Technology Ramblings

One of the gifts I bought this year for my granddaughter was a GoPro Hero 3+ Silver Edition camera.  Best Buy had an excellent bundle that included an LCD Touchback and 16GB SD Card that saved me over $100 versus purchasing separately.   In addition, I also bought the 3 way arm/tripod combination.  This is one of the cooler little mounts I've ever seen and extremely light and versatile. The Hero 3+ is actually an amazing little piece of technology - and I emphasize the little.   Weighing in at only 74g and maybe 3" wide by 2" high and about an inch thick the main camera almost feels like a toy.  Even with the housing - the whole unit weights in at 134g - so about the same as my Nokia 735 smart phone.  My 8 year old granddaughter ran around with it no problem.  Combined with the 3 way arm/tripod - she can easily use it to record all sorts of activities and can easily manage the device at 8 years old. Many years ago I was one of the first to own the Olympus OM-1 SLR. 

So after some soul searching I decided that instead of getting my wife the same Nokia 735 RM-1039 that I recently purchased that I'd go ahead and get her the new iPhone 6. My primary reasons were 1. My wife is very familiar with iOS UI - she's had an iPad mini for a couple of years and is very comfortable the UI 2. With some of her activities - she uses apps that simply aren't available for Windows Phone.  Just the reality of the Windows Phone market share. 3. She needed a better camera than her 5Mp Lumia 635 - my wife really documents my granddaughters life via her phone - so having something that was easy - good flash etc... Again TMO made it easy and I purchased her a 16Gb model.   I think its kind of odd that Apple sizes go 16, 64 and 128GB.   Honestly for the hefty price of $649 I would like to have seen at least 32GB as a entry size.  TMOs iPhone comes with the nano-SIM installed - but just as with my 735 it was really easy to activate via TMOs web site. T

I recently purchased an unlocked Latin American Nokia Lumia 735 RM-1039.  It was the first of the new  735s I have seen that supported US LTE Bands and also came loaded with Denim Firmware and WP 8.1 update 1. In my previous post I noted my initial impression and now have been running it for over a week including making my normal weekly road trip into Southern California. Here is what I experienced and so far with the 735.   Data and Voice connectivity has not been a problem.  But signal strength is consistently showing about 1 bar lower. I did loose an occasional call in an elevator - but that was hit or miss with the 635 as well.    Calls were clear and speed tests around SoCal where about in the same 20 - 30Mbps down and 10 - 14Mbps up range I experience here at home.  I did experience some step downs in connection to HSPA+ and even 3G - but never lost connectivity. Also - when I do a manual network search I can see both TMO and AT&T networks fine - so it should wo

So in the last couple of posts I discussed my decision to A) replace my 4 month old Lumia 635 and B) to try the new Lumia 735 - RM-1039. I bought from B&H Photo for $299 which included an 8GB Micro SD card. So first off what surprised me was the packaging.  Which was quite compact at 5" x 5" and maybe an inch thick.  Contents were simple - the phone body, battery and a plugin charger.   The charger to me is better than what comes with the 635 in that it uses a USB connector at the plug and so that cable can also be used for charging from a laptop or any USB power source.  The 635s used a fixed cord at the plug end.   I was hoping to just pop the SIM and SD card out of my 635 and be working immediately, but the 735 uses a Nano SIM versus the Micro SIM in the 635.  So had to run off to local TMO store and get one.   I do have to say the TMO makes it really easy to switch SIMS via an app on their Web site.   My RM-1039 is actually a Central/South American unit.  Wh

So in my previous post I mentioned that after just 4 months I am looking to replace the Nokia Lumia 635s that I bought for my wife and I.    So now the question is what to get ? When MS announced the 730/735 and 830 models @ IFA in September - two things immediately came to mind.   First was would they be available in the US and second with what carriers. Well the answer has been very mixed.  Today only the 830 is available and from only 1 carrier - AT&T and is priced at $450.  When comparing the specs to the 735 I had a hard time justifying that price tag.   The 735 and 830 share the same processor and RAM. Both have the same screen resolution with Clear Black Screens - the 830 is a 5" IPS and the 735 a 4.7".   The 830 base storage is 16GB vs 8GB for the 735 - but both have SD expansion.  The 830 also has a 10Mp rear camera versus the 735 6.7Mp and both have LED Flash.  But the 735 has a 5Mp HD front camera versus a 0.9Mp for the 830.    Also from preliminary

So back in August of this year - I decided to update my Lumia 521 and my wife's even older Lumia 710 to the new Lumia 635.   Since I was already very familiar with the 521, the 635 seemed like a natural replacement and the price was right @ $129 at the MS store.    LTE support was nice uprade.  I'm on TMO and in travels to both coasts had no signal issues.   Voice quality was fine and features like WiFi calling and Visual Voicemail were supported. I expanded the base 8GB of storage via a 32GB SD card and have not had any issues with the 512MB of RAM as far as running all of my day to day applications.    However, some applications do load slowly, especially the Nokia Camera App and Good Secure Messaging - which is required for my work. Obviously moving to a 4.5" screen was also a nice upgrade in real estate from the 4" 521.  The DPI was similar to what I had the on the 521 so the clarity was fine.  I don't watch movies on my phone so the lack of HD resol

One the newest standards in Wireless is the 802.11ac standard.  The successor to 802.11n it promises to bring speeds up to 2.6Gbps over the 5Ghz WiFi bands. So sounds great - 2.6Gbps over wireless.  And every wireless vendor on the planet has 802.11ac offerings.   You'll notice a range of available models with AC in the name along with a number from 600 to 3200.  That number represents the published total Mbps rating across all bands. Prices can range from around $90 for an AC1200 all the way up to $250 or more for an AC3200 model.    What differentiates the models is the number of concurrent streams it can support to a single end-point.  So for example an AC1200 model supports a 2 antenna access point (AP) and a dual antenna endpoint at 80Mhz wide channel up to 867Mbps at 5Ghz. An AC3200 device supports 2 antenna AP and dual antenna endpoints with a 160Mhz wide channel so 1.3Gbps at 5Ghz + another 1.3Gbps using the new 60Ghz bands - also called Triband.    The AC3200 mod

I've been involved in networking computers since the middle 80s.  Back then it was the early versions of a solution called Ethernet from a company called 3Com.   Over the years I've watched the explosive growth of this industry and the introduction of first the Hub, then the router and then the switch.   By 2006 I was Sr. Director of Networking and Telecommunications for Intuit running a large multi-site shop with over 2500 network devices and a staff of 125. Today most data center networks are defined by the Access, Aggregation and Core concept introduced by Cisco.  With this concept, individual servers connected to an Access or Top of Rack (TOR) switch.  The TOR switches consolidated to an End of Row (EOR) Aggregation switch which then consolidated to a large redundant set of Core switches.  Using this model Cisco has become the 900 pound gorilla in the market with some 70%+ market share. Along with this basic topology was concepts like Spanning Tree to support multi-path

For nearly 25 years now - the Intel based x86 server platform has been the basis for modern distributed computing.    From the early Compaq System Pro in 1989 and Proliant in 1992 the concept of combining a single, dual or quad processor motherboard along with a drive bay capable of supporting pluggable hard drives with RAID and dual power supplies became the base platform for the growth of operating systems like Windows Server and Linux. By the late 90's as the numbers of these servers exploded and the storage requirements started to grow beyond the capacity of of the drive bays - there was a movement to consolidate storage onto large scale arrays and create a storage area network (SAN) to provide access from servers to those arrays.    All throughout the last decade the SAN grew in popularity and customers spent millions on the arrays and the associated networking gear.  The challenge was - SANs are expensive - easily double and triple the cost of the same capacity that you

It has been recently reported that MS is looking to acquire a company called Acompli.   Acompli is the developer of a mobile email, calendaring and contacts app and backend services for iOS and Android.   Think of it as Outlook for mobile that supports Office365, Gmail, Outlook.com, DropBox, OneDrive and more. http://www.acompli.com Acompli addresses one of the challenges I've felt about modern mobile devices and that is the separate Mail, Calendar and Contact apps that every Mobile OS has.  It's not that seperate apps are necessarily bad, but for the modern corporate user with multiple email accounts, having a more unifying experience is great.... When MS released Office for iPad back in March of this year, one of things that I asked was why no Outlook.   For many Corporate users, that is the one app that they actually spend more time in than Word or Excel or Powerpoint - so why not include it ?   Especially when Outlook is typically the primary gateway to Office365.

Normally I write about home computing, mobile and home automation subjects. But in real life I am a pre-sales architect for the Enterprise Solutions Group @ Dell in the Healthcare vertical.  That means I spend my days developing solutions involving hundreds if not thousands of servers, petabytes of storage and all the networking that makes it all work.    With the advent of server virtualization, many of the traditional approaches to compute, network and storage solutions are being challenged.   One of those challenges is the concept of converged infrastructure.    Converged Infrastructure is the approach of taking two or more pieces of compute, network or storage components and integrating them in some fashion to create a single manageable entity.    In recent years companies like VCE - the joint partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware - have created rack sized product offerings that attempt to create that single managed entity.  VCE's was called a Vblock.  NetApp's

So I starting thinking about a replacement for my 5 year old HP Pavilion e9270 CTO desktop.  I bought this from HP back on 12/1/2009 for about $1,220. This device has been my primary computer and sports a 1st Gen Clarkdale Core i7 920 Proc - 8Gb of RAM P55 Express Chipset, a Samsung 830 series 256GB SSD and Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM HDD.  It also has a ATI Radeon 4850 GPU with 1024Mb RAM.   The Motherboard itself is actually an MSI MS7613 Mini-ATX with a 450W Power supply. I figured okay we're now at 4th Gen Core family - so maybe I should see how much more performance the new Haswell based designs may get me and for how much. So from my first round of due diligence the answer is not as much as you'd think... So let take a look at my current system.. The Intel Core i-7 920 is a 4 Core, 8 Thread proc running at 2.67Ghz with 8M Smart Cache and 4.8 GT/s DMI and supports up to 24GB of DDR3 800/1066 RAM and 25.6 GB/s Throughput.  But it is a bit of a power hog @ 130W TDP The