2011-10-28 · 05:23

The Apple price premium for laptops

This post goes out to two of my homeboys: Brian Desmond and Brian Hill. It was sparked by a discussion that Brian, Tony Redmond, and I had at breakfast this morning about laptops; more specifically, Brian D claimed that buyers who opted for Apple laptops were doomed to pay a premium price relative to the PC laptop world. I decided to spec out a few different machines from Apple, Dell, Lenovo, and H-P to see whether this is actually true.

A few rules: I wanted to keep the configurations as close as possible. Although I only buy (and highly recommend) refurbished machines from Apple, I stuck with new hardware from each vendor. Although it might have been cheaper to buy from third parties, I used Apple’s MSRP for RAM expansion.

I started with Apple’s online store. A current-generation MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz quad-i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200rpm disk, a 1080p camera, and a 1680 x 1050 15.4″ display costs $2549. Full specs are here. One spec of note: 0.95″ thick and 5.6 lbs. (OK, so that was two specs. So sue me.) You can drive an additional 2560 x 1920 display by using the built-in Thunderbolt port.

Then I went to Lenovo’s online store. There’s currently a special on the W520 line. I configured a W520 with a 2.5GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 1920 x 1080 15.6″ display, a 500GB 7200 RPM disk, and a 720p camera. MSRP for this configuration is $2990– so the MacBook Pro wins! Not really, because Lenovo’s sale price is $2059. The W520 can accommodate up to 32GB of RAM and drive two external monitors, so those are points in its favor as well, plus you can swap its DVD drive for a second hard disk (though you can do this on the MacBook Pro via third-party kits). The W520 is about 1.4″ thick and weighs 5.7 lbs in its default configuration. At this price point, the Lenovo has an advantage: $500 less for a higher-resolution display (but see my note on that below), more expandability, and a better graphics subsystem. (Oh, and a color-calibrated display, if you care, which I don’t.)

What about H-P? The EliteBook 8760w line only seems to have quad-core processors if you spring for the 17.3″ display, which is waaaay too big for many people, me included. Leaving that aside, you could have a 1920 x 1080 panel for $2499 with a 2.7GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB disk. No camera, no external monitor support (that I can see on the specs page, anyway), and a 7.6lb weight. There are various other combinations of (slower) CPUs and GPUs, but this seems like the best value offering from H-P. So: significantly heavier than the MBP, with a faster CPU and a higher-res display but a smaller disk for the same price. I’m going to give the nod to Apple on this one because of build quality (see below.)

For Dell, I priced a Precision Workstation M4600, their 15″-class machine. MSRP on this configuration is $2934, but Dell’s selling it for $2154. For that price, you get a 1920 x 1080 panel, a quad i7 (with 8MB cache, unlike the 6MB cache on the Mac, H-P, and Lenovo machines), 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200 RPM disk, and AMD’s integrated graphics (though Nvidia graphics are available for a couple hundred bucks more.) Interestingly, Dell offers a secondary SSD and a touch display as factory options. I’ve got to give Dell the price advantage here as well.

Now, about display resolution: for my poor eyes, 1920 x 1080 in a 15″ panel is too many pixels. Great for watching movies, but the high DPI means that I can’t read text at standard font sizes. I’m happy to admit that the higher-resolution panels are a point against Apple. I don’t know enough about the specs of the various graphics adapters involved to be able to authoritatively say which one is better for normal use (obviously the fancy Nvidia adapters would be more useful for CAD, etc.)

Battery life? All I can say is this: on my MBP I routinely get 4 solid hours of writing code from one battery charge, and I’ve gotten 6+ hours when just doing e-mail and web browsing. Apple claims a life of 7+ hours for light browsing. I don’t have enough data to evaluate the battery life claims of the other vendors.

Of course, there are other factors involved, too, besides the machine configuration. The Dell and H-P laptops I’ve used in the past were squeaky, plastic-y, festooned with stickers, and cheap-feeling, with displays that wobbled, flexing cases, and poor build quality. Lenovo’s build quality is excellent, with a great keyboard, a case that doesn’t flex or squeak under pressure, and good durability. I think Apple’s build quality is better, though; the aluminum unibody construction on the MacBook Pro means that there’s absolutely no flex in the case. The keyboard is as good as Lenovo’s (plus it’s backlit), and the overall industrial design is top-notch, as you’d expect from Apple. There are lots of little touches, like the magnetic power adapter, that set Apple’s hardware apart.

So, bottom line: yes, Dell and Lenovo will sell you less expensive laptops with specs equal to or better than Apple’s. H-P apparently won’t. Is the price premium worth the Apple features and industrial design? For some people, probably; for others, probably not. For now, though, it looks like the two Brians are right. Darn it.

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2011-10-27 · 19:59

Thursday trivia #41

I’ve been in Pensacola working at the US Navy’s IT A-school. Short summary: you should be very proud of the dedication and work ethic of the members of your Navy. Now I’m in Greenwich teaching the final Exchange Maestro event for 2011, thence to Mountain View for a night in my own bed, then to Vegas for the Exchange Connections show and then, finally, back to Pensacola.

With all this teaching and travel going on, my blogging of late has been limited; without further ado, this week’s trivia edition:

  • No one seems to know what the actual average mailbox size is for Exchange mailboxes. In fact, most organizations don’t seem to know what their own averages are, much less what the industry-wide average is.
  • Steve Yegge is the kind of guy I’d like to work with.
  • Really, New York Times? An article on how to be hip and Mormon on the front page of your Thursday style section? Who exactly do you think the audience is for this? I’m guessing that the overlap between would-be Mormon hipsters and NYT readers is probably pretty small.
  • This year’s Marine Corps birthday message.
  • Hopefully this year I’ll make it to the MVP Summit. Well, next year, I mean.
  • The more I run, the better I like running. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

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2011-10-16 · 10:39

A tricky UM routing problem

A colleague who earned his Exchange 2010 last year recently contacted me with a bit of an odd UM question. Here’s the basic scenario: Steve Secretary answers the phone for Betty Bosswoman. This was set up in Cisco Call Manager such that Steve’s phone has two extensions: 1000 (Betty’s extension) and 1001 (Steve’s extension). When someone calls Betty, both phones ring, and Steve can answer it as necessary. Sometimes Steve would answer the phone and the caller would ask for Betty’s voicemail; Steve could oblige by doing a blind transfer to Betty’s extension and the call would be routed to the voicemail system.

Things were all fine with this configuration until the advent of Exchange UM. Call answering and delivery worked fine until Steve tried to transfer a call to Betty’s voicemail, now hosted on Exchange UM. The caller whose call was transferred was getting Steve’s voicemail.. not at all the right result.

This was happening because when the call was transferred, CUCM was emitting a diversion header that indicated that the call was being sent to Steve. Why? Because Steve had Betty’s extension assigned as a secondary extension! Remember, Exchange UM uses the SIP diversion information to determine where the call’s from, who it’s to, and why Exchange is getting it. If any of these three data are incorrect or missing, Exchange will fall back to assuming that the call is to the voicemail pilot number, and you’ll hear “Welcome to Microsoft Exchange. Please enter your mailbox extension” (or whatever; the exact phrase escapes me) instead of the correct greeting.

My interlocutor wanted to know if there was a way to change this behavior on the Exchange side. Sadly there isn’t– whatever diversion header information is provided, Exchange will consume. There’s no way to rewrite, edit, or otherwise control the diversion data on the Exchange side, nor can you create rules or filters that modify the actions that Exchange takes. That’s what the call coverage map on the PBX is for, see?

Anyway, after a little head scratching, some consultation with a CUCM engineer, and the sacrifice of a chicken, it was discovered that CUCM had a way to modify the extension information sent as part of a blind transfer. The change was made so that transferring a call from Steve’s phone emitted Betty’s extension instead, and the problem was solved. Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what change was made, or I’d document it here. Such are the perils of not being a CUCM guy…

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2011-10-11 · 11:16

E-mail and defamation

So LegalZoom (which I recommend if you need a will or other basic legal document) sent me an interesting newsletter the other day. Headlined “Can You Be Sued for Sending an Email?”, it covers the case of Sandals Resorts vs Google. Basically, Sandals filed suit to force Google to disclose information about a Gmail user who wrote an e-mail they didn’t like. Google won, Sandals lost, and LegalZoom’s asking a valid question.

(Disclaimer: as though you didn’t know this, I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)

The first facile answer that comes to mind is “of course you can be sued for an e-mail you write.” Under the American system of jurisprudence, anyone can sue anyone for anything. I’ve been harassed and threatened with lawsuits by a crazy person who objected to something I wrote on my blog about his business; so could you be. That’s part of the price of admission to a nation where you get the benefits of a stable, well-established judicial system based on adversarial law. It doesn’t mean that such a suit would be valid, just that the potential exists for it to be filed.

A little more nuanced answer requires us to dig into the facts of this particular case: Sandals didn’t sue the person who wrote the e-mail, they asked Google to find out who that person was. Google declined, and the fight was on. Anonymity is often an effective defense against bearing the consequences of what you say in e-mail… but don’t count on it. Some e-mail providers are more, shall we say, flexible than others when asked to provide information about who created an e-mail; they may do so based on a subpoena or merely upon a written request. If you use an e-mail service that you don’t run yourself, it would be worth your time to find out what kind of privacy and disclosure policies your provider follows. In this case, Google did the right thing and resisted the discovery request.

A still more nuanced answer: in this particular case, Sandals claimed that the e-mail in question was libelous, defamed their business, and caused them financial injury. The judge ruled against them on several points. The most interesting ones are these: first, because the plaintiff didn’t prove any actual financial injury, they couldn’t claim that the alleged defamation had actually harmed them. Second, the judge found that the e-mail was clearly an expression of opinion, and would be very likely perceived as such by the recipients. Defamation and libel require that the offender present their claims as fact. It’s OK for me to say “It’s my opinion that Oracle makes crappy software”; couched as an opinion, my statement cannot be construed as libelous or defamatory. If I instead claimed that Larry Ellison eats small children, and presented that claim as fact, that might be defamatory (unless I could prove that it was true, not that I’m planning on trying.)

The New York Law Journal review of the case is worth reading in depth if this sort of thing interests you, in part because it explains what you must do to write e-mails that don’t meet the legal standard for defamation (hint: overblown rhetorical language helps). It’s also fairly entertaining in its own right.

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2011-10-10 · 17:45

A few pictures from Fleet Week 2011

The boys and I made a pilgrimage to Fleet Week 2011 in San Francisco this past weekend. Selected photos are here. We drove to Pier 30 and parked, where we started with a tour of the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6), which was well-provisioned with a nice selection of Marine vehicles and aircraft. Among other things, the boys got to check out a HiMARS truck, where thanks to Marine Cpl. Lamb from the great state of Tennessee the boys got to see a cellphone video he took of a fire mission in Afghanistan; a V-22, an AH-1Z Cobra (which I hadn’t seen before), and a variety of crew-served and individual weapons. The boys also got to hear an unusual call on the 1MC: “Man down, man down, man down on the flight deck!” A visitor tripped over a tiedown chain, so the Navy surged a bunch of corpsman to make sure he wasn’t hurt. They liked that quite a bit.

A quick taxi ride took us over to Marina Green for the airshow proper.

Having learned my lesson from last year, I’d rented a Sigma 50-500mm lens from LensRentals.com. I figured that this lens, which was every bit as big and heavy as advertised, would do a better job of capturing the action than my own 70-300. Sure enough, it did, but with a couple of caveats. It turns out that it’s a lot harder to take pictures of fast-moving aircraft with a telephoto lens than you might think. This problem was compounded by the fact that autofocus on the Sigma is fairly slow. Accordingly, I had a hard time getting pictures that were both well-framed and well-focused. However, some of them came out quite well.. I deleted the others, that being the major advantage of a digital camera. Tom and I between us took almost 600 pictures, about 150 of which were good enough to make the initial cut. I’ve posted a few of the better ones on my Flickr “airplanes” set.

Side note about LensRentals.com: I could not have been more pleased with their prices or service. I will definitely use them again, possibly for the Veterans’ Day airshow that the Blue Angels traditionally put on at NAS Pensacola. I recommend them highly.

The taxi ride on the way back might have been the highlight of the show: we had the same crazy, gravel-voiced, wrong-side-of-the-road-driving-on driver who scared the stuffing out of us last year. The odds against getting the same driver two years in a row must have been very high but… well, there it was. We survived, barely, and the four of us laughed uncontrollably for several minutes after exiting the cab. Whether the laughter was from relief at our survival or amusement at running into the same guy two years running, I couldn’t say.

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2011-10-10 · 11:38

Testing speech grammars with Exchange Unified Messaging

One of the things i teach in the MCM UM curriculum is the fact that Exchange UM has a phonetic name attribute that you can use to adjust how the system pronounces unusual names like “Robichaux” or “Szcezpanski.” MVP (and now Exchange MCM!) Jeff Guillet shared an article with me during the MCM R10 UM class that explains how to preview the pronunciation you’re going to get from a given phonetic value– I’d always done it with trial and error, but Jeff’s method is better. See Jeff’s article for background on how the phonetic system works, and learn how to preview pronunciation as a bonus.

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2011-10-05 · 13:55

Exchange MCM R10 wrapup and a reminder about Exchange Maestro

Fellow Exchange MVP Jeff Guillet just finished rotation 10 (R10) of the Microsoft Certified Master program for Exchange. His writeup gives an excellent overview of what the program’s really like: intense and focused learning, now 7 days per week. It is very hard work, but the quality of the work that MCM candidates do with the skills and knowledge they get at MCM speaks for itself.

But suppose that you can’t spare the time or money to attend an MCM rotation? Good news: Tony Redmond and I have one more Exchange Maestro class coming up at the end of October in Greenwich, CT. For a limited time, using the registration code “FAN” will net you $250 off registration. (When I say “limited”, what I really mean is that I don’t know when Penton will stop honoring the code so I encourage you not to dawdle; the class is nearly full.)

But further suppose that you aren’t able to attend this Maestro event– after all, Connecticut in the fall isn’t for everyone. Good news: don’t forget that Tony and I are co-presenting a one-day workshop on planning and executing Exchange 2010 migrations as a pre-conference session at the Fall Exchange Connections show. In one action-packed day, we’ll cover the migration-related highlights from the Maestro curriculum, plus Tony will tell jokes. Trust me when I say that his jokes are not to be missed. Plus, it’s Halloween that day, so if I can persuade Tony to agree we might have a costume contest for attendees. I mean, who wouldn’t want to dress up in costume for Halloween in Las Vegas? That’s certainly on my bucket list. Feel free to leave costume suggestions for me in the comments section of this post.

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2011-10-05 · 07:54

Webcast: Office 365 vs Google Apps

Tony has been writing about Office 365 quite a bit lately, including a few discussions of pros and cons of Office 365 versus Google Apps, its chief competitor. (IBM Lotus would really like to imagine that they’re competing effectively in this space but I’ve seen no evidence that they’re doing so. Sorry, guys.)

On that theme, I wanted to mention a webcast I’m doing with the Windows IT Pro folks. Paul Thurrott, Jeff James, and I will be joined by a special guest, Matt James (no relation to Jeff). Matt’s a satisfied Google Apps customer, and we’re looking forward to getting his perspective on how these two application stacks, well, stack up.

To register for the webcast, drop by the vConference site and sign up. I hope to see you there!

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2011-09-22 · 03:05

Thursday trivia #40

As always, Marines lead the way.

Top engineering schools compared to schools from Hogwarts. (Hint: Stanford is like Gryffindor.)

Would you send your English-only kids to a Russian-language-only school? I’m not sure I would. But this story makes some interesting points related to expectation and achievement– something I deal with daily when working on products at Acuitus. I have a lot more to say about this and hope to be able to someday.

This interactive map of submarine cables is very, very cool. There are cables in places you might not have expected, like 8 of them running to Alaska.

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2011-09-19 · 07:22

MCM Exchange rotation 10 notes

This weekend, I taught the unified messaging portion of rotation 10 of the Microsoft Certified Master | Exchange program. This was quite a milestone in a couple of ways. First, it’s rotation 10. That means that there are now more than 200 Exchange Masters graduates running around loose and applying the things I’ve taught them. (There aren’t that many actual MCM credential holders, as not every attendee passes the exams necessary to earn the credential.)

Second, this is the first time the Exchange MCM course has run for seven days each week. In the past, the classes have met Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm, and often much later, with weekends reserved for study, lab work, and life maintenance– laundry, grocery shopping, and so on. The theory for this rotation is that moving to a schedule of seven class days with shorter days would be an improvement. In the past I’ve taught UM on the first day of the third week; this time I taught on class day 7. The students had already had a couple of much longer-than-expected days during the preceding week, but I attribute that to some new lab elements that were being debugged as part of this rotation. Their schedule should settle down a bit.

This rotation is small– only 4 students are in Redmond, with a dozen or so remote students attending via Lync meetings. This fostered a really intimate teaching atmosphere, which was further enhanced by our off-campus trip for lunch (Microsoft’s cafeterias are closed on weekends). I cut down the amount of material in my presentation a bit; this time the attendees only had 3 labs and about 125 slides to digest. We finished about 5:15pm, and I left them well-prepared both for the UM portion of the exam and to get through the next two weeks thinking “wow, these other instructors are way better than that UM guy.” Exchange MVP and MCM R10 candidate Jeff Guillet posted a summary of his first week in class, which you might enjoy if you want to see things from the students’ perspective.

Registration is now ongoing for the November rotation. If you’ve been considering whether to try for your MCM credential, this would be a good time to register; contact me for details if you’re interested.

On a more personal note, for this rotation I was able to get in a day early and spend some time with people I like: my former parter at 3Sharp, Paul Flynn, and I had a delicious lunch at Purple, (a favorite of mine; try the apple, walnut, and Stilton salad!), and then I met my brother Tim and his lovely wife Julie for Julie’s first trip to the pistol range, some time playing with their three cats, and a delicious Italian dinner at Paolo’s (where I’d never been but hope to return.) When I first started traveling to Seattle more than a dozen years ago, each trip was an exciting odyssey, with new people, sights, and places to encounter and explore. Even after the newness wore off, I still enjoyed the feel of visiting the big city– Toledo and its environs aren’t small, exactly, but metro Seattle is a much bigger and more diverse place. Now that I live in the Bay Area, I’m a little saddened to recognize that I don’t have exactly that same feeling towards Seattle. Living in the big city means that visiting there doesn’t have that same country-mouse-goes-to-town vibe. On the other hand, I still love the scenery there: the mountains (when visible), the pattern of the waters on Elliott Bay and Lake Washington, the thousand shades of green that blanket the hills and streets… there’s a lot to see there even if you’re on the east side. My many visits mean that it’s a comfortable and familiar place, too, which is valuable in itself. I’ll definitely be back!

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2011-09-18 · 09:25

The Detachment (Eisler)

I’ve written about Barry Eisler’s books before. Executive summary: I love ’em. The plotting, pacing, and atmospherics are top-notch. His characters’ motivations are logical, meaning that their actions are plausible (however ill-considered they may be.) He writes crisply, without excessive baggage. And of late, his books have been increasingly topical.

The central plot behind The Detachment is that a shadowy cabal is apparently plotting a coup attempt against the US government. I say “apparently” because there’s conflicting evidence, and some of those involved are, shall we say, not entirely forthcoming about their motives or plans. I don’t want to say much more about the plot than that, other than that it’s well-supported by real-world events. Eisler continues his habit of including a few pages of references to descriptions of those events, too, perhaps as a guard against accusations that his imagination’s overwrought.

Most of the characters from Eisler’s previous work are here: John Rain, Dox, Ben Treven, and Daniel Larison, and Scott Horton, along with a few lesser folks. I have to say that I find it jarring to see Larison and Horton used as character names given their real-world prominence as bloggers. It wasn’t so bad in the first book where Eisler did it, but it started bugging me from about page 10 in this book.

That’s about the only fault I can find with The Detachment, though. Completely apart from the quality of the writing, I applaud Eisler for his foray into self-publishing. He’s clearly put his money where his mouth is by pricing and shipping his books on his own. The Kindle edition was $6. $6, I say! That’s half the cost of a movie ticket for something that provided several hours more entertainment than the average movie, plus it automatically showed up on my Kindle the day of its release.

Apart from making me happy, Eisler’s decision to self-publish meant that he could cut down the cycle time for publishing and get the book out sooner; the book felt fresh because in the first few pages, there’s a mention of the Tohoku earthquake (which you may know better as the Fukushima earthquake), and there are a number of other fairly recent topical references embedded in the text. I’m delighted to report that, unlike most mainstream titles, there were very few typos or grammatical errors in the text. Anyone who claims that self-publishing will inevitably lead to lower-quality books isn’t playing straight. It certainly doesn’t have to.

In closing, three grace notes: first, I love it that he threw in a Piaggio P180; I admire N7PA every single time I see it at the Palo Alto airport. Second, Eisler’s sex scenes in prior books have drawn lots of attention. There’s only one such scene here; it’s only about three lines long, and it made me laugh so hard that the passengers around me on my SJC-SEA flight looked at me as though I were crazy. Third, the book is available for Kindle users a few weeks before the paperback version ships, which (as a die-hard Kindler) I appreciate.

Verdict: very highly recommended, but you should probably read his other books first for context. (Secondary verdict: Alex Berenson, please call Eisler and figure out how to self-publish your books from now on too.)

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2011-09-16 · 16:52

17 mistakes, Exchange, and thin provisioning

Justin Vashisht, whom I’ve never met but already like, unleashed a really good article on his blog this week: the 17 biggest mistakes made in Exchange 2010 deployment. His article stands well on its own; you could maybe quibble over the ordering of the items, but all of the things he cites are potential mistakes that you can easily make if you’re not careful or experienced. (Actually, I think the preferred phrase is now “operationally mature.”)

Justin’s list includes a few things that have been recent topics of discussion in the MCM community lately, and I wanted to call those out for attention because they’re important.

First, two warnings that you can’t get something for nothing:

  • Be very careful with allowing memory overcommitment (or, as Microsoft calls it, dynamic memory). Hyper-V and VMware both allow you to allocate more than the total amount of physical RAM across your VMs; that is, on a server with 64GB of RAM you could allow your VMs to consume more than 64GB. Virtual memory is certainly useful, but Exchange doesn’t like it much. Exchange 2010’s storage engine will consume as much RAM as it can get, backing off and releasing RAM only if the page fault rate increases excessively. The problem is that virtualized Exchange instances don’t see the page fault rate increasing– when you enable overcommitment, swapping happens on the host, not the guests. Memory overcommitment is mostly a cost-saving measure, and there are other, better ways to save money on your Exchange deployments. That’s why Microsoft recommends against using overcommitment on Exchange, but for some reason the word doesn’t seem to have gotten out very well.
  • Avoid thin provisioning of storage. The idea behind thin provisioning is sound: you authorize a pool of storage for an application, but you don’t actually allocate it until it’s needed. (Cue the joke about the old man whose son wanted to go to college; when the son expressed his desire, the old man said “Well, son, you have my permission.”) While the up-front savings are tempting, thin provisioning makes it very, very hard to predict exactly what your storage usage or performance patterns will look like.. not to mention that it makes stress testing difficult or impossible. Justin mentions the performance burden of on-the-fly storage allocation in his mistake #7, and that’s a sound reason to avoid it too.

The third thing I want to mention is something that you may already have heard, but it bears repeating. Stress test your storage system before deployment. This should go without saying; the fact that it’s on Justin’s list (and a similar list I’ve seen circulating around Microsoft) tells me that not everyone’s gotten the memo. You must, must, MUST test your storage hardware using both jetstress and loadgen to ensure that it will respond properly under load. There is no substitute, shortcut, or workaround that will excuse you from this requirement. If you don’t test it, you can’t know whether you’ll get suitable performance under load… and if you can’t know that, how do you know whether you’re spending your money wisely?

The rest of Justin’s list is good reading too, and I commend it to your attention. I also should mention that the last Exchange Maestro event of 2011 is right around the corner, so if you’re looking for more, shall we say, direct guidance on what to do, and not do, with Exchange, perhaps you should join us there.

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2011-09-15 · 15:49

Thursday trivia #39

Wow.. long time, no post. I’m getting ready to embark on a large project down in the home of Naval Aviation and that, along with visiting the boys every other weekend and trying to finish my pilot’s license, has kept me super busy. Without further delay, here’s this installment of Thursday trivia.

  • I can’t overstate how many birds there are in and around the Palo Alto airport. Tons of geese and huge clouds of gulls make the already-challenging process of navigating the traffic pattern for takeoffs and landings even more tricky. However, I stand by my belief that if I can fly safely in the congested, controlled, bird-filled skies here in the Bay Area that everywhere else will seem easy by comparison.
  • As much as I like the U-Verse feature set, the picture quality here in Mountain View is pretty poor on some channels. It’s impossible to tell if this is because the source material is poor or because U-Verse is stepping on it, but it’s definitely a downer. For example, “The Simpsons” on Fox looks good, but older episodes on the local CW affiliate are terrible. Most sports channels are medium- to poor-quality. Even Showtime isn’t great. Makes me miss Buckeye.
  • I’ve really enjoyed using Spotify to check out new music, in large part because so much of it is awful and I can quickly find that out for free. And, of course, C89.5 is a regular part of my listening routine.
  • Fleet Week is almost upon us again. Last year was great; I hope I’m in town for this year’s edition.
  • Windows 8 looks really slick, but I’m probably more excited about the improvements in the server edition. 2300+ PowerShell cmdlets? Yes, please!
  • Too many projects, not enough time…

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2011-08-25 · 20:17

Henge Dock mini-review

As part of my ongoing downsizing, I sent both my 2008 MacBook Pro and my 2006 Mac Pro to the great used computer yard in the sky and consolidated to a single 2011 MBP. After years of using ThinkPads with docking stations (and being well pleased therewith), I went looking for a Mac equivalent. When I’m home, most of the time I’ll be working at my desk, but when I’m not home the MBP needs to go with me, and I didn’t want to mess with endless plugging and unplugging of cables.

A friend at Microsoft mentioned the Henge line of docks, so I ordered one to try it out. I liked their look, and I liked the fact that there are no mechanical parts (like the old NewerTech claw-style dock I had back in the day.)

When the dock arrived (promptly, I might add), I immediately got to setting it up. Here’s what it looks like with the cables installed:

cables through slots

Each cable is installed in a slot cut into the dock. You fasten the cable connector into the slot with a setscrew. Henge includes extension cables that fit into the slots; the idea is that you put in the extension cables you want connected, fasten their setscrews, and dock your laptop. I quickly assembled everything and docked my laptop. Although it fit, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep. The MacBook Pro requires 3 things to wake with the lid closed: the power adapter, a keyboard or mouse, and a video display must all be connected. I quickly determined that this wasn’t happening, but I couldn’t tell which because the shape of the dock prevents you from seeing the plugs. I put it aside for another day, then last night, I decided to experiment some more to try to get the dock working.

I pulled the cables through the dock openings so there was enough slack to plug everything in without fully docking the laptop. This let me verify that everything was plugged in. I have the MagSafe, 2 USB, DisplayPort, and audio out cables in place. This took me a while because I accidentally pushed the head of the video cable all the way through the dock opening and then couldn’t get it back through! After a bunch of fiddling, I finally got the connector back where it belonged.

Flushed with success, once that was done, I was able to ease the plugs back into the dock openings and screw them into place. I docked the laptop, woke it up, and enjoyed working with it for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, the video adapter (I’m using Apple’s DisplayPort-to-VGA) wouldn’t seat until I manually jiggled it. The plug fits in the opening in the dock, but in its default position it’s ever-so-slightly misaligned with the opening in the MBP case, so it won’t seat unless I rock the MBP back and forth.

After some jiggling and rocking (boy, that sounds wrong), I got it to seat and worked with my machine docked all last night. This morning, I undocked it and tried to redock it, and the same problem– the USB plugs engaged (so the external keyboard was active) but the video plug didn’t seat properly.

When I e-mailed them, Henge told me that some Apple VGA adapters are sized funny and that I could either try another adapter or trim the one I had to remove some of the excess plastic. They kindly offered me a discount coupon for their brand of adapter, which is basically an extension cable that simplifies the routing quite a bit. I have a Monoprice DVI adapter that I’m going to test tonight. I like the industrial design of the dock, but if I can’t make it work reliably, back it goes.

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2011-08-25 · 09:56

Thursday trivia #38

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