I’ve never been a hardcore music fan. My college roommate, ran UCLA’s radio station in the mid 80s, and probably owned a bazillion albums. I had maybe 20. So I’m not really the ultimate customer for an IPOD. I like music, but couldn’t see my way to spending 300 bucks on an MP3 player, or a thousand dollars to fill it up. I’m fine with my car stereo and an occasional tune on the stereo system in my office. So I got picked, as the closest thing to a civilian here in our studios, to evaluate and test what’s new in MP3 players and portable music devices.

So let me tell you right off the bat, bang for the buck, the New SANSA Shaker will rock your world. This 30 dollar MP3 player has a purity and clarity of sound that is just amazing. I loaded up a digitally mastered recording of Hotel California, put in the earbuds, gave it a shake and heard the opening 12 string guitar like i’ve never heard it before. The stereo separation is so perfect, you can feel the marracas shaking on your left, the guitar in the center of your soul, the drummer in front and the audience to your right. Stellar, beautiful, clear, rich, rounded sound. Its almost enough to make you understand why people get addicted to their IPOD. I always wondered what stereo was good for. With the Shaker I understand. The first question I had was: Do all little earbud MP3 players sound this good? I loaded up the song on a $90 dollar VIBE from PNY, popped in my earbuds and heard plain old transister radio quality sound. So, no. Great sound is not a done deal, but the Sansa guys got it right. And this is their bottom of the line unit.

Nevertheless, even though I’m inclined to keep the Shaker myself, I’m not the real target demographic. It says right on the packaging: Ages 8 and UP. Thus, before I had a chance to discover great new sound, my two preteen sons have been marching around for the last week constantly rocking to the beat of their own shakers. My 12 year old has been asking for an IPOD for months, and was thrilled when I tossed him the Shaker. Ergonomically, its no IPOD look alike, so its cool to be the only kid in class carrying one. The Shaker is shaped like a little salt shaker, with a twist band top and bottom to control sound and navigation. Just give it a little wrist flick shake and it’ll randomly pick a new song to play.

He tells me its simple to load songs. (even his mom could do it). Plug in the scsi cable to the bottom of the shaker. Then open an explorer window to the list of songs on his PC, open another to the SANSA (because its built around a removable SD card – just like your digital camera- it shows up as just another removable harddrive on your PC) and drag the files you want from one to the other.

The Shaker is a really well designed little package with intuitive controls and nice extra features. Since the music is stored on a removable SD card (Sandisk’s core product) you can easily expand capacity, and in theory have an unlimited supply of songs available to your shaker.
Even better, you can grab a few low capacity SD cards for 10 bucks a piece and use one for each kid, or even one for you to store that new audio book you just downloaded. Best of all for a rugged little player aimed at kids, the Shaker is easy to share. It comes with an external speaker – so everyone can hear it, has enough power to drive a bigger pair of speakers or feed a stereo system, and even comes with Two headset jacks so the kids can listen together and Mom and Dad can still have some peace and quiet.

All in all, at the price, i would call it a sure fire gift for all of family holiday gift exchanges. The only guys who won’t love the shaker are the Zune product managers over at Microsoft. I don’t see how they are ever gonna be number two with Sansa in their way.

Check out SanDisk’s Product page here to learn more.

• Don’t Use AN Hosting details another horror story about AN Hosting where the site was shut down for a traffic spike. I cannot agree more strongly with their conclusion:
  

  Hopefully, wordpress.org will remove AN Hosting as a recommended provider. They were awesome during setup, but I feel they didn’t give me any options the first time an issue arose. For many who read this blog and someday hope to get a site on digg.com, think what would happen if you were hosted on AN Hosting. You’d get dugg and then shut off.

• Down again – Blogger M is for Myg writes:
  

  Okay, I think it’s official now. AN Hosting sucks ass.

  I have never dealt with so much downtime in a hosting service, ever. Add to that the fact that their customer support department, while very nice and quite responsive, is inept. Now you have every reason to move your shit to a new service.

  For example, when trying to get assistance for configuring an addon domain, I was told I had to upgrade my service to host the addon. Being a dumbass, I did it even though I didn’t think I needed to. I was right–I didn’t need to. The service person was proactive enough to contact me and let me know about the error, which I appreciated. However, he then downgraded my service plan farther than my original plan. Then the company kept the money I paid (upfront) and when I contacted them about a) restoring my service to my original plan and b) getting my money back, the poor bastard on the other end of the phone was so confused I had to walk him through the situation at *least* five times before he understood that I didn’t actually owe them any money. And then he still had to get his supervisor on the phone.

  Folks, that’s just one episode. I have at least four other stories like that, and I’ve only been with these people for about 10 weeks.

• Jason Scott’s ASCII blog has some comments:
  

  I had several accounts under Mid-Phase. I just cancelled them today because they automatically charge your account for renewal if you don’t fill out the “cancellation form on their website”. They give you NO WARNING that your checking account is being billed, which caused several ovedraft fees. I called and complained with their billing department, which was less than friendly with me, even though I was calm. He said that a link to the agreement should have been emailed to me when I signed up for the account. I went back and clicked the link, and the agreement was not at the URL they sent me when I activated the account. Granted the agreement is plainly at the bottom of their homepage nowadays, but how do I know it hasn’t changed? They charged my account $53, and will not refund it. I design several websites a year, and will never use them, nor will I recommend them again.
  Posted by: Jason | November 7, 2006 04:54 PM

  Midphase is the worst…..in three weeks we’ve had two down times including now for hours. business killer.
  i will post how bad whenever i can.
  Posted by: BSLM | December 31, 2006 03:09 PM

  Horrible. Read about it here.
  Posted by: Michael | January 4, 2007 03:48 PM

• And from Bryanboy, an article about his experience whose title we won’t cite, also has a set of links to other horror stories. Coupla points:
  

  Here’s the 411 on them: Midphase is a webhosting company formed by Zak (Zachary) Boca and Dan Ushman in 2003 from their dorm rooms and a $2,000 investment on their credit cards. Fast forward a few years later, they have over 50,000 customers supported from two offices and two datacenters.
  …
  I have a feeling Midphase is being run by 1 and only 1 person only and his name is Alexander. My god, looking at all the emails I got, there’s just too many Alexanders going on: “Alexander Morozov”, “Alexander Ilnitsky”, “Alex Shevchuk”. If you’re gonna pretend you outsource support to Russia/former republics, please use other names like “Snejana Onopka”, “Natasha Poly”, “Natalia Vodianova” and “Eugenia Volodina”.

• Overwhelming majority of comments here condemn Midphase, too.

It’s making me think that perhaps the $6.95/mo is just a ruse to upsell dedicated server accounts. Get a traffic spike and your site is shut down and you’re extorted for a lot more $ instead of a more reasonable monthly fee for excess usage.

Dear WordPress… WHY do you have AN Hosting / Midphase on your recommended hosts list?!?

We TechTalk folk love WordPress. We love its themes. We love its plugins. We love its speed. We love its search engine friendliness. We love the price. We even love the FIRST recommended host on its list.

Sadly, we have to report that #2 on that is exactly that, “number 2″, in all its euphemistic scatological badness (list at right).

We at TechTalk routinely work with websites spread among many hosts. In the case of one set of domains, we thought we’d try AN Hosting, due to it’s being listed second on WordPress’ list of preferred web hosts. (see screen at right)

DISCLAIMER: TechTalk, for the record, is hosted on BlueHost. Our experience with hosts is that they can be great one year and turn bad a year later, so distributing websites among multiple hosts is a precaution that can facilitate restoring

Our experience with AN Hosting (see their banner, corrected by us for accuracy, at right) for the last year has been nothing short of abysmal, and considerably worse since it was taken over by Midphase a few months ago.

The account has 6 domains. An advertising campaign was run on one of them so the traffic spiked from 3,000 to 15,000 visitors a day. Apparently, this exceeded unpublished limits. Instead of charging us a fee to handle the extra traffic, we were greeted on all six domains with a screen stating THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED.

No phone call. We get to work the next morning with an email that the sites have been shut off and as we’re in Los Angeles, that means the east coast hasn’t been able to see ANY of those sites for the better part of half a day. No ability to FTP. Complete shut-down while and advertising campaign is running… pointing people to a dead domain.

A couple more points…

• 24/7 phone/e-mail support. If you believe this, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
• CHAT. AN Hosting’s version of Liveperson crashes both FireFox and MSIE and does some strange things to my keyboard, randomly transposing characters on other tabbed windows.

Got a hosting horror story? Do tell in the comments.

We’ve all been spammed by the pathetic Nigerian emails offering to make us endless riches. Steve Graham fought back. He answered them and began a correspondence with a dark and seedy world of international crooks. It is desk-poundingly funny and guaranteed to get you off the keyboard for the most outrageously hilarious trip through the swamps of con. This is the first and only book Lucianne.com has endorsed. We don’t know the author in person and all funds go to him for beer and double fried chicken. Click here for Amazon and give yourself a treat.

Steve is scheduled to appear on Fox News tomorrow. The Good, The Spam and The Ugly has already appeared on Amazon’s list of Movers and Shakers today (click image at right to enlarge).

Amazon’s description of the book suggests a must-read for techies and anyone who has worn out a DELETE key in frustration:

Armed with a scathing sense of humor, Graham quickly turned the tables on his tormentors–with side-splittingly hilarious results. Whether he’s referring to his fictional lawyer Biff Wellington, complaining about the injury he received while milking a lactating sloth, or offering the Preparation H helpline as his phone number, Graham–using aliases such as Wile E. Coyote, Barney Rubble, and Herman Munster–offers proof that spamming the spammers is the best revenge.

Buy it. And buy another copy for that gullible relative of yours who often believes this stuff.

Personal Reflections on Microsoft’s New Vision… in three parts.

Microsoft Windows – Vista – First Thoughts

I have now been working with Vista for a while, and here are my personal impressions.

1. Looks cool
2. Windows XP… SP3</li>
3. User Account Control (UAC) – DOA. This was really funny when I tried to un-install some software that I had installed – it wouldn’t let me. It said: Check with System Administrator. BUT I AM THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR! you whacked out piece of junk, and I have no idea why you won’t let me un-install this software. I had to turn off UAC, reboot, so I could un-install.
4. Everything is slightly different (kind of like the transition from 2000 to XP). In my opinion, this works against Microsoft – I now am immune to distinctions in the UI, since I transition from 98/2000/XP/Vista/Linux distros/Mac OS, etc. So there is nothing special about MS Windows that I am used to, e.g. no loyalty or comfort that makes me resist something different. Just recreating the UI to be different is like painting the house so no one sees the cracks. The reality is that the cracks are still there.
5. Security – I guess better, but more annoying, and from everything I’ve read, not a whole lot better than XP SP2
6. Code signing – took a few days and $400 / 2 years, but I can now sign our code – whoopee!
7. You get immune to the cool effects pretty quickly, and they do nothing to improve your performance within the system.
8. The search in the start menu is OK, but I’ve experienced stuff where it doesn’t find things I know I have, so I had to tweak search settings – there is nothing more annoying than MS making these decisions on what can be searched – yes, yes, I know it isn’t my computer anymore.
9. I would like to completely ignore Vista entirely, but I have no choice. The things we do for money…
10. My Intel Duo core system compiles really fast – if nothing else, I like the hardware…

Second Thoughts
This is from slashdot - very accurate & funny…

There’s a much, much bigger hole than any programmer could possibly exploit: The annoyance factor.

Last night, I restored my old XP partition after figuring I’d give Vista a shot for just a couple of days. You know, just to experience it myself instead of taking other people’s word for what it’s like.

The theme of Vista seems to be simple: Annoy the hell out of he end user. You want to run an application, is that okay? You want to copy a file, is that okay? You want to change your desktop background, is that okay? You want to copy text from IE7, is that okay? You want to delete an old text file, is that okay? You want to paste text into a form field in IE7, is that okay? The list goes on and on. Almost every action in Vista is actually compose of two separate actions: the one you want to do, and the confirmation to do it.

After getting Windows Vista installed, I took an hour or so to configure my personal settings and install a couple of applications. I had to acknowledge somewhere between 50 and 100 dialog boxes asking me if it was okay to do what I was doing. No, I’m not exaggerating.

Now, I’m a very experienced computer user, and I’ve worked for over a decade supporting PCs, servers, networks, and so on. Yes, I know, I could disable UAC if I want to, but that kind of defeats the point of Vista’s so-called beefed up security.

Even I became so numb to clicking OK in two short days that I wouldn’t think twice about it. You want to move that shortcut on your start menu, is that okay? You want to install the Pwnzjoo virus, is that okay? You want to send your bank account numbers to Nigeria, is that okay? Yes, yes, yes, dammit!

If Microsoft wants to really get serious about security, they have to get it through their heads that it’s not about locking everything down and popping up prompt after prompt after prompt to the user. It’s about being smart, letting the user do normal things without interference or interruption, and having the level of alerts match the danger of what’s being done.

As it is, Vista cries wolf so often that when the real wolves show up, I’d be surprised if any user, newbie or guru, listens.

Third Thoughts: Standing Still – Faster Than Ever

I had a few minutes to kill waiting for a meeting, so I thought I’d verify the boot speed issue.

IBM 380ED Laptop
Pentium: Blazing at 166Mhz
RAM: a whopping 32MB
OS: Win 95 B

Intel special (motherboard/processor)
Core Duo: 6400 at 2.13Ghz
RAM: 2 GB
OS: Vista business

I realized some of the boot time is the system hardware itself, and the Vista box initializes significantly slower than the laptop (part of this is a SATA raid option that needs to be on due to some quirk in the Intel motherboard – when off, the hard drive LED doesn’t work – so I had to turn it back on, but this adds several seconds to the whole startup cycle, and has nothing to do with Vista). So I timed the 2 booting up side by side once past the hardware initialization and you know what? Just about the same, both getting to the logon prompt, and also hitting enter once the password is in to get to the desktop.

So in 12 years, and a 1200% increase in performance, you still wait just as long to use your computer. This is the kind of progress that makes your jaw drop…

Kermit Komm – CTO/Innovation Management Group, Inc., Contributing Editor

So who’s hot in info security? Who are the players?

InfoSecurityProductsGuide named its picks for hot players in the security market this week. It includes old standbys like Novell, 3Com, PGP, PortAuthority, but also lots of up and comers like IPlocks.

Selected from an industry analysis of more than 500 prominent information security vendors, winners of this prestigious honor are chosen based upon a stern selection criteria of 4Ps. Nominees are evaluated on Products, People, Performance and Potential..

Check out the list

Here are a few choice picks:

IPLOCKS:

Ncircle:

nCircle is the leading provider of enterprise-class security risk and compliance management solutions. Global enterprises and government agencies rely on nCircle’s proactive security solutions to identify, measure, manage, and reduce security risk and automate compliance on their worldwide networks. nCircle has won numerous industry awards for growth, innovation and technology leadership and has been ranked among the top 100 best places to work in the San Francisco Bay Area. nCircle is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with regional offices throughout the USA and in London, Toronto and Tokyo. Additional information about nCircle is available at http://www.ncircle.com

Thoughts about the Pentax k100d:

It comes well packaged, pieces nicely protected. I got it with the 18- 55mm lens kit standard.

I popped in new ultra II sdhc 4.0 GB card from SanDisk, got a memory card error right away. Oh well, nothing technical is supposed to be too easy..

So I registered on line, did a quick google search and found i needed a firmware upgrade. The sdhc is so new, so big, goes beyond the the sd parameters, so the camera needs new firmware to use the high capacity card. I just love a camera that can be altered just by loading new firmware. kudos to pentax.

The process of upgrading the firmware in a Pentax k100D is pretty simple, if you have another old sd card around. You need at least 8mb. SO borrow a friend’s for an hour, or pick one up on ebay for 10 bucks. I borrowed one out of my Minolta Dimage z1.

All you need to do is copy the firmware upate onto the smaller capacity SD card and start the camera while holding down the menu key. It will walk installthe upgrade for you.

To find the upgrade go here:

This Pentax page has the download.
Save the exe file to your computer and run it. Its a self extracting EXE file , it will extract a bin file.

copy the bin file (a binary file with new firmware) onto an sd card. put the sd card in the camera with the power off.

then hold down the menu button on the left back of the camera and hold it while you turn on the camera. it should show you the old firmware version and then show that it is updating.

the camera’s screen has a litle image that says program update yes/ no use the up down arrows near the ok button to choose yes and just wait.
takes a few minutes to load goes through two phases, but has a fine little progress indicator so that you know what is happening. When you are done, take out the old sd card, pop in the new ultra high capacity card and you are off to the races.

Five minutes later i was ready to start learning and testing the camera.

Up and Running with the Pentax K100D

The Pentax k100d Digital SLR (DSLR) camera feels great in your hand. Definitely designed for a righty, with the the built in hand hold on the right side that has become a pretty standard design feature in all but the slimmest of digital cameras. The camera is definitely heavier than a little fixed lens zoom digital like the Minolta Dimage Z series. I’ll weigh them both and post it in another entry later. The balance is fine, no wobble to the camera. You can use it with one hand but definitely more stable with that left hand adding some balance.

I’ve been shooting with a Minolta Dimage Z1 with a 10 times optical zoom, and have mostly been happy with it. But its been just powerful enough to make me want a more substantial, versatile camera. My number one complaint with the simpler camera is stability and vibration. When you try to get an indoor shot, you often get blur or trailing motion. The Pentax is a Rock. Totally stable. No shake, no jitter. It has an anti shake setting. I was able to get ambient light, night time indoor lighting only shots of my daughters sleeping and playing with crisp edges.

Tonite I’m going to try to test another of its stability features: A 2 second delay on the shutter. Why does that matter? I’ve tried a number of times to get a decent nighttime shot of the Downtown Los Angeles Skyline from my deck. But even with a tripod I always get light trails. The Pentax manual suggests the problem might be the subtle rocking of the camera when i push the shutter release button and the internal mirror moves.

The manual suggests that if I use my tripod and the 2 second delay, the camera will have a couple moments to stabilize after i push the button before the image is snapped. I’ll let you know in my next post.

The camera has a batch of preprogrammed scene types where it will optimize its performance. Nighttime scenes, bright snow scenes, text on a page, sunset/sunrise, kids at play, pets, candlelight, and indoor flash prohibited locales like museums and school plays. Aimed right at the sweet spot of parenthood.

Took the camera out with me today to grab some shots and see how it plays out in the real world. Number 1: I love the camera’s speed. I have twin 4 year old daughters, getting them both looking the same direction and smiling can be a challenge. But with the K100d it is a breeze to just keep shooting and shooting figuring at least one picture will just rock. I got a dozen excellent shots today. When we kick this over to the blog and more formal review, we’ll post samples of some of the images.

Picked up some excellent macro shots of fresh picked roses. Clear enough to capture the sheen on the petals. Played a little bit with focus depths and with capturing a sunset sky. Limited by my own skill the camera’s images are stunning.

Okay, you want to read more technical detail here are some useful links:
pentax k100d user manual

Pentax k100d Product Specifications

So far I love the camera. Images are crisp and clean, shake resistance works like a charm, and you can snap lots of images quickly.

My only disappointments so far:

1. I really need a longer lens to get decent images of downtown, sunset etc.

2. I wish I could also take video. My cheap little minolta lets me spin a dial and catch a minute or two clip of decent resolution video. so lots of times i don’t even carry my video camera. the K100d certainly could be engineered to do it, but it just isnt there. Probably enough to keep me from standardizing on this as my main family camera.

Have fun with them

I know we will

Howard Witkin
Executive Producer