Hey folks... The last day of the year begins with an early roundup of some interesting bits from around the internets:

• If you think you're safer using your credit card at a restaurant than over the Internet, you're very, very wrong. You need to read this one.
• How exactly does 14,800 pounds of ground beef go missing? (Brings new meaning to "Where's the beef?")
• Maybe the DHS should stop oppressing the average folks and take a look inward instead.

When NPR decides to delve into the murky waters of security and technology, professionals should probably take some notice:

• Marketplace reported (wait a bit for the audio associated with that blurb to be posted) on the increased dangers of identity theft predicted for 2008.
• NPR's Morning Edition also covered identify theft and gave a brief nod to Netscape Navigator's demise.
• At the peak, Amazon was selling 17 Wii's per second this Christmas. That's quite a bit of Wii.

It's a gorgeous day out here and the posts may be few and far between for the rest of the day. Mary & I will be taking some time alone at Monsoon tonight and I'll be sure to post some comments on the cuisine.

One last note is that EVE Online looks amazing on a 46" Sony Bravia LCD HDTV. Booted Windows XP on the MacBook Pro and hooked it up with a DVI-to-HDMI cable, piped the stereo out to the receiver and worked the controls with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard (old school) and a Logitech wireless mouse. The Trinity expansion with the enhanced graphics make it look like you're watching a movie. Great fun!

Happy new year everyone!

It's been a tough day so far, and I'm still recovering from the MacBook Pro open heart surgery (new 320GB HD + Leopard install + BootCamp/WindowsXP/EVE Online Trinity Premium Content install last night), but here are some odds-and-ends from this morning:

• The Kindle is cooler than I thought (but Amazon is as lame as I expected)
• These two discs are not even gold plated and they still cost $500,000,000.00USD
• It's the end of the world as we know it [for Netscape Navigator]
• Warner music just decimated Zune, Rhapsody, Napster, et al (the subscription model was never all that intelligent to begin with so these folks deserve to have their business model crushed)
• I hear they killed Kennedy and Lincoln, too

Finally, is anyone else thinking that Google may have to re-issue their 2007 Zeitgeist in light of the Bhutto assassination?

MacNN purports that the iPhone is in the top five of e-disappointments this year. Part of their argument relates to the problems folks faced after they deliberately cracked the security of their device to load unsupported apps and then tried to keep up with official patches. That's just silly.

I've written some poor posts, but that author really needs some time off to find that lost clue.

The Zune isn't exactly a wholesale failure or disappointment either (tho the iPod Touch wins with a KO in round #1 of any battle between it and the Zune).

Highly portable routers are nothing new. Apple's Airport Express is a good example of a compact device which seamlessly bridges wi-fi and ethernet with an admin interface almost anyone can use. It's disruptive - small enough to conceal anywhere - but it has a drawback - it requires a physical power connection. It's also limited to wi-fi rage in terms of wireless connectivity.

Enter CradlePoint and their new PHS300 Personal Hotspot, an 802.11b/g access point with the ability to pair with a cell phone for 3G or utilize a USB 3G modem for internet connectivity. While interesting, those features alone do not make the device noteworthy. The killer feature of this package is the lithium ion battery which can power the whole setup. A truly portable wireless internet connection that will let you provide wi-fi to all the other folks stuck on I-5 during the AM/PM rush hour periods.

While the device is cool, I'm interested in a slightly altered configuration where it's a 3G to ethernet bridge with the same battery. Make the configuration/administration simple enough and you've now got a way for anyone to setup remote access into their organization and completely decimate security and network integrity. Great tool for consultants who want to still be there once their contract is up. It's also a great tool for corporate espionage.

NAC (network access control) may be able to save you from this one, if you implement an in-stream solution and have all of your static device assignments up-to-date and restricted to certain protocol profiles. Full network monitoring may help as well, provided you have a comprehensive understanding of all your connection and protocol usage baselines. I know my current and previous corporate network would not be safe from such a device.

If the box I've proposed is made and used on your network, how will you detect it? What will you do to protect your information assets? What tools are out there to help or what do we need to build in order to respond to this new "weapon".

(via MacNN)

Google has mixed up the presence world with it's acquisition of Jaiku. Jaiku is just like Twitter and both let you tell the world what you're up to and listen to what the world is doing (the "world" being those users on Jaiku and those feeds you've asked to flow through Jaiku).

Official Google Blog: Reach out and message someone: "Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most -- regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone."

From the Stanford News Service:

Geologists recover rocks yielding unprecedented insights into San Andreas Fault: "Altogether, the geologists retrieved 135 feet of 4-inch diameter rock cores weighing roughly 1 ton. They were brought to the surface through a research borehole drilled more than 2.5 miles into the Earth. The last of the cores was brought to the surface in the predawn hours of Sept. 7"

You think they would have learned from history:

Moria... You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.

Now I won't have to clean the gutters in the new house, thanks to the iRobot Looj.

Yesterday, I received my AT&T bill (just as poorly designed as the ones from Verizon Wireless) and noticed it was way too high. After some inspection, it was blatantly obvious they charged me an activation fee *again* for the two iPhones we purchased.

It took 30 minutes talking to a customer support rep - and eventually threatening legal action - to get it straightened out. Ultimately, they removed the charges.

So, keep an eye on those bills, especially if you decide to enroll in auto-bill pay with them.

A couple more things:

• Chat client. The need Jabber & AIM connectivity @ least. If only on wi-fi.
• Full Bluetooth headset support. I paired my Motorola HT820 stereo headset with the iPhone and could use it for phone conversations, but not for music. Just plain dumb. No good reason not to support this.

I also wasn't thrilled that my car charger/dock that also has a line-out connector doesn't work with the iPhone (the device said so via a nicely formatted popup). It said it was charging it, but the phone got extremely warm, so I won't be plugging it in there again.

I also had to turn the phone on-and-off again today (day 3 of ownership) since the response from the touchscreen was almost nonexistent.

I'll keep documenting issues/requests. It was good to see that there may be Flash support coming soon.

Two additions to theprevious post:

• Streaming radio. While they claim to have support for streaming media, it's only through certain protocols and formats. Like the Apple TV, I still cannot play iTunes-listed or manual-playlist-generated streaming radio links through the iPod portion of the iPhone. Trying to play the stream from WHYY via Safari gave me an error message as well. I don't think folks would mind if this were limited to wi-fi only, especially given the slow EDGE speeds.
• Blogging client. While relying on internet access and site forms for blogging is not unreasonable, a local client would be much more useful (i.e. think ecto on the iPhone).

So, I wound up getting an iPhone. Goodbye, Verizon. Hello, AT&T.

You can (and probably have) read all about Apple's latest device, so I won't bore you with the standard list of features. Overall, the device is the best phone I've played with, and I've seen them all: from first-model BlackBerry units to the RAZR to all of the various incarnations of Windows mobile devices. They all were horrid and unintuitive - apart from just plain dialing, and even then the Windows mobile units were just plain ugly even doing that.

The iPhone is just big enough, just small enough, just heavy enough and just light enough to carry around and use regularly while still feeling like a solid piece of engineering. It fits into all of the designed-for-cell-phone pockets I have on various pieces of clothing and hasn't broken since Monday (it's Wednesday, so that's a good run for me with a device with so much glass on it). While there is more than just one physical button, Apple kept them to a useful minimum and I don't have any concern about hitting the wrong one, ever. The majority of the device operations just make sense and work extremely intuitively. The camera is great in decent light (640x480 resolution) and the Internet experience on both wi-fi and EDGE are quite tolerable. Videos look great and music and calls sound clear and distortion-free.

So, what does Apple need to do for firmware version 1.1?

• Make contacts a primary widget. It's trivial, but having to go to the phone app then to the contacts is one step too many. I'm thinkin' something called "Address Book" on the main page (or just "Contacts").
• Enable video capture. It's a great camera, limited to just still pictures. It's a no-brainer to allow shooting video and they need to enable this.
• Overhaul iPhone mail app. The mail app works OK. My biggest gripe is the lack of a delete all function (deleting multiple msgs is tedious). My second biggest gripe is no landscape mode for mail. Which is a good segue to...
• More apps need landscape support. I want to be able to rotate any app, especially to use a keyboard with more real estate. It's a GUI inconsistency that Apple needs to remedy.
• Stabilize Safari and add Flash support. The browser crashes on complex sites and has no Flash support. For a modern web experience, both need to be looked at and addressed.
• Include an RSS widget. Google Reader in mobile mode works OK, but a solid, local app would work even better. The iPhone is yearning to have one. You can just hear it asking.
• iTunes ringtones. While I'm fine with a beep or two, it makes no sense to not allow the selection of a ringtone from the library on the iPhone.

That's all, so far. And, if that's the worst of it, then Apple did an amazing job with this new gadget.

I/we have a large amount of data and also have a number of computers and personal files that need to be backed up. I have been debating the best way to accommodate our storage needs for quite some time and was eager to try out LaCie's latest offering since it had almost everything I was looking for (I prefer FW400/800 as well as USB).

The Ethernet Big Disk is a terabyte drive with gigabit Ethernet and 2 USB ports (one for interfacing with a computer as a non-networked drive, the other for expanding the storage with additional units). It supports SMB, AFP, FTP & HTTP file access over the network. I plugged it in to power, plugged it into the network switch (just 100MB) and it DHCP'd and address. I didn't use the utilities that came with it for configuration since I mapped an IP to the MAC address and planned on using the web interface to manage it. It does have tools that work under both OS X and Windows (I didn't look for the Linux ones yet, but will) if you need to tweak the config before using.

I setup a few basic shares and users - the admin interface is dead simple - and started copying files. On my 100MB network, it does about 10GB an hour copying from USB or FW drives through my MacBook Pro over the network. Mounting the shares was as easy as browsing my local network with OS X's built-in browser under "Connect to Server...".

I noticed it has something called a "media server". it will scan selected shares for media files and add them to that "media server" automatically, so I dedicated a share for just our media files (iTunes music and movies/shows mostly) and waited for it to scan the contents. I poked around trying to find a UPnP client for OS X (since it says that is what's needed) when I noticed that the "media" share I created showed up in iTunes!

I haven't fully tested it across all platforms and haven't setup the system and user backup strategy yet, but am very happy with the performance and capabilities in my single-system, single-user test. Since it does not do RAID, I will probably be getting a second unit or a separate TB plain drive and configuring some type of backup system to ensure our data is safe in the event of a hardware failure.

You can grab one of the units here: LaCie Ethernet Big Disk

One has to wonder what type of age we live in when a company can produce something like this that has the obvious sole purpose of supporting movie & music piracy.

Having said that, this would be an eco-friendly way of pirating, since you don't need to keep a watt-eating PC up and running just to support your digital vice.

Over at: http://www.rudis.net/macsa-2007 you'll find some resources from the talks @ MACSA's 2007 Technology Day. Tim didn't have a great deal of time left and couldn't go into the interactive demos, but he kindly provided his slides and I posted them.

Please feel free to drop a note in the comments section of each post there if you have anything to add or would like to ask a question about the topics.

Thanks to everyone who came!

UPDATE: Full review in this post

Here are some screen captures of the application (below). The OS X Training Center application read from my Edge 305 (I'll try it with the ForeRunner later) without any hiccups and the app behaved almost exactly like the PC version.

It's not a perfect port to OS X - it just doesn't "feel" like a Mac app - but at least it's not written in Java and it has the ability to export to XML.

There are no app-specific AppleScript elements, so you'll need to enable GUI-scripting to automate any apps that want to make use of the exported data. There were no obvious options to the "export" command to limit the number historical activities being saved. Here's a sample that is over 7 MB when expanded: export.tcx.zip.

Application Info

First Startup Health Warning

First Startup Main Window

First Download

Selection From History

HTML Help File