Boost your cell signal with Freedom Antenna

I am living in a cell dead zone temporarily and thanks to Arc’s Freedom Antenna, I can at least get a few more bars of signal strength and actually hear my callers. The antenna is about four inches high and has various cables to attach to a few different phones — you can search the company’s Web site and find out if yours is covered. In my case, the Razr has a small rubber plug on the back that pops out and can be connected. It is a bit cumbersome, and I still leave the antenna by the window to pick up the best signal, but the arrangement works. The antenna is less than $30 at major online retailers.

Baseline: Virtualization is the new clustering

As enterprises become more involved in virtualizing their application servers, they are finding that virtualization can deliver more than just better utilization of their computing resources. High availability and near-term server failover, previously the province of clustered servers, are now available in virtualization applications for less money and less hassle than had been the case with pure-play clustering applications. As IT shops gain expertise in virtualized applications, they can also get a better handle on load balancing and availability—once the domain of clustering solutions.

You can read more at Baseline Magazine here.

Something you won’t find on Missouri’s freeways, fer sure

Naked woman running on I-80 disrupts Berkeley traffic, according to the local NoCal papers. What I find interesting about this piece is the poll at the bottom of the story. Asking what is the most unusual thing the reader has seen on the freeway, one of the choices is “driver using turn signal.”  Hmm.

When good companies make bad products

What do Zimbra, Knol and MobileMe have in common? All three have come out in the past month, all from companies that have loyal customers and solid revenues, and all three are dogs. Yahoo, Google, and Apple should know better: don’t push something out the door before it is baked. I’ve tried them all, and while I haven’t spent tons of time to review them, I have seen enough to know that none of them are ready for real customers.

Zimbra is Yahoo’s answer to a desktop email client, like Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, or something similar. It allows you to combine a variety of Web-based emailers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL (remember them? I know, there are still a few people in my life that insist on using AOL, try to be kind to them and not sneer) into one unified inbox. The trouble is, it is a product that would have been innovative say back in 1997 or 1998. But today? Nope. Gmail does a terrific job organizing my email, and can collect emails from other systems, too.

Yahoo’s email software has always been a day late and a dollar short, sorry guys. Icahn doesn’t love you for your email – indeed, if he ever did use a computer, that would probably be the last email product he would pick up. It is clunky, the user interface (both the classic one and the current one) are used in classes on bad design principles, and when you have to manage multiple accounts it bogs down like quicksand. Into this environment we have a solution: let’s develop a client emailer! Well, at least give them points for diversity training: it comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux flavors. But a dressed up pig still stinks.

I also don’t want to go back to a desktop email client for several reasons: First, because I use several computers during the course of my average day, and when I am on the road I don’t want to have to bring my laptop and fight through the TSA screening lines and cart it up and down concourses and escalators ad infinitum. Second, because I have forgotten how to set up POP and IMAP mail servers and don’t want to have to dig out my book (which I wrote with Marshall Rose back in 1998) to remember how to do it. Finally, I don’t want to have to backup my desktop email archive: having it sorted out by Google’s Gmail means I don’t have to deal with this chore. Scratch Zimbra.

MobileMe is Apple’s latest incarnation to its dot Mac service. It’s failures have been well documented, and it has been amusing to watch Apple stumble on this one. Again, give them some points for having both a Windows and Mac versions, but they didn’t quite get it right: the Windows version doesn’t run on Internet Explorer. Hunh? What reality distortion field were you living in, Steve baby? I mean, what do you expect all those Windows users to do, move over to Safari or Firefox just to run your nifty software? I even said Apple’s choice of nomenclature was prophetic: remember Windows Me, the version that lasted all of a few months before Microsoft realized what a dog it was? MobileMe is the Apple version for the rest of us.

And now we have Google’s attempt at creating another Wikipedia with Knol. Isn’t one Wiki-tiki-web site enough for our universe? And I mean the good folks over there all due respect. I like Wikipedia, it is responsible for endless hours of amusement and resolving pivotal factual arguments in my life. Granted, Knol has some nifty name verification features, so that you can at least have some clue who is writing all that free content and whether you want to trust them when you have to cut and paste it into your next term paper. But I couldn’t verify my name using either with a credit card or phone number, probably because I have just moved and the addresses aren’t on file. Oh well.

But more importantly, why oh why would Google get into the content creation business just to piss off every one of their advertising partners? It doesn’t make any AdSense. Some have already claimed that Google IS in the content business already, we just haven’t been paying attention. I will leave that argument for another day.

Knol, MobileMe, and Zimbra are all cases of bad products coming from otherwise good companies. Notice I didn’t draw any parallels to any number of past Microsoft products, like Bob, Vista, DOS 4, or even MSN for that matter. Remember those?

If you have your favorite bad-product-from-good-company story, please share.

This essay also ran on Pajamas Media this week here.

More crappy service from Anthem Blue Cross

When I connected this morning to anthem.com, I got the following message when I tried to access my account:

Our site will be unavailable from July 24 through July 28 due to scheduled site maintenance. If you have questions about your health plan, please call the toll-free phone number on your ID card to reach one of our customer service representatives.
If you ran your Web site like this, how long would you last at your job? I can see being down for a day, or perhaps over the weekend, but nearly a week? This is absurd!

MokaFive, a new take on portable virtualization

If you don’t want to bring your laptop with you but still want to carry most of your environment, tools, and digital documents, MokaFive gives you an interesting and secure way to do this. The software has a nice collection of utilities to pull this off, and while a bit quirky to get installed and operating, it could be a big convenience for people on the go. I say secure because the product is a lot safer than just using a borrowed PC at a public kiosk or library, too. And it is free, too!

You can read my complete review at Tom’s Guides here.

Using OpenDNS to protect your network

This week we had another Internet security exploit revealed. And while I don’t want to get into the details, let’s just say that if you aren’t using OpenDNS.com for your home network, now is the time to take the five minutes and get it done. It is simple (well, as these things go), it is free, and it will protect you from any number of issues in the future. And you might get better browsing performance as a result.

Before I tell you how to do this, let’s have a brief explanation of what the Domain Name System is for those of you that really want to know. Think of what a phone book (remember them, before we used online searches to look up a friend’s number, seems so quaint now) does – it allows you if you know someone’s name to look up their phone number. The names are in alphabetical order, so if you know the alphabet, you can quickly page through and find the person, if they are listed.

The DNS does something similar, except for computers: if you type in “google.com” it translates that name into a sequence of four numbers, called an IP address, which in this case for google.com is 72.14.207.99. Paul Mockapetris, a gentleman I have spent some time with and one of the Internet bright lights, put the thing together in the early 1980s, which is enshrined in RFC 882, even before Al Gore had invented the Internet itself.

The overall Internet infrastructure has a series of master phone books, or DNS root servers, located at strategic places around the world and maintained by a collection of public, semi-public, and private providers. They talk to each other on a regular basis, to make sure that as we add new domains they are in synch. As you can imagine, if someone wants to “poison” one of the entries,  or misdirect Internet traffic to a phony domain, it can be done with the right amount of subterfuge.

Here is where OpenDNS comes into play. When you set up your home network, typically you don’t give your DNS settings any further thought. If you have a cable or DSL modem, you hook it up and it automatically gets its DNS settings from the cable or phone company’s DNS servers.

What I am suggesting is that you change these settings, to reflect the DNS servers at OpenDNS. There are instructions on their Web site, but basically you specify the two (one is used for backup) DNS IP addresses for your router or DSL/cable modem. If you have a wireless gateway from Netgear or someone similar, you make the entries there. You need to know the router’s IP address, and how to access it via its Web interface.

There are a few nice things about using OpenDNS. First, you can set it up to block objectionable domains, so that you might be able to get around your kids seeing something that you would rather they didn’t. They also spend time to block known exploit domains, so you have a better chance of not getting trapped by some hacker. You also get better DNS service, because they have servers that will return the domains supposedly faster than the ones for the general Internet. They also catch common typos, so if you are like me and make mistakes typing in names in your browser, they can usually direct you to the place you intended.

How do they make money? If you type in an unknown domain name, you are directed to their search page where they show ads, just like the Google search pages.

OpenDNS is not the answer for everyone, and businesses should go a step further and protect their DNS servers on their networks. While I don’t want to get into that here, you can find out more about the explot from the experts, start with this blog post here:

http://www.circleid.com/posts/87143_dns_not_a_guessing_game/

It is sad that the Internet is at risk: this exploit is serious, and goes at the core protocol that everyone uses all day long. Hopefully, the engineers will find a fix soon.

I am so into this photo essay

I love places like this: labs where geeks do their geekiest stuff. Thanks to Seed Magazine, you can see some great pictures, like this one taken at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Extra points if you can actually ID any of the gear in these racks.

Buying an SSD-equipped laptop

With Apple’s sexy MacBook Air thrusting them into the limelight, laptops with built-in solid state drives (SSDs) are suddenly all the rage. Now they are also available from a variety of Windows OEMs including Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell. While the drives can offer higher performance than conventional rotating storage, they also add about $500- $800 to the base purchase price of laptops, and can be almost ten times as expensive as a standard hard disk.

In this story for JupiterMedia’s IT Management, I discuss the issues and advantages of getting an SSD-equipped laptop.

Bluetooth technology in motion

One of the oldest cold war technologies still in current use has become the leading edge of present-day technology innovation.  The first satellite launched for the Global Positioning System or GPS back in 1978 has in turn launched a wide variety of programs and innovative applications across mining, farming, transit operations, as well as personal navigation.  And a key link between GPS and Bluetooth protocols is pushing innovation even further. You can read more about the relationship in a story I wrote for the Bluetooth.org’s SIGnature magazine (on p. 16) here.