.

I’ve had my Samsung X427m (link current as of May 10 2005) for about 6 months and just had my second replacement sent to me by Cingular. The ‘universal’ hands free headset jack is broken on all of them so far, and I’ve tried a headset from Plantronics and Motorola in all 3 phones… the one I got in today is having the same problem so it’s going back too.

The design of the phone is slick, there are plenty of features to love, and I enjoy the color screen, but it’s difficult to open with one hand when I’m driving, and my commute is unsafe without a hands free headset jack that works.

I also found with my first model that once I set up my phone to use ICQ that I no longer had the ability to go back and select AIM instead (I use both services).

Admittedly, I’ve dropped the phone a few times (who doesn’t) and every single time, the battery falls off.

Now the good stuff: the screen is crisp and clear, and the animated wallpapers that ship with the firmware are pleasant enough for me. There’s a decent assortment of ringtones that ship, and I’ve always been partial to the old analog telephone ring, or ‘ring 2′ as Cingular calls it. The vibra-melody setting is nice – since I can’t always hear the phone ring in the car with the stereo on, I close the clamshell around my seatbelt on my chest so I can feel it vibrate – even on maximum volume it’s difficult to hear in the car at 60+mph with either the windows down or the radio on.

I enjoy the T9 editing, even though many people don’t. Having my phonebook on the SIM card is nice too for all of these replacements they’re sending…

However, despite the good features of this phone, the bad headset port on 3 of the phones so far, the fact that the battery falls off far too easily, and the volume of the ringer, my next call to Cingular will be to ask for a credit to exchange the phone for a different model.

The Firefox Sensation

There are a lot of really good reasons to use Firefox instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Here’s my take on the browser war issue (in my mind) and what benefits Firefox offers that IE doesn’t, and drawbacks that Firefox has that will require me to keep IE around whether I want to or not…

I’ve been using Firefox since 0.7 and was instantly hooked. Of the 50+ million downloads so far, I can count about a dozen of them being my own.

I’ve found excellent compatibility with the CSS standards, at least for the properties I most commonly use – my site looks almost identical in IE and Firefox right now – one minor glitch in some of the graphics but nothing a few minutes won’t fix. It handles XHTML 1.1 no problem, which is pretty nice. But anyhow, on to the pros and cons of using Firefox:

Ken’s files about his car accident last fall.

There are very few disadvantages I’ve seen to using Firefox so far, and the only one I can see so far is ActiveX control. I also have one client who uses AOL exclusively which uses a branded version of IE’s engine for rending web pages – because current versions of IE don’t support as much of the CSS standard as Firefox does, a page I develop that looks great in Firefox may look like junk on IE/AOL. Not much I can do there, and usually correcting it for IE/AOL means something in Firefox doesn’t look quite right. The other major annoyance is on framed sites – Firefox should be smart enough to know which frame I’m right-clicking on if I want to ‘view source’ (IE does) but Firefox makes me choose ‘This Frame’ from the context menu first to view the source of the frame I’ve clicked on. Grr. Less is more guys.

The concern in the news right now has to do with JavaScript within Firefox that will allow malicious code to be run in very specific conditions. Nobody said Firefox was perfect … but I’ve lost count of how many megabytes of patches I’ve had to download over the years to patch IE. There are growing pains to moving to any other browser.

The biggest things I truly love though? It’s free, blocks pop-ups natively without any other security software installed, and doesn’t have annoying advertisements littering the screen.

(coming soon!) Without further ado: my favorite firefox extensions. This list is here to share with you, as well as to serve as an online reference for me to get at my list of extensions in a hurry if I ever install Firefox on a new system.

Pros: Cost was great, guys were generally pretty knowledgable
Cons: April 2004 they unplugged a LOT of their customers with ZERO notice.

I had a good deal going. For $50/month, I had a 1Mbit bandwidth feed. For an extra $15 per ‘U’, I had all the cabinet space I wanted. The only catch was a 30-mile drive to metro Los Angeles to their location since I had to do my own system support.

In early April 2004, my bandwidth link went dead. No reason, no warning, just nothing. I contacted them and they said it would be fixed, but eventually I heard from someone related to the issue that NHI had not paid a rent bill or something in the office space they were using for renting out space, and the company they were getting their office space from killed their main bandwidth links which meant *all* of NHI’s customers were offline.

NHI had no intention of bringing those clients back online, nor reimbursing them for downtime. In an effort to get my domains moved quickly, I signed up with LunarPages and was up and running in no time.

Other mentions of them online:

• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/thread/256231-1.html

Pros: Awesome looking site, and how some members are clever enough to work around the limitations of adding extra contact info in their profiles.
Cons: Little expensive ($24.95/month)

Match.com, ultimately, is my success story. After months of meeting girls from three other major sites and a handful of other minor sites (and typically finding the same girls on all of them), I started shutting down my profiles. But in my timing, match.com had *just* billed my credit card another $24.95 for a month of access, so I stuck it out. That was around July 10th. On July 17th, I got an Email ‘wink’ from match.com saying another member was interested in my profile. She wasn’t a paying member though, so she couldn’t receive the Email message I tried to send through the site.

My profile name was the same as my AIM handle, and she later contacted me on AIM – thank goodness she was a mini-geek in the making! We chatted a few times online and spoke on the phone, and decided to meet up on July 21, 2003 at a Starbucks.

Well, we sure hit it off that night, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. That young lady is the love of my life, my fiancee, and my new ‘anonymous flirt’ here on the new blog. )

Pros: great site, easy to navigate, good searching features
Cons: Had to purchase credits to talk to other members and that got a little expensive after a while.

I forget what name they started out with, but they evolved into LavaLife and was one of the first dating sites I joined when I moved to California.

These guys had everything that Christian Cafe didn’t have: the looks. They split their site into three portions: Dating, Relationships, and Intimate Encounters, and I frequented the Dating/Relationship areas only, thank you very much.

Never really met any quality people through this site, but had a few Email penpals for a little while.

Pros: $40 personality Profile, and ability to meet someone who matches on a lot of the same levels as you do
Cons: Horribly expensive – $49.95/month !! And it was too confusing and limiting for initial conversation.

As far as dating services go, these guys got me suckered in with a free personality profile. I’ve always enjoyed answering questions like “what’s your favorite number” and “if you could be any kind of fruit…” and have a generated report of why I’m an introvert. I find that kind of thing fascinating.

Ultimately, E-Harmony was an interesting service to use, but I didn’t meet any ‘soulmate’ on the site; I met two people in person and didn’t “click” with either one. One of the young ladies was a few years older than me and while we got along okay, there was too much driving distance between us to make a brand new relationship an easy thing to work into.

As for the site, I found it cumbersome to use, and found it pretty limiting when it came to asking members questions. It forces you through a 5-stage communication process – everything from multiple choice questions to choosing only 3 questions of what seemed like over 50 questions to ask the other person for some limited communication, before it would allow you to send ‘real’ Emails through the site.

I ordered the guy’s book from Amazon, not knowing I’d get a copy from signing up for a $49.95/month membership, so ended up with two.

I met some neat people, but nobody I met with really “clicked”, which was disappointing for the price of admission.

Found out from a friend about a year and a half later that a buddy’s ex-fiancee (who I knew) got me as a match on E-Harmony, but she didn’t post a photo of herself on the site, so I likely didn’t get her as a match (I usually only searched for matches with photos).

Pros: Most elabroate profiling and searching I’d ever seen on a dating web site, and when I signed up as “iandouglas” for a username, they tacked on a random 3-digit number to avoid similar usernames, and I was forever dubbed “iandouglas736“.
Cons: What a *horrible* looking site back then. In the 4 years I was either a member (or by a recent visit to confirm my suspicions), they haven’t updated their look at all. It’s very plain looking, and the ‘mocha’ colored theme gets old very quickly.

Of all of the dating services I was a part of between 2000 and 2003, I’d have to say that Christian Cafe was by far the most interesting site I’ve come across, and certainly the most fun of the other Christian-based web sites I had been a member of.

I lost count of how many people I actually met through the service – at least two dozen over the years, most of those in the spring of 2003. I was easily going out 2-3 times a week meeting some new girl. A few were upfront and honest about intentions for dating, some were more elusive, and some were quite different than their personality profiles they posted online, but that’s nothing new in the online dating game.

I travelled anywhere from 2 miles to 400 miles to meet girls from this site and made some good friends along the way. I thought their search engine was one of the best, their profiles were very descriptive, but they lost out on points because the look of their site is ‘teh sux0r’.

Lately though, I archive everything through file shares and private FTP sites and have a few USB devices for quick copies of data if I need to be portable. But then, that’s why I got a laptop too…

Update: June 1, 2007
Lately I use logmein.com, which is a free service and does everything I need to access my wife’s Windows machine at home. Of course since I’m a full-time Linux geek now, I just SSH into my Linux workstation at home…

Voice Over IP isn’t anything new. It’s been around for ages. But only recently has it been cheap enough for Joe Public to afford using it. Myself, I signed up in 02/2004 when I was going to be making lots of long distance phone calls for finding a new job.

For $14.99/month, I get 500 minutes of long distance within the US and Canada. For an additional $4.99/month, I get a ‘virtual’ phone number based in Toronto, that forwards to Los Angeles free of charge, which is much more convenient for friends and family to call me here. I did the math – dropping my land-line telephone service with Verizon and DSL and signing up for basic TV cable, cable modem (which was faster than the DSL service) plus the VoIP setup saved me about $20/month. I have full telephone features such as call waiting, voice mail, and my favorite: call forwarding.

For no extra charge, I have my VoIP service forward to my cell phone if I don’t answer the phone at home within 5 seconds. Other than call forwarding, my favorite feature is getting an Email when I have voice mail, and being able to log in via web browser and download a WAV file of the recording.

Only ‘glitch’ I’ve found (and I hesitate to call it a ‘glitch’) is that Vonage is based in New Jersey – so any other service that says “just call 1-800-WHATEVER and you’ll be connected to a local office” will actually connect me to an office in New England instead of in California.