Category: Computing

It’s been awhile since I last posted — I’ve been pretty busy in the interim but I’ll try to get back to a more regular posting schedule.

I realized the other day that the reason USB memory stick transfers were so slow on my machine was because my keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Pro, was probably a USB 1.1 device. Merely having it plugged into my machine would result in the USB 2.0 controller dropping down to a slower compatibility mode, which would also affect any other devices on the same bus — like a memory stick, external hard drive, or what have you.

I had difficulty finding information about my keyboard online — it was produced in 1999 and has been out of production for several years, as far as I can tell. I read online that the USB 2.0 spec was finalized in 2000, though, so I could infer that my keyboard didn’t support it. In the end, I decided to retire my keyboard, after about 7 years of ownership, even though it’s still working fine. My keyboard has survived several computer upgrades and a move across the state, but it bothered me that it was potentially slowing down other parts of the system.

Its replacement is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 — I didn’t really consider many other brands, as I liked the layout of my previous keyboard, and the off-brand ones that I looked at seemed pretty flimsy or otherwise undesirable. So far my experience has been very positive — the additional angling provided by the removable shim underneath the keyboard feels pretty good, and the key action is a fair bit quieter than the old Natural Pro without sacrificing feel. My only complaint is that it seems like I have to press the ‘y’ key very hard — sometimes it misses a keypress — but that may be an acclimation issue rather than a technical fault.

My recent experiences in setting up another server and site have served as a reminder that, on the net, it seems like nothing is secure by default. FTP sends your credentials over the wire in plain text. Telnet, of course, isn’t secure for the same reasons. Most ISP mail providers don’t use SSL or secure authentication for their POP3/IMAP connections, which, again, means that your login credentials are insecure. Some web content management systems (like Drupal, by default) don’t deal with passwords in a non-SSL environment as securely as they should. (Using a challenge-response authentication mechanism is better than nothing, if you can’t use SSL.) Web publishing protocols like the Blogger, WordPress, and other APIs tend to send your password over the wire as plain text, as well — and if you’re using a connection such as a public wifi hotspot, you are definitely vulnerable. (It looks like the Atom Publishing Protocol may help resolve this issue, but this isn’t a viable option yet.)

Now, thankfully, there are secure alternatives for most of the activities described in the last paragraph. For example, you can use FTPS or SFTP to transfer files securely, or SSH as a replacement for Telnet (and as a way to tunnel almost anything securely). You can find plugins for insecure content management systems to make them more secure, or simply administer them via HTTPS.

However, when you don’t control the server-side of the equation, your options may be limited. My mail account with my ISP, for example, can only be accessed securely via their web mail interface — they don’t appear to support any of the standard POP3/IMAP security mechanisms, which is disappointing.

The most unfortunate thing about this situation is that you need to go to quite a bit of trouble to set all of these secure alternatives up, and it’s more effort than most users will put up with. It’s also not obvious that things are insecure in many cases — while web users are probably used to the “lock” graphic indicating a secure web page, there’s no similar convention for other programs like FTP and e-mail clients, and no warnings about insecure transfers. Unfortunately, it’s going to take some kind of massive industry-wide effort to really effect any change or move to secure protocols. The insecure defaults are deeply entrenched — so much so that it would be really difficult to get people to “fix” something that, to them, isn’t “broken.”

I’m not actually left-handed, but a few years ago, I decided that it might be a good idea for me to learn to use a mouse with my left hand, to give my right hand a much-needed break during the work day. I figured I wasn’t the first person to try this, and a quick Google search confirmed this with a couple of related results for “learning to use the mouse left-handed.”

This article by one of the cofounders of Blogger.com echoes my experience with learning to mouse left-handed. I believe I started shortly after starting work on Secret Weapons Over Normandy in 2003 — a fairly low-stress period during which I could afford to spend more time becoming familiar with the ins-and-outs of the process. It probably took me a couple of weeks before I was as productive doing day-to-day stuff as I was when I was using the mouse right-handed — I was actually surprised at how little time it took before I felt reasonably comfortable. I didn’t need much encouragement to keep going through the process — I almost immediately noticed improvement in the condition of my right hand and wrist after starting, so I was definitely very receptive to the benefits.

I also tried to utilize keyboard shortcuts more frequently — even more so than I already did. I found this Coding Horror article about printing a list of Visual Studio keyboard commands to be useful, although I found through the use of the free Command Spy SlickEdit gadget that I was already using the most common ones out there.

Interestingly, I also find that my keyboard’s alignment with my body “feels” better when I mouse left-handed. This article titled “Keyboards Are Backwards” makes this point clearly with photographs — the numeric pad is a waste of space for righties, and forces your hand to kick out much further than it should in order to use the mouse. With the mouse on the left-hand side of the keyboard, the overall range through which your hands need to move is reduced.

I still need to use the mouse right-handed for any sort of precise activity. For example, I still play most games right-handed (with turn-based games being a possible exception, due to the slower pace). Any activity that involves a lot of precise clicking, or especially dragging, can be difficult for me to do left-handed. Additionally, I feel that my keyboard usage is still “unbalanced” and biased towards my left hand, since I use my left pinky for holding down the Shift and Control keys. I also depress the Alt key with my left thumb — both of these motions require slight movements of the entire hand, and I believe that this may place more stress on it as a result.

I made an attempt awhile back to try and correct this by using my right hand for pressing Shift/Alt/Control in certain situations, but slacked off. (The heuristic I used was to hold down the modifier key with the opposite hand as the letter/number key being pressed. I didn’t consult any research or anything when I came up with this — it just seemed like a fairly sensible way of doing things.) Perhaps I’ll give that a whirl again, to try and ensure that my hands remain healthy and usable for years to come. I’ve used a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro (which is no longer made, but similar to this) for years now, and between that and my Habu mouseI feel my setup is ergonomic enough such that if my usage habits are sound, I shouldn’t develop any RSIs.

Yesterday I started having some issues with my cable modem (a nearly 4 year old RCA DCM-305) that resulted in me being unable to access the Internet. In my attempts to resolve the situation, I wound up tethering my trusty phone and its 3G wireless connection to my PC so I could research the problem online. I must say that I’m really impressed with the performance — given the sometimes sluggish web browsing experience on the phone itself, I was afraid that the wireless connection was the bottleneck. It’s actually the phone/OS/web browser itself, not the connection. I was able to browse web sites on my PC at a reduced, but still entirely usable speed, without having to disable images or engage in any chicanery like that. Shockingly, even streaming videos such as the ones on my ISP’s home page worked. Color me impressed.

The one down side to tethering my phone is that it gets pretty hot when doing so — enough to make it a little uncomfortable to use for a phone call. Also, it sucks up so much power that it doesn’t really recharge while it’s tethered.

In the course of diagnosing the cable modem problem, I somehow got it into my head that my router (a Buffalo WBR2-G54, whose firmware was replaced by X-WRT) might be going flaky. Since my brother had recently installed the Tomato firmware and recommended it, I decided to give it a try and installed it. Of course, because I wasn’t really thinking things through, I wound up installing it via my personal PC over the wireless connection, which is not recommended, mind you. It worked, but the router still had problems getting an IP address from the DHCP service on the cable modem, which cemented in my mind that the problem lay with the cable modem.

Talking to the technical support people for Road Runner was interesting. The tier 1 or 2 guy that I talked with yesterday seemed more knowledgeable than the tier 3 person I talked to today — however, because the cable modem was intermittently working (after being remotely reset), this led him to believe that the problem was with my router. After discovering that things were still flaky this morning, I called again and asked about doing an equipment swap since I was pretty sure the problem was not with my router. Lo and behold, I swap out the cable modem (for a much more svelte Ambit model), everything works correctly, and I can finally stop using my phone as my primary Internet connection.

I have to say that so far I’m pretty impressed with the Tomato router software. It seems much more responsive than X-WRT/OpenWRT, and the UI is much better (very AJAX-y, in a good way). The only disadvantage that I see is that it doesn’t appear to support any VPN capabilities, which might be fun to tinker with. I guess I could always go back to X-WRT if I want to mess around with that some more…

I just experienced a stereotypical moment of “tech columnist rage.” I had downloaded a mobile version of the (highly recommended) Keepass password manager, to make sure that I could access my personal information when I’m taking a trip or am otherwise away from my computer. For example, if I uploaded a trip itinerary to TripIt, and wanted to check it on the road, I could use Keepass to remember my password. I used a randomly-generated password for TripIt, which is both lengthy and nonmnemonic, so normally I’d use the cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop functionality of the desktop version of Keepass to fill it in. The mobile version of Keepass also lets you copy a password to the clipboard.

However, in the mobile version of Internet Explorer, you cannot paste into a password field. This makes randomly-generated passwords much more cumbersome to use, and appears to be a somewhat arbitrary restriction. Oh, and while we’re at it, the Javascript support in Mobile IE isn’t sufficient enough to support some basic Javascript like that used by the Semisecure Login WordPress plugin.

Fortunately, there are a couple of competitors in the Windows Mobile browsing arena. Let’s see how they fare in comparison:

• Opera Mobile will actually allow me to paste into the password field. In addition, it has better Javascript support, and the Semisecure Login plugin will actually work. Sounds pretty good, right? Except for the fact that, for some reason, Opera Mobile’s password fields use the text field auto-completion feature, including storing new values! What this means is that, essentially, if you enter your password in a web page’s password field, the password will show up in other text fields as part of the auto-completion hints in plain text. (I tested and reverified this with Gmail.)This is a product for which they expect you to pay money. Unbelievable. And this product has been in development for 8 years.
• Minimo, the mobile version of Mozilla/Firefox, has had its development process “rebooted,” and as far as I know, is nowhere near completion. The last available binaries (for Windows Mobile 5) crash on startup on my phone.

I can scarcely believe that these kinds of problems still exist. Windows Mobile would be much more useful and effective if they got more of these kinds of little things right — as it is right now, it can frequently be an aggravating experience.

I’ve been trying out Windows Live Writer for a little bit here, because I’ve heard that it’s quite good. While I think the WordPress interface is just fine for writing and editing posts, it is kind of nice to have a better client user interface when composing posts.

So far my experience has been pretty positive, although I haven’t used any of the media-related features — I’ve really just been using it as a better editing environment for posts. I’m pretty impressed that it interoperates pretty much perfectly with WordPress, as far as I can tell. It’s actually a little strange to see Microsoft striving to integrate with something that’s not governed by an international standards body.

A few weeks ago, my cell phone started acting a little flaky. Nothing fatal, but strange things like charging problems, and getting stuck in a strange “not on, but not off” state, which made me think that its time was nigh. I’d had the phone for about three and a half years, so it’s not necessarily surprising — I got it a couple of months before I moved down to southern California, I believe. I’m definitely not the kind of person who gets a new phone every year — my previous (and first) phone was more than four years old by the time I replaced it. It had an interface more reminiscent of Game & Watch than any proper phone.

So, for once, I decided to get a nice, new, gadgety phone that could do more than make phone calls and take poor pictures. I picked up the AT&T 8525, which, to go on a brief tangent, is a terrible model name — it’s called the Hermes by its manufacturer, HTC, a name that I think is much better. It runs Windows Mobile, Pocket PC edition.

My experience so far has been pretty darn good. The funny thing is that I had an easier time getting accustomed to all of the fancy Windows Mobile applications than I did tasks like making a phone call. I’m very much taken with the ability to do things like keep appointments, tasks, and messages on my phone, and even more so with being able to access the Internet from just about anywhere. I downloaded the Google Maps mobile version, which is awesome — it’s pretty much like the normal, fully-fledged PC Google Maps experience, but not running inside a browser. (Speaking of which, Internet Explorer Mobile works OK, but some sites tend to give it fits. I haven’t tried Opera yet, but maybe I’ll have to give that a shot.)

Part of my (somewhat flimsy) justification for getting this phone was that I wanted to futz around with developing applications for smartphones and Pocket PCs. They’re capable enough now that I think it might be interesting to develop something for them, rather than just a royal pain. I haven’t gotten around to any of that yet, though, so we’ll see how it goes.