Tech at Play |

I had the chance to interview Etienne Guerou, Vice President, Chloride South East Asia at the beginning of last week.  Over a cup of coffee at the Borders Books, Music & Café at Wheelock place, Mr. Guerou shared some of his 20 years worth of expertise in building datacenters.

A few key areas were mentioned, namely:

• Harboring the wrong appreciation of a datacenter
• Attempting to run a datacenter from improper facilities
• Buying by brands
• Rushing onto the “Green IT” bandwagon

Here is a short excerpt of the last point in my TechRepublic submission:

Rushing onto the “Green IT” bandwagon

The increasingly popularity of “Green IT” has vendors unveiling new servers and equipment touted for their superior power efficiency. While the idea is definitely laudable, you should sieve out the marketing hype from actual operational consumption.

Check out the full article on TechRepublic: The top four mistakes organizations make when building datacenters

The Matrox M9140 LP graphics card finally came in today.  In case you are wondering what it is, the Matrox M9140 is a 512MB quad head — meaning it supports four displays, graphics card with advanced desktop managment support.  Indeed, it packs support for both Windows XP as well as Windows Vista Aero (WDDM) modes.

With this, I finally have all the hardware required for my special project in place - more on this later.  In the meantime, my thanks to Stephen Choi of Matrox for putting the logistical arrangements into order.  Thanks!

I finally got my own BlackBerry Bold last night - weeks after it was actually launched in Singapore.  It’s a long story, but suffice to say Kok Sen from RIM found it rather amusing when the friends I encouraged to go for the BlackBerry Bold got their units before me.

Anyway, click on the link below for more pictures and setup observations.

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A review unit of the Samsung INNOV8 phone arrived on Friday evening.  The INNOV8 is a S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (Symbian) phone packing an impressive 8 megapixel camera.  In addition, it has the native ability to play videos compressed in formats such as DivX, H.263, H.264, WMV, and MP4.

Still testing it out - though it is already on sales in Singapore as of this weekend.  More photos after the fold.

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The i-mate Ultimate 6150 came in via FedEx yesterday.  The 6150 is a Windows Mobile 6.0 Smartphone that is unique in that it has an XGA video out and a VGA-resolution touchscreen.

What is even more interesting is that i-mate has developed a proprietary ‘i-Q’ service that allows remote device management without any back-end investments on the part of the customer.

According to i-mate:

The ‘i-Q’ services are available through an online portal and serve as a remote device management dashboard to control security, customization and support options for customer profiles and devices. In the example of leaving a phone behind somewhere, the user can sign on to their i-Q account and have their phone immediately disabled remotely (either completely bricked, or just locked), a key security feature for enterprise users.

Will post again once I am able to test it out.

Last week, I finally took the Razer Pro|Type keyboard that was stashed at the back of my “work” shelf and lugged the massive box over to my brother’s place to test out.

I produce his comments verbatim:

Overall the keyboard itself has a good look and feel. The IPod dock will be utterly useless if the owner does not own an IPod and Razer didnt provide anything to cover up that hole. so over time, it will only collect dust.

The macro buttons come in quite handy be it gaming or normal usage. However, the buttons on the right side are not so ‘control friendly’ as u will end up reaching over with your left hand or letting go of your mouse to press it.

It would be better if the entire keyboard came with back-lights instead of only certain the extra featured buttons.

The Magma ExpressBox1 Pro has finally arrived!  Now, what it does is allow a laptop to add a PCI Express (PCIe) card via the laptops ExpressCard slot, which is really PCIe x1, or about 2000Mbps in full duplex.  Only one more component is missing now, can you guess what that might be?

Hint: Its related to the Samsung monitors here.

Teaser: Samsung monitors came on Friday evening.  Working on a new feature, together with the Matrox TripleHead2Go and some other pieces of exotic hardware.

Hopefully, everything will be in place before end of next week.  I say hopefully because some of them are coming from afar, and FedEx currently reports that “Severe weather may cause some service delays and disruptions along the U.S. Gulf Coast.”  Anyway, will update again when everything comes in.

The DYMO DiscPainter came in a few days ago, though I will be able to try it out only this weekend. While printing on CD or DVD media is nothing new, DYMO’s RadialPrint Technology does it differently - printing by spinning the disc under its printhead. The result should be an end to frustration when trying to align a disc properly.  The company promises a complete full color 600 dpi print in just 60 seconds, with edge-to-huge printing at 1200 dpi also possible.

Assuming the DiscPainter delivers in quality, then this will be very useful for companies that give out CD or DVD media to limited crowds at a sales meeting or presentation.  Will post my experiences on this again.

I was attempting to reference one of my projects while on the MRT (subway) the other day.  After using for about 10 minutes, this was screenshot I captured of the remaining runtime (battery) on my Sony TZ laptop.

• LCD brightness was set to two (out of eight) bars.
• All wireless was off (WLAN, Bluetooth)
• The Nano receiver for my Logitech wireless mouse was inserted though mouse was not used
• No other special adjustments or settings were invoked
• All these in a 1.2 kg package

Technically, Sony products are really good, despite the recent recall on earlier models of TZ laptops.  Unfortunately, I can’t say the same with their customer support, which I found less than satisfactory despite the price premium.  Need to work on other things now - I’ll highlight my negative experiences another time.

After some customs delay, the Matrox TripleHead2Go finally arrived today via UPS.  More hardware will continue to come in over this week and next… for a special feature that I am working on.

Yup, I have already found a home for the article - keep you posted when it’s done.

Look what just came in the door today.  I’ve actually got the Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5500 Revolution unboxed and am using it right now.  I have yet to install the bundled software though, so I’ll post my thoughts on it after I manage to do so.  For now, all I can say is - definitely cool stuff!

Unable to tolerate my old eccentric Netgear router anymore, I finally went and bought a new wireless router.  Because I kept running on a 24-by-7 basis, the Netgear has been in continuous service for 3 and a half years to date. Of late, it has been behaving strangely - its next to impossible to stay connected via wireless as it unilaterally and repeatedly drops them.

Productivity was definitely hit, since I rely on the Internet heavily as I work on my various reviews and writing assignments.  Time to get a new one.

I opted for Linksys for its brand reputation, and ended picking up the WRT310N from a shop.  With Wireless-N and four Gigabit ports, what more can you ask for.  I received a pleasant surprise when I reached home and only then realize that this model is supported by the DD-WRT project.  It’ll be fun hacking it - once I find the time.

The normal mumbo jumbo to get you to “install” the device via the included CD-ROM package.  I just tore it off.

Annoyingly, default user-id and password wasn’t on any of the printed documentation.  Took another fifteen seconds while I figured it out via brute-force.  (Note to myself; user-id is root, password is admin)

My now defunct Netgear wireless router.  Note the LAN cabling leading to my laptops (off picture).  They served as an interim measure to pipe the Internet in.

Check out this walkthrough of Google’s Android OS.

If you’re pardon the title, but I figured that “RFID technology at play” just sounds weird here — never mind that I named the site Tech at Play in the first place. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I went over to the resort island of Sentosa over the weekend.

The company running the resort island issued an entrance card that serves as an electronic tag for its automated gantries. The technology is obviously RFID, though the interesting thing here is that their RFID card is made from cardboard instead of plastic. To verify my theory, I successfully ripped the card into two-halves — at the end of the day of course.

Note the outline of the RFID antenna in the second photo. Apologies if you’re wondering about the view outside my window, which, since I live on the 24th level, is really nice.

My RFID reader is nicely mothballed into a nice storage box, so I didn’t feel inclined to rig it up this time. This is assuming compatible standards in the first place, which seems too much to ask for. Despite all the noise over RFID lately however, I very much doubt that any form of encryption or challenge-response mechanism is even used here.

Then again, it does not make much sense to forge a SG$3 (~US$2.20) ticket either, does it?