Amuyu

## So – I lost some images…
Today I had to do some errands, one of which included me going to a car wash. It was more than just a simple wash – it was the first wash of my wife’s 1.5 year old car. Yeah – that’s not good, but it is what it is. Naturally, that wash took some time \(and money\). During the wait, I fired up my MacBook 11.6″ \(weee!!!\). I looked and saw that there was no open wifi around. But not to fear, I whipped out my trusty clear hotspot. In a manner of a few minutes, I’m settled and I start doing today’s stuff.

Today’s stuff happened to be an update my daughter’s lacrosse website ([rhsgirlslax](http://rhsgirlslax.com/ “RHS Lax”)). I had to put some of the sponsor images on the website via a pretty cool WordPress plugin called [Ad Squares Widget](http://www.primothemes.com/ “Ad Squares”). It felt good to be happily resizing images, redoing some of the logos so they would fit, etc on a really small form factor computer. Definitely something I could not have done (well easily) on an iPad. Anywho, about halfway through the mini project, I noticed that the plugin had been updated. WordPress does a nice job of notifying you about this. So – not thinking twice about it, I told wordpress to go ahead and update the plugin. While it was doing that, I finished fixing the code for the plugin and then added all the URL’s to the adds into the widget. But, when I went to reload the site, none of my images worked. A serious WTF moment later and some digging showed me what should have been pretty evident all along. The example code from the plugin places the images in the folder with the plugin. I did that. Well – when you update the plugin, it doesn’t update the directories and files – it replaces them! BAM! All my images were gone.

No big deal, right? Just upload them to the server again and poof. Well, that wasn’t so easy. The 11″ MBA just came into duty and all I had was the images that I was working on that day (got them from my email). Well – the good news is that the iMac that had those images was at home. A quick ssh to my home server and a hop over to the iMac and I was there. Then I ran into a simple problem: how do I efficiently transfer those files back to my 11″. That’s when Dropbox did a double whami AHA! on me. A quick “mv rhsimages ~/Dropbox” later they were in the cloud and seconds later on the 11″. Wee!!

It gets better. I serve the website from my home server via my DSL line that has a relatively meager 750Kb/s uplink. It works well for most things, but it sure isn’t enough to quickly serve something with tons of images. Well Dropbox, has this public folder thing. If you want, you can generate a URL to any file in that folder. So rather than copying those images back to my server, I left them on Dropbox and grabbed the public URL. I used that in the Ad Squares page and now my daughter’s site is being served a zillion times faster.

So – what is this then? I like to think of it as my cloud migration experiment. I’m doing a blend of private (my vmware farm with the web server) and public (Dropbox) clouds to do something better. How about that.

So I travel a lot

I’ve been on a plane a ton lately. Last year, for the first time in many, many years, I made platinum with Delta. However, even with that semi-rarified status, I still don’t get upgraded to first class all of the time. That means that I have to figure out how to spend my time in coach often. Very often. So lately, I’ve been using my ipad as “the device” on the plane. I can listen to music, do some light email, read a book, etc. – you know the drill. However, as you can tell from my previous post, I can not use the ipad for everything that I need it to be: a real computer. I can’t do email, correctly. I can’t — well, simply put – I can’t create on the ipad. Now, I do know that there’s apps that let you do a lot of stuff, but when it comes down to word processing, spreadsheeting (that sounds wrong somehow), and presentation creating, the ipad just won’t do.

The dilemma I have is that my work laptop is a very generously provided 17″ MBP. It’s an awesome laptop. The screen is beautiful, the horsepower is amazing, the hard disk size is stupendous, etc., etc. But – it’s big. Too big. I can’t open it in rookie class on the plane unless I happen to sit on an exit row. Even then, that means that I’m giving up the meager refreshments that are served to us during the flight. That laptop consumes all of my generous space allocation. I have on occasion gotten a drink and played the very dangerous balancing game of putting the drink on my laptop.

Enter the MacBook Air 11.6″. I’ve just come into possession of one. It is clearly an amazing piece of technology. The form factor is truly hard to describe, unless you actually hold one and use one. You do sacrifice a ton: screen real estate, cpu horsepower, storage space, and ports. My specimen happens to be a top of the line 1.6GHz, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM unit. In my mind – those are essentially minimum specs. They happen to be the maximum at this point, but they are what they are. That said, what you gain for that sacrifice is an laptop that you can actually forget you have in your hand. I closed it and was walking from my office to the kitchen when my daughter waylaid me and we started talking. 20 minutes later, I’m still standing there, and the laptop was honestly forgotten in my hand. It’s that light. That’s very cool.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now. Battery life on this is rated at 5 hours. That turns out to be 5 real hours in my experience. As in, I did just about anything I would normally do during a day of using the laptop and it gave me about 5 hours. That’s actually fricking amazing. There’s few flights that I take that are much longer than 5 hours – and I suspect that if I’m careful with wifi, bluetooth, etc. I can get much more. The CPU you get on this is surprisingly fast. My office productivity apps (MS and Apple) all fire up nearly instantly – even the first time after a reboot. All thanks to that cool SSD drive. My spreadsheets are not monster computationally challenging things. My presentations are kinda creative, but don’t require supercomputer’s worth of processing to deliver. And even though I do create some pretty complex Word documents – everything is fast enough. I mean, can I tell the difference between this and my 27″ Core i7 Imac? You bet – but the beauty of it is – that I can use that whenever I’m home. I can usually reserve the long sessions of content creation to when I am around the super ‘puter. The 11″ air is way more than good enough. And that’s cool.

oh and what about doing that email thing?

That is honestly, my number one annoyance with the pad. I can use it, just like I use my iphone, for quick emails and status checks. I can’t use it for real email. That means doing real answers – which includes a lot of typing, documents, replies, flagging of importance, and filing of emails.

Does the 11″ do this? Yes! It does, it’s a full computer. The whole thing. I mean everything. I can CREATE, FILE, DO IT ALL!!!

I’m giddy with excitement for having this cool thing.

one more thing

It’s so small I can actually take it to bed. When I’m done using it, I close it and lay down on my nightstand. Without having to do the one arm sweep of everything else so it will fit. I wrote this whole article – in bed. My lap is not scorched. And I like it.

I like it a lot.

so what do you do with the other computers?

The iMac will remain as the main production ‘puter. The 17″ MBP, will become the playground/take it on the road when you know you will need to do heavy duty content creation computer. The 11″ will become the default travel companion along with the iPad. Media consumption will remain on the iPad. That’s what it’s made fore and it’s much better than OSX computers.

More on this once I actually travel with this thing.

Sorry for the length. Had to get it out while I was thinking about it.

I’m back (and a review of the ZaggMate)

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything to this blog. Sorry about that. Had some issues with hackers, patience, a new baby, and laziness. It happens.

Things have changed much since I last wrote: baby, new mbp, imac, mac mini, iphone, and ipad. Yes, Apple has my garnished my wages in a very interesting way.

So – I figured a review would be a good way to bring this back to life. I love my iPad and I’ve been looking for a way to turn it into “the” tool to use while I’m flying. I really hate to lug around my 17″ MBP, specially on day trips. However, the iPad by itself is not really that efficient of a machine for me to sort the 100’s of emails. The onscreen keyboard is also difficult to use if you are trying to write anything but just a few sentences (better than an iPhone, but much less than a real keyboard). Zagg introduced the ZaggMate and some of the reviews said it was cool. I found out you could get one at a bestbuy and I did. My hopes were that it was going to at least let me reduce my backpack load down to two things: ipad+zaggmate and Clear hot spot. I tried it and this is what came of it:

The good:

• The fit and overall polish is very high. It looks like it was made for the ipad.
• The keyboard is pretty responsive and can keep up with me at my fastest, but that’s a limited thing because of some of the downsides
• Battery life is rated at months and recharge time is very quick.
• There are several function keys that are built into the keyboard that are nice touches: volume keys, media keys (ipod control) and screen keyboard controls.
• Having a full keyboard makes things like SSH eminently usable now. Also using text note utilities that do things like Markdown are much more usable. You no longer need a special app, just to get the markdown symbols.
• The case+ipad = real thin.

The bad:

• The keyboard is not full sized, so it takes some getting used to. I definitely can not type as fast as I can with a real full sized keyboard. However, it is much faster than the onscreen keyboard.
• There is no cutout for the headphone. That means that to use the ipad as an audio device, you have to take it out of the case. There’s not way to fit the case and the audio plugins at the same time. Period.
• Once you take the ipad out of the case, you can not flip it over and put it back in the case. Basically, unless you are using it as a stand, you can not use the case. On my flight, before we took off, I had to take the ipad out, put the keyboard in the seat back and wait until we were up in the air before I could use it.
• The f’ing caps lock key! The keyboard is small already and it’s really easy to hit the caps lock key. I don’t need that key. I wish there was a way to turn it off or remap it like there is in OSX.
• The osx mail.app keyboard shortcuts don’t work. So – you use the keyboard only to type stuff in. Sending, moving, replying, deleting, etc are all done through screen interactions.- The back of the ipad is not protected while it’s in the case. You can get another thingy, but those are another $30-$70
• The plastic thing that props the ipad up feels very cheap. I don’t trust it to survive in the long run

The final result = me returning the case this weekend. Cool experiment, but not really all there. The killers for me:

• No back protection
• No way for it to latch on the back when you are not using the keyboard
• No audio hole
• Flimsy build of the stand thing