habanero_joe

Product Review: Lenovo Mini Wireless Keyboard N5091

I have a home project to replace the DirecTV satellite boxes with PCs. So far so good. To make it easy to use I needed a wireless keyboard and mouse. The first box ended up with a Gyration Media Center Remote. For the next box I found a Lenovo Mini Wireless Keyboard with trackball. I purchased it new from the local CompUSA for less than $40.

Upon opening the box I was impressed with the product. It fits in the hand well and is easy to use. The keyboard includes basic media player controls, essential for pausing the movie to grab another drink. Installation was a joke, plug in the micro dongle to an available USB port, install the two (included) AAA batteries and switch on the keyboard. In less than 15 seconds Windows 7 recognized the device and it began working. I removed the wired keyboard and mouse and put em back in the parts locker.

Holding the device in the palm of my right hand I can reach most of the keyboard with my thumb. The shape makes it very comforable to hold. The small power switch is located on the underside of the device and it out of the way so it will not be accidentally shut off. Turning the keyboard will save battery life considerably when not in use. Turn the switch back on and I reconnects immediately. My typical use is from about ten feet away and it works great. Being wireless instead of infrared makes operation painless. I did some testing and was able to use over 25 feet away from the PC in a different room. Good enough for me.

Anyone used this before? Leave a comment.

20110618-165010.jpg

– habanero_joe

Update: 06212011
A couple things about this device that are lacking; 1) no backlighting of the keypad 2) no trigger finger mouse buttons 3) current trackball/mouse button configuration makes it a little difficult to ‘click and scroll’

12/3012

Still using this little guy. Battery life is pretty respectable. Would love to hear of any similar (read that as better) devices.

Alternatives to MS Windows (desktop)

I have worked with and supported just about every version of MS desktop operating systems. That is life in the corporate environment. No matter your opinion of Microsoft OS, it gets the job done for the business user. However, there are many less than desirable “features”, such as licensing costs, hardware requirements, resources used by the OS, and the list goes on…

Some of my early experience was as a sys admin for a SCO UNIX network. I was impressed with the stability and reliability of the system. If I remember correctly the server had 128MB RAM to support 100-plus users. The serial network certainly had no bells and whistles, but it was easy to maintain. Server uptimes were measured in months instead of days for a typical Windows server. Adding a NIC and TCP/IP made the server very versatile and improved performance. As is common in the corporate environment, after a few years, new software required Windows servers and the UNIX box was retired. I pretty much lost touch with *nix in general.

Fast forward five years…

At some point I began loading various Linux distros on older laptops to check it out. Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE and all the other usual suspects were checked out. CentOS seemed to be one of the more popular distros supported. Along the way I met some more-serious Linux users and began loading Ubuntu starting with the 8 series releases. By now I had converted a personal laptop and the main home computer to Ubuntu. Stayed involved and moved along with updates until 10.04 LTS. Was very pleased with how it all worked. The variety of supported hardware is excellent (except maybe audio) and the stability was always very good.

Fast forward to Thursday June 16…

My Lenovo laptop with an XP install was finally experiencing some OS corruption and general performance degradation. Time for a reload with Linux. Off to Ubuntu.com to download 11.04 ISO. I loaded it up and the process was the same simple install I had come to expect with Ubuntu. Rebooted and logged in. I immediately noted the new UI. Complete crap was my first thought. I poked around for the rest of the day and my opinion got worse. It was not intuitive at all. Played around a couple more hours and tossed it in the bag for the night.

Fast forward to the next day…

Thoroughly disappointed with Ubuntu 11.04 I looked up Debian and did a little research. Seemed pretty solid and why use a derivative when you can get the original? A couple answers later (thank you himuraken!) I was installing Debian 6. (look for a future post on using ISO files and a USB drive)
Knowing that Ubuntu is based on Debian, I expected it to be familiar and it was. Two days later and I am very happy with the decision to replace Ubuntu 11.04. I look forward to using it daily.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in Linux to check out Debian. You will not be disappointed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_GNU/Linux

– habanero_joe

Cheap Network Attached Storage Is Expensive.

The bottom line: you get what you pay for…

In my limited IT experience (~20 years), I have seen it proven over and over that low-cost hardware costs a lot in the not so long run. This post is about NAS, but this premise is not limited to that particular device. In the course of various consulting engagements, I have come across many devices that on first glance seem to be a great value. Until you really get it in production…

Before I start making sweeping generalizations, let me be clear: many manufacturers have a wide breadth of products, many of which are truly commercial-grade, enterprise ready. This is not what the common small business or non-profit chooses the first time around. For example, Iomega delivers several wonderful, relatively low-cost devices that work very well as a disk-disk backup target. The ix4-200 comes to mind.

The real problem comes from the low end hardware in the low-cost NAS devices. This includes home PC quality hard drives, incorrectly sized power supplies, improper cooling, lack of standard storage protocols available, no redundant drives, no hot-spare, and generally poor user management interfaces. A “good” device will provide a non-proprietary way to access the data if the rest of the network (servers/PCs) fail.

When purchasing any type of network storage (or rolling your own), carefully consider all of the components before making a purchase. Look at the MTBF (mean time between failure) or CDL (component design life) of the drives. The difference between a true RAID-quality drive and a PC drive can be staggering. Remember that your NAS runs 24/7-365. That Is 8760 hours per year. Often the better equipment is only a few dollars more and will save you considerably less in the long-run.

How much is your company’s data worth to you? Industry statistics have shown that 60% of companies that lose their data shut down within six months. Over 90% of companies that lost their data center for ten days or more file for bankruptcy within one year. Every week there are over 14,000 hard drive crashes in the United States. Don’t let your company become a statistic…

– habanero_Joe

Working For Corporate IT

Background: I work as a manager for a public regional financial institution, managing a team of business analysts. I have held this position for just over seven months. Previously I had worked as IT Director for a medium-sized private company in charge of all aspects of data and voice for approximately ten years. During this time I always thought: “I wonder what it would be like to work for a big company…?”

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

I have approximately fifteen years of technical/IT experience and I have always enjoyed being hands-on, first as a technician and then later as an IT manager. My preference is virtualization, storage, security and networking, specifically planning and implementation of new or growth/replacement scenarios.  While I am the first to admit I don’t care for the daily user helpdesk issues, I certainly enjoy the technical aspects of pure IT. While I have some minor programming training, I have never been a developer or application guy.

So on to the new position: I am now 95% pure management and all that entails. The majority of my day is spent on project conference calls and attending various project and administrative-type meetings. While the change in role has been interesting it has quickly become routine. I travel fairly often and spend a lot of time in hotels and airports. After seven months I am also quickly loosing touch with technical knowledge and it is a struggle to stay interested in what I do everyday. It will come to no surprise to anyone who has experienced this, but corporate IT is typically much more siloed than any small business. The most obvious separation is between infrastructure and applications.

In the corporate application world one benefit is the available resources for development and testing. The drawback is that the requirements to push a new product to production are rather inflexible. Production loads usually have to follow a scheduled calendar cycle. In the small business environment I was used to, “testing” often meant making a production server backup, loading the new update and crossing fingers that it worked. We had had a backup right? On tape… The corporate methodology pretty much ensures that the new app or upgrade will work successfully when moved to production. Of course all of the server virtualization options now make this much easier for everyone.

Overall environment comparisons:

Small Business (non-public company)- flexibility in position, more control over resources,  less restrictions and regulations to deal with, faster move to production, less resources.

Corporate (public company) – rigid org chart, many regulatory controls, more teams with less responsibility, much higher level of security, slower pace, more resources available

So the bottom line is that if you are faced with making a voluntary or involuntary decision to move from a private company smaller environment to a public corporate environment (no matter the position) make sure you ask plenty of questions to ensure that you fully understand what you are getting in to. And count on your life changing!