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What Apple should make instead of the Apple Tablet

The concept of an Apple tablet is pretty underwhelming to me. Unless there's some big surprise (an innovative combo E-Ink/LCD screen, for example), I expect to be uninterested. Here are some products that would get me more excited. 

1. An Apple netbook

Steve Jobs doesn't like netbooks, but netbooks are products with a future. They have proven their value as secondary computers for travel or carrying around, or as inexpensive computers for kids or students. 

Apple needs to make a netbook that isn't cheap and crappy like most netbooks are. It should be something like the smart little Sony Vaio W - small, lightweight, and stylish with a 10.1" WXGA screen. The Vaio W easily justifies its $450 base price. A similar Apple netbook priced at, say, $549 would fly off the shelves. It wouldn't cannibalize any current Mac products other than the similarly-priced Mac Mini.

Lots of people install OS X on the $279 Dell Mini-10V to create hackintoshes, so the Apple netbook already exists, but in the cheesy, low-quality format that Steve Jobs detests. Apple is leaving money on the table and denying its customers a product they want.

Specs of the Apple Netbook:

• Intel Atom, preferably a dual-core Mount Olive to save power 
• 1 GB RAM, maximum 2GB
• 160GB hard disk, optional 60GB SSD
• 1366x768 LED-backlit display
• VGA-out as well as mini-DisplayPort, and at least three USB ports
• Price: $549

Why won't Apple build it? Because of fears, unjustified I believe, that it will take sales from the Macbook Air. It won't - the Apple Netbook should be practical and utilitarian for light duty, like a Toyota pickup truck, while the Macbook Air is refined to near impracticality, like a Lotus Elise.

2. A Core i3/i5/i7 Mac Mini

The Mac Mini is stuck in a concept that it needs to be a low-end computer for people who aren't really serious. The problem with that idea is Moore's Law. Even a low-end computer today can do practically anything you want to do, if it's designed and put together right.

Intel's new Arrandale mobile processors are dual core CPUs with integrated graphics, memory controller, and PCIe. They have a lot of promise for a computer with the Mini's footprint and power profile. With integrated graphics and a memory controller on the processor package, they outperform equivalent Core 2 Duos while using less power overall. The ability of the Core I5 and I7 to boost a single core above the CPU's base clock frequency means great performance for most common computing tasks. Something like the Core i7-620M at 2.66 GHz base with 3.33GHz Turbo would wipe the floor with the P8800 Core 2 Duo that is the  current Mini's top CPU, but I am almost as tempted by the Core i7-640LM. At a mere 2.13GHz base it doesn't sound impressive, but Turbo Boost to 2.93 GHz would make it scream for single-threaded tasks (read: most of what most people actually do).  Its TDP of 25 watts only matches the P8800, but includes graphics, a memory hub, and PCIe.

Meanwhile, why not offer the Mini with an SSD? If you have enough DRAM, hard drive speed is the bottleneck for most desktop computers. A Mac Mini using Arrandale processors with the equivalent of the 80GB Intel X-25M would run circles around the current design while using less power.

In the meantime, the base price of the Mini ought to come down. You can get a useful Windows 7 desktop for $249. There's no reason why the Mini should cost more than twice that much.

Specs of the Arrandale Mini:

• A Core i3-350M version for $499 with 2GB DRAM and 160GB, 5400RPM hard drive
• A Core i5-540M version for $599 with 4GB DRAM and 320GB, 7200 RPM hard drive
• A Core i7-620M version for $799 with 8GB DRAM and 320GB, 7200 RPM hard drive
• 80 GB SSD upgrade for $250
• 160 GB SSD upgrade for $500

Why won't Apple build it? They will, but probably not until Arrandale is a year old.

3. A few tweaks for the Macbook Air

The Macbook Air is a beautiful concept. Thin, elegant, and minimalist, it has spawned lots of admiration but few imitators. The same design discipline that created its unsullied sleekness also made it totally unfitted for business. 

As you can see from the picture, the Macbook Air has practically no way to connect to anything, other than by wireless networking. The Mini DisplayPort may be the wave of the future, but for the next few years it means you'll need a dongle to connect to a projector or to most non-Apple displays.

I have been in the boardroom more than once, scheduled to present to the CEO or the SVP. At best you have five minutes to make your laptop work with the VGA port of their projector, and you have to schmooze your immediate client - usually a VP or director, in my business - while you're making it work. And it almost never works right the first time. Little extra pieces of crap to connect my laptop to the projector are not on the program. Period.  

A single USB port is also ridiculously inadequate. If you are using a mouse, you can't attach a data key. 

It's possible to make an elegant, thin, light notebook that still can work as a business computer. I hate to keep going back to Sony, but the Sony Viao X, in the same price range as the MacBook Air, is thinner (0.55" to 0.76"), lighter (1.6 pounds to 3.0) and has up to 14 hours battery life (albeit with its included extended battery, at a weight closer to the Air's). It's a beautifully slim and minimal computer that still manages to have a standard VGA port, two USB ports, and even a wired Ethernet jack that folds open when in use.

This wouldn't have nearly the star power of launching an Apple Tablet, but if Apple reworked the MacBook Air to have a VGA port in addition to the Mini DisplayPort, and two or three USB ports, its potential audience would increase dramatically. 

Specs of the tweaked MacBook Air: same as the current one.

That's my list. Apple won't do the netbook because they don't think they could make their margins with one. Apple won't tweak the MacBook Air because that wouldn't be purist enough. It will make an Arrandale Mini, but I don't expect to see it until late 2010.

HP LX195 hard drive upgrade

The Hewlett Packard LX195 comes with a 640GB hard drive – a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, to be exact. It's adequate for backing up a few normal office PC's, but it doesn't have the kind of capacity to handle lots of massive media files, and I don't want to find myself running out of space in a year or two.

So I decided to upgrade the hard drive. I found a great deal on a a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda LP. The Barracuda LP is an odd duck – it spins at 5900 RPM, designed more to save power than for high performance. That works for me, since this drive will mostly do nightly backups while I'm sleeping.

The LX195 case is a really nice piece of design and integration. I wish I could buy a case like this – most small cases for Mini-ITX boards will only accept a 2.5 inch laptop drive, but 3.5 inch drives have better performance and cost less. I followed the excellent instructions at Home Server Hacks to open the case:

The hard drive is mounted with vibration-reducing elastomeric grommets. It took less than five minutes to take out the 640GB Scorpio Blue and put in the Barracuda LP.

In my first attempt at upgrading, I used a PC to clone the 640GB drive onto the 1.5TB drive. This didn't work. Windows Server binds itself to the specific drive it's installed on. Windows Server booted, but it would not use the Seagate drive for backups or open the backups that were on it. This kind of hardware dependency is a bad thing.

The second, less desirable option was to use the server restore disk that came with the LX195 to create a fresh install of WHS on the Seagate drive. This is a fairly tedious procedure:

• Uninstall all WHS software from a PC.
• Connect that PC directly to the LX195 with a network cable.
• Run the server recovery program from the disk on that PC connected to the network the LX195.
• Use a paper clip to press a recessed switch on the LX195 at a certain point in its boot cycle.

This puts the LX195 into recovery mode. It should be able to reset itself to factory configuration using the information from the disk in the PC's DVD drive.

Problem is, that didn't work for me. The PC software would attempt to connect to the LX195 and fail, after about four minutes. It gave an error message so truly useless I didn't even bother to write it down – something like "step 3 failed".

After head-banging several times, time to call Hewlett Packard support. This was the excellent experience I'm becoming used to getting from HP support. No time wasted on brain-dead diagnostics or other nonsense. The tech had a simple solution: give the PC a specific static IP address, and start the recovery process again. This magic number is 169.37.37.42. It worked flawlessly, and a short time later I had a factory-fresh server with adequate storage.

Windows Home Server

Windows Home Server is misnamed. Few people really want a server for their home. It should be Windows SOHO Server, and Microsoft should market it to micro-businesses like mine - businesses with fewer than ten employees and no IT help. WHS has the features of Windows Server that are most important to these businesses: backup and remote access; and it makes those features dead easy to use.

The backup situation at Seal Rock Research has been adequate but never truly satisfactory. For the last eight years, we've backed up to servers running Samba on various flavors of Unix or Linux. Each PC has a simple batch file that incrementally copies changed or new files from our document directories to the server. Too much of this is manual. Everyone has to remember to launch the batch file, and if Outlook is running the Outlook files don't get backed up. Applications and OS are not backed up, and I have had to rebuild machines a few times. We have never lost a document, but I wanted to improve this situation.

I installed the trial version of Windows Small Business Server on an old PC to try it out. It wanted to take control of my gateway router so I went no farther with that. SBS seems like overkill to me anyway; running my own Exchange server is not on my list of must-dos.

The trial version of Windows Home Server was much more successful. In an hour or so I installed it on an old PC, connected one of our client PC's to it and got a complete image backup. 

So When HP started blowing their HP LX 195 out the doors for $199 I was ready. I bought one the first day that price was available at NewEgg. That deal is gone but good deals are still available at Amazon. 

The LX 195 is a tiny box with an Atom 230 CPU, 1GB of memory, a 640GB hard drive, and Windows Home Server. It is headless by design, with no video or PS/2 ports on its back panel. In two hours I had it up and running, and installed the connector software on all our PC's and laptops. I left everything turned on, and the next morning our entire network was backed up. This, really, is magic.

I want to setup remote access but there are wrinkles. I have a dual-NAT network. The gateway router has a 10.1.10 internal network that connects to my LAN/wireless router. The LAN router has an internal 192.168.1 network, which all PC's and laptops connect to. Here's a picture:

 

If the WHS server is on the 10.1.10 network, it can do remote access but not backup; on the 192.168.1 network, it can do backup but not remote access. For now backup is the key application, so I'll leave it on the 192.168.1 network, but this makes me want to flatten my network topology. There are probably lots of ways to do it, but I'm tempted to just burn a public IP so the Linksys can be the only NAT router on my network:

 

Another wrinkle is storage. We aren't a very data-intensive business, but the initial backup used up over half of the ~600GB the LX195 makes available. The LX195 has only one internal drive bay. Expansion is by adding external drives to the four USB ports on the back. This is OK, but I'd rather not have two pieces of gear where one would do. I don't want to find myself in a space crunch a year or two from now, so I've ordered a 1.5TB drive as a replacement.

The Nexus One sucks for business

Julie got her Nexus One yesterday. It may well go back to Google next week.

As everyone else is saying, it's a beautiful phone with a superb screen and a snappy processor. Android supports Exchange server, and it only took a few minutes to get her email and contacts synced with our hosted Exchange provider. The problem is, the Nexus One won't sync with the Exchange calendar.

Here's how Exchange syncing works with the BlackBerry, the iPhone, and even hapless Windows Mobile:

Simple and sweet. Everything is stored in the cloud and all devices are always in sync.

The Nexus One works that way with email and contacts, but the Nexus One calendar app will only sync with Google's calendar. We can use Google calendar sync to sync events with Outlook on the PC. That produces this kludge:

Calendar sync uses a polling model, and won't update more often than every ten minutes. Julie will need to be careful not to turn the PC off after making changes in the calendar. The notebook won't participate unless I install calendar sync on it too. Changes made using Outlook Web Access won't sync until a PC or notebook with Google Calendar Sync does the job. This is the kind of mess decent modern software and devices haven't required for years.

There's an app called Touchdown that apparently does the job, but you have to use its interface to access your calendar. It also costs $20.

I can't believe Google shipped this phone with such a basic component missing. The Nexus One is not a business phone. Maybe we need to wait for Nexus Six.

Chrome OS shows Google is the new AOL

Google's Chrome OS is more evidence that Google aims to become the new walled garden of the Internet, a la America Online. For a long time, AOL was a destination where subscribers to its connectivity services became targets for ads, enriching the company twice - once when they paid for their dial-up service, and again when they responded to pitches on the AOL home screen.

Chrome OS follows what is now Google's standard three-fold strategy: offer something that is (1) really good, (2) free, and makes it (3) dead easy to access Google's services. The Chrome browser, Android OS, and now Chrome OS are examples.

No one is forced to use Google's products or, using them, to use Google's applications and services. Like Microsoft, which triumphed for a while by placing its browser icon on the desktop, Google plans to win by being the most convenient option. People like being coddled, even if it means they're being herded into Google's pastures.

Like Microsoft, too, Google will no doubt be surprised when the antitrust vultures swoop in to punish it for for treating customers so well they don't want to patronize anyone else. So it goes.

Why Macs are like Birkins and BMWs

What does a Macintosh computer have in common with a BMW car or a Hermes Birkin handbag? 

If you said exceptional trend-setting design and a high price to go with it, you're half right. 

There is one other thing: like BMWs and Hermes handbags, Macs have superior resale value.

I bought a Mac Mini when they first came out in early 2004. It was the $499 base model – 1.25 GHz G4 processor, 256MB RAM, and a 40GB hard drive. I bought it for one reason: to learn the OS X interface so I could do market research on Mac software. For that purpose it worked well enough, but it was much too sluggish to use as a general purpose computer.

Sometime later I paid $20 for 1GB of RAM and installed it. The sluggish Mini became a smooth, responsive PC that could easily handle day-to-day computing tasks – even photo editing. Its tiny form factor and near-silent operation made it ideal for my home office.

I was quite happy with the Mac Mini and still am, but in the summer of 2009 I started using Microsoft Windows 7. I run it on a home-made desktop with a 2.4 GHz Athlon II. Windows 7 really is much better than Vista or even XP – it's about as good as Mac OS X. I ended up using the PC more and the Mac less, partly because the PC lets me use Outlook 2007 with my hosted Exchange account. Outlook is beastly software, and I'd love to try Snow Leopard's Exchange compatibility, but Snow Leopard won't run on G4 Macs.

So the Mini was surplus. Checking eBay, I was amazed to learn that Minis like mine went for up to two hundred dollars. Not wanting to go through the anxieties and unknowns of an eBay sale, I listed my Mini on Craig's List for $200 and sold it in a few days for $175. I threw in a keyboard and mouse, but they had no value to me and I don't think they influenced the price the buyer paid. So including the cost of the memory, but ignoring the keyboard and mouse, the actual cost of my Mini was $344 – darn cheap for a desktop computer in 2004, and even today. The selling experience was quick and congenial.

Why do Macs have resale value? Part of it is that there are only a few models. Buyers know exactly what they are getting. This, more than anything else, reduces the friction associated with a transaction.

Part of it is industrial design. No one ever lost style points for using a Mac.

And part of it is something else. Macintosh computers appeal to interesting people. At least, the two people who wanted to buy my Mini were more than commonly interesting. One is an educator who uses Macs in community-oriented educational events and programs. He was too far away, and didn't want to make the trip to San Francisco. No problem. The actual buyer was a German programmer for Pixar who plays with Amiga software in his spare time. It turns out there's an Amiga port for the G4 Mini, and he wanted to run Amiga OS on a Mini (and now he does: he emailed me later to let me know it had worked).

Not only did I get a third of the cost of my Mac Mini back; I had two encounters with interesting people I would not have met otherwise. That's a pretty compelling case for buying another Mac.

Switching hosted Exchange providers

I've been using Mi8 for hosted Exchange since early 2007. It's been fairly reliable, but it costs nearly fifty dollars a month for two users sharing one gigabyte of storage. Additional storage costs thirty dollars a month per gigabyte – a ridiculous amount when a GB on S3 costs 15 cents per month.

So when Comcast offers eight Exchange mailboxes with 2GB each for no additional cost with my 22MBPS Internet service, I'm ready to jump. I haven't found any instructions for doing this on the web, but it's fairly simple. Here's how I did it (I used tadalist to manage this list):

1. Set up new accounts on Comcast servers
2. Sign in to XO, where I manage DNS for sealrock.com, and create a CNAME record as instructed by Comcast, to verify domain ownership (the XO interface wouldn't let me create this record for some reason, so I had to get their support to do it)
3. Notify a few active clients of the switchover in case there were any mail flow issues (there weren't)
4. Set the TTL on sealrock.com's MX records to 5 minutes. This averts the so-called "propagation" delay when the records are changed.
5. Wait for the weekend
6. Add the new MX records for Comcast and delete the old MX records pointing to Mi8. Create the autodiscover, imap, pop, and smtp CNAME record as instructed by Comcast.
7. Wait for mail flow to stop coming to the Mi8 accounts (just a few minutes, thanks to the TTL trick)
8. Send email to myself from a Gmail account, and sign into the Comcast account's webmail interface to check that it has arrived OK.
9. Export all email, contacts, and calendars to a PST file on each of our PCs. This is easily done by selecting the Mailbox folder in Outlook's export wizard
10. Open the PST files in Outlook and check that they are intact
11. Quit Outlook and setup new profiles for the Comcast server, using the Mail applet in Control Panel. The autodiscover CNAME makes this really easy. Do this on very PC and laptop that uses Outlook with Exchange.
12. Sign in to the new profile for each user, and import the PST file created in step 9.
13. Test mail flow to/from each account again.
14. Setup mobile phones to access new accounts.
15. Cancel Mi8 service.

     

There were only three issues:

1. The issue with XO in entering the verification CNAME – it's a 32 digit hexadecimal string, and may have been too long for XO's web interface
2. The Activesync application on our HTC Dash phones let me edit the domain and password, but gave no way to edit the Exchange domain or username. These fields were inaccessible in the interface, so we had to do hard resets on our phones, losing all our settings, speed dial numbers, etc.
3. And now Mi8 is dragging its feet over the cancellation. After I told them to cancel the account, they sent a verification email. I responded to that, and then they sent a cancellation spreadsheet form for me to fill out. Typical behavior for an outmoded company grimly hanging on to an obsolete business model. I would advise anyone to avoid Mi8 or Apptix, its parent company.

A better view of Boswell

The office dog in repose. Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Leaving the cloud

I am an advocate of cloud computing. For over two years, I have used slicehost.com to host a collection of low-traffic websites I have somehow over the years become responsible for. More recently, I've also set it up to run Ruby on Rails so I could learn about that platform.

Slicehost uses Xen virtualization to divide quad-core machines into virtual private servers. My 256 Slice has 256MB of memory, 10GB disk space, and comes with 100GB of data transfer per month, for $20. I can install any of a number of Linux distributions at the touch of a button (I chose Centos).

Slicehost has been dead reliable. As of this writing, I have 544 days of uptime on my slice. Performance is everything I could ask, and the combination of low price and total control has attracted a community of developers who make the Slicehost forum a great place to ask questions about server configuration.

As good as all this is, it still does have a cost. Last week I replaced my Covad 1.5Mbps down/ 384kbps up DSL with Comcast's business-class connection at 22Mbps down / 5Mbps up. It's $30 a month more than the DSL but more than 10 times faster. And the upload speed is finally enough to let me host those low-traffic websites and my training-wheels Rails apps on my own server in the office. So I am coming back out of the cloud.

The server for now is a 600Mhz VIA Eden-powered box running Ubuntu 9.0.4. It is slow, and has only 512MB of RAM (still more than the slice) but it should be good enough for what I am doing, and it uses less than 30 watts. If the speed turns out to be a problem I'll replace it with an Atom or Via Nano platform.

SQLExpress error: provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40

I needed to get up to speed quickly on SQL Server for a possible contract.

Fortunately, Microsoft (which has always been brilliant at supporting developers) gives away a development version of SQL Server, branded SQL Express. All I had to do was install it and go.

Unfortunately, the "go" part wasn't as easy as I would hope. Install went without a hitch, but I had trouble getting SQL Server Management Studio connected to SQL Server Express on my machine.

SQL Server Management Studio has a "server name" field. It would be nice if it would detect my server and prefill the field, but it doesn't. Since the name of my machine is "Pelican" I tried that; it just gave me an error:

I got the same error when I tried typing "localhost" and when I tried the name of the instance SQL Server had created ("SQLExpress").

A search found plenty of other newbies getting the same error, but all the advice I found had to do with failed installs, firewalls, misconfigured networks, and other egregious errors. I knew my problem was none of those; I was just invoking the wrong magic combination.

The problem was finding the right one. The documentation and tutorials I could find didn't seem to have the information I neeeded; they looked like big time-wasters. (aside: Why does no one write concise documentation anymore? The C Programming Language by K&R was a language reference, default standard, documentation, tutorial, and style guide in 228 pages of precise, lucid prose and code. Nothing I have seen since has come close!)

Finally I did the right thing: I dove into the logs. In

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG

I found the line

2009-06-19 07:56:52.46 spid7s      Server name is 'PELICAN\SQLEXPRESS'. This is an informational message only. No user action is required.

And there's the answer: I typed PELICAN\SQLEXPRESS as the Server Name in SQL Server Management Studio. It connected immediately.

This is what happens when people are so thoroughly steeped in the monoculture surrounding a product that they can't imagine what a newcomer needs to know. Why say "server name" in the connection dialog when you mean "instance name"? Why not document the format of the instance name in the SQLExpress readme, or during the install when the instance name is created? It wasn't a big deal for me, but I'll bet there are others who have been stymied by this.