It turns out that the Razer Mamba driver package installs a “virtual keyboard” (probably for the Mamba’s docking station?), which wakes up the computer from sleep for no reason.

The solution is to deactivate this device’s ability to wake the computer from sleep, from within the device manager. Look at your end and you’ll probably also see two “keyboard” type devices. The installation date should give you a hint on what is what!

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It worked very well for two weeks now – until this evening when it just went black and never came back. The power indicator LED doesn’t even come on anymore. Of course I tried it with everything disconnected and on various power plugs. It’s DEAD. I can surely have it replaced on warranty, but …

This put into the context of my other big Philips failure, makes me definitely now say that I will NEVER, EVER buy any of this cheap-ass Philips bullshit anymore. EVER!

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ever.

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1. The Philips HTS7502/12 bluray homecinema kit has a lot of trouble reading the latest Bluray disks
2. The Lenovo X301 high-end laptop ships with an SSD disk that does not support TRIM

The issues identified make me classify these two pieces of hardware as DON’T BUY.

Read on to find out more…

Philips HTS7520/12 Bluray home cinema kit

This is a complete nightmare story. I bought the first device two years ago when it was brand new on the market. It lasted 4 weeks until I got the dreaded “Unknown disc” error for whatever disc I put in there, be it CD, DVD, or Bluray. The optical drive was just clicking away, but not detecting anything anymore. So, took it back for repair.

6 weeks later (six weeks!?), I got a completely new unit, because the first one was “unfixable”. Drove back home, installed everything (including all of the cabling that I was asked to send back in for repair…), switched on, and… no subwoofer. Subwoofer was dead on arrival.

Drove back again to the shop, explained that I wanted a new completely new unit, right away, which they did. So now I got a unit that works well, and still does. Except for 1 out of 3 new Bluray discs that I buy, and that the device simply doesn’t recognize (“UNKNOWN” again…). There’s no firmware update since 12 months from Philips, and no response so far to my E-mails to their support.

Potential buyers : I will NEVER buy anything from Philips again (and have started 2 months ago by buying a Sony TV). Their Bluray stuff seems to be broken by design; their support is worthless. If you just want something that works, and is of good quality, and don’t mind spending a few more euros to avoid needless trouble, buy something serious. Not Philips.

Lenovo X301

Got this “executive” laptop, fully loaded, two years ago. It’s a great machine, or at least it was before disk performance slowed to a crawl because of missing TRIM support on the Samsung SSD drive it has. Oh, Samsung has released a new Firmware with TRIM support ages ago, but as Lenovo has an OEM deal with Samsung, and still hasn’t, for obscure reasons, deployed this firmware update for their customers, I’m now stuck with a 3000 euro laptop that is slow.

Come on Lenovo – X301 is the Rolls Royce for executives and people who want to spend more to get the best there is available, and you don’t know how to deploy TRIM firmware to your customers? Have you forgotten that most people who buy expensive X301′s are actually IT decision makers? I didn’t buy a 590 euros consumer laptop here, but a 3000 euros “road warrior power house”. Do you think Porsche wouldn’t care if for some reason, their 911 Turbo customers wouldn’t be able to go further than 3rd gear anymore?

Been there, done that. My next expensive Laptop will be another Macbook Air. The new 13 inch ones look great, and cost half. Bye bye Lenovo.

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Based on the famous (?) Lotus one-liner “light is right”, I thought I’d write up a manifesto of the english gentleman Lotus driver.

1. Racing is for racetracks. Never fall into anyone’s trap to make you race them on the public road. Anyway – you know who’d win! If someone really insists, kindly invite them to your next track-day.
2. Speeding in sensible areas like cities or smaller B-roads, is absolute no-go. Always respect the speed limitations, especially on spots marked 50 or 70 km/h. I’ve been driving for 18 years and never got fined for speeding in sensible spots – I actually simply never did!
3. People often look in awe at your car because they don’t see that many around; some, especially kids, will wink and scream as you drive by. Flash your headlights twice and politely wink back at them with a smile, they’ll appreciate!
4. Always stop at the pedestrian crossing to let that old lady walk over; smile and show her a very visible sign with your hand to indicate that it’s a pleasure for you to stop your car for her. Hey – more people might actually have time to look at your beauty in detail !
5. In dense traffic with changing lanes, make place for others to drive in just in front of you. You wouldn’t want to go head to head with that other big, old, ugly car anyway, would you?
6. When driving back home late at night, gently roll through your block or village in 4th gear at low speed, making as little noise as possible. Your neighbours want to know you as the nice, gentleman sportscar driver, not as the rowdy who wakes them up in the middle of the night, landing in 2nd gear, 8500 rpm, and a stage 3 exhaust – screaming like a jetplane. What’s more – no engine on earth would like a brutal 8500 rpm to immediate engine shut-down process.
7. Talking about neighbours – if they’ve got young kids, invite them to the party when you clean your car. They’ll have a great story to tell next day in school, and you’ll have some helping hands. Just keep an eye on those hands though..
8. If someone keeps hammering you with questions about your car, simply offer them to be the driver for 10 minutes, if they like. I know most people don’t let others drive their Lotus, but the experience I’ve made is very positive, as long as you are the copilot. For most, the driving experience is so new and uncommon that they barely dare hitting the accelerator, but you’ll have made their day. If you really don’t want (or can’t because of insurance) anyone else to drive your Lotus, offer them to sit behind the steering wheel to at least share the feeling.
9. Talking about questions – one of the first questions I’m being asked is “How much horsepower?”, or something like that. I always answer that, with a Lotus, the right question would be “How much weight?”. A very good way to get them introduced to the “Light is right” concept… and maybe transform them into future Lotus owners.

And that closes the circle. Actually, you’ll have noticed that being polite is also very protective for yourself and your car. Win-Win !

Now, keep the comments flowing! How do you culture your gentleman driving?

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When surfing on the Apple website, I also read about the upcoming iOS 4.3 update, which will bring a very interesting featured called Personal Hotspot. It basically transforms your iPhone, or other compatible device, into a small WIFI hotspot that up to 5 devices can access to share a 3G internet connection.

This is great news, because I won’t have to worry about Internet access for me and my colleagues during meetings at customer premises which don’t have guest Wifi access.

This is probably one of the best feature addons since I got my iPhone 4 a couple of months ago. Good stuff Apple. Needless to say that Android devices have this for quite some time now, but hey – better late than never.

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This is not what you'd like to be provided by your company nowadays

A couple of months ago, I wrote on allowing employees to bring their own computer to work, instead of using company provided hardware, and part of my article was featured on I-CIO.

Recently, I had an interesting chat with a fellow manager about security, which lead me to the conclusion that a proper BYOC policy can actually be a very important part of global security management.

The company’s global work policy includes a “work from home” policy that allows employees to work part of the week from home, if they agree to play by the rules, which are properly documented and need to be accepted in written by the employee before being applied. I think that being able to work from home is something every company should make possible for their employees nowadays, especially in IT firms. Fast, cheap and reliable broadband connections are available in most EU countries, VPN connections are a standard fitout in most companies’ IT infrastructure, and from an ecological point of view, it makes more sense than ever before to save some fuel and CO2 emission by not driving to your workplace every day. This is without speaking about the motivation increase this provides, as people can more easily combine their professional and personal lives.

So, one day, one of the employees who is used to work from home regularly, had the very bad luck of getting his home PC infected by some kind of keylogger that was silently transmitting FTP access details to some obscure servers in China, which in turn used these credentials to infect script files on a webserver, which in their turn were aimed at infecting even more PC’s of the website’s visitors by installing the keylogger through a cross-site scripting and browser vulnerability exploit technique. Very bad for the employee, and for the company. The issue was quickly identified and cured – gladfully.

Talking about the BYOC idea with the employee’s manager made him tell me : “Well look, that’s what happens with strange ideas like yours about ‘bring your own computer to work’ and so …”. I couldn’t do but disagree respectfully, but firmly. First of all, this wasn’t at all a case of bring your own computer to work, as the employee was using his own hardware at home, but not at the office. It was more a problem about the IT security concept of the company. On the opposite, had the company applied a proper BYOC policy, the employee’s computer would have been fully integrated into the company’s security process, and it would have been equipped with proper and up-to-date antivirus software, for instance.

My conclusion is that “work from home” actually works best if combined with “bring your own computer to work”, because it allows the security processes to be applied not only to the extent of the computers inside the company, but also to the hardware used outside of the company, for company purposes. One approach would be to require employees wanting to work from home, to also bring their hardware to their office workplace (works a bit less well with desktop computers, I have to agree). This allows the company IT security processes to be applied, security and reporting software to be installed, and a pro-active security aura to shine well beyond the office walls. For the employee, this comes at the cost of opening up their personal gear to the eyes of the company IT security team, of course. Then again, no one is forced to work from home. If you want to take advantage of working from your comfy home, you have to give something in return.

Of course, in the end of the day, none of this works if your employees don’t have the right mindset, or if you haven’t educated them responsibly. The most complete and secure policies are useless if they’re not understood in their global impact, or if they are not easy to apply on a daily basis.

What do you think? Please share your views, I promise I’ll reply to every comment.

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In my recent article about Amazon CloudFront, I told you about the very cheap pricing of this service, which makes CloudFront very sexy even for very small websites that just want to use it to offload their own webservers and/or provide better than average performance for remote visitors (think about small E-commerce websites in Luxembourg that want to sell internationally even without having thousands of customers a day).

After some days of production use of CloudFront on www.wishlist.lu , here’s the bill to date:

9 cents. I think that on a monthly basis, for www.wishlist.lu, we’ll never be above 1 USD cost wise. So, to sum it up:

• Global “Amazon performance” for your website
• Sets up and configures in less than 15 minutes
• Costs less than an apple a month

Why would you not use CloudFront even for your smallest website (*)? Great stuff …

(*) I can imagine many reasons, actually, privacy concerns or data export regulations being two. But still, these won’t apply to 99% of the potential small website users I’m thinking of.

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So today I got myself the MacBook Air 11.6 inch with 4 GB of RAM, the 1.6 Ghz CPU, and the 128 GB SSD. It’s a fabulous little gem and it really does create this “Whoa, this is small!” effect.

I got this machine as a replacement for my ASUS 1008 netbook that I sold a couple of days ago because it was a tad too small and slow for the work I typically do on this type of computer. I agree that it might sound wrong to call the Air a “netbook”, but then again, the use I make of it pretty much fits in the “netbook usage” category : surfing the web, reading and writing my E-mail, and using general productivity tools like DropBox and some basic document editing.

Speed

The MacBook Air in my current configuration is very fast. Applications start and switch instantly, and the bootup time, even from a complete power off, is blazing, in the range of a couple of seconds from 0 to fully operational. Waking it up from sleep mode is instant. I opted for the fully loaded version of the Air after reading some reviews about speed impact related to the higher clocked CPU and the 4 gigs of RAM, and especially because there’s no way to upgrade your Air if for some reason – mainly money – you’d have chosen to get one of the smaller specc’ed versions.

Productivity

I rely a lot on web based and cloud based solutions for my work, like DropBox, Google Apps for Enterprise, Delicious, etc. so getting all of my work data on the Air was a snap, as these services are all well supported on the Mac. The keyboard is excellent in touch and size for my needs. The screen size is OK for E-mail, web browsing, and blogging, although I need to get used to it. It’s a pity Apple removed the backlit keyboard from the new series of Air’s though; probably a step towards the very good battery life of around 5 hours I seem to get with my normal workload.

Something very nice is that the Mail application now supports native Exchange 2007, getting all of my E-mails, calendar, and contacts into the respective apps. Configuration was a complete no-brainer, as all it took was to provide Mail with my E-mail address and password, and it auto-magically detected all parameters from my corporate Exchange account and started downloading content right away. Something that is weird is that it seems to take a very long time to download the several thousand E-mails I keep in my Exchange account, but fortunately that’s something it needs to do only once.

First conclusion

The price of the Air is not what you’d call cheap, but the value you get for the money is great in my eyes. The lightness, speed, and ease of use is fantastic, and I’ll make my new Air a permanent accessory for my meetings and evening blogging.

Disclaimer: I’m absolutely no Apple Fanboy and own a PC with Windows 7 at home plus a Lenovo X301 laptop for daily business use at the office. That makes three computers for three different types of usage. One day, who knows, they’ll invent a Transformers’ style WinMac that is small and light and that can transform into a complete over-powered machine with two 30 inch displays with the push of a button. Until then, I’ll keep my three work tools .

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Amazon CloudFront is a relatively new product offering in the range of the AWS products. In a simple definition, you could say that CloudFront allows you to easily setup and use Amazon’s infrastructure to distribute your content (web or streaming) globally, by leveraging Amazon’s edge servers in the US, Europe, and Asia. You can just call it a CDN – Content Delivery Network, although that definition applies to services that often provide very distinct additional services, depending on the provider.

My today’s Saturday morning IT exercise was to quickly dive into the CloudFront universe and give it a spin on one of our lab websites – www.wishlist.lu , which is a gift-list creating platform without any real commercial objective.

Read on to find out how easy it was to setup CloudFront on WishList !

I have some personal experience with CDN services from my job with atHome Group, where we now use Akamai technology as our CDN provider on our websites www.athome.lu, www.athome.de, and www.immoregion.fr. We mainly use the CDN for static content, i.e. property photos, and JavaScript (.js) and stylesheet (.css) files, and we’ve had a very good experience with it so far. Content delivery is very fast in all countries we serve, and the origin servers are offloaded quite significantly. The apparent problem with services like Akamai is that they’re quite cumbersome and expensive to use for small scale projects that could benefit from a CDN other than to keep up with extreme traffic requirements (for instance, just to offload your origin servers from serving static content). CloudFront seems to be a solution for this. But let’s get into it right away.

The exercise

My exercise is quite simple : have all images (design elements and gift photos) on www.wishlist.lu served globally via CloudFront instead of serving them locally. In other words, whenever a page call requires a picture to be displayed, I don’t want my own webserver serve that content, but I want CloudFront to do so.

It turned out that this was going to be a very easy task in fact! Let me give you a quick run-down of the involved steps.

1. You need a valid AWS CloudFront account to get started, of course. You can sign-up using your credit card on the AWS website.
2. You then need to setup a CloudFront distribution. A distribution is basically the definition of a CDN service, allowing you to specify your content origin (where your original content actually lives), plus a set of options related to it (is it web/http content, or streaming content? are there particular privacy settings to be applied? do you use http or https? etc.) Amazon says : A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name (e.g. abc123.cloudfront.net) that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations. If you wish, you can also map your own domain name (e.g. images.example.com) to your distribution. You can create distributions to either download your content using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols, or stream your content using the RTMP protocol.
3. Optionally, and that’s what I did, you configure a CNAME on your domain to point to the newly created CloudFront name – it makes things look sexier, if nothing else. In my case, this is cdn.wishlist.lu, although it would have been smarter to create the CNAME on a cookie-less domain.
   

   nslookup output for my newly created CNAME

4. Once your distribution is setup and configured, you need to configure your website’s code so that images are served through CloudFront instead of being served locally. If your code permits, it’s generally just a configuration setting that you change accordingly. On www.wishlist.lu, it was as easy as changing one configuration setting as seen below.
   

   Editing the wishlist.lu application source code

   As you can see here, we use a constant that defines the URL to be used in the <img /> tag of gift photos, and I’ve just told it to use the new CNAME (pointing to my freshly created CloudFront distribution) of my CDN. The result is now that the HTML code produced by our application contains this kind of <img /> tags :

   

5. Done ! Yes, that’s it. Of course, I didn’t go into all of the details here, but these four steps are what it takes, in my case, to “CDNize” the www.wishlist.lu website.

Pitfalls

The only real challenge I encountered was to actually create a CloudFront Distribution that would use a custom origin. Distributions are designed to use Amazon S3 storage as their origin by default, but Amazon recently added the option to use your own servers as the origin for your CloudFront Distribution, making it unnecessary to first deploy (and later on sync and manage) your content to an S3 bucket. Unfortunately, the AWS Management Console, while allowing you to create CloudFront Distributions, does not yet allow you to specify your own origin server. You can currently only do that using the AWS CloudFront API.

Fortunately, there is a number of very nice graphical tools that allow you to leverage this API very conveniently. I chose to use the excellent CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 to create my Distribution using a custom origin server.

Once your Distribution is setup, it will show up in the AWS Management Console and you can continue managing it from there, if you want, or you use the PRO version of CloudBerry Explorer which allows you to so, too.

Pricing

The CloudFront service is ridiculously cheap.

In Europe, the most expensive price is 0.150 USD per transferred GB, with prices decreasing as your needs grow. This is especially true if you want to use CloudFront to reduce the load on your webservers that might struggle keeping up with the sheer number of requests caused by calling static content. That’s one of the big winners I see with this service – a very cheap and quick way to give your website or web application a good performance boost without the need of adding hardware or applying otherwise complicated and time consuming optimization measures.

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I do have an “unknown” WIFI network that seems to be at a constant 80 to 90 percent signal strength, but any attempt to connect to it fails, as I don’t even know the correct SSID to use. My last hope is to catch one of the SNCF employees in the train and try to get some meaningful information from them.

Now, what is even worse, is the fact that it seems impossible to find any detailed information about this anywhere on any of the SNCF or TGV-Europe websites. I did find one link on the www.tgv-europe.lu website, but it was broken (Sorry, this page does no longer exist…). I personally think it’s a shame that the SNCF and their partners invested a lot of money to make wireless Internet available in their high speed trains, and then omit to publish meaningful information for customers on how to use this service, and details on to where exactly it is available, at what speeds, and at what price.

So, in the meantime, I used my iPhone 4 in tethering mode to get Internet on my Lenovo X301. This allowed me to quickly notice how awfully expensive Internet roaming is – I have a subscription with luxembourgish LuxGSM, unmetered national data plan – but I’m traveling through France now. So, staying connected to french operator Orange’s 3G network and doing some normal office work like reading my E-mails, connecting to ZenDesk, and writing this blog post for approximately one hour, made me receive an SMS from LuxGSM to warn me that I had approached to 98% percent of the 100 euro data roaming threshold that I defined.

WTF!? Less than one hour of online work over a foreign 3G network, and already 100 euros of 3G related cost? It’s about time that someone gets these data roaming prices down. In 2010, it is not acceptable to pay 100 euros for one hour of Internet usage, regardless of where you are and what device or wireless technology you use. My luxembourgish fellow Ms. Viviane Reding managed to get some very nice customer oriented decisions to be taken by the EU commission while she was responsible for the telecom matters some years ago, but mostly limited to voice call roaming prices. Dear Viviane Reding, can you help me and probably some more 450 thousand Luxembourgers to get cheap data roaming calls when traveling abroad? It’s actually very easy to be traveling abroad in a country like Luxembourg which is roughly 70 x 40 km on the map.

I’m writing this blog post offline now, and will publish it once I arrive in Paris and have access to the Wifi of my Hotel room, which actually costs less than 100 euros a night – the room, breakfast and wifi included.

While writing this, the train has been slowly but steadily accelerating… looking out of my window, I can see the landscape fly by VERY quickly by now, so I guess we must be approaching the 320 km/h cruise speed of the train. Not bad at all

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